(03-22-2011, 07:41 AM)Eve Wrote: I love it! The language of the narrator (figgering, rubbering) is gripping, as is the description of the tavern's characters and the cold "fifty below" northern weather.

My favourite paragraph has sound, shiver, northern lights, tavern lights, hunger and darkness:

Were you ever out in the Great Alone,
when the moon was awful clear,
And the icy mountains hemmed you in
with a silence you most could hear;
With only the howl of a timber wolf,
and you camped there in the cold,
A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world,
clean mad for the muck called gold;
While high overhead, green, yellow and red,
the North Lights swept in bars? —
Then you've a hunch what the music meant. . .
hunger and night and the stars.

Have you read Jack London's wolf novels? "The Call of the Wild" and "White Fang" are set in icy northern communities as well.