Small-town America does not come much more remote than Wasilla. Thousands of miles from Washington, DC, and close to the Arctic Circle, almost on the other side of the world, this is on one of the furthest-flung frontiers of the USA. Cabin and porch homes here ring icy lakes encircled by snow-capped peaks. By British standards, Wasilla – population 9,780 – would count as little more than a village. But here in Alaska it awards itself city status, and by the yardstick of this vast and sparsely populated state, it is. In most distant communities like this, ambitions tend to remain modest. But Sarah Palin always planned on being a winner, one of Wasilla’s big fish. It is unlikely she ever thought her journey would take her much beyond the state border. Yet in little more than 10 days from now, the self-styled “hockey mom” could find herself planning the decor of an office in the White House – a beat away from being the leader of the free world.

At the end of a garden path in Wasilla is a wilderness cabin home like many others here, with a set of antlers adorning the front porch or nailed to a tree painted with the name of the occupants. But like Palin, who spent part of her youth in this house, her parents, Chuck and Sally Heath, have gone further than most Alaskans.

To the side of their path, by the front door, stands a mountain of moose and caribou antlers that towers above visitors’ heads, built from the bleached “racks” of countless “field-dressed” wildlife. It is a reminder that the Heaths are proud and enthusiastic hunters, and a clue to how high their daughter set her sights.

The day Senator John McCain hijacked the election agenda by announcing an unknown outsider as his running mate, television crews and journalists descended on Wasilla to find out who America might be about to elect as vice-president. But as the global financial crisis bit and the election merry-go-round moved on to other pressing concerns, so did much of the media circus, leaving behind a community that had hardly broken ranks. A few talked ad nauseam, either to criticise or to praise Palin. But the quiet ones who really knew her kept their counsel, out of either loyalty or fear that she would be back in Wasilla after the election, looking for payback. Then, after weeks of quiet, doors slowly began to open. People began to speak to me about the Sarah Palin they know well – or too well.

Quite extraordinarily, Chuck Heath and his wife, Sally, take me into their home, where few but the most favourably disposed local newspapermen have recently been welcome. Seeing me shudder slightly at the stack of antlers, and concerned perhaps that the excessive display may colour my judgment, Chuck explains that he and his family did not shoot “every” animal in the pile: “Some of ’em were killed by wolves.”

Alaska is not a place for the faint-hearted. This becomes clearer when I settle at the counter of the family’s open-plan kitchen, where Palin must have listened so intently to her father’s hunting and fishing stories after she had accompanied him on his forays into the wild. Chuck perches on a stool by my side, in a baggy hooded sweatshirt, while his wife, in a girlish pink gingham blouse, busies herself making chocolate puddings, and the couple reminisce about Palin’s childhood.

“It’s a different breed of person who ends up here in Alaska,” says Chuck, a retired science teacher and sports coach who brought his young family from Idaho to “the Last Frontier” state when Sarah, the third of four children, was two months old. “People here tend to be more adventurous.” He describes how he would regularly take his children ice-fishing and hiking in temperatures of -20C to -30C in winter, and how in the summer he would take them on long runs in the early morning. The whole family would often compete in 5- or 10-kilometre races. Sarah and her father ran marathons. “Sarah got a lot of stern discipline from me and a lot of love, devotion and faith from her mom. I wasn’t mean to her, but I’d push her a lot in sport and outdoor activities. I taught her to believe she could do anything in the world she wanted to do if she put her mind to it,” he says, slapping the counter top triumphantly.

“We didn’t expect it to go this far, that’s for sure,” his wife chimes in. There is a hint of surprise and bewilderment in her voice, as if she fears her daughter’s ambition has taken her to, or beyond, her limit – an impression strengthened when she admits to being “dumbfounded, absolutely floored” on hearing that her daughter was McCain’s surprise pick as running mate.

It is a testament to the secrecy and speed with which McCain broke with expectations to pick 44-year-old Palin for the Republican ticket that not even her parents were in the loop – as they surely would have been if the process of choosing had been anything more than a last-minute gamble to wrest the headlines away from his rival, Barack Obama.

Chuck simply laughs, shrugs his shoulders good-naturedly and continues telling stories about his daughter’s childhood. For Palin, school days often began with a moose hunt, long before the bell went for first lesson. Her father would take her along before school started, “for safety reasons, because I didn’t want to go alone”. While stuffed animal heads and skins, including those of several bears, line nearly every wall of the Heath household, he claims that for his family, as for most others in the area struggling financially at the time, the purpose of hunting was to put food on the table.

He tells a story about driving Palin to school one day when he was planning to teach a lesson on animal dissection. “I handed her a pair of moose eyes and told her to hold ’em real quick. She didn’t want to, but she did it,” he says, his shoulders shaking with laughter. “She wasn’t into the killing. But she’d always help me field-dress the moose. When you shoot a 1,200lb animal, one person can’t do that alone.” Chuck patiently explains that by “field-dressing” he means “gut ’n’ cut”. I must still be looking a little confused because he expands: “Y’know, throwing the legs around, pulling it apart, skinning it and cuttin’ it up into 100lb chunks.” He then pushes home the point that while his daughter would “carry a gun and shoot a few caribou, killing wasn’t her priority”.

Maybe not. But by the time she had become a high-school student, she had clearly developed a killer instinct that would become even more apparent when she entered politics aged only 28, first as city councillor, then as two-term mayor of Wasilla. While much of the media coverage has portrayed Palin as a maverick “softball” candidate lacking the experience to deal with high office, there are people here in her home town who know her well and suggest much more worrying traits than inexperience and unpredictability. There is a high body count of people who have dared to disagree with Sarah Palin, shown a reluctance to do her bidding or, in her eyes, failed to support her wholeheartedly – among them some who say they too have been hunted, carved up and cast aside along her path to power. These people warn, as do even her closest friends and family, that in Palin’s eyes there are no grey areas, no room for doubt. There is only right or wrong, black or white, “good or evil”. Her father Chuck’s word for it is “stubborn”. One of her friends calls her “dogged”. If Palin believes something to be true, it is – no amount of evidence to the contrary will sway her, and everybody else had better believe it too.

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