Unlike the miners who had discovered the creature, when the gold rush had petered out Samuel had given up on his stake and settled into his one-room cabin, writing the odd dispatch for the local rag and tutoring ill-lettered prospectors in exchange for flakes of gold dust or odd fossils that they felt had no value. Once Fanny Alice had even given him a molar from what Samuel assumed was a mammoth, one she'd been given by a customer, and that tooth – larger than his fist, yellowed and dirty and well –worn from an apparently long life of grinding down vegetation – held a special place of pride in his small collection. She had told him that it had special properties, but he had dismissed that as an exaggeration.

It so happened that Samuel was just bidding farewell to one of his students – scraggly and unkempt, smelling of tallow and burnt caribou flesh, as they all did – when a small crowd seemed to spontaneously form on the icy patch of road beside his sagging grey front stoop. He blinked in surprise at the sight of so many people, wondering if perhaps he'd drunkenly promised a group lesson the other night while consuming his self-assigned monthly allotment of alcohol.