But my father did not dream of what might happen.

It came in the spring of the year he took me on my first trip to the States, when I was eighteen.

We were gone five months, and they were five months of hell for him.

Day and night he grieved for my mother and the little home under the mountain.

And when at last we came back--" He turned again to the window, but he did not see the golden sun of the tundra or hear Tautuk calling from the corral.
"When we came back," he repeated in a cold, hard voice, "a construction camp of a hundred men had invaded my father's little paradise.