In 1968, at the age of 19, Robert Perkins was hospitalized for two years in an east coast psychiatric hospital. This book begins here with unflinching writing on this cruel loss. For Perkins, solitary Arctic travel has become a way to test his ties with humanity. His writing on the Artic is filled with humorous observations - on the death dance of the caribou and wolf, on the quality of human fear in and on an ancient human presence in a vast land. The text finishes with the illness and death of the author's young wife to cancer.