But these are private prejudices. I am aware of the argument that hunting and fishing can lead a man into an intense, intimate engagement with the natural world unknown to the casual hiker. When the hunting or fishing is based on hunger, on need, I know that this is true. But sport, in the end, is only sport—divertissement. A diversion, that is, from the central game of life. Which is—what? Let’s not go into that. Furthermore, I have yet to taste the flesh of the fresh-baked Arctic char.

Once more our aerial taxicab returns, unloading the balance of the 1983 Kongakut expedition: John Feeley, a schoolteacher from a little town called Whittier in southern Alaska; a legal secretary named Maureen Bachman from Anchorage; and Mike Bladyka, an anesthesiologist from Los Angeles. Good people, happy to be here. Each of us but John has been on a river trip with Mark Jensen before. Obeying the territorial, nesting instinct, each sets up his tent first thing. Maureen moves in with Ginger. John uncases his rod and goes fishing, Mike joins the crowd in the cook tent, out of the wind, to manufacture the salad for our first wilderness dinner. I too do my part: I sit on my ammo can and activate my word processor. It’s a good one. User-friendly, cheap, silent, no vibrations or radiation, no moving parts, no maintenance, no power source needed, easily replaceable, fully portable—it consists of a notebook and a ball-point pen from “Desert Trees, 9559 N. Camino del Plata, Tucson, Ariz.” The necessary software must be supplied by the operator, but as friendly critics have pointed out, an author’s head is full of that.

Mark fails to land a worthwhile fish. John also fails—in fact he loses half his tackle to a rock or submerged log or sunken fuel drum. They’ll both do better in the days to follow. For dinner we get by on soup, salad, spaghetti and sauce with meatballs. We drink no beer on this trip. When air freight costs one dollar a pound, beer is not cost effective; we subsist on wine, whisky, schnapps and best of all, the forty-degree-cold immaculately conceived waters of the Kongakut River.

Jensen passes on the meatballs. A semivegetarian, he refuses on nutritional grounds to eat beef and pork, asserting that in the ten years since giving up on what he calls “dead red” he has become a healthier, happier, more wholesome human being. He could be right about that, but the rest of us disregard his advice and eat the meatballs. Every time we eat a cow, I remind him, we save the life of a moose, two caribou, four mule deer or eight char squared. He ponders the dilemma. I twist the knife: “Whose side are you on, Jensen? God’s side, Saint Francis’s side, John Muir’s side or the side of those rangeland lawn mowers we call beef cattle?”

“Beef is bad for you, partner,” he insists. “Look at this stunted little runt Dana here, twenty-five years old and still not six foot high. Never will grow to man size.”