Book excerpt: Above the Arctic Circle transports the reader back in time to the Alaska of 1911 into the Athabaskan Indian village of Fort Yukon and beyond. It was a time when travel was by trail or river on routes shared by man and wild beast, when communication reached only as far as the echo of one's voice, and when the first order of each new day was survival in the face of unyielding natural elements. This is the time and place chronicled in the personal journals of James A. Carroll: explorer, pioneer, dogsled musher, trapper, trader, husband, and father. It is an authentic first-hand account of a young man's first decade in the territory of Alaska, a straightforward telling of the adversity and adventures of life on the far north frontier. This story, told with honesty and more than a little humor, offers a kind of kinship connecting author and reader thereby extending a personal invitation to take the journey north through time with James A. Carroll -- Above the Arctic Circle.