It was the record of a presumptive death hearing, the results of which the parents of the deceased were challenging. A young man, one of a youth group affiliated with a Presbyterian church out of Akron, Ohio, who had come to Alaska for a lesson in wilderness experience, had gone hiking with three friends on a glacier in the Wood River Mountains. The young man had gone for water and disappeared, and after four days Liam Campbell had called off the search and requested a hearing on the presumptive death of the young man.

At the hearing, he had displayed photographs of the area, photographs of the pot lying on its side next to a sluggish stream of meltoff, a map with distances penciled in showing a narrow, easily overlooked and seemingly bottomless crevasse a few feet away from which Liam reported the sound of a lot of water running hard, and SARs report of lowering a fiber-optic cable down the crevasse and finding no body. The troopers best guess was that the boy had gone for water, slipped and fallen into the crevasse, and immediately been caught up in the subglacial river. The location of the boys disappearance was near the mouth of the glacier, and the force of the subsurface meltoff swift and strong, but given the slow rate at which glaciers melted, it would be a long time before the body could be recovered, if ever. With luck the glacier would calve quickly and in ten or fifteen years one of the slabs that fell from its face would yield up the body of the lost boy.

The parents had flown up from Akron, and they fought Bills finding of death by misadventure every step of the way. They reported quarrels between the hikers, a grudge held against their son by another of the hikers, whose girlfriend their son had taken, and even floated the idea that the instructor had harbored feelings of animosity and possibly homicide toward the boy because of some disagreement over grades back in McKinley High School.

Bill understood; it was difficult to accept the fact that your golden boy had tripped over his own feet and fallen headfirst into a glacier, never to be seen again. There was no sense in that kind of death. Better foul play, a murder, an event that would give them someone to blame, to punish.

Presumptive death hearings were Bills least favorite duty. When a fisher was lost at sea, when a climber died on Denali, when a plane was lost in the Bush, and when the bodies of the fishers and the climbers and the fliers were unrecoverable, a presumptive death hearing was held. Most of the time the procedure gave the families some closure, the insurance companies the go-ahead to pay off policies and the lawyers permission to file for probate.

Sometimes, though, the families could not or would not accept the inevitable.