Washington Harbor reached out a welcoming arm, and the airplane flew in low and slow. Water, catching the iridescent blue and amber of the sky, riffled between narrowing banks of evergreens, black with shadow. Blue turned to white as ice formed in the shallower water, ringing Beaver Island in a necklace of diamonds. At the level of the treetops, and hugging the bank to avoid the worst of the crosswind, the pilot lined up on the expanse of white between the tiny harbor island and the docks at Windigo.

The weekly arrival of food and people from the outside world was apparently quite an event. A snowmobile, surrounded by four figures so muffled in layers of clothing that they looked like bags of dirty laundry, was parked on the ice east of the dock. As the airplane slid gracefully from the sky, one of the bundles turned its back, dropped its insulated trousers and mooned them; a pale butt exposed to the elements. Anna laughed. The pilot ignored it.

As the propeller came to a stop, bearded faces with fur-rimmed hoods peered up at them, and Anna was put in mind of Cro-Magnons first sighting a metal bird from the gods. The pilot shut down the engine, unbuckled his harness and slid from the left seat. Robin Adair, light as a snowflake in a Christmas globe, drifted from the rear seat to the harbor ice. Anna pawed open her harness buckles and maneuvered her oversized boots out one at a time, thrust her down-padded rear end through the door and clambered awkwardly down the itsy-bitsy steps on the wheel pant. Ninety minutes sitting in the cold had done nothing to add to her natural grace and she clumped to the ground with all the dignity of a garbage bag tossed into a Dumpster.