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letters and yellow envelopes containing units of our correspondence schoolwork. We skipped the teachers’ handwritten encouragements, glanced at the grades, and stuffed them back into the sled to peruse at home.
    â€œDo well?” Abe asked.
    Figment writhed his head back and forth, slipped his collar, and stretched gingerly back toward the sled, wagging for a bite of paniqtuq. Abe’s blond hair was tousled, his mouth full of the dried meat. One of his front teeth had a piece of meat caught in it. He had a stub of pink pastel chalk in his mitten, sketching on the canvas sled tarp. He glanced at Figment. He raised his hand, palm down. Figment pointed his nose at the snow, glanced beseechingly one more time at Abe, and curled up.
    â€œAll As.” Iris giggled between her mittens. She swung her eyes at Jerry. “Sorry.”

    â€œC in math.” His voice was deep, his windpipe strong and smooth in his neck. He liked some of the high school courses but hadn’t yet discovered an excuse for the existence of geometry. I was in eighth grade and felt the same about all schoolwork. Abe claimed that people in other parts of the world would fight to have an education. I didn’t argue, but in my experience with people—Takunak—it had always seemed they fought instead of getting an education. I had skipped two grades: one because Jerry taught us everything as he learned it; the other because Woodrow Washington Jr. had broken into the post office when everyone was across the river waiting for a forest fire to pass Takunak, and he’d thrown my first-grade supply box down an outhouse hole. By the time mail got through I was halfway into Iris’s second-grade lessons, frozen to the wall from the year before.
    I jogged back and forth to get my blood moving and warm; in town the importance of never appearing cold far outweighed a school grade from a stranger in a place called Juneau.
    â€œBetter off learning what you want to know.” Abe swung his leg over the toprail. “Don’t let anyone with a degree talk you into happiness insurance.” We stared at him, and then kicked snow, embarrassed. A drone came out of the western sky.
    â€œThere!” Iris spotted the speck. Above the cabins, smoke from stovepipes rippled, strained thin by a cold east breeze. “They’re coming!”
    Who would they be? Maybe the yearly dentist with his grinders and pliers. A hippie with a Kelty pack. Or people returning from jail or from shooting ravens in National Guard war games. The Twin Otter roared overhead, an alien bird deciding if we were fat enough to eat. The town dogs loosed a stirring ground wave of howls. The dot turned in the sky. Villagers boiled from houses and the school. Kids raced up and leaned at the toprails of our sled, spitting, stepping carelessly on our load of mail, camp stove, and gear. Our dogs wagged and stretched back. The kids jumped away.
    â€œHi Jerry. Hi Iris. Hi Cutuk,” kids said. In the village young people said hi and someone’s name, all as one word.
    â€œHi Cutuk. Bywhere you fellas’ mom?” a small boy asked.
    â€œWhen you go around here?” another boy interrupted.
    â€œToday.” We spoke uncertainly, not recalling all of their names. The
kids wore bright tattered nylon jackets and cold stiff jeans. They would freeze before maiming their profiles with furs and skins. It wasn’t a good feeling, the way everyone knew us. We were white kids, had only a dad, and lived out in what they called “camp”—but few knew even from what direction we appeared. Out of town simply meant out of touch, out of money, the opposite of lucky. No family from Takunak lived in “camp.”
    My cheeks were red, in the village a shout of weakness. I fingered the frostbite burns on my nose, hoping they had darkened into the scab badges of a hunter. I pulled my caribou parka off over my head, squaring my shoulders, exhaling as if I