The first time I saw the northern lights – soft green and yellow beams drawing across the sky like a curtain – I understood how the indigenous peoples of the Arctic came to associate them with the supernatural. Night after night I stood in the dark cold of Alaska’s Brooks Range and watched an unseen hand switch on the lights. An evanescence of strands rippled and flashed, and at other times bright bars marched in close-packed succession, transforming themselves at a set point into solid white lances.

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