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_The snows that are older than history,

The woods where the weird shadows slant;

The stillness, the moonlight, the mystery,

I've bade 'em good-by--_ but I can't.

_________

Robert W. Service, "The Spell of the Yukon"

11 Front Street

Nome, Alaska Territory

20th August 1906

To my dearest friend, E.A. Lynch:

I must apologize forthwith for the vacancy of my letters, as I believe the last one to you was probably dated last year, so any worry that has befallen you or our fellow townspeople is my fault alone. Being as where we are on this spinning globe, of course, it is nothing if not inevitable.

However--is of the most dreadful & paramount importance, that before you read the contents of this letter, I must insist, indeed demand, that you burn it upon reading. Tell no one about what I am about to relate, only that I will be at last coming home to W. Va.

I wish I was writing under circumstances more happy to relate--alas, it is not so. Perhaps the news of the earthquake will reach you before this letter does--if so, please know I am well & safe. But, even so, as I have told you, this is a place where men & dreams go to die & it is only by miracle of Providence & Providence alone, that I have been anywhere near successful in my attempts to extract that infandous glittering rock which will make us rich--gold.

I say Providence because, though I know & respect your Faith, there is no God here--no God in Alaska, nor Kings, only the deeds & crimes of Men & the spirits of things primeval, things that would make the hardiest missionary convinced he should return home & let this be the sole province of the heathen Eskimeaux. This is a place of soulless white, if the spirit of the poet be invoked, or indeed the humanist too, for surely when Voltaire said quelques arpents de neige he did not mean Canada, he meant this place, Walrussia, Seward's Great Polar Bear Garden.

It is here, as I related in my last letter, that nature undergoes a terrible inversion & pours out broad, sunny daylight certain times of year when darkness should drape the land. The native dogs, monstrous lupine furry things to match their masters in great furry jackets & coats--Malamuts, they are called--are treated with the same respect & dignity as a man of $300 a year. Come twilight, or what passes for twilight, they all join together, the dogs do, native & imported, making the coming sunset hideous with howls more sad & lonesome than Pluto's own Cerberus--one never gets used to it, the sound of these dogs together, the sweetness in their sad voices bespeaking some elder tragedy that afflicted this place in the times of the diabolical heathenism of the first Esquimaux uncounted æons ago.

(I mean not to tease, but surely you can shudder yourself from this--what it means to you, after all, in our little corner of the benighted parts of Old Virginia, of the elder nature of dogs & curses--there is more, which I will add below.)

At any rate, if you find this a bit of theater, my dear Ezra, I can assure you it is actually an understatement--there is no God in Alaska.

As you know I came here in Nome by way of Seattle by way of Frisco, crossing by railroad from Chicago across the broad breast of our continent, in search of gold, as many of the men--with, remarkable to relate, women also--who have come here to do the same. My last letter described Nome & the culture here, which you will no doubt recall is perhaps not so different from the wildness & vice that Cinder Bottom lays claim to in our own W. Va, if a little more tamer & subdued by the ever-present chill & cold that makes even Summertime cool to the skin--though instead of horses & cows & the like; of course as I also mentioned in my first letter & throughout this one, there is ever an overabundance of dogs, such that when a cow was brought from Frisco by boat, the little children of the tavernkeep exclaimed in wonder at its size & that it had horns.

My coming & living here was both arduous & trying but not without reward, so it is my pleasure to relate that I have indeed amassed a fortune, a sum of which I shall not disclose but which will afford my family--and you, friend of mine--a satisfying result to defying death & worse in this Heaven-forgotten land of nightmares. I am writing you, then, to tell you I board for Seattle & thence to Frisco once again, to make the travels back to Chicago & thence to Morgantown.

You may ask why I am departing so early, why I would not stay to at least attempt to forge friendships or indeed collect yet more gold--what follows is why I have determined to depart, why I have waited some months to write you, awaiting for the icebound port to melt enough for the ships to come & take us all away. Indeed, you may ask why, even after the fruits of success, I would implore you to inform the appropriate parties of my return & then burn this message forthwith.

The truth is--complicated.

I seem to recall your father was of the same sensitive Celtic mind as his grandfather, come from Erin across the sea, he was prone to seeing, or thinking he saw, things that were beyond our ken of perception--faeries, ghosts, all manner of devilish hosts, so went the rhyme. We have at least _heard_enough, I think, to know the truth of his beliefs & to keep a mind much more open than others would be to the strangeness of the world, to the laughter in the dark--the persistent strangeness of the dogs about our place is the most salient.

Ezra, my friend, if I may be honest enough as one man to another, I do not discount, as others do, the innate wrongness_of any of the fur-wrapped Esquimaux folk & their doings & beliefs--I am a God-fearing man who has read his Scripture & all the dire admonitions against wizards & those with familiar spirits & the dangers indeed of bewitchment from the strange women & mad hermits that populate our _own homeland, but what I have seen here, what I have felt, without a recourse to science or logic or indeed Christian theology, has shaken me more than anything else--more than all of the drunkenness & depravity & bloodshed in this accursed Cocytus. But never will you find me to call these Native folk diabolist_or _devilish or something worse, for I have seen what many have only dreamed of.

Thus do I depart Nome, though I have made life-friends and indeed brothers here--they called me Shenandoah, and croaked the song out at me after too much whiskey--under appreciable mental strain. It is because of one such incident--something which eclipses any tall story or peculiar tale of our mountain forebears. I mean to relate to you, my dear Ezra, the fate of one Edward Edwards of California--what I saw with my own eyes one Hellish day drenched in the Midnight Sun, which has convinced me more than the drunkenness, vice & Godlessness of this place to take what I have & depart, what I must implore you to keep secret with the burning of this letter upon its receipt.

I refer, ultimately, to the terrible fate of that terrible man, the Californian with the double-name, Edward Edwards.

I believe I mentioned Edward Edwards in my last letter as being an experienced prospector & little else--I did not know very many people at the time & meant only to list who was staying with us at the Saloon. We were all cheechako then, scarcely knowing what we were doing, scarcely being able to believe we were there. But at the time, that was all--there was, then, not much else to relate about the man, because even then I failed to get close to him, through no fault of mine or any of the other prospectors here.

For Edward Edwards was not a pleasant man, even in this town full of rather even more unpleasant men. His hair was the color of dead wheat, thin like lint, with an unhealthy visage that spoke of a handsome aspect made evil by a heavy reliance on the bottle, perhaps to keep what vestiges of sanity that he could cling to being here so long. Indeed, his time in Nome had surpassed any of us--he had been one of the first prospectors who heard about the news of the Three Lucky Swedes & had stolen a march on the toughs & bravados of Frisco to get here--ill rumor said he had jumped the claim he was digging, slain a man to get it. They said the same thing about my father, you know--though I have had to deny it from the time I passed my twentieth year, we both knew my father, it is more than possible, if not probable, which of course stays between us. But even my father, sinner as he was, could not compare in Satan's court to the vile being that was Edward Edwards. A half-decade in Alaska Territory had made him what they call a real sourdough, but he bore none of the tendencies of jollity or resilience or self-deprecating world-weariness so often ascribed to people with that moniker so affixed. Whatever time he had spent here had let a kind of insidious bitterness get inside him--we all saw it, the way his eyes would move about the room & judge us to our very soul simply by a single glance. Little wonder that he was friendless, too, as far as I can tell. He was a vile, contumelious thing. Have you ever seen a man kick a dog for looking at him the wrong way? In Nome such a thing is tantamount to assaulting a full-grown man--three times I saw Edward Edwards be challenged by knife, pickaxe & gun for abusing one of the poor animals, who luckily were not badly hurt, though I imagine they could have been had the jackass had his way. He owned no dogs himself, nor did he seem to have a woman, although--once more--the town gossips held that he took unlawful carnal knowledge of an Esquimau girl & paid a heavy sum to the father to keep the whole thing quiet. I believe it, as I would believe any foul thing whispered of that damnable creature. His contempt for the Esquimaux went beyond the typical mistrust that a White man would, I wager naturally, have of them & indeed verged on a race-hatred it was difficult not to find repugnant.

I have told you, Ezra, that there is no God in Alaska--as such, we depend on those whose forekind have seen the true face of this country to tell us what we should know. Too many of the newcomers here may recoiled at the wildness of the mythology that the Esquimaux are so rich with--not I, indeed, as I have said, now. But even before that I was no fool, if an Esquimaux musher told you not to go out because some queer omen foretold a storm, you d--n well stayed home! Too many fools have laughed at those wiser & marched off to their doom.

So it was with Edward Edwards--so it is fate that drives me away in fear & loathing from Alaska, Land of Tomorrow, of saintlessness & nightmare.

The awful events were set in motion on the morning of the 5th of August when a pair of mushers, commissioned by the Army in Fort Davis to map the more obscure parts of the peninsula upon which Nome precariously treads icy water, were given leave from their task & set to overwinter in Nome for the next few months.

We greeted them with the usual communal hospitality & offered them supper as they regaled us with the thrills & despair of running dog-shod over such endless inhospitable miles. A little naturally, they compared dog teams, engaging in the Dog Dope that Nome so delights in.

As the hour grew late, however, they seemed to wish to talk about the more--shall one say unusual things they had seen & heard, out on the trail & well beyond it, such that the room grew hushed as, with a little whiskey, the topic turned to the strange & the half-understood.

Evidently there was, somewhere near Fairbanks back east, a tribe of truly degenerate Esquimaux that practiced nameless & utterly nauseous rituals in congress with their Malmut dogs & had been doing so for some centuries, though only hinted & whispered of by those Esquimaux that already knew. So went the tale, they would lure young lads who were fresh in attaining manhood--I suppose around nineteen, perhaps twenty years--into their nefarious liturgy, inherited from days immemorial & they would attain new form as a man-beast not unlike the were-wolf of legend, yet here more were-dog, but did not shift into one form or the other, but yet stayed as merged hybrid between the two. They would hunt together & indeed so commune with special Malmut companions with a lifespan that dwarfs those of a normal human, but at a cost of their humanity, such as it was. They are spurned & shunned by their fellow Esquimaux, who will hush outsiders who pry too deep. However, I believe Dr. Boas has discussed them in his writing as being the Adlet, but even so it is yet strange, I thought to myself, that these unsuspecting travellers would have heard it themselves, independently.

(Examples abound uncounted, of course, the world over, yet I cannot help to think about our own town, our own Adkins County--what is the connection here, Ezra? Is there one? The darkness that beats in the heart of man is surely brightened by the soul of the dog--yet what is to be said about this tale & those we have heard so poignantly in our country, about when these two hearts merge--?)

I beg pardon for the aside. So--in addition to this, to which I paid the keenest attention until their concluding tale, was a smattering of ghost lore--slain miners & the like--and something garbled about a polar bear with many legs & a whale so large it sank, by its own volition, a trio of ill-fated Japanese vessels that aimed to slay that same Leviathan by harpoon.

But they saved their most sensational story for last.

Not far due north of here, they said, but rather out of the way from the trails & into treacherous & scarcely-trodden terrain, were vast, glittering piles of morse--a word I & other sourdoughs have come to understand to be walrus, or perhaps mammoth, ivory & bones. It was, they averred, almost unbelievable if they had not seen it so themselves: like an Elephant Graveyard of the queer African lore Dr. Livingstone recorded & indeed perhaps serving the same function, vast piles of the finest quality morse they had ever laid their eyes on, stretching from a humped ridge on out into the sea.

