The protagonist of this story is an unnamed woman who is in jail for murder because she claimed responsibility for a local storekeeper's death. She feels compelled to read the signs of nature as portents, and when she sees the sun standing perfectly still, not moving through time, she tries to alert a guard, but he doesn't care. She speaks Yupik and English.
From jail, we learn more about her life. She is whipped in school for speaking her native tongue. She is constantly advanced upon by men and boys, and finally, her life at home with her Native grandmother is so boring to her that she leaves. She meets an old man who makes advances on her, but she still accepts his company. She tells him about her grandmother's arthritis. She never goes back to school, and she subjects herself to his sexual advances.
She gets tired of him, in this long flashback, and leaves him for the red-haired man. The old man is distraught. We also learn about the deaths of her parents, from some sort of potion sold at a shop where the storekeeper vanished when they died—apparently it wasn't what they thought it was. She lures the shopkeeper out onto thinning ice, and he breaks through and drowns in frigid waters. We learn this is the crime she accepts as her murdering him.
