In this agile collection of essays, author Sherry Simpson takes readers from her Southeast Alaska hometown of Juneau, into the frigid Interior, across the Arctic Circle, ending in the North Slope. She writes of solitude and searching, painting the landscapes of the north with her words. Her subject is the great and wild mystery that is the 49th State, the people who live there and the animals which inhabit it. Simpson writes about wolves and bears, ravens and moose, trappers and biologists, and of places that barely appear on a map.