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When a glacier calves, you can hear it forback and forth between the towering peaks on either side of the bay Sometimes you feel it before you hear it--a vibration in your bones thatfork

Bones They know the call of the ice They sense the relentless push of the glacier Not just the bones of the living, but the bones of the dead, too

I’ll tell you what I know--the strange things that happened one bleak and terrible September I’ll tell you once, but I’ll deny I ever said it, and you’d be better off if you forget you ever heard it But I’ll tell you all the same

People say it all started the day that need couple died at the face of Exit Glacier, but they just say that because people like things to have a beginning and an end It makes them comfortable The truth is, it started before any of us were born Maybe even before there were people here at all

"This world is older and stranger than any of us knows," et that, Anika" My dad’s a helicopter pilot In high season--that’s su tourists up into Alaska’s big sky to get a firsthand look at Nature’s Majesty: the Harding Icefield and theinto Resurrection Bay We lived in Resurrection Bay--my dad, my brother, and me--in the port town of Seward

Seward, not Sewer It was naht Alaska from Russia Not our fault he had a lousy last name

In Seward, it’s all summer trade A lot of businesses close up coh uses for a helicopter pilot in Alaska that my dad has plenty of work all year-round, so we stay

On the day those needs died, Dad got quiet and paced around the house, doing things like looking in the refrigerator as if hethe TV on and off, like he forgot what shoanted to watch

"You think he saw it, Anika?" my little brother, Sammy, asked as atched our father bu

"He couldn’t have seen it," I told hi people up to the ice field when it happened"

"Yeah, but he coulda seen it froiven that very same couple a helicopter tour the day before, but the winds were too rough to land Still, they wanted an up close and personal experience with a glacier, so they took a self-guided walking tour, right up to the face of Exit Glacier It’s a glacier that hasn’t reached the sea for maybe a thousand years It just kind of stops a few miles inland at the silt-filled remains of its old track, which now looksstretch of earth cleared by nature’s force and filled with little hills that lacier’s advance in winter and retreat in sulaciers do flow, just very, very slowly