The mission and a typical village home.

The land had an imponderable emptiness about it, stretching out and out, beyond the powers of a man’s imagination to fill. Off in the distance the low sky fused with the gray line of the horizon, merging with the landscape in a pink haze, vast and immeasurable. Against this awesome expanse of land and sky even the great bend of the Yukon, gleaming with the borrowed fire of the sun, seemed a small and insignificant thing. The nearer complex of the mission site barely made an impression on it all. It seemed to go on forever, a snowy wasteland where no human voice was heard and there was nothing but the ghostly passage of the wind over the frozen tundra.

 At the time of the gold rush in the Klondike  the men called it the ‘Great Empty’ and many were lost in that wilderness, taking their lusts and desires and hopes with them to unknown graves. It was said that their voices still moved on the wind, sounding in the rustle of trees and the leafless branches of willow bush.

 Standing there on the brow of the hill Daniel had a new sense of himself. In all this, he thought, what was a man’s soul? What was so important about the things he carried in his small gray head? He had lived a soft life, unchallenged, wrapped in the cellophane of civility. He had never known hunger, or want. Yet, when he stared at the vacant landscape he was struck by the recollection that all men came out of that emptiness and, on day like this, when the wind was up and the stars were beginning to dance in the frosty sky, he ‘remembered’ something lying deep in his bones; something fearful, and hungry, and lost. It called to him, wolf-like, on the thin voices of the village dogs, a reminder that the ‘Great Empty’ was still there, waiting for him like the night waited on the brief rosy reign of the setting sun. - From Chapter 10- The Village

Below: Two steamboats are trapped in the ice as winter sets in, a common occurrence on the rivers and sloughs.

One of the saintly Ursaline Nuns who served at the Mission.

When he reached the Library he was pleased to find one of the old Ursaline nuns in attendance. He remembered her from his teaching days there, Sister Lucile, an amiable septuagenarian who drifted about with a heavy darned wool sweater over her gray habit, buttoned all the way to the throat where a circular white collar trimmed the main dress and matched the border of her headpiece. A few strands of thin gray hair managed to slip from their captivity and dangle above her ears. She wore a pair of gold rimmed reading glasses, with a braided tassel attached to the back of each arm so they could dangle from her neck when she did not need them. The lines of many years traced thin wrinkles on her forehead, though her eyes were bright and lively, and she always seemed to be smiling, her head bobbing this way and that with a palsied unsteadiness. The skin hung in loose folds from her neck, quivering a bit when she spoke. - From Chapter 13, The Library

The Author, “out on the boards” skiing the winding course of Steamboat Slough. Cross country was a great way to relax and get some exercise in the brief 3 to 4 hour interval of daylight that made up each day in the dead of winter. Sometimes you would go out with other volunteer teachers at the mission, and other times, just getting away into the solitude of the tundra was a real balm for the soul.