Four Quarters of Light by Brian Keenan

the fire. He moved about swiftly and silently after that. The minutes seemed protracted by my own anxiety about whether I should stand up and say, ‘Hello, my name is Brian Keenan, what should I call you?’ Instead I watched him move about the kitchen, presumably making coffee and something to eat. He was tall and lean and wore the proverbial check shirt and braces, which held up a worn pair of denims. He sported a well-kept beard beneath which I fancied I might find the remnants of a young James Dean, a middle-aged Clint Eastwood and a mature Gene Hackman, if such movie icons could be mixed into one person. Dan the dog musher seemed at every point a classical Alaskan male.
    I sat a little nervously on my easy chair waiting on Dan to make the next move or at least to say a little more to ease the log-jam of the silence. As I waited, part of me became aware that men like Dan are part of the silence of the place, as if they had subsumed a greater silence into themselves and words only cluttered up the cleanness of it. I tried to occupy myself by taking mental notes of the cabin I was in and looking inconspicuously at Dan. My firstimpression, on arrival, had been that the cabin and its environs had all the possibilities of being the perfect location set for an early John Ford western.
    In a country where distance frequently makes even your nearest neighbour a stranger, or at least someone who lives twenty miles over the rise and whom you rarely see, I expected our conversation to be forced and filled with more of the kind of silences I had already encountered. But when it came, conversation was slow and easy. It was the sort of exchange I suppose travellers at an airport might share before they set off to their different destinations from the different places they had come from. I answered his questions about Ireland and he talked about life in Alaska. Dan, it seemed, had had many jobs since leaving the army but nothing particularly skilful and nothing that fired his enthusiasm enough to stick with it. His longest stint was working as a carnie, a casual labourer with a travelling circus-cum-carnival. As I listened to him talking about his life with the carnival folk I thought that perhaps the seven or eight years he had spent travelling around America working at the canvas rigs and living with these people who exist at the edge of normal society, even if they bring some curious entertainment with it, had predisposed him, in a way, to Alaska. I suppose if you live with a bunch of people whose life and work is carried on at the very margins of normality you become part of that and find day-to-day existence in a normal lifestyle hard to deal with. I talked over these thoughts with Dan but he seemed unimpressed, though not uninterested.
    Our conversation continued, and became easier as he got a hold on who this stranger was in his cabin. I thought I would dare to do what I had been advised not to do. I explained to him how people didn’t seem to know his name and how Pat, when trying to locate him, had rung around a few other dog mushers and had been given different names. Dan listened and laughed unselfconsciously. ‘Many people arrive in Alaska and change their name as soon as they set foot in the place, or as soon as someone asks them who they are,’ he answered by way of simple explanation.I pushed him on the subject, trying to burrow my way into his personal story. He laughed again and shrugged his shoulders, saying once more, ‘Nobody cares up here too much anyway.’ I thought about what he said, and part of me agreed. After all, it’s not so much why you come to a place but what you do with the place when you get there, or what you do with what it does to you, that matters. So I left him with his past. It didn’t really concern him, so why should it concern me?
    Soon we were talking about his dogs, the two dozen or so animals he kept outside. They had gone quiet over the time we had been