The title character of this story, Michael “Kaz” Kazmierczak is based on a real life woodsman I have the privilege to call a friend. We met as neighbors in Salcha Alaska, a remote Alaskan settlement of less than a thousand souls spread over an area fifty-six miles long and twenty miles wide along a stretch of the Richardson Highway an hour east of Fairbanks. Kaz was a former North Slope Police officer, who gave up that life for powerful reasons and settled on a homestead in the remote wilderness an hour out of Fairbanks where he farmed and hunted and enjoyed a mostly peaceful life…mostly.
The majority of my fiction has a basis in real life, and Kaz’s real life back story is in many ways a modern telling of the fictional character’s adventures.