The very thought excited us at once: if the mushers were correct & the sheer amount of ivory as they so estimated was lying there, waiting to be taken, then not a small fortune could be made with very little effort! Enough with the infandous yellow--let us strike it rich with the gleaming white!

But a ginger-haired gentleman from Boston, who I now believe will stay in Nome as a permanent resident rather than to return whence to his Yankee origin, spoke up with a concerned look: how was it, he asked the mushers, that they had not made off with some of this scrimshander treasure themselves?

It was then that the two sledders looked at each other, a sudden graveness coming to their faces--one nodded to the other & he answered, in a low, shaken voice, that his dogs would dare not go near the bones at all, but would cower & shy away from them. When one of the mushers, impatient with his lead dog, directed him to get close, he protested, the poor thing did, by letting loose a howl that so spooked the sledder he had no choice but to retreat from his position.

The other musher joined his companion by saying that, when they neared the site, the sky did not look right, the clouds too flat or too wide, as they had never seen before. The two of them were then questioned at length about what they meant, but each time one of them would explain, or try to, he found he could not adequately put into words whatever strange thing it was he thought he sensed--the sky, they insisted, just did not seem right.

Amongst us men, whom we had, up to that point, maintained that Alaska had hardened us into sourdoughs, absorbing all manner of freakishness & cruelty from God & Nature & Man with a stony stoicism such that nothing more could ever shock us, looks of significance & confusion darted from one set of eyes to the next. What could it all mean?

Eventually, exasperated, the mushers inferred that it must have been a case of their own nerves, first of all, as well an overly arduous journey for their dogs--all this & the very sight itself of a thing of Nature so numinously majestic even in its morbidity, suchlike seeing a wolf rip the throat out of a polar bear, must have rattled them too much to let irrationality reign--which, in their profession, could prove deadly.

Thus did they repeat their story, indeed a very tempting offer: by only a short journey would riches await a patient, rational man, unafraid of atypical weather in the skies above & the skittishness of sled-dog.

The room stirred for a full quarter-hour before Amka, the lady Esquimau who made a tidy living selling pelts to the prospectors, heard of what had happened, making a scene by positioning herself before the fire & clapping her hands for attention. All eyes turned to her, some in anticipation, others in bemusement.

She was a handsome woman as those of her blood go, with a proud face & an upright gait that gave deference to neither man nor woman, which caused her some conflict & more than one altercation with a White man who thought him her natural superior.

Her large, black eyes were pits of fury as she stared us, the men there gathered, down with the scolding of one who must discipline a willful child.

"No go--no disturb where Negafook sleep."

This was a word none of us had heard before, but we knew immediately it had something to do with her peoples' folklore & superstition, such that not a few chuckles murmured amongst us, punctuated by a solitary whoop that went up from the back--this was Edward Edwards, I suppose needless to say if you have been making the connection. His noise made some of us brace with annoyance, along with the mocking abuse that came with it: "How much more of this Snow-Devil stuff! Nonsense! Unaccounted pagan piffle!"

To these Amka recoiled, then, borrowing the body language from the ungrateful White men before her, folded her arms before her ample bosom.

"No! Do not go! Negafook there sleeps--dreams & dreams--season, season, season, he sleeps & he dreams--move his bones, his teeth, he awaken, make you dream what he dream..." She thrust her head forward, whipping an arm around to gesture in the general direction of wherever this pile of morse was said to have been--then, raising her voice as loud as she dared, proclaimed: "Do--not--go!"

Amka being who she was, we knew here to be somewhat saucy & not a little cross, quite often, but she was in rare form, then--I dare say she actually frightened us. Those she did not frighten she certainly agitated enough into quiet.

Eventually it was left up to me, I supposed, to breach the silence & ask this woman what she meant.

Were these bones sacred to your people? I ventured, a few of my fellows & nodding their approval at the question, wondering if those that came before her had held them in some regard--one hears all the time of Indian Rajas suffering this or that calamity because they dared pluck the Sapphire eyes from a temple idol, perhaps this was similar.

"They the teeth of Negafook! Dwell in badlands--bad things. They bad to us, always! Negafook--comes with the north wind--is north wind--cold, bad. Grandmother's grandmother--good woman, wise woman--say he bad, bad terrible. Her brother go out--bones were there, old when she young. He try to gather them, but then--" She stopped & in her defiant face was a flicker of something--we all saw it--something that, for the first time any of us had known this remarkable lass, actually made her look afraid. But as soon as the flicker came, then like a blown-out candle was it gone & she returned to her angry defiance. "No--no go out--no wake Negafook. He dream, he dream bad."

Behind Amka was her teenage son, a remarkably handsome & upright boy who watched his mother intently as she spoke. His name was Aselu, although for whatever reason amongst his people it was some big to-do about it being a name he chose after his thirteenth year, not the name he was born with. No matter--Aselu was known to speak English better--with more fluency, I suppose I should say--than his mother, but when he opened his mouth, she shushed him, such that her words alone rang through the arm, the circle of men in armchairs or standing with drinks in hand, such that the endless crackle of the fire was the only sound in the room.

She motioned to Aselu to follow her & they departed, leaving a room of bewilderment behind her.

There gathered were we, men of the White Race that God in his Wisdom had dispersed to every strange corner of Europe & then America--men of the White Race that God had created but then led into this Godless land. Amongst our group were sturdy Vikings from Norway & Sweden--Celts from Scotland & Ireland--brave Russians whose people had claimed this land ere Nantucket whalers ever thought to gaze upon it--Anglo-Saxons from across the breast of the continent that the United States has laid claim for our own.

Yet what were we to do? The Bostonian asked this first--did it not sound dangerous, yet did it not sound immensely profitable? Should not we, as healthy men of the great conquering race, put this to a rational vote as to how to proceed?

The matter being so agreed to, it was then that I, in my own agitation, put forth that the morse should be left be--already there were strange omens from the dog-punchers who would certainly know better than the rest of us, so I appealed to them to repeat the veracity of their claims, which they readily & earnestly did. White men though we were, we there gathered were no invincibles nor immortals--too many of our comrades, had ventured off into weather that appeared fine but which the Esquimaux warned against, never to return. If they had been correct about that, well--who was to say they were not correct about other things? Perhaps in the most practical terms there was no supernatural curse at all, but because Alaska was already brimming with surprises both unpleasant & uncanny, so who was also not to say that this morse had yet to be gathered because of some nameless disease or ague that would afflict those who would come near it?

I should have perhaps known that my reasoning--met with nods, once again, quick & sagacious--would be answered with the hateful spite of the Californian. No sooner had I closed my mouth, when he opened his:

"The words of a common squaw over your own d--n destiny!" Edward Edwards roared. "What do these d--n Snow Devils know?! No better than the teeming hordes that Custer wiped clean in the Dakotas! & the sooner Alaska gets a Custer of its own--why, I would celebrate the day thereafter like a Fourth of July!"

Most of us cringed--one booed--another shot an invective at him to shut his mouth, lest the half-breed families & the Esquimaux lodgers actually hear his hateful nonsense.

"Enough out of you--d--n fools & d--n cowards, the lot! Tomorrow go I to where my fortune awaits--the rest of you may go to Hell!"

Then, as the room burst into guffaws, protests, hollers of every voice, Edwards elbowed his way in front of the fireplace to corner the musher who had seen the morse there northward lain, to extract from him the exact details of where his supposed fortune might be made.

When he was satisfied, he turned to us, roaring: "I--will be the richest man in Alaska!" He swaggered off to his room, defiant against our hurled abuse.

The greed in him made him move quickly. It was near dawn the following morning, the 6th, when he departed, having paid extra to overcome the hesitancy of a kennel-keeper for a dog team to take him. Off he went, northward, with all of us watching him until he was well out of sight.

"I hope," said the erstwhile Bostonian to me that evening, but loud enough that everyone could hear, "that those dogs have more sense than he does & leaves the son of a b-- to his fate."

A ripple of laughter met his words & the conversation for the rest of the evening went safely into other channels.

Even in the vast expanse of Alaska, the dogsledders guide their able animals to make sure that news & goods travel as fast as they might. So it was, that on the evening of the 9th there came loose talk amongst the Esquimaux that reached those that dealt with & lived them that there were evil omens seen in the sky & in the weather, the signs of a disturbed & vengeful Negafook--sure enough when Amka came with pelts, otter & fox, to trade, she spoke vaguely of some her kinsman seeing Edwards camped by the ridge where the vast cache of bones was supposedly housed. When she was pressed directly about the rumors of odd & mysterious things making prospectors & dog-punchers alike skittish our on the trail, she was furtive & circumspect, until at last she waved her hands about her face, trying to express a term in her tongue that could not be rendered into English, but which, I can at least be assured, was filled with some manner of dread & woe.

"Him gone, gone now--your friend find what brother of grandmother of grandmother's find..." Clearly there was something that the faculties in her native tongue could convey quite clearly, but not to us. She concluded at last a repetition from before: "Negafook_dream--dream bad--now--_him dream bad too." Then with a huff: "We warn--White Man no listen." Then she stormed off, Aselu, in tow behind her. "White Man never listen!"

That was the last we saw of Amka until this entire affair reached its awful climax--for she went to stay with her people in their generational lands outside of town, refusing to come back, Aselu was instructed to relate to us the following day, until whatever crisis had befallen us, of our own doing, was resolved.

Some of the men waited up in a kind of vigil until dawn to see if Edwards might somehow make his way back--but the Sun rose, sluggish & half-lit as it gets up here, with no sign of the Californian being found.

On the 10th, the mail arrived, but the mushers who brought it said they would be lodging for a day, maybe longer, for coming down from Fort Davis they had reported strange patterns in the clouds above them & whole settlements of Esquimaux that would not come out & greet them--fearful, they said, of something they could not & would not repeat. They could give no more details than that. When they met the mushers from the week before, they traded stories how they, too, felt a sense of dread at how the sky looked & the hesitancy among the lead dogs which was highly abnormal for such sturdy & trustworthy creatures.

It was just after midnight--only accounted for with a reliable watch, as the Midnight Sun left us only with a spare & spectral twilight--on the 11th, when it happened: storming into town, barking & carrying-on as we had never in our lives heard, the sled-dog team that Edward Edwards had assembled, but driverless, no musher at the helm. Such a thing had never, ever, happened before--I suppose it would be like a sailing ship bereft of passengers or crew drifting into a port, so ghastly & singular was such a thing.

One of the mushers came out to the far end of Front Street & wrangled them up--all the dogs were accounted for, not a one missing. But now the entire town was in an uproar, the men back at the Saloon in such a state that no work could get done, nor anything scarcely talked about all, save for the fool thing that Edward Edwards had gotten himself into & indeed the kind of doom he had, in his arrogance & race-hatred, dragged us all into, one way or another.

Once again, my fellow men & I were at an impasse. Most were not in favor of expending the necessary money--not to say the effort, if each of us was speaking plainly--of finding that wretched Californian, but clearly the Esquimaux, spooked enough, were vital to our dealings & trade & we could not risk the actions of one to threaten the many.

