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he saw someone.
    There, framed like an oil painting, sat the man on his horse. It was a pale horse.
    The man stared right through the glass at Sig, then he
swung his leg over the beast’s back and dismounted. Sig again caught a flash of the nickel backstrap.
    The man walked steadily toward the cabin door.

    These men are mad with lust for Gold. Conditions will be desperate unless a restraining influence can be exerted. You can hardly imagine to what depths a mining camp, shut away from civilization for eight months by a thousand miles of impassable ice, may descend.
    GOVERNOR JOHN G. BRADY
GOVERNOR OF ALASKA,
1897 – 1906

8
    Faith
    â€œM ay God protect us now.”
    Einar always remembered the first words Maria whispered when she learned that the boat had sailed without them.
    He’d come for the gold, and he hadn’t meant to stay. These things never lasted long, Einar knew. Just like the Klondike, by the time the rest of the world got to know about the gold, it would be too late; all the best strikes found, the land claimed, the easy pickings gone. All that would be left would be the struggle to survive in a world of danger, both natural and man-made, with the occasional speck of gold dust coming his way. Just enough to keep that stupid dream of easy money alive, the dream of fantastic wealth, of ease and luxury and fine things for the rest of his days, but in reality not enough to live on for even a week.

    â€œYes, my love,” Einar said, sitting down on the floor by the makeshift cabin bed, stroking Maria’s forehead. Sig lay curled up by her feet. There was nowhere else for him to sleep. Anna stood, holding a ragged old doll, hopping from one foot to the other, trying to see through the frost-rimmed window, stealing a glance at her mother from time to time, trying not to think thoughts she didn’t like.
    â€œYes, my love,” Einar said softly. “God will protect us now.”
    Maria’s fever was high again, and sweat poured from her face though she shuddered as if icy winds gripped her. Suddenly she winced, screwing up her face, her eyes shut fast.
    â€œAnna,” Einar called. “See to the fire.”
    The girl stared at her mother, not hearing her father.
    â€œAnna!” he called, louder now. “Anna, make up the fire. We must keep your mother warm.”
    Still she ignored him. She hopped onto her other foot and began to stroke her doll’s tattered dress and wooden head, with its few strands of real horsehair.
    â€œAnna!” Einar shouted this time.
    She jumped and stood straight like a soldier but still didn’t move. Sig woke and almost immediately began to cry.
    Einar cursed and shook his head.
    â€œAnna,” he said, more softly. “Anna, see to your brother while I see to the fire.”

    Anna nodded, dropping her doll onto the bare wooden floor and picking up her little brother bodily. She was tall for her age, he was small for his, and she held him like a baby against her chest, singing to him, till she could hold him no more.
    She put him down and with surprise saw her mother looking at her, a weak smile on her lips.
    â€œHave faith,” she whispered, so quietly that Anna didn’t really hear.

9
    The Frozen Sea
    N ever was there a winter like the winter in Nome as, somewhere over the course of seven months, 1899 became 1900.
    As the sea froze, a great cavernous silence descended on the town, an eerie nothingness, in which the few sounds there were traveled unnaturally far. It froze so hard that the enormous pressure of ice from far out to sea threw huge slabs of shore ice up onto the beach, twenty feet, thirty feet, even fifty feet. The Esquimaux called it ivu , “the ice that leaps,” but Einar took it as another strange omen of the desolate world to which he had foolishly brought his family.
    Was it good providence or bad that his cousin was a friend of one of the Three Lucky Swedes, the infamous trio who’d