The turbo-prop King Air descends from the clouds and cants low over the sea, around the snowy block of Sevuokuk Mountain—the sacred place—and there’s the town of Gambell: lines of shacks strung out on a stark gravel bar, with the lake behind, still frozen at the end of May. Some of the shacks have red roofs, some blue, some shiny tin, and each house has a four-wheeler beside it. There are no trees. I see only one large building, the aluminum-sided school at the edge of town toward the mountain, but otherwise, no brick post office, no granite courthouse, no white-painted town hall—no center. The plane circles the point, where offshore ice stretches away into the clouds forty miles to Siberia, and makes for the runway between the ocean’s shoreline and the frozen lake. It’s mid-afternoon, but time doesn’t matter here because, this far north, it’s daylight forever.

On the ground, the eight of us birders, strangers to one another except for a mother and her college-aged son, are ferried by ATV to the hotel, such as it is, a modular structure with ten rooms along one hallway, a kitchen in the lobby, and a small room for eating and watching television. I’m in number five with Janet Moreland, a forty-year-old widow from Minneapolis, and I unpack my sweat clothes, heavy socks, slippers—I didn’t bring makeup or my hair dryer—and then we assemble in the TV room and are reminded of the parameters of our visit. We have five-day permits to be on the road around the lake and in the boneyards and along the shore to the northwest point. If we want to search the tundra or the mountain—if we want to look for the Eurasian Dotterel—we’ll need a native guide. No alcohol is allowed. No noise in the hotel after eleven P.M. We will monitor channel 6.1 on our two-way radios. As part of the package, our group has rented five ATVs, and whether or not we stay with our guides, Heather and Larry, or go off on our own is up to us, but we should pace ourselves. The days of long light can be wearying. Get some sleep. Most birds are not one-minute wonders; they stay a day or two.

Within an hour we’re dressed in parkas and wind pants and are out with the guides in the Near Boneyard searching for thrushes blown off course from Asia, sandpipers and plovers that breed in the far north, pipits, Bluethroats, buntings, not one of which my friends in New Hampshire would ever have heard of. The boneyard is a dug-up expanse of what looks like a battlefield—holes ten feet deep, some with water or ice in the bottom, bones strewn everywhere. In decades and centuries past, the Yupiks buried the corpses of seals and walruses near the town. In the last fifty years, as walruses diminished and ivory carving became sought after, the walrus tusks had a new value, and the digging began. Birds hunker down in these holes out of the wind.

We walk through stealthily, in as much of a line as we can, Janet Moreland on my left, and the college kid, Eric, on my right. Heather calls out redpolls, Lapland Longspurs, Snow Buntings—all common birds here. Janet is a serious lister and eager for a Brambling or Eye-browed Thrush. She has on a black parka with a hood and holds her Zeiss binoculars with both hands. I imagine her a store manager, setting up quotas for the sales force, or maybe an accountant. The boy, too, has all the gear—blue knit cap pulled low, gloves, red windbreaker, Swarovski glasses—but he’s not looking as the rest of us are. He pauses and stares out beyond the shacks to the beach, where, following his gaze, I see seal meat drying on racks and the skeleton of a whale. On his face is an expression of wonder, as if he were fleshing the bones of the whale and seeing it alive.

“You’re not a birder?” I ask him.

“My mother made me come,” he says.

“From?”

“Houston.”

“Good birding territory.”

“I know a little,” he says. “I’ve done High Island and Big Bend and the Lower Valley. My mother takes me to corroborate what she sees.”

“But you’re not a lister?”

“I know everyone else is. How many do you have?”

“Seven hundred and sixteen in North America. What would you be doing otherwise, I mean, at home?”

“Screwing around.”

“Literally or figuratively?”

He smiles, as if surprised by the intrusive familiarity of the question from someone my age. “What would you be doing?” he asks.

“I’m a professor from New Hampshire,” I say. “I’d be reading.”

He looks past the shacks again. “How do they kill the whales?” he asks. “Do they use rifles or spears?”

“They ride ATVs and snowmobiles,” I say. “I suppose they use rifles.”

He ponders this. His face bears into the wind, and longish hair spills from beneath his knit cap. His eyes are brown, his chin bristly. He reminds me of my own son I never had, an invisible son, one I imagine.

Then a Bluethroat appears in a hole in front of us. It hops to the edge and struts among the bones—smaller than a robin, rusty tail. “Blue-throat,” Janet calls out, and the line of birders breaks and runs toward the bird.

The next morning the weather is foggy, with a cold wind from the east. For passerine vagrants, we want a west wind, but there are still migrating seabirds. Heather and Larry set up scopes on the gravel spit at the northwest point of the island, where the ice pack is a few hundred feet offshore. We collect shreds of cardboard boxes, pieces of plywood, even a smashed Clorox bottle to sit on because an inch under the gravel is solid ice. Hundreds of thousands of auklets and murres fly past, scores of puffins, loons, and eiders. Kittiwakes and gulls weave sinuous lines higher in the air. Now and then someone calls out “Emperor Goose” or “Arctic Loon,” and we all find the bird and follow it with our binoculars.

Eric’s mother is small and round-looking in her layers of clothes and has on a knit cap like his. Over the course of a half hour, she circles closer to me, then paces nearby. Finally she says, “You’re the one Eric likes.”

I’m watching a string of Horned Puffins pass by and lower the glasses. “Are you talking to me?”

“You’re Lauren from New Hampshire. The professor. Eric has an awareness of people.”

“He seems like a good kid,” I say.

“I’m Eve Harrison,” she says. “Eric’s not so good as you imagine. I wanted to get him away from Houston for a while.”

I train my binoculars out to the shelf ice where gulls are loafing. “He says he’s not much of a birder.”

