This is an engagingly personal account of the hardships, challenges, and rewards of a life lived wholly in the presence of God and at the service of the Alaskan people. In September 1935, Segundo Llorente, a wide-eyed twenty-eight-year-old Jesuit priest from Spain set foot in Alaska for the the first time. His memoirs are filled with all that he saw, endured, and enjoyed for forty years in Uncle Sam's "icebox," whether by dogsled in the 1930s or by plane and snowmobile in the 1970s. He prayed, worked, scolded, helped, and laughed with a practical wisdom that recalls the Ignatian spirituality in everyday life that also marks Father Walter Cisek's Russian journal, He Leadeth Me.

These fascinating memoirs of Father Nicolas Coccola, a Corsican-born Oblatean who arrived in British Columbia in 1880, reveal the complexity of the work carried out by ordinary missionary priests.