One bright April morning a dozen years ago, Clarence Wood and I stood on the crest of a birch knoll, looking out over the upper Kobuk valley. Before us, thousands of caribou grazed, dark specks trailing off into the blue-white distance. Clarence turned, his weathered Eskimo face split by a wide grin. "Lots," he said quietly. "Lots." The longer I live here and write, the more I find myself following Clarence's cue-turning to simpler words, and fewer of them. My hope, in these twenty-eight brief essays about life in the Alaskan arctic, is to find words not big enough, but small enough for a landscape and a place without end. ---- In A Place Beyond, Nick Jans leads us into his "found" home-the Eskimo village of Ambler, Alaska, and the vast wilderness around it. In his powerful essays, the rhythms of daily arctic life blend with high adventure-camping among wolves, traveling with Inupiat hunters, witnessing the Kobuk River at breakup. The poignancy of a village funeral comes to life, hordes of mosquitoes whine against a tent, a grizzly stands etched against the snow-just a sampling of the images and events rendered in Jans's transparent, visual prose. Moments of humor are offset by haunting insights, and by thoughtful reflections on contemporary Inupiaq culture, making A Place Beyond a book to savor.