"I was told you were a magic man."In October of 1894, the anthropologist Rebecca Ashford arrives in Kodiak, Alaska to interview a Russian prisoner with an American name and an Athabascan Indian past. Aleksandr Campbell has been sentenced to hang for a double murder, killings that place in his homeland far to the north on the Kenai Peninsula-a little-known part of the territory where Russian is the common language and the handful of resident Americans are foreigners in a strange land. His tale, recorded in her notes as he waits for the gallows, spans years and miles of wilderness and clashing cultures. It is a story of young love and of old magic that is rapidly draining out of the country with the coming of the gold rush. It is a story of being Alaskan at a time when Alaska barely existed. KRIS FARMEN is a writer, historian, and recovering journalist whose work has appeared in Alaska magazine, Eater, The Anchorage Press, and the Alaska Dispatch News, among others. He lives in Alaska with his wife, daughter, and rescue dog.
