Returning home to El Valle, Alex began to notice in Jacobo some of the qualities he had admired in the old Eskimo. There was the same centered gentleness, the same motility of face and hands, the same wholeness of the storyteller’s art. He soon faced an ironic realization: just as I had discovered late in my attempt to write history that my most important source was a garrulous next door neighbor, Alex came back from the top of the hemisphere to learn that the essence of what he’d been drawn to document in Alaska also existed, even flourished, a few minute’s walk down the road.
