Doug Peacock usually works alone, responsible for nobody’s life but his own. Commercial outfitters like Mark Jensen, and professional wilderness guides like Dana Van Burgh, feeling responsible for the safety of their clients—who have come a long way at considerable financial expense to enjoy the mosquitoes, white-sock blackflies, GRIZZ, polar bears, Arctic wind chill, avalanches, wolves, swamps, drunken Eskimos on motorized tricycles, the ice and isolation and other varied pleasures of Alaska—always bring shotguns.

The noise we heard is not repeated. Dana and I surmise a lone caribou browsing on willow leaves. We finish our work. Erecting my own tent—an Oval Invention from North Face—out on the gravel bar close to the river, where the breeze is breezier and the mosquitoes scattered, I happen to glance up and see a file of caribou, ten, twelve, fifteen of them, moving rapidly down the open mountainside on the other side of the Kongakut valley. They appear to be heading for an acre field of overflow ice, the white Aufeis, as the Germans call it, which covers much of the bottomland a half mile to our north. I watch them for a while through my binoculars. Pale brown or yellowish in color, as big as elk, each animal carries an impressive rack of antlers (not horns) on its head, the cow and yearling as well as the bull. They look to me like storybook reindeer, exactly the kind that Santa Claus once harnessed to his sleigh. The caribou gather on the ice and linger there, perhaps to escape for a time the flying swarms of devils that infest the grass, flowers, shrubs, heather and bracken of the tundra-upholstered hillsides.

Heather, bracken—there is much about this open, spacious, treeless terrain that recalls Scotland, the Hebrides, the maritime provinces of eastern Canada. We are, after all, not far from the Beaufort Sea, the ice packs of the Arctic Ocean. White Thayer’s gulls, winging back and forth across the river, reinforce the resemblance.

The Cessna returns, circles once, floats down upon the rough shingle of the gravel bar, bounces to another hair-raising stop in an aura of dust. Dana has hung his rainbow-colored paper carp on a pole, providing a wind sock, but when we made the first landing there was no such indicator available. “How,” I had asked our pilot, young Gil Zemansky, Ph.D. (biology), “do you determine wind direction in a place like this?” Looking down as we circled the apparent landing spot—and spot is the right word—I could see nothing, not even a drift of dust, to suggest the proper approach.

“I go by the feel of the plane,” Dr. Zemansky replied. This technique was formerly known as “flying by the seat of the pants.” He added, “Sometimes you can see wind ripples on the water.”

The airplane is opened from within, disgorging the pilot, our trip leader Mark Jensen, another half ton of baggage and a lawyer. A lawyer on the Kongakut River? Everybody has to be somewhere, said the philosopher Parmenides, explaining his theory of the plenum. Her name is Ginger Fletcher, and she comes from Salt Lake City, where she works as a public defender. She’s that kind of lawyer, public spirited, and a smart, lively, good-looking young woman to boot. (I list her more conspicuous attributes in random order of importance.) When she opens a bottle of schnapps from her bag, later that day, we name her Ginger Schnapps.