overstuffed arms dusted with frost. They drove past the neighborhoods of Lousetown and Alligator Acres, the Alaska Commercial Company store, the medical center where Yup'ik Eskimos received free treatment. They passed White Alice, a huge curved structure that resembled a drive-in movie screen but that actually was a radar system built during the Cold War. Daniel had broken into it a hundred times as a kid - climbed up through the pitch-black center to sit on top and get drunk on Windsor Whiskey.
“Okay,” he told the cab driver. “You can stop here.” The Long House Inn was covered with ravens. There were at least a dozen on the roof, and another group battled around the remains of a torn Hefty bag in the Dumpster off to the side. Daniel paid the driver and stared at the renovated building. When he'd left, it was on the verge of being condemned.
There were three snow machines parked out front, something Daniel filed away in the recesses of his mind. He'd need one, after he figured out what direction to head to find Trixie. He could hotwire one of these, if he still remembered how, or take the honorable route and charge one to his MasterCard. They were sold in the Alaska Commercial store, at the end of the dairy aisle, past the $6.99 gallons of milk.
“Did you know a group of ravens is called an unkindness?” Laura said, coming to stand beside him.
He looked at her. For some reason, the space between them seemed smaller in Alaska. Or maybe you just had to get far enough away from the scene of a crime to start to forget the details.
“Did you know,” he replied, “that ravens like Thai food better than anything else?”
Laura's eyes lit up. “You win.”
A banner had been strung across the doorway: K300 HEADQUARTERS. Daniel walked inside, stamping his boots to get the snow off. He'd been a kid when this dogsled race was just getting organized, when locals like Rick Swenson and Jerry Austin and Myron Angstman had won the pot of a few thousand dollars. Now the winnings were
$20,000, and the mushers who came were stars with corporate backing for their dog kennels - Jeff King and Martin Buser and DeeDee Jonrowe.
The room was crowded. A knot of native kids sat on the floor, drinking cans of Coke and passing around a comic book. Two women answered phones, another was carefully printing the latest splits on a white board. There were Yup'ik mothers carrying moonfaced babies, elderly men reading the scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, schoolgirls with blue-black braids giggling behind their hands as they helped themselves to the potluck stews and cobblers. Everyone moved pendulously in layers of winter clothing, astronauts navigating the surface of a distant planet.
Which, Daniel thought, this might as well be.
He walked up to the desk where the women were answering phones.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I'm trying to find a teenage girl. ..” One woman held up a finger: Just a moment.
He unzipped his jacket. Before they'd left, he'd packed a duffel full of winter gear; he and Laura were pretty much wearing everything they'd brought all at once. It was cold in Maine, but nothing compared to what it would be like in the Eskimo villages. The woman hung up. “Hi. Can I . . .” She broke off as the phone rang again.
Frustrated, Daniel turned away. Impatience was a trait you developed in the lower forty-eight, an attribute that a child who grew up here didn't possess. Time wasn't the same on the tundra; it stretched to elastic lengths and snapped back fast when you weren't looking. The only things that really operated on a schedule were school and church, and most Yupiit were late to those anyway.
Daniel noticed an old man sitting on a chair, staring. He was Yup'ik, with the weathered skin of a person who'd spent his life outside. He wore green flannel pants and a fur parka.
“Aliurturua,” the man whispered. I'm seeing a ghost.
“Not a ghost.” Daniel took a step toward him. “Cama-i.” The man's face wrinkled, and he reached for Daniel's hand.
“Alangruksaaqamken.” You amazed me, showing up unexpectedly. Daniel had not spoken Yup'ik in fifteen years, but the syllables flowed through him like a river. Nelson Charles had, in fact, taught him his very first Yup'ik words: iqalluk . . . fish, angsaq . . . boat, and terren purruaq . . . you suck the meat off an asshole, which is what Nelson told him to say to kids who made fun of him for being kass 'aq. Daniel reached for Laura, who was watching the exchange with amazement. “Una arnaq nulirqaqa,” he said. This is my wife.
“That kind's pretty,” Nelson said in English. He shook her hand but didn't look her in the eye.
Daniel turned to Laura. 'Nelson used to be a substitute teacher.
When the native kids got to go on field trips to Anchorage that were subsidized by the government, I wasn't allowed to go because I was white. So Nelson would take me on my own little field trip to check out fishnets and animal traps.'
“Don't teach these days,” Nelson said. “Now I'm the race marshal.”
That would mean, Daniel realized, that Nelson had been here since the start of the K300. “Listen,” he said, and he found himself slipping back into Yup'ik because the words, thorny on his tongue and in his throat, didn't hurt quite as much as they did in English. “Paniika tamaumauq.”
My daughter is lost.
He didn't have to explain to Nelson why he thought that his child, who lived a whole country away, might have wound up in Alaska when she went missing. The Yupiit understood that the person you were when you went to sleep at night might not necessarily
be the person you were when you woke up. You could have become a seal or a bear. You might have crossed into the land of the dead. You might have casually spoken a wish aloud in your dreams and then found yourself living in the middle of it.
“She's fourteen,” Daniel said, and he tried to describe Trixie, but he didn't know what to say. How could her height or weight or the color of her hair convey that when she laughed, her eyes narrowed shut? That she had to have the peanut butter on the top side of the sandwich and the jelly on the bottom? That she sometimes got up and wrote poetry in the middle of the night because she'd dreamed it?
The woman who had been on the phone stepped out from behind the table. “Sorry about that . . . the calls have