Lots were drawn, with mine selected, so it was I charged to go fetch Edwards & bring him back. My skill with the dog-team was not great, but adequate enough that I could maneuver for some miles--by no means a long distance--without much trouble, so it was not altogether too difficult for me to assemble a different dog team & set off with vague directions for this Hyperborean elephant graveyard that had caused us so much trouble.

Now, Ezra, I must ask you to read carefully--what am I about to set down you must believe is the truth as I saw it--however incredible & horrible as it may seem to you. Once more, it is why you must burn this when you read it.

I do not know how long it took me to get there, but at last I approached the great promontory they spoke of that led down to a beach where, in an obscured cove, the great piles of ivory supposedly were. The shoreline was rocky & jagged, disappearing around a bend--there were no tents or piers as there were in Nome, indeed no apparent human settlements for some miles.

Almost at once, as we neared, the lead dog, a bearish Malmut with sable fur given the apropos name Blackie reared up as though he were a horse, then stamped his mighty paws to stop us dead--no sooner had he done so when he threw back his mighty head & let out the noble call of his kindred, a solitary howl.

His brothers in their respective harnesses echoed Blackie, arching their heads back to howl with him, one after the other after the other, so like the Malmut Chorus that we would hear in Nome ourselves every sunset, that dulcet hideousness--there is no other way to describe it--that is the canine way of telling the citizens of Nome, whether White or Esquimau or man or woman or child, goodnight, sweet & happy dreams.

But there was no sweetness, no comfort or coziness, in their sudden & crazy action--as Blackie ceased his howl his cries turned nervous & then pained, his comrades doing the same, growls & whimpers & all manner of pitiful noises that rose in volume & then intensity until they filled the air, a whole team of dogs acting as though something unseen & terrible had cruelly struck them.

And then--it was rather like something _had_struck them, for at Blackie's command--I have told you the seemingly magical hold a lead dog will have over his fellows--they leapt forward at full steam, jerking me with such force that I felt the fastenings to the sled unravel & fail, in mere seconds I had fallen backwards, hard, into the snow.

Off the dogs went in their swooning canine panic, leaving me alone, bereft of any supplies, including my Verey with its lifesaving flare--my heart sank into a despairing rage & for the first time since I reached this Godforsaken snowy land did I swear at those wretched curs. As they had done to Edward Edwards, so had they done to me, leaving me alone in terra incognita.

Mercifully there were no storms nor blizzards, though a continuous breeze blew from the north--I confess for a moment I was chilled far deeper than the Arctic airishness that was now threatening to freeze me, for I remembered Amka saying that the Negafook was the spirit of the north wind.

It being the Summer months, there was very little snow to be seen--some mud, but any possibility of me tracking Edwards or his own dogsled team was very small indeed, as what few pawprints there were to be had inevitably intermingled in a confusion on the ground.

There I was--lonesome, in a lonesome land.

I had no choice but to gain my bearings & try & discover if the dog's behavior was because I was close to my goal--if the stories were true, their queer cowardice was because the great place of ivory was somewhere nearby. I could intercept Edwards, take him back to Nome & end this travesty which threatened to upend what little peace we had.

It was with rising trepidation that I mounted the hill that rose into the promontory-cliff, a lazy slope topped by neither tree nor shade. As I kept on, I felt a distinct dazedness come upon me with each step--a feeling I cannot equate except for being drunk, when the spins overtake the head & there is nothing to do but stumble. I say that this was the closest way to equate it, for I found very suddenly that I could properly have words for what I was feeling.

I shook my head, hard, trying to clear it--but this turned out to be a lethal mistake, a mistake that I must live with for the rest of my days.

Because it was then--that I looked up.

My mishaps with the dogs, with its burning frustration & befuddlement, then my determination to find out where I was--not to say the strange way the place was, apparently, playing with my head--had all prevented me from noticing the sky above me.

But when I looked--I saw what the mushers had seen, I saw what made the Esquimaux quake at the sight--I saw the sky as it should not have been¸ I saw an inversion of nature that was far more strange & nightmarish than the Midnight Sun that played havoc with what any sane man should know about this Earth.

The sky was--different. It seemed vaulted or--I struggle here--taller than it should be, stretched into dimensions they seemed not capable of--the light from the Sun seemed strange as well, as though it was bent or curved--again I struggle to explain, other than to say that it was all unhealthy& fundamentally not right in the way it was supposed to shine.

I blinked, hard, several times, trying to catch my breath & put my sights ahead, convincing myself it was nothing but some strangeness of the latitudes, not the innate, cosmic wrongness that it felt like--why, I do not know, if only maybe because I was so fearful of what the truth might really be.

My head down, few steps more & I was atop the promontory & beheld beneath me--the graveyard of ivory.

The mushers were certainly right--impressively so. The shoreline curved from one tucked-in part of the promontory to the other in a kind of crescent--littering the sand of the shore was ivory, morse, of every kind & shape--here were the vast heads of whales, with their long stretches of ribcages like the vaults of a European cathedral, the great long partizans & polearms of mammoths, the dagger-mouths of the walrus. Here & there I saw parts of bear, wolf, even eagle--a ghastly menagerie of all the beasts of Alaska.

And all of it--every bit--glittered, shone, brilliant, I may even say magnficient, in the warped & strange sunlight.

In the midst of it all wandered a solitary creature in an aimless pace. I thought it a wolf or a starved bear, at first, so I approached cautiously, down the slope to get a better look & come close to thing.

But then I realize what--not to say who--it was.

For a fraction of another moment did I think it to be a Leper, some woeful nightmare of a long-dead Crusader who saw such pitiable wretches massed against a desert Krak--but then, my fancy shattered, I knew at once who I was seeing.

It was Edwards.

His parka was in tatters, leaving patches of exposed skin that the Alaskan elements had ravaged with the tell-tale gangrene of frostbite & chilblain--elsewhere there were sores & cuts that wept blood & pus that froze & then refroze whenever he attempted to move, slithering along the permafrost & then rubbing against the bones, the teeth, the tusks of the morse--deliberately, I saw him, deliberately doing so, moaning in some tenebrous ecstasy, as though the pain he was inflicting on himself by pulling the naked flesh of his arm against the sharpened edges of the ivory to rip open his own skin produced in him some nameless, exquisite pleasure.

As I beheld him like this, an icy gust from the North blew right into my face, stinging my eyes, bringing with it a miasma of some execrable, nauseous stench, as though a whole charnel-house of corpses had been dumped somewhere upwind.

When it died down, the sick, sere creature that once was Edward Edwards, some feet away from me in the midst of those terrible bones, stirred--he looked up at me, the hood of what was left of his ratty parka sinking down to his shoulders.

I gasped aloud.

His body was hideous enough, cadaverous, rotting, but his face I daresay could beggar description--his eyes were sunken back into his head, rings of indigo beneath them, betraying a wildness that must have come from an inability to sleep. His skin seemed--brittle, if I may be allowed the word, a lack of fresh water killing this man as surely as world a sword.

A twitch--a kind of half-cringe, half-wince--ran through his whole face, as though it was unaccustomed to making expressions or had lost the ability to properly do so, before he settled on a kind of slack half-smile, directly at me.

"Why you--it's the Shenandoah--the one who would listen to the fables of a Snow Devil rather than take what was rightfully his..."

He grabbed hold of a rib, or what I believe was a rib, so tall & upright it could have belonged to a small whale that beached itself in time immemorial, to pull himself up--he stumbled, nearly collapsed, but held fast, standing up with his hand on an iron grip around the Cyclopean rib-bone.

"Behold it, won't you? Behold it! D--n it all! What size, what immensity! A thousand pianos from one carcass--I shall be a rich man yet, O Shenandoah!"

"Edwards, enough--you are unwell, you need the treatment of a doctor. Where is your Verey? We may fire it off to call for help."

He did not answer, only stared at me, the quiet of Alaska between us.

I have spoken before about the silence in the Alaskan wilderness, the tundra that maddens the eyes because it is so monotonous in its endlessness, indeed perhaps you have read the words of poets with loftier talents than I, how there is no sound, no chirping of birds or the squawking of squirrels as one might find in our own Virginian mountains--in Fairbanks I heard the rasping croak of the ravens which the Esquimaux hold with such veneration in their legendry, but Fairbanks has trees, my dear Ezra--where Nome has none. So with no trees there are neither birds nor squirrels nor anything else to break the silence, the silence that swallows, the silence that--deafens.

With my dog-team now an uncounted distance away--with it, now, just he & I, Edward Edwards, face to face--I heard nothing, nothing at all, but the labored, fearful sound of my lungs & the rattling, shuddering breaths of his own.

"I will be a rich man yet, O Shenandoah..." he repeated, his face twisted in that awful grin, a rictus that was fixed on his mouth as though he had been shocked with an electric current. "A rich man! The richest man in Alaska!"

To this, said I: "Edwards, you must cease this errand. Clearly the bones are diseased, or some malady has befallen you. Let me help you--let us go back to town together." Repeating what

I said before: Edwards, where is your Verey? We will signal for help!"

"You may take my Verey & shoot a flare to Hell, where you belong, you d--n Virginian liar!" He shouted it, so suddenly loud it startled me where I stood.

His face was no longer the grotesque grin which was once plastered on it, replaced with a look of dead stillness--as though his eyes were a doll's eyes, lifeless & without feeling or understanding.

Wordlessly, he grasped the end of one of the ribs--or tusks, I couldn't be sure--and gripped it hard until the end snapped off, a good eight or nine inches, with a sickening splintering crack which in my bewilderment reminded me hideously of the way tree branches sound when they give in under the weight of too much snow.

Then--still without a word--he took this piece of ivory, staring at me, as though knowing where to put it in the great hole that was in the front of his parka_--and stabbed himself with it_, wrenching it down inch by inch with the breathless moan of one who has found religious ecstasy.

He swung the ivory piece back up to his face, fresh with the gore & blood from his self-inflicted wound--his eyes flicked to it, eying it as a child eyes with delight a piece of sweetened treat his mother has given him.

"Is this not the most spectacular quality of morse you have ever seen, O Shenandoah? Though--though--morse I think not it be, but something more ancient--older--were they not called mammoths for their size? But--look--_look again--_is this not the most delicious piece of ivory you have ever laid eyes on?"

"Truly," I answered, fighting back fresh urges to vomit, fearing for my life or what he might do to me with that same sharpened spear of ivory, "it is a most spectacular piece--surely many, would want to buy it..."

In answer, his voice dipped into near a whisper, his eyes widened, that sick, stiff grin rearranging the features on his nigh-syphilitic nightmare of a face: "I'll be the richest man in Alaska."

He whirled around, procuring a skull which once belonged some nameless winter animal that came there to die centuries ago--it hung askew atop one of the spear-like ribs--and he threw away the blood-soaked piece he had, he placed both hands on the skull & then set it atop his head--I was reminded of that portrait of Napoléon when he crowned himself Emperor.

"He--" he pointed to the skull. "He talks to me--as I talk to it--it tells me--tells me what it dreams, as it sleeps--"

One could not think that this horror would achieve yet another level of supreme awfulness--yet then it did.

