I made it onto the next flight from Vancouver and a couple hours later watched out the window as we descended toward a small island of lights in a vast sea of darkness. The Yukon is huge and tiny. It’s got a landmass the size of France and a population — 33,897 — that’s barely one-hundredth the size of Paris’s. Most of that population is in Whitehorse, leaving the bulk of the territory uninhabited, a subarctic landscape of tundra and mountains stretching north toward the pole.

The area often evokes romantic images of Jack London and the Klondike Gold Rush. Donald Trump Jr.’s German great-grandfather, Friedrich Trump, actually lived here for a while during the Rush. He opened a saloon on Main Street in Whitehorse — one that may have doubled as a brothel — and ran it for a few years, catering to the boom-and-bust desires of gold-panners. Then he sold his share and eventually made his way to the United States, where he decided to start investing in real estate. Large- and small-scale miners are still drawn to the Yukon, but these days when Americans come here they’re often in pursuit of a different natural resource. The territory hosts a cornucopia of wild game — there are at least twice as many moose as humans here, for example — making it a hunter’s paradise.

Donald Trump Jr. is an avid hunter. The internet is full of grisly pictures of him posing with the corpses of elephants, leopards, water buffaloes, crocodiles. That he might come here on a hunting trip wasn’t surprising. But it surprised me that he had traveled on a commercial flight — economy class, no less. I wondered whether my friend at the airport had been mistaken. The president’s son is the sort of generically handsome guy that might have more than a few look-alikes.

Over the next couple of days, I occasionally checked news stories online but didn’t find even the whiff of a Yukon trip. Trump’s social media accounts had gone suspiciously quiet, though. The morning after his supposed arrival in Whitehorse, he tweeted the following: “Protip: If have to tell others you’re an alpha … you’re not,” but after that his usually active feed became just a sporadic drizzle of retweets.

Then on Sept. 18, The New York Times ran an article with the following headline: “Donald Trump Jr. Gives Up Secret Service Protection, Seeking Privacy.” The article explained that a few days earlier, Trump voluntarily abandoned his security detail. The reporters had reached out to Trump for comment, but hadn’t been able to locate him. Apparently they didn’t know where he was. That vacuum of knowledge was soon filled with speculation in other outlets about how Trump’s surprise move might mesh with the all-consuming scandals hanging over his father’s administration. GQ ruminated about how “suspicious” it was for “a major adviser to and son of the president who is the subject of a serious investigation into possible international espionage to get rid of the government agents who are around him all the time.” A British paper echoed that theme, running a piece with a headline noting that Trump was “conspicuously absent” during the president’s speech at the United Nations.

But I was now confident that I knew where he was — give or take a couple hundred thousand square miles — and that it was nowhere near Moscow. Instead, the son of the president was traveling on the down low in a remote wilderness, without Secret Service. And that seemed significant, regardless of your politics, or your investment in the Russia scandal. After all, one reason you want to protect the president’s family members is to prevent them from being abducted, a nightmare scenario that would put the president, and the whole country, in an awful position. I mean, a whole story arc on “The West Wing” hinged on basically that exact premise. (Incidentally, after Zoey was abducted, President Bartlet temporarily abdicated office by invoking the same amendment — the 25th — that some people hope might eventually push Trump out the door.) Whatever your politics, whatever you think of Trump, the last thing you would want is for his son to fall into the wrong hands. Meaning that if Trump Jr. had decided to give up his Secret Service protection, at the very least you would hope he wouldn’t be easy to find.