After last call at three a.m. the sun on the horizon like a giant lodestar would guide us over uneven boardwalks and dirt roads toward the George Black Ferry, across the mud-fed Yukon River to where our hidden world of tents lay inside a maze of birch, where branches knocked and clacked in the wind like the restless bones of ghosts, where someone always screamed blue murder back at the landlocked sled dogs as they cried and howled at the lingering season and stunning lack of darkness inside the night...