She turned to look at the cabin. It had been made from logs a long time ago, and those logs had not been oiled in a long time. The roof was covered with a thick mat of vegetation that was more than moss and might even flower in the summer. The front door was offset to the right, and on the left was a large picture window. Wy couldn’t imagine how they’d gotten the glass up here without breaking it.

She walked to the door and knocked. “Hello? Hello, is anyone home?”

There was no answer. She reached for the handle and the door opened easily inwards. Inside was a single room, about sixteen feet by twenty, where a full-size bed took up most of one corner. A wood stove sat in the opposite corner with two easy chairs flanking it. A small dining table with two chairs sat in front of the window and a kitchen area consisting of a high, freestanding counter with shelves beneath stood against the wall in back of the door. There were two more windows, sliders with screens, one on each side.

A propane lantern hung from a hook and she took it down and pumped it up and lit it with matches she found in an ashtray on the table. With the gloom dispelled more details revealed themselves. The cabin might be old but it was clean and neat, with none of the funky smell that came with age in so many of its brethren. There were two sets of shelves, Blazo boxes three high each, one for clothes and one for books. There was a five-gallon water jug on the floor under the counter and a small metal tub on top with toiletries neatly arranged around it. A rectangular mirror in a plastic frame hung on the wall. The shelves below held a selection of canned and dry goods, heavy on the Spam, and a flat of bottled water. There was a saucepan, a frying pan, a moka pot, and a two-burner Coleman stove. On a single shelf nailed to the wall above sat two plates, three bowls, and a collection of public radio mugs. A rusting coffee can held cutlery and utensils. A small wooden box with a lid that locked held a bag of ground coffee and packets of raw sugar and creamer.

There was a nightstand next to the bed. On it was a headlamp and a stack of books, including a fat textbook on fossils in east Africa by Maeve Leakey, a tattered paperback copy of The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly, the first three novels of the Codex Alera series by Jim Butcher, Willie Hensley’s autobiography, and a slim volume titled Mapping the Americas by Shari M. Huhndorf, subtitled “The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture.” It was published by Cornell University Press and looked dense but interesting.

She put the book down and looked around the cabin again. She thought she would have liked Erik Berglund, too, and she was suddenly angry that the pleasure of his acquaintance had been stolen from her, and that the community of Alaska had been robbed of the contributions that he might have made to it, and that the world of archeology would now never benefit from his discoveries. Murder was the rankest form of crime, the outright theft of a human life and all that that life had to offer to family, friends, and the world.