Ike is the owner. I like him fine, as do most of the other people who work here. He’s got a story too, and he told it when he interviewed me. Ike asked if I had experience with animals and I told him that I could communicate with dogs. He had a miniature dachshund asleep at his heels and I said, Watch this, and started making groans in the back of my throat. The dog wouldn’t even raise his head to look at me. Ike said, You need the job that bad, or are you just plain crazy? I said I needed the job and he said, Okay then.

Ike’s part Eskimo. He grew up near the Bering Sea, in Unalakleet, Alaska. Many of the men would work on the oil rigs and be gone for months at a time. This gave the village an abandoned feeling, even with all the women and children around, but it also gave Ike a lot of freedom. He liked to hang with boys who were older. The Iditarod sled dog race came through each year, and when this happened, the kids would go crazy, building ramshackle sleds and hitching up their dogs, who more often than not knocked them over and escaped, dragging pieces of sheet metal behind them for the rest of the day.

To get around this problem, Ike’s friend George decided to strap his little brother onto the sled first before tying it to the family dog, a young husky with a habit of running away. The dog took off, dragging George’s little brother screaming into the distance, and the two boys had to track them down. They’d gone a mile out and were about to bridge a hill when they found a little blue hat, the kind that ties under your chin. Ike picked it up and they went over the top, and there was a polar bear ripping the guts out of George’s little brother. He’d already torn apart the dog—the snow was covered with blood—the sled overturned, the rope hanging loosely from the husky’s neck. George started screaming and the bear turned to look, its muzzle wet with red, and that was it—Ike ran.

He got about ten feet away when George passed him. George was older and his legs were flying fast. Ike got this feeling down the back of his neck between his shoulder blades and he knew the bear was coming and it was almost as if he could see the arm reach out and knock him over. Ike’s feet fell out from underneath him. He landed on his face, his lips stinging in the snow. He didn’t move. He felt the lumbering body of the bear crunching next to him through the powder and he lost it; he pissed all over himself.