And for an interloper, I was, and am, innocuous enough. Better yet: I have had a positive effect. We missionaries all tell ourselves that, but I have, I really have. With the help of modern medicine, I have healed the sick; with the help of the bishop, fed the hungry; with help of wealthy, faraway, misty-eyed parishes, clothed the poor. I have insisted on saying Mass, but I adjusted my schedule to meet theirs. What's more, I've eaten their food, I've tried to talk their language, I've played their games with their children. The previous man outlawed traditional dancing. I've encouraged it and attempted to learn.

And I've blessed things. Babies, houses, holes in the ice. Dogs, and later, snowmachines. Outboard motors and cases of Crisco. Nets, knives, and sewing needles, yes; but guns, never. And once, a dead woman's stuffed parakeet, although that was more exorcism than blessing. Her widower had remarried; the man's new wife said the parakeet helped friends cheat her at cards. Saint Francis, I prayed, it's not enough that this woman has to make a life in the subarctic tundra? With a husband who keeps his first wifes parakeet? Peace, Saint Francis. Go easy, O Lord.

And this hospice, Quyana House. It's a curious, mostly empty place, located well outside of town. It blossomed on the grounds of an abandoned radar installation, and is supported almost entirely by a Seattle family whose son drowned here one summer while serving as a missionary-in-training.

THE HOSPICE IS OFTEN empty because it's hard to get to, and people don't quite trust this Outside generosity. (Quyana means “thank you” in Yup'ik, which is all well and good, since this part of Alaska is Yup'ik Eskimo, but people find it a strange name nonetheless: just who is being thanked, and for what?) Plus, the old and terminally ill usually die at home-or at the hospital in town. The hospital is known as the Yellow Submarine, but the way it snakes along the tundra, long and flat, its every corner rounded, it looks more like bars of soap smushed together, or maybe some Outside architect's idea for a hospital on the moon. It stands on stilts; just about everything in town does. Otherwise, buildings would melt the permafrost and slowly sink into the tundra. But the hospital's awkward seventies Star Wars design makes its stilts look like landing gear; the entire building seems poised for takeoff, and there are those in town who sometimes wish it would.

The hospice, on the other hand, is a soaring structure, seemingly composed of equal parts glass and light. We all await the storm that will level it, but month after month it survives, and maybe I shouldn't be surprised: I've blessed the place half a dozen times. First, when they cleared the land for construction; second, when someone had fallen from some scaffolding and broken both legs; third and fourth came when a new wing went up and when it collapsed; fifth was the grand opening; and sixth was the dedication of the wing where Ronnie now lies, ready to discuss the terms of our truce.

I had put the doll replica of me in my breast pocket, taking care that the little arms and head were peeking out. At first, I did it as a joke, but then I had this sudden, inexplicable need to cough, and I thought: play it safe. I gave the little guy more room and Ronnie smiled. He knew I was thinking of the word, the word that's become a central tenet of my amalgamated Alaskan faith, a word that inevitably becomes part of any religion that spends too much time in the subzero subarctic dark: maybe. No one from Outside understands this law of the bush. No one understands how rock-solid principles can slide here; how black-and-white so inexorably mists to gray; how a priest, a true believer, a defender of the faith, a dealer in eternal truths, can find himself spooked by a makeshift voodoo doll. It can't happen. It's not possible. You repeat this like a mantra, and then you get back to the word.

Maybe.

For Ronnie, God bless him (if only either were interested), there is no maybe, only is. On those occasions when we do talk theology- which is seldom, sadly, now that he's more sober-Ronnie always taunts me with his trump card: proof. Show me proof of your God, this Jesus, he'll say; I usually respond with some version of the Apostle Paul's insistence to the Hebrews that faith is the evidence of things not seen. Ronnie finds this rather pat: his proof, he says, is in the stars, in the grains of snow blowing against the glass, in the salmon who return every year, in the Yup'ik people, who, despite everything, still walk the earth. All this is proof of spirits-his spirits-at work.

Diabetes, on the other hand, is proof of my work. Not me personally, not even my God, but certainly my people, he says. And it's true, junk food is replacing alcohol as the white man's new smallpox, and though it takes longer to kill the native population, the unhealthy shift in diet from what the land provided to what air cargo provides-Spam, Pop-Tarts, and worse-still takes too many lives too early.

Diabetes sent Ronnie to the hospital more than once, then trouble with his liver. For years, he drank too much, but as I'm down to one kidney, I'm not one to lecture him on that. He's been using the hospice for his health care of late. He likes it here; it's quiet, no one bothers him. But he bothers them, since they're not really set up to deliver the care he needs, unless he gets really ill. He used to respond that if they kept it up, he would be that ill, and for a while, that seemed funny. But now he's more sick, more often, and they just shrug and let him stay as long as he wants. I think he misses fighting with them. I miss it, too.

In the past, we'd talk and joke a bit whenever I visited him here. (Or rather, I talk, and Ronnie shakes his head and rolls his eyes: I talk too much.) Whenever he fell asleep, I would pray, as much a function of habit as anything else: when I first started visiting Ronnie back in the hospital, I would ask him to pray with me, and he would inevitably fall asleep. Eventually, it became a kind of ritual that soothed us both. I sat and prayed, he slept, and in this way, we visited.

The balance has shifted of late, though. He's dying. Or rather, he thinks he is and wants me to think the same. I'll admit: he is asleep more than he is awake, and when he is awake, it's very strange. He'll stop, mid-conversation, and search around the room: something is missing, or something is here. “I can hear him,” he'll whisper. And sometimes, when there is something to hear-a distant moan or cough-he'll say, “Tell me how he died,” which I never understand: Does he need a primer? What does he think he'd learn from the other patients? Then he'll look at me, and I can see in his eyes what he wants to say, what he's never said to me, not directly: I need your help. Help, real help, is back in town, back at the hospital. But whenever I ask about moving him there, he shakes his head.

“Everyone is gone, Lou-is.”

Ronnie alone has never called me “Father,” and whenever he says my name, he mimics the exaggerated, not-sure-if-you-speak-English pronunciation I used when I first introduced myself, what? Forty, fifty years ago? A century, maybe.

“Gone where?” I asked, and he nodded his head toward the window. “To the festival?” I said. He shook his head and stared outside, silent. One of the smaller villages upriver was hosting a gathering; as always, they'd scheduled it for the last days of winter, at just about the point when you simply couldn't take it anymore. Alaska 's winter calendar is full of these events. They say that, in Anchorage, if you have a tuxedo, you'll have something to do every night from November through March; out here, the same is true if you swap the tuxedo for a snowmachine.

I don't have a tuxedo-clerical garb is just as black and much cheaper-but I do have a snowmachine, which I got from the high school shop class. They'd gotten it from the manufacturer, who'd donated it with only one condition (courtesy of their lawyers): students couldn't ride it, just take it apart and put it back together again. Which they did for ten years, before giving it to me, with, their teacher promised, the “vast majority” of its essential parts intact. But I take it out less and less of late. Not because of my body-though my bones do increasingly feel as though they were made of kindling-but my mind. The older I get, the more recent my youth seems, and the more I recall that first youthful trip I made into the bush. I was a soldier then, not a priest, and it was summer, not winter.