TWO HUNDRED AND twenty years before I waited, pitching and rolling in the chop off the mouth of Lituya Bay, for the tide to turn, a group of young Tlingit hunters on the shore near the mouth spotted something unusual far out to sea. Inside the bay nearly three hundred people were picking berries, catching halibut, and hunting seals, working to put away enough food for the coming winter. Unlike on the day I arrived, the sea the young hunters walked beside was smooth and glassy. A gentle breeze blew in from the west. But the people occupying the temporary summer camp inside the bay were already on edge. Only a few days earlier a group of four canoes arriving from Kaax’noowu, a village one hundred miles away on Icy Strait, had been caught in the tidal maelstrom at the entrance and had overturned.