The achievement of middle age is itself an achievement.

Unsuspecting, the caribou come to meet us, a herd of twenty-five or so. Anxious and bug-harassed creatures, they usually keep on the move. I can hear the lens shutters snapping in the thicket as the beasts splash through shallow water, approaching to within fifty feet of where I sit on the gravel beach. They pass me, their big ungulate feet clicking, then spot Dana’s paper fish fluttering on its staff. They stop, turn, go the other way, finely attuned to one another’s movements, ideas and opinions as a school of minnows. (Like literary critics.) Watching them at close range, I can see the velvet on their antlers, the large glowing eyeballs, the supple muscles, the spring and tension in their step. Each animal moves within its personalized cloud of gnats, flies, mosquitoes—every insect probing for entrance into an eye, nostril, ear, mouth, vagina, rectum or wound. I do not envy the caribou. North of here on the calving grounds, as we shall learn, the bear and wolves are attacking the newborn caribou at this very hour. The natives hound them on snowmobiles (or “snow machines,” as Alaskans say), shooting them down by the thousands with high-powered, scope-sighted rifles (“subsistence hunting”). Even the golden eagle, according to some Alaska State Fish and Game officials, will attack and kill a caribou calf. Nobody envies the caribou. But like fruit flies, rabbits, alley cats, street rats and the human race, caribou possess one great talent for survival—not intelligence or the power of reasoning, but fertility, a high rate of reproduction.

The herd crosses the river again below the willow thicket, giving the photographers another chance at close pictures, and jogs in unison up the west side of the valley, beyond our camp. We return to campfire and coffee. Mark assembles his fly rod and goes fishing for char, not with a fly but a lure, the Luhr Jensen (made in Norway) “Krokodile,” triple-hooked but without barbs. Mark has filed off the barbs. Anything he catches not big enough to be worth cooking and eating he can release and return to the river with minimal injury. Physical injury, I mean—who knows what psychic trauma the fish suffers? Experience suggests that refished fish are meaner, tougher, wilier than what one might call virginal fish.

Myself, I gave up fishing decades ago. Not so much on moral grounds—although I can see the point of animal liberationists when they argue that there is something unjust in fishing or hunting primarily for sport—but on account of sloth. I lack the diligence and industry to stand in one place for hours, casting and recasting, reeling in and reeling out, endeavoring to outwit a simple creature with a one-digit I.Q. and one-twentieth my body weight. In the time one man spends trying to catch one fish I have ascended a small mountain, explored five miles of river valley or probed to its secret heart a winding desert canyon.

I don’t even much like to eat fish. In the outback I am content with a diet of cereal and powdered milk for breakfast, a hunk of cheese or a stick of jerky for lunch, a can of pork and beans for supper.