As Edwards tried to finish his ungrounded rambling, he sucked in a hard breath, his eyes fluttering, stumbling backwards to collapse to the ground beneath him--then, to my everlasting disgust, he crawled forward & then gripped me by the ankles--gnarled hands, fingers missing, streaks of flesh blackened & gruesome with the coming necrosis of frostbite--he--how else can I put it?--he clawed at me, thrust forward with his arms to hold onto me, to any living thing that would bind him to this or any mortal coil at all.

"It has me!" he shrieked, a sense of panic in his throat that I have never, not once, heard another human utter. "It has me! It has me! Don't you see you d--n fool Virginian! It has me! Now--now--now it shall have you, too!"

He screamed these words, screamed them at me with every fiber of what was left of his pathetic being--screamed so hard & so hoarse the noise was scarcely something that a human should make--and then, O Heaven, it wasn't. It was deep, long, low, not a howl but something worse--a moan, a groan, a shuddering, wailing lamentation.

"O! When will I sleep? When will I dream? It has me, it has me! Why won't it have you--!" His hands came to his face--his fingers dug at his cheeks, already purple & nigh-putrescent with chilblain, such that he could peel his flesh off his face with every dug. They fell, small clumps, to strike the bones below him, falling off to slide into the snow at bottom--his face deformed with oblong troughs of sloughed-off flesh.

I stood, horrified into a speechless stupor, but he ignored me in his insane prattle: "It will not let me go--awake, awake, all day, all night! I want is to sleep & to dream & to sleep & to dream!"

I understand that someone reading these words could not be frightened by them, but that is because they did not hear them--hear them, as I did--the sorrow, the devastation, the desperation that swelled unholy, the shouts that came hard against the rising wind--a terrible squall born aloft once more from the north--that even its tempestuous blow could not drown out his screams.

He writhed where he lay before jumping upright, snatching the skull that had fallen from him which he had been speaking to, and which he had fancied--or rather I hope he had fancied--could speak back to him.

Then I saw him hold up the skull to his face, nose to nose with the thing of dead ivory--then turn it, putting up to his eyelevel, as though he would wear it as a mask.

It was such a simple action, such a small thing to have done, perhaps natural, contemplating death, memento mori, even in his complete insanity--such a simple action, perhaps such a natural action & yet what happened next will forever be seared into my memory, no matter how much I dearly wish to forget it.

The skull was up to his face in Edwards' hands--when it flew out of them & affixed itself to his head. He struggled to remove it, but no sooner had his fingers grasped the yellowed old bone when he found it would not budge.

Then--a second later--I heard it. May Heaven commit me forever, but I heard it. As Edwards tried as hard as he dared to remove the skull from his head, there was the sound of sizzling, as though of bacon in the skillet, as his flesh merged with it--the two skulls becoming one.

As his arms uselessly jerked at the thing, thrusting outward & backward & backward & outward in an impotent frenzy of terror--Edwards let out a new scream, a different one--sheer & total animal pain, an ululation of naked agony that tore out of him as though a shotgun had gone off in his very throat & the recoil had sent his lungs throbbing out one solitary shriek of excruciation.

Now he leered blindly, smashing & crashing into the bones as he went, tearing what was left of his parka & his other gear, ripping it into ribbons as it was caught on the jagged edge of the scattered bones that, I swear, now glittered even more brilliantly in the ghostly twilight of the Midnight Sun, harsher & harsher to the eye such that it became almost diamondiferous--luminescent from within.

The bones were phosphorescent--glowing green like the foxfire we would find, dear Ezra, in the logs of oak as children--it was that color, hideously chloric, fulgent & throbbing--the same shade, the same kind of wraithlike ebullience which filled the sky when the aurora would snake out over the clouds--how, I asked, I prayed, how could this be happening? What malign malady would make ivory glow--what eldritch disease could fuse a skull to a man's face?

The questions were paltry then--I can only imagine the stupidity, the uselessness of even phrasing them now. One uses words like malign & eldritch, but they mean nothing, nothing at all, if you have witnessed what they were meant to describe.

I witnessed it all--even now as I come to the soul-upheaving climax of this terrible affair.

As I watched, Edwards' clothing was nothing but scraps & tatters--and then--it was nothing at all, for what damage the sharpened edges of that glimmering prison of ivory did was soon joined by his own spasmodic movements to tear away at what little he wore left.

I have, Ezra, heard heartending tales of those suffering from extreme cold, when in their last moments they will lose all sense of themselves or their surroundings & in their delirium will strip naked & freeze to death, too often alone--but that was only when some poor soul was freezing & I knew, as much as I allowed myself to know_in this bedlam of outrage after outrage against both sensibility & sanity, that Edwards was not freezing, but that he was mad, or--worse--that in the moment he was no longer really Edwards at all, or rather Edwards admixed--_with something else.

I say this--I say this because then he collapsed to his knees, upstretched his arms to the Midnight Sun & the stretched & undulating heavens--to let out a singular roar.

It was a different sound than the ones before, deeper, so deep that they seemed to shake my own ribcage as surely as it made the titan ribcages of the now-fossil monsters nearby me vibrate & shake all the same.

I cannot describe it--I shall never be able to describe it--the catastrophic anguish that ripped through me to hear it. What I heard shattered my ears & rattled my brain. I was stunned--paralyzed--rooted to the very ground where I stood.

There but for a moment I could not see him, I could see nothing at all, my eyes shut tight & my hands clapped to my ears--there was one final blast of wind from the North like that which could collapse the walls of Jericho.

With it all at last came the crowning thing of all--the ground began to tremor beneath me.

Harder & harder, louder & louder, Edwards' dire note of terror & the trembling of the Earth from the quake, they came together in one final, cataclysmic Armageddon as the shoreline, its ivory mysteries, its unwilling priest with his diseased body & diseased mind, broke away, crumbling into dust--then, at last, washed away by a solitary, humbling wave thrown out of the Bering Sea.

The ivory--the shore--Edward Edwards--all vanished in the crashing tide.

But that was all. I remember nothing else.

The young Esquimau boy, Aselu, found me with his dogs the following morning--I was awakened by them licking at my face, pawing at my parka, evidently worrying over me as though they could sense the distress of a human being. Aselu frankly marveled at how I survived the night; he had known I was from some mountains far away in the Lower Forty-Eight & said as much: perhaps my mountaineer blood had saved me up here in the tundra.

Though I was grateful, I confessed myself then & still confess myself now deeply mortified at how close I was to a truly foolish death. But Aselu shook his head & told me the truth: Amka had sent him, for she knew that I was in danger, when the sled-dog team had ran back to Nome yet a second time. I was, said she, a good man & deserved the help.

I was overwhelmed--I still am, if I may be honest enough--by her kindness. I feel she may have been repaying my own, or what she thought was my own, but it was no kindness at all--only respect.

As I rode with him back to Nome, I looked above me to the sky, what had confused & horrified me how many hours before--yet then saw only the same comforting firmament that I had always known. Whatever horror had come, had now passed.

When we returned to Nome near the whole town was there to greet me, some throngs of people who all wanted to know what happened--the earthquake had sent every citizen, White & Esquimau, into an uproar & indeed not a few of them counted me among the dead that the Alaskan wilderness so cruelly & regularly takes.

Of course I was at once accosted by every living person in that town to report what I saw, or what I knew, but everything that happened--the confusion with the dogs, the fear in the geometry of the skies above me, everything that took place in the ivory-strewn nightmare-garden with Edwards & then its collapse into the sea--was so new, too new, I could barely have words for any of it.

It was much later that night when there came a knock at my door--it was Amka, who had prepared a salmon dish, letting herself sit at the foot of my bed as she gently asked, in her broken but undaunted English, what became of the man who hated her & her race so much he was willing to die to prove them wrong./

Then, right then, I told Amka what I saw--everything--the gruesome state of Edwards, the terrible visions of the naked Midnight Sun heavens, the foul scourge of the north wind. She only nodded when I was finished--then, with a smile that was knowing & wry, she asked: "What you tell them now?" She pointed outside to make her point.

I answered her the same way I answered the rest of them--every one, no matter who, no matter where--that an unfortunate disease had gripped him when he found some unwholesome whale bones he thought were quality ivory, yet alas, he drowned in the waves that came crashing with the recent earthquake.

Then she smiled at me, she closed her eyes & nuzzled my cheek in what her people call the koonik way of expressing affection--then she nodded in affirmation: "Aporniakinatit, Mister Shenandoah."

Then she left me alone in my room.

I share with that woman--and, now, with you, my dear Ezra--a secret we shall all take to our graves.

The world was told a lie because they could not handle the truth, but so be it, for I am sure the world is built on such lies, for as I have said, I will now no longer give the slightest snicker at the notion of any superstition, however queer--I have seen too much, I know too much.

As for Edward Edwards--I know not where he has gone. I do not care to know. Perhaps the Esquimaux are right & he was possessed--or worse--of the Negafook from the ivory skull he pilfered--perhaps--or was afflicted with some awful & unthinkable infectious malady that gave him the nauseous bodily characteristics I have described. But this would not explain rest of what I saw & smelled--nothing will.

The mushers & fellow-prospectors link the violent weather, the fearfulness of the dogs & the unaccounted dread they felt from the skies as all being linked--but all now explainable by natural causes, such that the Esquimaux trepidation & sometimes frank hysteria were all just superstition on full display from a backwards people.

The world believes that Edward Edwards, of Frisco by way of Sacramento, lately of Nome, drowned in a gale when he was dying of some horrid malady picked up by attempting to retrieve unwholesome & diseased ivory on the shore of some obscure part of the peninsula which bears Secretary Seward's name--and that is all what they should believe. The graveyard of morse, the place where the _Negafook_dwelt & possessed the brain & soul of one Edward Edwards, has sunk into the sea, following an earthquake, swallowing the man whole.

Still I swear I see in some dreams when the north wind blows too hard against my lodgings, the true form of what the man, Edward Edwards, became: the great tusked monstrosity that still, I think, roams the wastes of this awful Septentrional place, as the learned Harvard scientists say that the mammoths & mastodons he now more than passingly resembles once did. The sea swallowed him, but it would just as soon spit him out.

I shall spend the rest of my days wondering if it was the ivory, some necrotic ague with which it was infected, that maimed Edward Edwards, soul & body--or something that the Esquimaux knew to be eldritch & immortal in the lives of their ancestors, something wicked, something not altogether of this or any sane world.

I shall spend the rest of my days, Ezra, wrestling with that very question--I do not think I shall ever have an answer.

I shudder to think, shudder all the harder of what might be--only the great amount of gold that piled in my pans, which I shall take with me back to W. Va to put on even more solid footing my family's fortune & share with you, my only friend, salves the pain.

It is too much--it is much too much. I have had my fill of Alaska, as no other prospector in Nome can probably claim to, even the poor rascals that shoot themselves every week on the beach out of a despair I know only too well. It is all I can do to stay my hand from shaking as my pen writes these words. It is as though to write about the memory of Edward Edwards is to somehow invoke him, summon him, somewhere nearby.

I implore you, once again, to burn this letter upon its receipt & reading. Tell no one what I have told you.

Pray for me as I make my journey back. Pray for me--for I must reiterate in every emphatic term that can be mustered: there is no God here. There never was.

There is no God in Alaska.

Your treasured friend,

Nicholas Archibald Lightfoot, V.

