In one village on the Arctic coast, a woman showed me a shaman grave mound that seemed to be opening by itself. She told me people kept covering it so as not to let out the bad luck. I suspected the earth underneath had gone soft because the permafrost was melting. In a way, either explanation was the same: a bad omen in the shape of new cracks in the soil.

There are the off-kilter caribou migrations, the river fish spawning at the wrong time, the once predictable tides of ice that carry bearded seal to Alaska Native hunters that never appeared. More than once in the last few years, very old people in Arctic villages have told me that the sky has changed, that the stars are in a different place. What do you do with that?

I’m a freelancer, so I get messages from editors sometimes, asking for stories about “climate refugees” or starving polar bears that they read about somewhere else. What I see, by and large, isn’t so dramatic. Climate change is often a factor, not a direct cause. The shape of the narrative, though, is always the same: sad or mysterious. You can write only so many stories like that. And it’s hard to know if anyone cares. What would they do if they did?

Sometimes the stray accounts I hear do germinate into articles, like my story this week on the dwindling catch in the Copper River, 250 miles east of Anchorage, where for the first time in memory many of the salmon didn’t return from the sea.

Early this summer, my cousin’s husband and my uncle went to the Copper for red salmon. My uncle has been getting our fish there since 1969. But this year nobody got any. Soon biologists closed the river to fishing so enough red salmon could make it upriver to spawn.