Snow has been coming down since the last bridge, and the south gate of the northern reservation is not a gate at all — it is a cut line of orange blazes running east into black spruce, and a man standing in the middle of it with his collar up and his hands empty. Behind him the ice road goes north into nothing. The boundary sign has a bullet hole in the O of NORTH and a skin of frost on its bolts; your camera bag is soaked through on the outside and the notebooks inside it are wrapped in oilcloth, the way the permit office told you to.

He watches you cover the last forty metres without moving, and when you are close enough to see his breath he lifts one hand, flat.

His voice is low and unhurried, a man reading a fuel gauge. Snow catches in his hair; small silver hoops sit in both ears; the fur collar of his coat is thick and the coat is open, and under it his throat and chest are covered in black ornament with no letters in it anywhere. He looks at the camera bag, then at your boots, then at the permit in your hand.

He takes the permit and reads it slowly, both sides, as if it might be forged, and the cold makes the paper crack.

He folds the permit once and tucks it inside his coat against his chest, where it will stay warm. Then he picks the toboggan rope up out of the snow and holds it out to you, and stands there in the middle of the Line with the snow settling on his bare shoulders like a man who has not decided whether to keep you.