The snows that are older than history,

_The woods where the weird shadows slant;

The stillness, the moonlight, the mystery,

I've bade 'em good-by--_ but I can't.

_________

Robert W. Service, "The Spell of the Yukon"

11 Front Street

Nome, Alaska Territory

20th August 1906

To my dearest friend, E.A. Lynch:

I must apologize forthwith for the vacancy of my letters, as I believe the last one to you was probably dated last year, so any worry that has befallen you or our fellow townspeople is my fault alone. Being as where we are on this spinning globe, of course, it is nothing if not inevitable.

However--is of the most dreadful & paramount importance, that before you read the contents of this letter, I must insist, indeed demand, that you burn it upon reading. Tell no one about what I am about to relate, only that I will be at last coming home to W. Va.

I wish I was writing under circumstances more happy to relate--alas, it is not so. Perhaps the news of the earthquake will reach you before this letter does--if so, please know I am well & safe. But, even so, as I have told you, this is a place where men & dreams go to die & it is only by miracle of Providence & Providence alone, that I have been anywhere near successful in my attempts to extract that infandous glittering rock which will make us rich--gold.

I say Providence because, though I know & respect your Faith, there is no God here--no God in Alaska, nor Kings, only the deeds & crimes of Men & the spirits of things primeval, things that would make the hardiest missionary convinced he should return home & let this be the sole province of the heathen Eskimeaux. This is a place of soulless white, if the spirit of the poet be invoked, or indeed the humanist too, for surely when Voltaire said quelques arpents de neige he did not mean Canada, he meant this place, Walrussia, Seward's Great Polar Bear Garden.

It is here, as I related in my last letter, that nature undergoes a terrible inversion & pours out broad, sunny daylight certain times of year when darkness should drape the land. The native dogs, monstrous lupine furry things to match their masters in great furry jackets & coats--Malamuts, they are called--are treated with the same respect & dignity as a man of $300 a year. Come twilight, or what passes for twilight, they all join together, the dogs do, native & imported, making the coming sunset hideous with howls more sad & lonesome than Pluto's own Cerberus--one never gets used to it, the sound of these dogs together, the sweetness in their sad voices bespeaking some elder tragedy that afflicted this place in the times of the diabolical heathenism of the first Esquimaux uncounted æons ago.

(I mean not to tease, but surely you can shudder yourself from this--what it means to you, after all, in our little corner of the benighted parts of Old Virginia, of the elder nature of dogs & curses--there is more, which I will add below.)

At any rate, if you find this a bit of theater, my dear Ezra, I can assure you it is actually an understatement--there is no God in Alaska.

As you know I came here in Nome by way of Seattle by way of Frisco, crossing by railroad from Chicago across the broad breast of our continent, in search of gold, as many of the men--with, remarkable to relate, women also--who have come here to do the same. My last letter described Nome & the culture here, which you will no doubt recall is perhaps not so different from the wildness & vice that Cinder Bottom lays claim to in our own W. Va, if a little more tamer & subdued by the ever-present chill & cold that makes even Summertime cool to the skin--though instead of horses & cows & the like; of course as I also mentioned in my first letter & throughout this one, there is ever an overabundance of dogs, such that when a cow was brought from Frisco by boat, the little children of the tavernkeep exclaimed in wonder at its size & that it had horns.

My coming & living here was both arduous & trying but not without reward, so it is my pleasure to relate that I have indeed amassed a fortune, a sum of which I shall not disclose but which will afford my family--and you, friend of mine--a satisfying result to defying death & worse in this Heaven-forgotten land of nightmares. I am writing you, then, to tell you I board for Seattle & thence to Frisco once again, to make the travels back to Chicago & thence to Morgantown.

You may ask why I am departing so early, why I would not stay to at least attempt to forge friendships or indeed collect yet more gold--what follows is why I have determined to depart, why I have waited some months to write you, awaiting for the icebound port to melt enough for the ships to come & take us all away. Indeed, you may ask why, even after the fruits of success, I would implore you to inform the appropriate parties of my return & then burn this message forthwith.

The truth is--complicated.

I seem to recall your father was of the same sensitive Celtic mind as his grandfather, come from Erin across the sea, he was prone to seeing, or thinking he saw, things that were beyond our ken of perception--faeries, ghosts, all manner of devilish hosts, so went the rhyme. We have at least _heard_enough, I think, to know the truth of his beliefs & to keep a mind much more open than others would be to the strangeness of the world, to the laughter in the dark--the persistent strangeness of the dogs about our place is the most salient.

Ezra, my friend, if I may be honest enough as one man to another, I do not discount, as others do, the innate wrongness_of any of the fur-wrapped Esquimaux folk & their doings & beliefs--I am a God-fearing man who has read his Scripture & all the dire admonitions against wizards & those with familiar spirits & the dangers indeed of bewitchment from the strange women & mad hermits that populate our _own homeland, but what I have seen here, what I have felt, without a recourse to science or logic or indeed Christian theology, has shaken me more than anything else--more than all of the drunkenness & depravity & bloodshed in this accursed Cocytus. But never will you find me to call these Native folk diabolist_or _devilish or something worse, for I have seen what many have only dreamed of.

Thus do I depart Nome, though I have made life-friends and indeed brothers here--they called me Shenandoah, and croaked the song out at me after too much whiskey--under appreciable mental strain. It is because of one such incident--something which eclipses any tall story or peculiar tale of our mountain forebears. I mean to relate to you, my dear Ezra, the fate of one Edward Edwards of California--what I saw with my own eyes one Hellish day drenched in the Midnight Sun, which has convinced me more than the drunkenness, vice & Godlessness of this place to take what I have & depart, what I must implore you to keep secret with the burning of this letter upon its receipt.

I refer, ultimately, to the terrible fate of that terrible man, the Californian with the double-name, Edward Edwards.

I believe I mentioned Edward Edwards in my last letter as being an experienced prospector & little else--I did not know very many people at the time & meant only to list who was staying with us at the Saloon. We were all cheechako then, scarcely knowing what we were doing, scarcely being able to believe we were there. But at the time, that was all--there was, then, not much else to relate about the man, because even then I failed to get close to him, through no fault of mine or any of the other prospectors here.

For Edward Edwards was not a pleasant man, even in this town full of rather even more unpleasant men. His hair was the color of dead wheat, thin like lint, with an unhealthy visage that spoke of a handsome aspect made evil by a heavy reliance on the bottle, perhaps to keep what vestiges of sanity that he could cling to being here so long. Indeed, his time in Nome had surpassed any of us--he had been one of the first prospectors who heard about the news of the Three Lucky Swedes & had stolen a march on the toughs & bravados of Frisco to get here--ill rumor said he had jumped the claim he was digging, slain a man to get it. They said the same thing about my father, you know--though I have had to deny it from the time I passed my twentieth year, we both knew my father, it is more than possible, if not probable, which of course stays between us. But even my father, sinner as he was, could not compare in Satan's court to the vile being that was Edward Edwards. A half-decade in Alaska Territory had made him what they call a real sourdough, but he bore none of the tendencies of jollity or resilience or self-deprecating world-weariness so often ascribed to people with that moniker so affixed. Whatever time he had spent here had let a kind of insidious bitterness get inside him--we all saw it, the way his eyes would move about the room & judge us to our very soul simply by a single glance. Little wonder that he was friendless, too, as far as I can tell. He was a vile, contumelious thing. Have you ever seen a man kick a dog for looking at him the wrong way? In Nome such a thing is tantamount to assaulting a full-grown man--three times I saw Edward Edwards be challenged by knife, pickaxe & gun for abusing one of the poor animals, who luckily were not badly hurt, though I imagine they could have been had the jackass had his way. He owned no dogs himself, nor did he seem to have a woman, although--once more--the town gossips held that he took unlawful carnal knowledge of an Esquimau girl & paid a heavy sum to the father to keep the whole thing quiet. I believe it, as I would believe any foul thing whispered of that damnable creature. His contempt for the Esquimaux went beyond the typical mistrust that a White man would, I wager naturally, have of them & indeed verged on a race-hatred it was difficult not to find repugnant.

I have told you, Ezra, that there is no God in Alaska--as such, we depend on those whose forekind have seen the true face of this country to tell us what we should know. Too many of the newcomers here may recoiled at the wildness of the mythology that the Esquimaux are so rich with--not I, indeed, as I have said, now. But even before that I was no fool, if an Esquimaux musher told you not to go out because some queer omen foretold a storm, you d--n well stayed home! Too many fools have laughed at those wiser & marched off to their doom.

So it was with Edward Edwards--so it is fate that drives me away in fear & loathing from Alaska, Land of Tomorrow, of saintlessness & nightmare.

The awful events were set in motion on the morning of the 5th of August when a pair of mushers, commissioned by the Army in Fort Davis to map the more obscure parts of the peninsula upon which Nome precariously treads icy water, were given leave from their task & set to overwinter in Nome for the next few months.

We greeted them with the usual communal hospitality & offered them supper as they regaled us with the thrills & despair of running dog-shod over such endless inhospitable miles. A little naturally, they compared dog teams, engaging in the Dog Dope that Nome so delights in.

As the hour grew late, however, they seemed to wish to talk about the more--shall one say unusual things they had seen & heard, out on the trail & well beyond it, such that the room grew hushed as, with a little whiskey, the topic turned to the strange & the half-understood.

Evidently there was, somewhere near Fairbanks back east, a tribe of truly degenerate Esquimaux that practiced nameless & utterly nauseous rituals in congress with their Malmut dogs & had been doing so for some centuries, though only hinted & whispered of by those Esquimaux that already knew. So went the tale, they would lure young lads who were fresh in attaining manhood--I suppose around nineteen, perhaps twenty years--into their nefarious liturgy, inherited from days immemorial & they would attain new form as a man-beast not unlike the were-wolf of legend, yet here more were-dog, but did not shift into one form or the other, but yet stayed as merged hybrid between the two. They would hunt together & indeed so commune with special Malmut companions with a lifespan that dwarfs those of a normal human, but at a cost of their humanity, such as it was. They are spurned & shunned by their fellow Esquimaux, who will hush outsiders who pry too deep. However, I believe Dr. Boas has discussed them in his writing as being the Adlet, but even so it is yet strange, I thought to myself, that these unsuspecting travellers would have heard it themselves, independently.

(Examples abound uncounted, of course, the world over, yet I cannot help to think about our own town, our own Adkins County--what is the connection here, Ezra? Is there one? The darkness that beats in the heart of man is surely brightened by the soul of the dog--yet what is to be said about this tale & those we have heard so poignantly in our country, about when these two hearts merge--?)

I beg pardon for the aside. So--in addition to this, to which I paid the keenest attention until their concluding tale, was a smattering of ghost lore--slain miners & the like--and something garbled about a polar bear with many legs & a whale so large it sank, by its own volition, a trio of ill-fated Japanese vessels that aimed to slay that same Leviathan by harpoon.

But they saved their most sensational story for last.

Not far due north of here, they said, but rather out of the way from the trails & into treacherous & scarcely-trodden terrain, were vast, glittering piles of morse--a word I & other sourdoughs have come to understand to be walrus, or perhaps mammoth, ivory & bones. It was, they averred, almost unbelievable if they had not seen it so themselves: like an Elephant Graveyard of the queer African lore Dr. Livingstone recorded & indeed perhaps serving the same function, vast piles of the finest quality morse they had ever laid their eyes on, stretching from a humped ridge on out into the sea.

