In August, 1977, a small plane left my wife Lois and me and our backpacks at the foot of a dirt runway. A quarter mile away lay the Yupik Eskimo village of Kongiganak, population 300 or so. A few miles beyond that lay the Bering Sea.

We would be teachers in Kongiganak for the next seven years. We lived in a place where English was the second language and almost all of what people ate came from the tundra, the rivers, or the sea. And yet televisions and videocassette recorders were already starting to appear, and one house had a telephone and a dish that connected it to a satellite in outer space.

The people of southwestern Alaska were entering a maelstrom of cultural and economic change, and I—as a writer—was witness to that in a part of the state where few outsiders had ever visited. I published articles in Country Journal and Alaska Magazine, and later I was offered a book contract to write about cultural change in western Alaska.

By then I had left Kongiganak, but I arranged to return and spend the summer of 1989 living with—and hunting and fishing with—dear friends from that village, Oscar and Margaret Active and their four children.

“Raven’s Children” was intended to be a simple narrative about life as a subsistence food- gatherer within a world shaken up by technological change and the cash economy. But I soon learned that Oscar was fighting an alcohol addiction and struggling to hold his marriage and family together. At first, I tried to ignore that side of the story. But then I saw that the events of the summer would make no sense without it. With Oscar and Margaret’s permission, that became part of the narrative too.

“Raven’s Children” turned out to be as heart-wrenching a story as I’ve ever wrestled with as a writer. I won’t say here how it turns out, but I will say that these friends and their extended family remain an inspiration to me for their courage, candor, and capacity to love.

An excerpt: “The fifth day of creation”

Half an hour after leaving the village, we reach an area where the river twists past a covey of meltwater lakes. Oscar throws the Evinrude into neutral and then kills it, allowing the boat to skim into a portion of the bank where swaths of undercut sod have split and fallen into a sort of stairway up the incline to the surrounding tableland. Charlie pulls the anchor out of the bow and then climbs stiffly up the bank, digging its tines into the parched grass above us. The rest of us empty out of the boat, Elsie skipping nimbly as a goat up the steps of sod. Oscar and Margaret climb up separately, still without sharing a glance, and I doubt they’ve so much as exchanged a word all day.

At the top of the bank we stand in a row and look out upon a huge, unportioned field of chalky greens and wintry yellows and browns, the lakes in the distance winking cobalt blue in the sunlight. Now that the big motor has stopped, the quiet is almost palpable. But slowly that ringing silence is overcome, and overwhelmed, by another sort of ringing, almost a roar, startling in its pervasiveness and breadth of register: a sourceless, throbbing cacophony of bird cries, a sound like the morning of the fifth day of creation.

Oscar grunts as he drives the sharp end of a broken oar into the grass at the top of the bank so that it stands upright like a fence post, marking the position of the boat. He stands there for a moment with his lips pressed together, hard and white, just as he did while he stood at his window earlier this morning, staring into the light glancing off the smooth surface of the bay.

Then, without a word of gesture to one another, we fan singly and in pairs out into the tundra . . . .