Tova Agard’s world is literally falling apart: she’s just been disowned by her father in a violent confrontation over her sexuality, and climate change is about to wreak havoc on the world around her. In the midst of catastrophe Tova meets Smithsonian Institute’s ethnologist John Swanton on an Alaskan-ferry time machine, trapping Swanton on Tova’s small hometown of Wrangell Island. Tova convinces Swanton that the island’s contemporary stories are worth collecting despite their strangeness: in Tova's oral traditions, a woman becomes a bear, a man marries trees, a UFO hunts deer, and the dead go to Seattle. These forty-three linked tales in the story-cycle are not stories that the Smithsonian intended to collect, but by the time all the tales are told, their reconstruction of history will make a greater impact on the world around them then either Tova or Swanton could have ever imagined.