The very thought excited us at once: if the mushers were correct & the sheer amount of ivory as they so estimated was lying there, waiting to be taken, then not a small fortune could be made with very little effort! Enough with the infandous yellow--let us strike it rich with the gleaming white!

But a ginger-haired gentleman from Boston, who I now believe will stay in Nome as a permanent resident rather than to return whence to his Yankee origin, spoke up with a concerned look: how was it, he asked the mushers, that they had not made off with some of this scrimshander treasure themselves?

It was then that the two sledders looked at each other, a sudden graveness coming to their faces--one nodded to the other & he answered, in a low, shaken voice, that his dogs would dare not go near the bones at all, but would cower & shy away from them. When one of the mushers, impatient with his lead dog, directed him to get close, he protested, the poor thing did, by letting loose a howl that so spooked the sledder he had no choice but to retreat from his position.

The other musher joined his companion by saying that, when they neared the site, the sky did not look right, the clouds too flat or too wide, as they had never seen before. The two of them were then questioned at length about what they meant, but each time one of them would explain, or try to, he found he could not adequately put into words whatever strange thing it was he thought he sensed--the sky, they insisted, just did not seem right.

Amongst us men, whom we had, up to that point, maintained that Alaska had hardened us into sourdoughs, absorbing all manner of freakishness & cruelty from God & Nature & Man with a stony stoicism such that nothing more could ever shock us, looks of significance & confusion darted from one set of eyes to the next. What could it all mean?

Eventually, exasperated, the mushers inferred that it must have been a case of their own nerves, first of all, as well an overly arduous journey for their dogs--all this & the very sight itself of a thing of Nature so numinously majestic even in its morbidity, suchlike seeing a wolf rip the throat out of a polar bear, must have rattled them too much to let irrationality reign--which, in their profession, could prove deadly.

Thus did they repeat their story, indeed a very tempting offer: by only a short journey would riches await a patient, rational man, unafraid of atypical weather in the skies above & the skittishness of sled-dog.

The room stirred for a full quarter-hour before Amka, the lady Esquimau who made a tidy living selling pelts to the prospectors, heard of what had happened, making a scene by positioning herself before the fire & clapping her hands for attention. All eyes turned to her, some in anticipation, others in bemusement.

She was a handsome woman as those of her blood go, with a proud face & an upright gait that gave deference to neither man nor woman, which caused her some conflict & more than one altercation with a White man who thought him her natural superior.

Her large, black eyes were pits of fury as she stared us, the men there gathered, down with the scolding of one who must discipline a willful child.

"No go--no disturb where Negafook sleep."

This was a word none of us had heard before, but we knew immediately it had something to do with her peoples' folklore & superstition, such that not a few chuckles murmured amongst us, punctuated by a solitary whoop that went up from the back--this was Edward Edwards, I suppose needless to say if you have been making the connection. His noise made some of us brace with annoyance, along with the mocking abuse that came with it: "How much more of this Snow-Devil stuff! Nonsense! Unaccounted pagan piffle!"

To these Amka recoiled, then, borrowing the body language from the ungrateful White men before her, folded her arms before her ample bosom.

"No! Do not go! Negafook there sleeps--dreams & dreams--season, season, season, he sleeps & he dreams--move his bones, his teeth, he awaken, make you dream what he dream..." She thrust her head forward, whipping an arm around to gesture in the general direction of wherever this pile of morse was said to have been--then, raising her voice as loud as she dared, proclaimed: "Do--not--go!"

Amka being who she was, we knew here to be somewhat saucy & not a little cross, quite often, but she was in rare form, then--I dare say she actually frightened us. Those she did not frighten she certainly agitated enough into quiet.

Eventually it was left up to me, I supposed, to breach the silence & ask this woman what she meant.

Were these bones sacred to your people? I ventured, a few of my fellows & nodding their approval at the question, wondering if those that came before her had held them in some regard--one hears all the time of Indian Rajas suffering this or that calamity because they dared pluck the Sapphire eyes from a temple idol, perhaps this was similar.

"They the teeth of Negafook! Dwell in badlands--bad things. They bad to us, always! Negafook--comes with the north wind--is north wind--cold, bad. Grandmother's grandmother--good woman, wise woman--say he bad, bad terrible. Her brother go out--bones were there, old when she young. He try to gather them, but then--" She stopped & in her defiant face was a flicker of something--we all saw it--something that, for the first time any of us had known this remarkable lass, actually made her look afraid. But as soon as the flicker came, then like a blown-out candle was it gone & she returned to her angry defiance. "No--no go out--no wake Negafook. He dream, he dream bad."

Behind Amka was her teenage son, a remarkably handsome & upright boy who watched his mother intently as she spoke. His name was Aselu, although for whatever reason amongst his people it was some big to-do about it being a name he chose after his thirteenth year, not the name he was born with. No matter--Aselu was known to speak English better--with more fluency, I suppose I should say--than his mother, but when he opened his mouth, she shushed him, such that her words alone rang through the arm, the circle of men in armchairs or standing with drinks in hand, such that the endless crackle of the fire was the only sound in the room.

She motioned to Aselu to follow her & they departed, leaving a room of bewilderment behind her.

There gathered were we, men of the White Race that God in his Wisdom had dispersed to every strange corner of Europe & then America--men of the White Race that God had created but then led into this Godless land. Amongst our group were sturdy Vikings from Norway & Sweden--Celts from Scotland & Ireland--brave Russians whose people had claimed this land ere Nantucket whalers ever thought to gaze upon it--Anglo-Saxons from across the breast of the continent that the United States has laid claim for our own.

Yet what were we to do? The Bostonian asked this first--did it not sound dangerous, yet did it not sound immensely profitable? Should not we, as healthy men of the great conquering race, put this to a rational vote as to how to proceed?

The matter being so agreed to, it was then that I, in my own agitation, put forth that the morse should be left be--already there were strange omens from the dog-punchers who would certainly know better than the rest of us, so I appealed to them to repeat the veracity of their claims, which they readily & earnestly did. White men though we were, we there gathered were no invincibles nor immortals--too many of our comrades, had ventured off into weather that appeared fine but which the Esquimaux warned against, never to return. If they had been correct about that, well--who was to say they were not correct about other things? Perhaps in the most practical terms there was no supernatural curse at all, but because Alaska was already brimming with surprises both unpleasant & uncanny, so who was also not to say that this morse had yet to be gathered because of some nameless disease or ague that would afflict those who would come near it?

I should have perhaps known that my reasoning--met with nods, once again, quick & sagacious--would be answered with the hateful spite of the Californian. No sooner had I closed my mouth, when he opened his:

"The words of a common squaw over your own d--n destiny!" Edward Edwards roared. "What do these d--n Snow Devils know?! No better than the teeming hordes that Custer wiped clean in the Dakotas! & the sooner Alaska gets a Custer of its own--why, I would celebrate the day thereafter like a Fourth of July!"

Most of us cringed--one booed--another shot an invective at him to shut his mouth, lest the half-breed families & the Esquimaux lodgers actually hear his hateful nonsense.

"Enough out of you--d--n fools & d--n cowards, the lot! Tomorrow go I to where my fortune awaits--the rest of you may go to Hell!"

Then, as the room burst into guffaws, protests, hollers of every voice, Edwards elbowed his way in front of the fireplace to corner the musher who had seen the morse there northward lain, to extract from him the exact details of where his supposed fortune might be made.

When he was satisfied, he turned to us, roaring: "I--will be the richest man in Alaska!" He swaggered off to his room, defiant against our hurled abuse.

The greed in him made him move quickly. It was near dawn the following morning, the 6th, when he departed, having paid extra to overcome the hesitancy of a kennel-keeper for a dog team to take him. Off he went, northward, with all of us watching him until he was well out of sight.

"I hope," said the erstwhile Bostonian to me that evening, but loud enough that everyone could hear, "that those dogs have more sense than he does & leaves the son of a b-- to his fate."

A ripple of laughter met his words & the conversation for the rest of the evening went safely into other channels.

Even in the vast expanse of Alaska, the dogsledders guide their able animals to make sure that news & goods travel as fast as they might. So it was, that on the evening of the 9th there came loose talk amongst the Esquimaux that reached those that dealt with & lived them that there were evil omens seen in the sky & in the weather, the signs of a disturbed & vengeful Negafook--sure enough when Amka came with pelts, otter & fox, to trade, she spoke vaguely of some her kinsman seeing Edwards camped by the ridge where the vast cache of bones was supposedly housed. When she was pressed directly about the rumors of odd & mysterious things making prospectors & dog-punchers alike skittish our on the trail, she was furtive & circumspect, until at last she waved her hands about her face, trying to express a term in her tongue that could not be rendered into English, but which, I can at least be assured, was filled with some manner of dread & woe.

"Him gone, gone now--your friend find what brother of grandmother of grandmother's find..." Clearly there was something that the faculties in her native tongue could convey quite clearly, but not to us. She concluded at last a repetition from before: "Negafook_dream--dream bad--now--_him dream bad too." Then with a huff: "We warn--White Man no listen." Then she stormed off, Aselu, in tow behind her. "White Man never listen!"

That was the last we saw of Amka until this entire affair reached its awful climax--for she went to stay with her people in their generational lands outside of town, refusing to come back, Aselu was instructed to relate to us the following day, until whatever crisis had befallen us, of our own doing, was resolved.

Some of the men waited up in a kind of vigil until dawn to see if Edwards might somehow make his way back--but the Sun rose, sluggish & half-lit as it gets up here, with no sign of the Californian being found.

On the 10th, the mail arrived, but the mushers who brought it said they would be lodging for a day, maybe longer, for coming down from Fort Davis they had reported strange patterns in the clouds above them & whole settlements of Esquimaux that would not come out & greet them--fearful, they said, of something they could not & would not repeat. They could give no more details than that. When they met the mushers from the week before, they traded stories how they, too, felt a sense of dread at how the sky looked & the hesitancy among the lead dogs which was highly abnormal for such sturdy & trustworthy creatures.

It was just after midnight--only accounted for with a reliable watch, as the Midnight Sun left us only with a spare & spectral twilight--on the 11th, when it happened: storming into town, barking & carrying-on as we had never in our lives heard, the sled-dog team that Edward Edwards had assembled, but driverless, no musher at the helm. Such a thing had never, ever, happened before--I suppose it would be like a sailing ship bereft of passengers or crew drifting into a port, so ghastly & singular was such a thing.

One of the mushers came out to the far end of Front Street & wrangled them up--all the dogs were accounted for, not a one missing. But now the entire town was in an uproar, the men back at the Saloon in such a state that no work could get done, nor anything scarcely talked about all, save for the fool thing that Edward Edwards had gotten himself into & indeed the kind of doom he had, in his arrogance & race-hatred, dragged us all into, one way or another.

Once again, my fellow men & I were at an impasse. Most were not in favor of expending the necessary money--not to say the effort, if each of us was speaking plainly--of finding that wretched Californian, but clearly the Esquimaux, spooked enough, were vital to our dealings & trade & we could not risk the actions of one to threaten the many.

