Book report....

I saw the color of snow and ice on the spine in the library...this is a must read. Bigelow is lonely and has found a love with an Inuit woman whose name he doesn't even know. Everything about her is captivating to him. She leaves, he fumbles.  She returns and his attempts to gain reciprocal feelings are not met until he shares the launch of his weather kite.  Romantic but also frigid...

Excerpts~
*Bigelow looks down at what aren't the woman's old winter boots, the ones he knows. Apart from being pulled over her feet and ankles, they're not even boots.  He tugs at the left one and she opens her eyes, she sits up on her elbows. There's nothing in her expression to forbid it, so he pulls the boot and it comes off in his hand--a seal flipper, unadorned, uncut, unstitched. Unlaced, because what need is there for laces? The animal's hide has been emptied of its owner, tanned and lined with dry grass, its pointed nails intact, its pearly lustrous fur smooth, the black leather marked with wrinkles too fat to feel. He touches them: soft. As soft as her own skin.  Having taken the left, he has to pull off the other, just to be sure there's a foot inside, that the pointed nails and the sleek fur aren't parts of her.  But no, the foot slides out, as smooth as its mate, toes rosy and damp from the heat in the boot, a little grass caught between the smallest and its neighbor.  He pulls the blade out with his teeth. The smell of them--not the usual cheesy smell of feet, but fishy. Like the sea.

*A grid of houses, and hers among them. His station and his flags. The shed on the bluff, and next to it the reel. The bays of Cook Inlet. The scribbled path of the creek.
     Three tattoed lines.
     Two bodies in a bed.
     A man walking track.
     A rain of blue-and-white china.
     The trumpet of a gramophone.
     The wet black eye of a seal.
     Cracks of light from between the warped boards.
     God exhaling clouds of geese.
     Copper siphon.
     Column of mercury.
     Each hour hanging like a pelt from her hands.

Taken together, one image laid over another, they will make a book of maps. The outlines of a life.