Like so many professional outdoors people, Mark Jensen is one of those depressing youngish types (thirty-four years old) with the body of a trained athlete, hands like Vise-Grips, a keen mind bright with ideas and full of enthusiasm for any project that promises the rewards of difficulty. He owns in fee simple the usual array of primary skills—being a first-class boatman, fisherman, hunter, camp cook, mountain climber and so on and so forth. I’m sick of these Übermenschen and wish that Fran Leibowitz and Nora Ephron were here. My kind of folks. He has hair like Robert Redford, drinks Wild Turkey and bears front and center on his face a sort of Robert Mitchum high-bridged nose, which gives him in profile the classical heroic Homeric look. Life is not fair. But in compensation he addresses everyone as “mate” or “partner,” which fools no one.

Mark glances with approval at the standing cook tent, the twig fire crackling on its sheet-iron firepan, and says to his hired subordinate, “Coffee ready, mate?” Jensen is an insatiable coffee drinker.

Dana Van Burgh III is not overawed. “You forgot to pack it in the first load, blue eyes. You’ll have to wait.”

Jensen smiles, opens a big Thermos jug and pours each of us a cupful of hot smoking coffee. Gil Zemansky gulps his quickly, we pivot his aircraft around by hand, nose into the wind, and off he roars in all-out effort, racketing over the stones and gravel at sixty to eighty mph toward the willow thicket, the boulders, the river, departing earth as before at the last plausible moment. He has one more trip to make, three more passengers to bring us, before his work is done and the day ends. But of course, I remind myself, it’s late June in the Arctic Zone; this day will not end, not for us. For us that sun never will go down.

We carry the baggage off the landing strip, build up the fire, start a two-gallon pot of coffee, eat a snack before supper. Or is it lunch? Ginger puts up her tent back in the caribou-cropped willows. We watch more caribou trickle over the mountain to join their friends on the ice field. A golden eagle sails overhead, and the gulls come and go, hoping for someone to catch and gut a fish. But seeing the growing assembly of caribou downriver, Mark Jensen and the others uncase their cameras and sneak that way, hoping for close-up photographs. I follow with binoculars.

I realize that I have described all of these people, including the pilot, as young. Compared to me they are. Everywhere I go these days I seem to find myself surrounded by younger and younger humans. If one keeps hanging about, as I do, then the temporal horizon expands, the pursuing generations extend toward infinity. But why should I care? Sagging into my late middle age, I have discovered one clear consolation for my stiffening back (I never could touch my toes anyway, and why should I want to?), my mildewed pancreas, my missing gall bladder, my panza de cerveza, my cranky and arthritic Anglo-Saxon attitudes. And the consolation is this—that I am content with my limitations.