“Oh, he’s good. He knows more than I do. But if I’d let him stay home, I wasn’t sure what he’d do.”

She breaks off and turns away. Again I lower my glasses.

“I wish you’d talk to him,” Eve says.

“About what?”

“About whatever. He lost his father recently—the man lived in California, we were divorced, a real bastard, but Eric doesn’t know that.”

“I’m sure you haven’t told him.”

“Please,” she says. “Eric needs friends.”

I look around the group. “Where is he?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” Eve says. “He’s a loner. When I woke up this morning, he was gone.”

Eric doesn’t show up at the hotel for lunch, and all afternoon as I trudge with the group though the Far Boneyard at the foot of the mountain I wonder where he is. There’s nowhere to go except along the coast or around the frozen lake. I imagine him in a Yupik shack talking to children, tutoring, maybe—there’s something childlike about him. Or taking drugs. That’s possible, too. Is that what Eve meant when she said he wasn’t as good as he seemed?

Snowmelt runs off the slope of the mountain and alongside the boneyard. Where there’s no snow, grass grows among the rocks. We find a Northern Wheatear and a Yellow Wagtail, though we’ve already seen these birds on an excursion around Nome. The wind is chilling and incessant, and several of the group have gone back to the hotel, though not Janet, not Eve. They doggedly follow the guides, checking each hole in the ground, scanning the hillside, looking into the sky.

Why am I the one he claims as a friend? I’m no one he knows. I’ve been a comp lit professor at UNH for fifteen years, never married and never needed to be. From early on I had an intellectual bent. I read; I considered alternatives; I stayed aloof. Growing up, I engaged the nearby terrain—Maine, Plum Island and Newburyport, the White Mountains—and in doing so found an affinity for birds. As I learned more, I was led farther afield to the arid mountains of southeast Arizona, the humid riverbottoms of Texas, the Florida Keys, even the islands off California. Birding drew me to the wider world, though my friends claimed the opposite—it made me sacrifice myself to a quest with no meaning. What was to be gained by counting species? What does seeing a bird mean? When the spirit is always on the move, how can it settle?

Heather flushes a Brambling from one of the holes, though none of us has a good look at it before it darts into another bone pit. As we pursue it, I see Eric in his red windbreaker coming up the road from the far end of the lake. I put my binoculars on him, and in that crisp circle he is defined by fog, shrouded in grainy imperfection. He looks up at the mountain with the same expression of wonder I saw earlier, as if he’s seeing through whatever he’s looking at. He doesn’t look at us.

I expect to see Eric at dinner, but he isn’t there. I eat with Larry, who teaches ornithology at UCLA, and two men from Ohio who’ve never been to Alaska. From walking and being in the wind, we’re all hungry for the chicken and mashed potatoes.

In the middle of the meal Larry leaves for a phone call, and Eve sits down. “I saw him walking back from the lake,” I tell her. “Is he in your room now?”

“He brought cheese and crackers and chocolate bars,” Eve says. “If he doesn’t eat with us, it’s his decision. I gave up telling him what to do a long time ago.”

“You made him come on this trip.”

“Is that what he told you?”

“He said you wanted him to see the birds, as a witness.”

Eve laughed. “People like to be believed,” she says, “but my list is my list. A witness doesn’t change what I see.”

Larry returns, and Eve gets up. “Talk to him,” she says.

Eve sits in front of the TV. She’s right—it’s what you see yourself that matters. When I finish eating, I find a Ziploc bag and pack chicken and potatoes and niblet corn for Eric, but when I knock on the door to their room, there’s no answer.

The whale skeletons on the beach are draped with rotting flesh. Dilapidated scaffolding holds the whale carcasses, and at the same time falls down around the bones. It’s almost eleven o’clock at night, and though the sun is under clouds, it’s still light out. I’m walking to escape my room, or, really, Janet, who talks nonstop about birds. Partly, though, it’s to feel the place at this hour. In New Hampshire it would be dark, people in bed on a Wednesday night, but here several young girls loiter at the airport runway, some riding bicycles on the only pavement. Two boys race a rattletrap ATV across the humps of pebbles on the beach and pass me without waving. The wind hides the sound of the motor, and then there’s nothing but the swirling clouds low over the ice. There’s an urgency to things here—people who hunt seals and whales and pick greens from the wild must know in their blood and bones where they are on the planet.

I never did. As a teenager and through college I felt on the outside of things. I had friends, of course, men and women both, lovers, but I didn’t know what to do with them, whether to embrace them or push them away. Gina and Ray—two random people—Gina, the year after college when I’d gone to Guatemala to build houses for the poor, and Ray, a welder I met during graduate school. Gina was five feet six, my height exactly, and dark-haired, from Rochester. We shared a room with two beds in a cinder-block building, but after a few days, even in the heat, we slept in one. When our time in Guatemala was nearing its end, Gina wanted to know what was next for us, what we’d do together when we got back to the States. I was going to graduate school. Where, she wanted to know. Should she move? For me such a question had no answer. I didn’t want her to go home to Rochester, but I didn’t want her to live with me, either.

It was the same with Ray. He had a welding shop next to the repair place I took my Camry, and he drank coffee with his mechanic friends. We had dinner at a café and, a week later, slept together. He was a kind, gentle man with a good sense of humor. He enjoyed his work and talking with his friends. For money he welded car parts, but his real calling was making sculptures from discarded pieces of metal. I went to his duplex on Fridays and left at eleven. Then it was Friday and Sunday and Wednesday. He said I might as well live with him—why did I want to leave? I told him I had reading to do. “Reading?” he said. Two weeks later we broke up. Ray wasn’t getting enough from me. He said, “You’re not with me.” I said, “I’m not against you.” He said, “You know what I mean.”

So it went. I finished my doctorate, got a job and did research, and absorbed myself in birds.