Velma Wallis’ career as a bestselling author may have been destined from the start, but it most likely would have seemed improbable — if not fantastical — to her as a young girl growing up in a remote Alaskan village.

Velma’s personal odyssey began in the vast fur-trapping country of Fort Yukon, Alaska, a location accessible only by riverboat, airplane, snowmobile or dogsled. Velma is one in a family of thirteen children, all raised with traditional Athabascan values.

Having dropped out of school at the age of 13 in order to care for her siblings in the wake of their father’s death, Wallis passed her high school equivalency test – earning her GED – and then surprised friends and relatives by choosing to move into an old trapping cabin 12 miles from Fort Yukon.

For almost a dozen years, she survived on what she gathered from hunting, fishing and trapping – a daring and strikingly independent lifestyle during which she struggled to define her personal identity.

In fact, it seems difficult to separate Velma Wallis from the imagery of hardship and the mere pursuit of survival itself – which is actually the underlying theme of her first and widely successful effort as a writer, Two Old Women.