Lots were drawn, with mine selected, so it was I charged to go fetch Edwards & bring him back. My skill with the dog-team was not great, but adequate enough that I could maneuver for some miles--by no means a long distance--without much trouble, so it was not altogether too difficult for me to assemble a different dog team & set off with vague directions for this Hyperborean elephant graveyard that had caused us so much trouble.

Now, Ezra, I must ask you to read carefully--what am I about to set down you must believe is the truth as I saw it--however incredible & horrible as it may seem to you. Once more, it is why you must burn this when you read it.

I do not know how long it took me to get there, but at last I approached the great promontory they spoke of that led down to a beach where, in an obscured cove, the great piles of ivory supposedly were. The shoreline was rocky & jagged, disappearing around a bend--there were no tents or piers as there were in Nome, indeed no apparent human settlements for some miles.

Almost at once, as we neared, the lead dog, a bearish Malmut with sable fur given the apropos name Blackie reared up as though he were a horse, then stamped his mighty paws to stop us dead--no sooner had he done so when he threw back his mighty head & let out the noble call of his kindred, a solitary howl.

His brothers in their respective harnesses echoed Blackie, arching their heads back to howl with him, one after the other after the other, so like the Malmut Chorus that we would hear in Nome ourselves every sunset, that dulcet hideousness--there is no other way to describe it--that is the canine way of telling the citizens of Nome, whether White or Esquimau or man or woman or child, goodnight, sweet & happy dreams.

But there was no sweetness, no comfort or coziness, in their sudden & crazy action--as Blackie ceased his howl his cries turned nervous & then pained, his comrades doing the same, growls & whimpers & all manner of pitiful noises that rose in volume & then intensity until they filled the air, a whole team of dogs acting as though something unseen & terrible had cruelly struck them.

And then--it was rather like something _had_struck them, for at Blackie's command--I have told you the seemingly magical hold a lead dog will have over his fellows--they leapt forward at full steam, jerking me with such force that I felt the fastenings to the sled unravel & fail, in mere seconds I had fallen backwards, hard, into the snow.

Off the dogs went in their swooning canine panic, leaving me alone, bereft of any supplies, including my Verey with its lifesaving flare--my heart sank into a despairing rage & for the first time since I reached this Godforsaken snowy land did I swear at those wretched curs. As they had done to Edward Edwards, so had they done to me, leaving me alone in terra incognita.

Mercifully there were no storms nor blizzards, though a continuous breeze blew from the north--I confess for a moment I was chilled far deeper than the Arctic airishness that was now threatening to freeze me, for I remembered Amka saying that the Negafook was the spirit of the north wind.

It being the Summer months, there was very little snow to be seen--some mud, but any possibility of me tracking Edwards or his own dogsled team was very small indeed, as what few pawprints there were to be had inevitably intermingled in a confusion on the ground.

There I was--lonesome, in a lonesome land.

I had no choice but to gain my bearings & try & discover if the dog's behavior was because I was close to my goal--if the stories were true, their queer cowardice was because the great place of ivory was somewhere nearby. I could intercept Edwards, take him back to Nome & end this travesty which threatened to upend what little peace we had.

It was with rising trepidation that I mounted the hill that rose into the promontory-cliff, a lazy slope topped by neither tree nor shade. As I kept on, I felt a distinct dazedness come upon me with each step--a feeling I cannot equate except for being drunk, when the spins overtake the head & there is nothing to do but stumble. I say that this was the closest way to equate it, for I found very suddenly that I could properly have words for what I was feeling.

I shook my head, hard, trying to clear it--but this turned out to be a lethal mistake, a mistake that I must live with for the rest of my days.

Because it was then--that I looked up.

My mishaps with the dogs, with its burning frustration & befuddlement, then my determination to find out where I was--not to say the strange way the place was, apparently, playing with my head--had all prevented me from noticing the sky above me.

But when I looked--I saw what the mushers had seen, I saw what made the Esquimaux quake at the sight--I saw the sky as it should not have been¸ I saw an inversion of nature that was far more strange & nightmarish than the Midnight Sun that played havoc with what any sane man should know about this Earth.

The sky was--different. It seemed vaulted or--I struggle here--taller than it should be, stretched into dimensions they seemed not capable of--the light from the Sun seemed strange as well, as though it was bent or curved--again I struggle to explain, other than to say that it was all unhealthy& fundamentally not right in the way it was supposed to shine.

I blinked, hard, several times, trying to catch my breath & put my sights ahead, convincing myself it was nothing but some strangeness of the latitudes, not the innate, cosmic wrongness that it felt like--why, I do not know, if only maybe because I was so fearful of what the truth might really be.

My head down, few steps more & I was atop the promontory & beheld beneath me--the graveyard of ivory.

The mushers were certainly right--impressively so. The shoreline curved from one tucked-in part of the promontory to the other in a kind of crescent--littering the sand of the shore was ivory, morse, of every kind & shape--here were the vast heads of whales, with their long stretches of ribcages like the vaults of a European cathedral, the great long partizans & polearms of mammoths, the dagger-mouths of the walrus. Here & there I saw parts of bear, wolf, even eagle--a ghastly menagerie of all the beasts of Alaska.

And all of it--every bit--glittered, shone, brilliant, I may even say magnficient, in the warped & strange sunlight.

In the midst of it all wandered a solitary creature in an aimless pace. I thought it a wolf or a starved bear, at first, so I approached cautiously, down the slope to get a better look & come close to thing.

But then I realize what--not to say who--it was.

For a fraction of another moment did I think it to be a Leper, some woeful nightmare of a long-dead Crusader who saw such pitiable wretches massed against a desert Krak--but then, my fancy shattered, I knew at once who I was seeing.

It was Edwards.

His parka was in tatters, leaving patches of exposed skin that the Alaskan elements had ravaged with the tell-tale gangrene of frostbite & chilblain--elsewhere there were sores & cuts that wept blood & pus that froze & then refroze whenever he attempted to move, slithering along the permafrost & then rubbing against the bones, the teeth, the tusks of the morse--deliberately, I saw him, deliberately doing so, moaning in some tenebrous ecstasy, as though the pain he was inflicting on himself by pulling the naked flesh of his arm against the sharpened edges of the ivory to rip open his own skin produced in him some nameless, exquisite pleasure.

As I beheld him like this, an icy gust from the North blew right into my face, stinging my eyes, bringing with it a miasma of some execrable, nauseous stench, as though a whole charnel-house of corpses had been dumped somewhere upwind.

When it died down, the sick, sere creature that once was Edward Edwards, some feet away from me in the midst of those terrible bones, stirred--he looked up at me, the hood of what was left of his ratty parka sinking down to his shoulders.

I gasped aloud.

His body was hideous enough, cadaverous, rotting, but his face I daresay could beggar description--his eyes were sunken back into his head, rings of indigo beneath them, betraying a wildness that must have come from an inability to sleep. His skin seemed--brittle, if I may be allowed the word, a lack of fresh water killing this man as surely as world a sword.

A twitch--a kind of half-cringe, half-wince--ran through his whole face, as though it was unaccustomed to making expressions or had lost the ability to properly do so, before he settled on a kind of slack half-smile, directly at me.

"Why you--it's the Shenandoah--the one who would listen to the fables of a Snow Devil rather than take what was rightfully his..."

He grabbed hold of a rib, or what I believe was a rib, so tall & upright it could have belonged to a small whale that beached itself in time immemorial, to pull himself up--he stumbled, nearly collapsed, but held fast, standing up with his hand on an iron grip around the Cyclopean rib-bone.

"Behold it, won't you? Behold it! D--n it all! What size, what immensity! A thousand pianos from one carcass--I shall be a rich man yet, O Shenandoah!"

"Edwards, enough--you are unwell, you need the treatment of a doctor. Where is your Verey? We may fire it off to call for help."

He did not answer, only stared at me, the quiet of Alaska between us.

I have spoken before about the silence in the Alaskan wilderness, the tundra that maddens the eyes because it is so monotonous in its endlessness, indeed perhaps you have read the words of poets with loftier talents than I, how there is no sound, no chirping of birds or the squawking of squirrels as one might find in our own Virginian mountains--in Fairbanks I heard the rasping croak of the ravens which the Esquimaux hold with such veneration in their legendry, but Fairbanks has trees, my dear Ezra--where Nome has none. So with no trees there are neither birds nor squirrels nor anything else to break the silence, the silence that swallows, the silence that--deafens.

With my dog-team now an uncounted distance away--with it, now, just he & I, Edward Edwards, face to face--I heard nothing, nothing at all, but the labored, fearful sound of my lungs & the rattling, shuddering breaths of his own.

"I will be a rich man yet, O Shenandoah..." he repeated, his face twisted in that awful grin, a rictus that was fixed on his mouth as though he had been shocked with an electric current. "A rich man! The richest man in Alaska!"

To this, said I: "Edwards, you must cease this errand. Clearly the bones are diseased, or some malady has befallen you. Let me help you--let us go back to town together." Repeating what

I said before: Edwards, where is your Verey? We will signal for help!"

"You may take my Verey & shoot a flare to Hell, where you belong, you d--n Virginian liar!" He shouted it, so suddenly loud it startled me where I stood.

His face was no longer the grotesque grin which was once plastered on it, replaced with a look of dead stillness--as though his eyes were a doll's eyes, lifeless & without feeling or understanding.

Wordlessly, he grasped the end of one of the ribs--or tusks, I couldn't be sure--and gripped it hard until the end snapped off, a good eight or nine inches, with a sickening splintering crack which in my bewilderment reminded me hideously of the way tree branches sound when they give in under the weight of too much snow.

Then--still without a word--he took this piece of ivory, staring at me, as though knowing where to put it in the great hole that was in the front of his parka_--and stabbed himself with it_, wrenching it down inch by inch with the breathless moan of one who has found religious ecstasy.

He swung the ivory piece back up to his face, fresh with the gore & blood from his self-inflicted wound--his eyes flicked to it, eying it as a child eyes with delight a piece of sweetened treat his mother has given him.

"Is this not the most spectacular quality of morse you have ever seen, O Shenandoah? Though--though--morse I think not it be, but something more ancient--older--were they not called mammoths for their size? But--look--_look again--_is this not the most delicious piece of ivory you have ever laid eyes on?"

"Truly," I answered, fighting back fresh urges to vomit, fearing for my life or what he might do to me with that same sharpened spear of ivory, "it is a most spectacular piece--surely many, would want to buy it..."

In answer, his voice dipped into near a whisper, his eyes widened, that sick, stiff grin rearranging the features on his nigh-syphilitic nightmare of a face: "I'll be the richest man in Alaska."

He whirled around, procuring a skull which once belonged some nameless winter animal that came there to die centuries ago--it hung askew atop one of the spear-like ribs--and he threw away the blood-soaked piece he had, he placed both hands on the skull & then set it atop his head--I was reminded of that portrait of Napoléon when he crowned himself Emperor.

"He--" he pointed to the skull. "He talks to me--as I talk to it--it tells me--tells me what it dreams, as it sleeps--"

One could not think that this horror would achieve yet another level of supreme awfulness--yet then it did.

