The literature of the American frontier has almost always played up the romantic at the expense of the realistic, and to great popular success. In fact, it's not much of a stretch to suggest that our most enduring images from the region, those that have long since blended into archetype, are also the images most firmly rooted in myth - High Noon and all that.

Alaska is clearly not immune to this trend; rather, as might be expected of a land known as the Last Frontier, portrayals of our state usually begin with exaggeration and spiral towards outright fiction soon after. Igloos and sled dogs, light all night, dark all day, salmon by the millions and mountains that don't end: as a literary landscape, Alaska hardly asks for imagination at all, which is probably why it's so easy for writers to get carried away. Even Jack London, who's probably done as much as anyone to swaddle the state within its popular mystique, tended to overreach, like when he explained how in the Far North a man's spit, or other fluid discharge, would freeze before hitting the ground. A nice enough image - tidy, evocative, gets the point across with a certain blue-collar universality - but not necessarily true. I know this because Seth Kantner told me so, and he knows because as a young boy reading London by the lamplight in his father's sod igloo, he was inspired to try it . . . at seventy-eight-below. Nothing froze.

Kantner, who this month has an essay featured for the first time in Fish Alaska, is an Alaskan first and an author second, and it's safe to say his work suffers from none of the geographical inaccuracies that may plague much of the rest of the frontier's bibliography. His debut novel, Ordinary Wolves, won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize and has been praised far and wide - for its heart, its poignancy, for the author's willingness to be real. That authenticity is one of the novel's great traits should come as no surprise: Kantner himself has been clad in mukluks most of his life, leaving his Arctic home only long enough to get a feel for Anchorage and then complete his baccalaureate work in journalism at the University of Montana. Only in the fine print does the plot of his fiction diverge greatly from the details of his own narrative.

Ordinary Wolves traces Cutuk Hawcly's journey from birth in an igloo on the tundra of northwest Alaska through a brief sojourn in "[t]he alien city . . . frozen stone, glass, locked locks, and enough left-on light to last lifetimes," and then back again. Cutuk is naluagmiu - a white person - and even though he idolizes an I–upiaq hunter, grows to love the man's granddaughter, and generally longs to become Eskimo (a desire that's outwardly manifest by his habit of "flattening his nose"), Cutuk knows he'll never quite gain unfettered access into their world. He finds himself just as displaced in the big city, where his descriptions turn increasingly septic: "His mother was a fingernail artist, with one-tenth the brains of a two-year-old wolf, a Bible and a diaphragm in her purse, and material desires itching like cold sores." The novel may not sound like the traditional American coming-of-age tale, but it is, only punctuated by the peculiarities of life in the contemporary Far North. Cutuk searches for his way between the I–upiaq culture that inspires but will never accept him and the urbanity beyond the mountains, which both attracts and repels. Mixed throughout (and clearly metaphorical) are the poetic interludes of the wolves, living out their existence on the tundra - alone, unrepentant, ordinary. In the end, it's no surprise to read of Cutuk's decision to return to the land and everything he knows and loves best. Just as it's no surprise to note that as I write this Seth Kantner is preparing to head out from his home in Kotzebue for a few winter weeks at the old igloo.

Seth is not a sport fisherman, however, as his essay that begins on page 14 of this issue clearly states, and for some that might make his inclusion within the pages of one of our special travel issues seem odd. I think it's a perfect fit, though, not least because of that Alaska mystique he's now helped along. For a significant number of visitors to the state, the call of the Great Land goes far beyond simple pounds of fish, trophies or not, and what Seth captures in his prose is an essence that's hard to distill. He may be out there with a net when I personally prefer the fly, and while he's fishing for a living, you can tell that for him it doesn't approach the definition of work - just as for the many of us who are busy plotting points on a map this winter, dreaming of the Alaska water we'll encounter when the ice melts and the sun comes to stay, angling (even catch-and-release) doesn't necessarily mean sport.

In both Ordinary Wolves and his story this month, Seth writes about the Alaska he knows. And although very few of us are likely to ever spend much quality time in a sod igloo or at the business end of a commercial net, it seems like an Alaska lots of folks would like to get to know (thus, the booming business done at Ted Stevens International Airport every July). It might not be for long, but we can touch it in something like a leopard-backed, utterly wild American Creek rainbow, and we can see it in the brown bears that own the Katmai coast, and sometimes, though it's very rare, we can feel it when we read something that's both good and true.