But the mountains are nothing but cold boring piles of shattered rock when the sky is blazing with the aurora borealis.  I gazed up into the cosmos and felt it move me.  It always moved me.

As a southerner who’d only glimpsed the northern lights in photographs, I’d thought of this lucent phenomenon as a still life fixture in the sky.  But tonight it was a flickering ribbon that appeared to spring from a point of origin just beyond the mountains.  It rose and curved sharply, a green mane running parallel to the horizon—a shock of glowing ions forty miles above the earth.  It seemed an ethereal symphony should accompany this skyfire but the night maintained its massive silence.

Breathing deeply and contentedly, I laid down in the grass, and staring into that burning sky, filled once more with the rapture of knowing I was home.

4

HORACE Boone left his trailer in the village of Haines Junction after dark and followed the one-lane dirt road that passed by Andrew Thomas’s mailbox en route to the trailheads of the St. Elias Range.  He pulled off the road a quarter mile from Andrew’s long winding driveway and parked his old Land Cruiser out of sight in the woods.

It was a ten minute jog through evergreens to the cabin.

The scrawny young man ran it easily in the dark, slowing to a careful walk when he glimpsed the glowing windows in the distance.

Stealing up to a window on the side of the cabin, he peered in, heart beating wildly.  This was only the second time he’d come and by far the most exhilarating thing he’d ever done on a Friday night.

The monster stood at the sink washing his supper dishes, the walls of the cabin flushed with firelight.  He wore black fleece pants, chili pepper-print fleece socks, and a long johns top.  His hair fell in a matted tangle halfway down his back.

A book lay open on the small table behind Andrew.  He’d apparently eaten his supper while reading by lanternlight.

When he’d dried and put away the last of the dishes, Andrew added wood to the fire, stoked it into a steady blaze, and climbed the ladder up into a loft.

From his cold perspective the voyeur could just make out the furnishings of Andrew’s writing nook—a desk, bookshelves, a typewriter, and little notes (perhaps two dozen of them) affixed to the rafters overhead.  A poster of Edgar Allen Poe was also tacked to one of the beams.  It fluttered in updrafts from the hearth.

Andrew sat at the desk and then faintly through the glass came the patter of his fingers on the keys.

The master was writing.

Horace grinned, mind racing to process every detail.  They would be so important.