As Edwards tried to finish his ungrounded rambling, he sucked in a hard breath, his eyes fluttering, stumbling backwards to collapse to the ground beneath him--then, to my everlasting disgust, he crawled forward & then gripped me by the ankles--gnarled hands, fingers missing, streaks of flesh blackened & gruesome with the coming necrosis of frostbite--he--how else can I put it?--he clawed at me, thrust forward with his arms to hold onto me, to any living thing that would bind him to this or any mortal coil at all.

"It has me!" he shrieked, a sense of panic in his throat that I have never, not once, heard another human utter. "It has me! It has me! Don't you see you d--n fool Virginian! It has me! Now--now--now it shall have you, too!"

He screamed these words, screamed them at me with every fiber of what was left of his pathetic being--screamed so hard & so hoarse the noise was scarcely something that a human should make--and then, O Heaven, it wasn't. It was deep, long, low, not a howl but something worse--a moan, a groan, a shuddering, wailing lamentation.

"O! When will I sleep? When will I dream? It has me, it has me! Why won't it have you--!" His hands came to his face--his fingers dug at his cheeks, already purple & nigh-putrescent with chilblain, such that he could peel his flesh off his face with every dug. They fell, small clumps, to strike the bones below him, falling off to slide into the snow at bottom--his face deformed with oblong troughs of sloughed-off flesh.

I stood, horrified into a speechless stupor, but he ignored me in his insane prattle: "It will not let me go--awake, awake, all day, all night! I want is to sleep & to dream & to sleep & to dream!"

I understand that someone reading these words could not be frightened by them, but that is because they did not hear them--hear them, as I did--the sorrow, the devastation, the desperation that swelled unholy, the shouts that came hard against the rising wind--a terrible squall born aloft once more from the north--that even its tempestuous blow could not drown out his screams.

He writhed where he lay before jumping upright, snatching the skull that had fallen from him which he had been speaking to, and which he had fancied--or rather I hope he had fancied--could speak back to him.

Then I saw him hold up the skull to his face, nose to nose with the thing of dead ivory--then turn it, putting up to his eyelevel, as though he would wear it as a mask.

It was such a simple action, such a small thing to have done, perhaps natural, contemplating death, memento mori, even in his complete insanity--such a simple action, perhaps such a natural action & yet what happened next will forever be seared into my memory, no matter how much I dearly wish to forget it.

The skull was up to his face in Edwards' hands--when it flew out of them & affixed itself to his head. He struggled to remove it, but no sooner had his fingers grasped the yellowed old bone when he found it would not budge.

Then--a second later--I heard it. May Heaven commit me forever, but I heard it. As Edwards tried as hard as he dared to remove the skull from his head, there was the sound of sizzling, as though of bacon in the skillet, as his flesh merged with it--the two skulls becoming one.

As his arms uselessly jerked at the thing, thrusting outward & backward & backward & outward in an impotent frenzy of terror--Edwards let out a new scream, a different one--sheer & total animal pain, an ululation of naked agony that tore out of him as though a shotgun had gone off in his very throat & the recoil had sent his lungs throbbing out one solitary shriek of excruciation.

Now he leered blindly, smashing & crashing into the bones as he went, tearing what was left of his parka & his other gear, ripping it into ribbons as it was caught on the jagged edge of the scattered bones that, I swear, now glittered even more brilliantly in the ghostly twilight of the Midnight Sun, harsher & harsher to the eye such that it became almost diamondiferous--luminescent from within.

The bones were phosphorescent--glowing green like the foxfire we would find, dear Ezra, in the logs of oak as children--it was that color, hideously chloric, fulgent & throbbing--the same shade, the same kind of wraithlike ebullience which filled the sky when the aurora would snake out over the clouds--how, I asked, I prayed, how could this be happening? What malign malady would make ivory glow--what eldritch disease could fuse a skull to a man's face?

The questions were paltry then--I can only imagine the stupidity, the uselessness of even phrasing them now. One uses words like malign & eldritch, but they mean nothing, nothing at all, if you have witnessed what they were meant to describe.

I witnessed it all--even now as I come to the soul-upheaving climax of this terrible affair.

As I watched, Edwards' clothing was nothing but scraps & tatters--and then--it was nothing at all, for what damage the sharpened edges of that glimmering prison of ivory did was soon joined by his own spasmodic movements to tear away at what little he wore left.

I have, Ezra, heard heartending tales of those suffering from extreme cold, when in their last moments they will lose all sense of themselves or their surroundings & in their delirium will strip naked & freeze to death, too often alone--but that was only when some poor soul was freezing & I knew, as much as I allowed myself to know_in this bedlam of outrage after outrage against both sensibility & sanity, that Edwards was not freezing, but that he was mad, or--worse--that in the moment he was no longer really Edwards at all, or rather Edwards admixed--_with something else.

I say this--I say this because then he collapsed to his knees, upstretched his arms to the Midnight Sun & the stretched & undulating heavens--to let out a singular roar.

It was a different sound than the ones before, deeper, so deep that they seemed to shake my own ribcage as surely as it made the titan ribcages of the now-fossil monsters nearby me vibrate & shake all the same.

I cannot describe it--I shall never be able to describe it--the catastrophic anguish that ripped through me to hear it. What I heard shattered my ears & rattled my brain. I was stunned--paralyzed--rooted to the very ground where I stood.

There but for a moment I could not see him, I could see nothing at all, my eyes shut tight & my hands clapped to my ears--there was one final blast of wind from the North like that which could collapse the walls of Jericho.

With it all at last came the crowning thing of all--the ground began to tremor beneath me.

Harder & harder, louder & louder, Edwards' dire note of terror & the trembling of the Earth from the quake, they came together in one final, cataclysmic Armageddon as the shoreline, its ivory mysteries, its unwilling priest with his diseased body & diseased mind, broke away, crumbling into dust--then, at last, washed away by a solitary, humbling wave thrown out of the Bering Sea.

The ivory--the shore--Edward Edwards--all vanished in the crashing tide.

But that was all. I remember nothing else.

The young Esquimau boy, Aselu, found me with his dogs the following morning--I was awakened by them licking at my face, pawing at my parka, evidently worrying over me as though they could sense the distress of a human being. Aselu frankly marveled at how I survived the night; he had known I was from some mountains far away in the Lower Forty-Eight & said as much: perhaps my mountaineer blood had saved me up here in the tundra.

Though I was grateful, I confessed myself then & still confess myself now deeply mortified at how close I was to a truly foolish death. But Aselu shook his head & told me the truth: Amka had sent him, for she knew that I was in danger, when the sled-dog team had ran back to Nome yet a second time. I was, said she, a good man & deserved the help.

I was overwhelmed--I still am, if I may be honest enough--by her kindness. I feel she may have been repaying my own, or what she thought was my own, but it was no kindness at all--only respect.

As I rode with him back to Nome, I looked above me to the sky, what had confused & horrified me how many hours before--yet then saw only the same comforting firmament that I had always known. Whatever horror had come, had now passed.

When we returned to Nome near the whole town was there to greet me, some throngs of people who all wanted to know what happened--the earthquake had sent every citizen, White & Esquimau, into an uproar & indeed not a few of them counted me among the dead that the Alaskan wilderness so cruelly & regularly takes.

Of course I was at once accosted by every living person in that town to report what I saw, or what I knew, but everything that happened--the confusion with the dogs, the fear in the geometry of the skies above me, everything that took place in the ivory-strewn nightmare-garden with Edwards & then its collapse into the sea--was so new, too new, I could barely have words for any of it.

It was much later that night when there came a knock at my door--it was Amka, who had prepared a salmon dish, letting herself sit at the foot of my bed as she gently asked, in her broken but undaunted English, what became of the man who hated her & her race so much he was willing to die to prove them wrong./

Then, right then, I told Amka what I saw--everything--the gruesome state of Edwards, the terrible visions of the naked Midnight Sun heavens, the foul scourge of the north wind. She only nodded when I was finished--then, with a smile that was knowing & wry, she asked: "What you tell them now?" She pointed outside to make her point.

I answered her the same way I answered the rest of them--every one, no matter who, no matter where--that an unfortunate disease had gripped him when he found some unwholesome whale bones he thought were quality ivory, yet alas, he drowned in the waves that came crashing with the recent earthquake.

Then she smiled at me, she closed her eyes & nuzzled my cheek in what her people call the koonik way of expressing affection--then she nodded in affirmation: "Aporniakinatit, Mister Shenandoah."

Then she left me alone in my room.

I share with that woman--and, now, with you, my dear Ezra--a secret we shall all take to our graves.

The world was told a lie because they could not handle the truth, but so be it, for I am sure the world is built on such lies, for as I have said, I will now no longer give the slightest snicker at the notion of any superstition, however queer--I have seen too much, I know too much.

As for Edward Edwards--I know not where he has gone. I do not care to know. Perhaps the Esquimaux are right & he was possessed--or worse--of the Negafook from the ivory skull he pilfered--perhaps--or was afflicted with some awful & unthinkable infectious malady that gave him the nauseous bodily characteristics I have described. But this would not explain rest of what I saw & smelled--nothing will.

The mushers & fellow-prospectors link the violent weather, the fearfulness of the dogs & the unaccounted dread they felt from the skies as all being linked--but all now explainable by natural causes, such that the Esquimaux trepidation & sometimes frank hysteria were all just superstition on full display from a backwards people.

The world believes that Edward Edwards, of Frisco by way of Sacramento, lately of Nome, drowned in a gale when he was dying of some horrid malady picked up by attempting to retrieve unwholesome & diseased ivory on the shore of some obscure part of the peninsula which bears Secretary Seward's name--and that is all what they should believe. The graveyard of morse, the place where the _Negafook_dwelt & possessed the brain & soul of one Edward Edwards, has sunk into the sea, following an earthquake, swallowing the man whole.

Still I swear I see in some dreams when the north wind blows too hard against my lodgings, the true form of what the man, Edward Edwards, became: the great tusked monstrosity that still, I think, roams the wastes of this awful Septentrional place, as the learned Harvard scientists say that the mammoths & mastodons he now more than passingly resembles once did. The sea swallowed him, but it would just as soon spit him out.

I shall spend the rest of my days wondering if it was the ivory, some necrotic ague with which it was infected, that maimed Edward Edwards, soul & body--or something that the Esquimaux knew to be eldritch & immortal in the lives of their ancestors, something wicked, something not altogether of this or any sane world.

I shall spend the rest of my days, Ezra, wrestling with that very question--I do not think I shall ever have an answer.

I shudder to think, shudder all the harder of what might be--only the great amount of gold that piled in my pans, which I shall take with me back to W. Va to put on even more solid footing my family's fortune & share with you, my only friend, salves the pain.

It is too much--it is much too much. I have had my fill of Alaska, as no other prospector in Nome can probably claim to, even the poor rascals that shoot themselves every week on the beach out of a despair I know only too well. It is all I can do to stay my hand from shaking as my pen writes these words. It is as though to write about the memory of Edward Edwards is to somehow invoke him, summon him, somewhere nearby.

I implore you, once again, to burn this letter upon its receipt & reading. Tell no one what I have told you.

Pray for me as I make my journey back. Pray for me--for I must reiterate in every emphatic term that can be mustered: there is no God here. There never was.

There is no God in Alaska.

Your treasured friend,

Nicholas Archibald Lightfoot, V.