Free Midnight come again by Dana Stabenow

the sob story for someone who cared, thanks. The people in line were tense and anxious and eager to please, some of them looked hungry, and Jim was pretty sure he saw among them a man from Wolf Lake he'd put away for child abuse ten years before, a woman who'd bankrupted her Chitina employer by writing checks to herself from his bank account in her capacity as his bookkeeper, and a kid from Tok, barely twenty, who had shot his sister while fooling around with a loaded shotgun nine years before. The district attorney had declined to prosecute, calling the incident a tragic accident. Tragic for the dead sister, certainly, Jim had thought at the time. He distinctly remembered wanting to take the kid and his father, who had left the loaded shotgun lying around in the first place, out back to beat the crap out of both of them.
    The kid was the only one who recognized Jim. His eyes widened and seemed to fill with tears. Jim couldn't get out of the building fast enough.

    But one afternoon he managed to get loose and visit Alaska Geographic's office on International Airport Road to thumb through the racks of quarterly publications, which featured titles from The Aleutians to Yakutat with stops at every other Alaskan location north, south and in between. A fair, pleasant woman named Kathy, plump in all the right places and whose eyes twinkled when he told her where he was going, directed him to the Society publication called The Kuskokwim. It was an engaging twinkle. Although she was wearing a wedding ring, out of habit Jim tried to strike up a flirtation, but it was soon obvious to both of them that his heart wasn't in it. He bought his book and left, worrying about the low level of his libido all the way to the hotel. What was worse, he had slept perfectly soundly that night, all alone in his queen-size bed.
    The jet flew into a bank of clouds, obscuring his view, and he looked back at the book.
    Bering, the largest settlement in western Alaska, was on the Kuskokwim River, maybe--he measured with thumb and forefinger and compared it to the legend on the map--forty miles upriver, on the undercurve of the pregnant belry. It had been founded by Moravian missionaries in 1886, who had wanted to call it Bethlehem. Natives protested and began a movement to call it Manilaaq, after a legendary shaman. Eventually a compromise was reached and the town was named for Virus Bering, a Dane on the payroll of the Imperial Russian Navy who was credited with the discovery of Alaska in 1728, and who died there in 1741. His memory was dim enough in everyone's mind for the partisan fervor to die down and for the missionaries to get on with moving the Yupik out of their sod houses and into the church. They were amazingly successful at both.

    Twenty years later, the Gold Rush brought measles and influenza to Alaska, from which the Natives had no immunity, and from which neither the missionaries nor the missionaries' god could protect them. Half the adults and all the babies in the Delta were dead from one disease or the other within a year. Bering was one of the few towns that survived.
    Tracing the curve of the belly, he saw that traditional names had prevailed elsewhere. Tununak, Umkumiut, Chefornak, Kipnuk, Kwigilh'ngok, Tuntutuliak, Napakiak, Nunapitsinchak and others he would bet had more letters in their names than people in their villages. The Alaska Geographic Society didn't provide translations, but most of the names were probably variations on the Yupik word for "mosquito." Or "salmon."

    One species was as ubiquitous in the Alaskan Bush as the other, with the mosquitoes, taking up less space per unit, possibly having a slight edge.

    Although the birds were giving both a run for their money. A lot of the Delta was the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge, created in 1980, at the same time the Park was created around Kate Shugak's father's homestead, and just how had Kate managed to creep back into his consciousness? Annoyed, he read on.

    The