They heard a faint cry, and looked around to see Ms. Doogan waving at them from the beach. “Did you hear her?” Johnny said.

“Hear who?” Vanessa said.

“We’d better go back, we could get in trouble,” Andrea said.

Betty, caught between a natural inclination to succumb to authority and a congenital compulsion to amass scientific data, wavered.

“Come on,” Johnny said. “We’re almost there.”

In the end the four of them approached the foot of the glacier together. Where the moraine ended, the leading edge of ice had eroded into a yawning black cave, shallow, dark from the silt and dirt embedded in it, an enormous, engulfing shadow in ominous contrast to the bright, sunny day a few feet away. It was melting so fast that the runoff sounded like rain. The gravel beneath, rounded smooth by millennia of glacial erosion, was wet and shiny. The cold and the moisture hit their faces like a slap.

“It’s like standing in front of an open refrigerator,” Andrea said.

Johnny didn’t look at Vanessa, the same way she didn’t look at him. Andrea lived in Niniltna, where they had electricity coming out of every wall plug. She didn’t live on a homestead, like he did, or on a defunct roadhouse site like Vanessa, or in the middle of a bison farm like Betty. Townies just had no clue.

Johnny peered into the interior. “Whoa,” Betty said. “You don’t want to get too close.” She pointed. “The face is calving all the time. Look at all that fallen stuff. Some of those pieces are pretty big. You don’t want to get hit.”

“Darn right we don’t,” Andrea said tartly. “Okay, we’ve been here, done that, let’s go back.”

“There’s someone in there,” Johnny said.

“Oh, come on,” Andrea said with a playful slap at his shoulder. “Stop kidding around.”