"Tent Dwellers--Okak, Labrador"

Inside this licheny ring of stones that once held down a sealskin tent, I pitch my own domed aquamarine tent and then quickly crawl inside to escape an ice pellet shower, whereupon I see a couple of my predecessors squatting dim and hazy, Dorset People with cuprous, epicanthic faces, scrapers of skin, tellers of tales, diviners of the weather, who stare at this pallid specimen from a distant age in his nylon-lined apparel, astonished that he somehow survived and they did not.

Lawrence Millman is the author of eight other books (most recently An Evening among Headhunters) and hundreds of essays, short stories, and poems published in hundreds of magazines, as well as the editor of several anthologies.