WHAT I FEARED then is what Ronnie fears now, and has feared for some time: the unseen forces that hound you through the night.

Old explorers who first witnessed this phenomenon struggled for words to describe it; eventually they settled on arctic hysteria. The affliction did not discriminate: both Natives and Outsiders occasionally succumbed to some force-often during this very time of year, deep winter, which is characterized less by snow than endless dark-that caused them to strip off their clothes and run outside, into the cold, into the tundra. If they're not caught in time, some wound up (wind up) running into the great beyond.

It's a story I like to share when people who have never been to Alaska ask me what it's like. This usually comes right after they've squealed something along the lines of “ Alaska! It's so big!” as though it might fall on them. But they don't really want to know what it's like. For them, asking me about Alaska is like pressing “play” to watch a horror movie; they just want to be scared: Alaska! A short discussion of arctic hysteria usually satisfies them, as it has all the things they think an Alaska story needs: cold, dark, death. It's missing a bear or a wolf, but I have other anecdotes to cover that.

Years ago, when I asked Ronnie about arctic hysteria, he had a ready punch line: Sometimes, they don't come after you. Time was, he explained, before the white man, before Ski-Doos, before Village Public Safety Officers, before medevac helicopters-sometimes, they just let people run away and disappear.

He was trying to spook me, of course, but it didn't work. As it happens, I have found myself chasing after Ronnie a dozen times, more frequently of late. I'll hear him run howling past my window late some night and leave my warm bed to run him down. Sometimes I catch him, sometimes I don't find him until much later, when he's passed out, in the shelter of some truck or house or Dumpster, often on a night that's cold enough to kill.

Whenever he comes to, in a few hours or a few days, he rarely mentions just what drove him into the night. But sometimes the memory is fresh or frightening enough that he can't help but speak of it, and out it comes, a similar story every time: an eagle, a caribou, a bear, encounters him, alone, walking down some street in town. He's recognized, and the animal gives chase. And as the chase continues, the animal changes from one form to another, always drawing closer, closer, until finally it is at his heels, and then Ronnie knows, hears, smells, feels, who it was all along. “The wolf, Lou-is,” he says then.

“The wolf,” he says now, blinking awake, and staring straight up at the hospice ceiling. “The wolf, Lou-is, he's closer now. He knows. He remembers. The boy. His mother. The baby. The wolf. My tuunraq.” Ronnie turns to face me, to make sure I am listening, though I myself can't be sure. Am I listening? Or dreaming? I feel a kind of fire in my legs, an urge to run myself. “He's heard I've been acting as an angalkuq once more. Without him. After all these years. He heard I was working right here. This place. That's how he found me. He's coming now. I hear him. He's coming now. Lou-is. Tell me-”

CHAPTER 4

“YOU ARE NOT CRAZY.”

First day, first hour of bomb disposal training, and a dozen of us enlisted were crammed into a makeshift classroom barracks at Aberdeen Proving Ground. Gottschalk was still alive. That first balloon, Alaska, Lily were all in my future.

First question: How can you tell the difference between a BD officer and a BD enlisted man? Some of the guys actually worried it out, raised their hands and gave answers about insignia or uniforms. One guy said something about the way a man stands, which caused another to mutter something lewd, and that's when the sergeant instructing us gave the correct answer: the difference between us guys and officers? We are not crazy.

Because it turned out there was a basic principle in bomb disposal, one they taught you before they taught you anything about bombs.

The officer defuses the bomb.

“Then what do we do, Sarge?” asked a guy nearby, whom I took to be even younger than I.

The sergeant smiled. “Grow old.”

THIS DIVISION OF DUTIES was British and was already in the process of changing. Soon enough, both enlisted and officers would be trained to render bombs safe. But when I went through, guys like me mostly had just one duty: dig. Think about bomb disposal today, and you're thinking of ticking, wiretangled things, hidden under a desk or a bridge. Maybe that sounds scary, but to us, something tucked under a desk would have sounded like roast turkey with trimmings. The bombs we went after had, for the most part, tumbled out of planes. Drop a bomb from that height, and if it doesn't explode when it's supposed to, all one hundred pounds-or five hundred or one thousand or more-of it disappears right into the ground.

That's when you start digging. Down a story or more, depending on the soil and the weight of the bomb. When you're not digging, you're timbering, to keep the hole from collapsing. To prevent anything from exploding too soon, everybody's using special, nonmagnetic tools and wearing cloth shoes without metal eyelets and belts without buckles-or that's what they were always doing in the training films.

Lit cigarettes are forbidden, obviously. They dangle from everyone's lips.

When you've finally gotten the ugly squat cockroach of a thing all exposed, you climb-carefully-back out, and call for an officer. He dusts off his hands (he's been eating, watching, trying to radio someone who can tell him more about where this bomb came from). Then he grabs his tools and goes down, taking his knowledge with him.

But you couldn't dig too many holes without learning a thing or two about bomb disposal yourself, and smart officers-older officers-always welcomed input from their crews.

AUGUST 1944. A B-17 is returning from a practice bombing run in the California desert. The story goes that they had had a lousy day on the test range, missing targets left and right. Then again, they may have been just holding their skills in reserve, because they hit their last target dead-on.

Officially, it was an accident. Unofficially, it was a miracle, because there's really no other explanation for a bomb falling into the middle of the Japanese-American Relocation Camp at Manzanar without killing anyone. It fell through the roof of a small building that was housing some recently arrived ceramics equipment. The equipment was destroyed-a true silver lining for internees who hadn't been looking forward to the prospect of the make-work pottery program, devoted to crafting lumpy ashtrays and bowls-but the bomb failed to explode. All five hundred pounds of it managed to drill through two packing cases, the pallet beneath, and continue on fourteen feet deeper into the arid soil beneath the floor.

My Aberdeen classmates and I had the misfortune of being relatively nearby, stationed just south of San Francisco at Fort Ord, waiting to be dispersed across the Pacific. Someone somewhere looked at a readiness roster, realized he had a BD crew in his backyard, and sent us off to put our newly completed training to use. It must have seemed ideal. Give some new guys a real challenge, with relatively low risks: it was our own bomb, right? Something we knew inside out? And ultimately, what's the worst that could happen? Some trainees die, maybe take a few Japanese with them.

Our detail numbered eight. A lieutenant, sergeant, plus six of us who didn't know any better, and so were excited, almost giddy at the prospect of our first real job. The lieutenant was young, but again, that was to be expected in our line of work.