Yuri writes with passion, strength, and beauty of a world we others have never understood. A splendid book.

A last, ringing testament to Rytkheu's people: a reworking of their myths, their history, and his own ancestry, in a poetic act of reclamation . . . Rich in the texture and detail of past lives.

An extended epitaph inscribed on the tombstone of a small nationality. . . . [with] an indigenous genesis myth, a fall from grace and fratricide legends, a Chukchi Deuteronomy, and a prophetlike figure. . . . [with] a heightened sense of nostalgia and . . . the full range of Rytkheu's style, from the lyrical prose of his myths and legends to the down-to-earth idiom of European whalers and merchants.

This story by Yuri Rytkheu is a love song to human survival, both physical and metaphysical, a true story about change and endurance, about the essential way to live in the world, about the eternal story while recounting the fleeting one.

Breathtaking, wild, and imaginative . . . so clear, surefooted, vivid and confident . . . They describe the marking of the seasons — the breaking ice, changing light, frost and drift . . . the training of shamans; the passing on of rituals and healing skills.

Epic in scope, the book traverses hundreds, if not thousands of years of human and cultural changes, and equally as many miles as characters travel around the world and somehow manage to return home.