After the snowbird, comes the whale pt 4, sec 2: ‘I didn’t know then, but later learned, that the Episcopal church is part of the Anglican communion and represents a kind of church aristocracy. Or rather that it does not represent a proletarian Christianity. Episcopalian priests were often humanists whose religious outlook lived within a world view that included and even incorporated non-Christian cultures. Hudson Stuck, ‘Archdeacon of the Arctic’, for example, invariably carried Shakespeare on his expeditions.’

After the snowbird, comes the whale pt 3, sec 3: ‘The multiply provisioned store, islanded within spacious customer parking, is in this way, like a barn at the centre of a field system, no less a functional warehouse, than the staunchest downtown JCPenneys. In both cases, old Fairbanks and even older stretches of the arboreal sub-Arctic have been swept away by pre-fabricated modular convenience architecture devoted to importation and product distribution.’

After the snowbird, comes the whale pt3, sec 1: This, on account of my own solitude, was no doubt a projection and I found myself repeating the passage in The Waste Land where Eliot writes ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins,’ and it was my happiness both to inhabit the ruins of what Asatchaq narrated and to imagine building something from them. It was in this environment that our common experience of solitude met.

After the snowbird, comes the whale pt2, sec 1: ‘I close my eyes and imagine the Kuukpak River inlet, north of Tikigaq, then paddling downstream in a skin boat. From the banks on the river, mammoth tusks dislodge and fall into the water. Two years later, on the north beach, I am pegging out a fish net when I scoop a fossil molar from the gravel. It lies on the beach stones: huge, gold-brown, perfect.’

After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale 5: ‘In ayahagaaq, a circle of sinew or seal line held between the palms is manipulated into semi-abstract versions of activity and transformation. The string moves in coordination with the narrative and when the string collapses, the space between the hands returns to emptiness.’

After the snowbird, comes the whale 3: ‘Two Octobers back, I watched the village clean up team collect the barrels that had contained stove oil brought each September from San Francisco. On complex contracts and transcending vastly difficult logistics, fuel from cosmopolitan producers and via multiple cooperating agencies is shipped in a four month summer series of provisions north to Alaska and at Tikigaq is lightered to a central tank that’s fueled the village since the mid-1950s. Brimful with excreta, the barrels at freeze-up are carried to the north side and rolled into the water.’