Dana helps himself to a second helping of the entrée. “At least I’m not anemic. I can tie my shoes without gasping for air.”

The sun angles sidewise behind some western peaks. But there is no sunset, no evening. Not even a twilight. The bald unmediated light continues to shine on the mountainsides east of the river. There are a couple of wristwatches in our group but no one refers to them. There seems no point to it. We plan to camp here for a second “day,” a second “night.” With only eighty miles of river to run and ten days to do it in, this should be a leisurely journey. We sit on the surplus ammunition cans, the sturdy Gott coolers, and talk and drink too much coffee and contemplate the golden midnight light in the land of the midnight sun. At last and reluctantly, one by one, we let the wind or the mosquitoes or fatigue—it’s been a long day—worry us into our tents.

The light inside my translucent nylon dome is bright enough to read a book by. The mosquitoes gather outside the netting of my doorway, poking their Pinocchio noses through the interstices, sniffing at me like bloodhounds. A few have followed me inside. I hunt them down, one at a time, and pinch their little heads off. For such resolute, persistent, vicious, bloodthirsty animalcules, they are surprisingly fragile. As individuals. One slap on the snout and they crumple. Collectively they can drive a bull moose insane. I feel no remorse in extinguishing their miserable lives. I’m a coldhearted bleeding heart. Yet I know that even the mosquito has a function—you might say a purpose—in the great web of life. Their larvae help feed fingerlings, for example. Certain of their women help spread the parasitic protozoa that give us dengue, breakbone fever, yellow fever and malaria, for example, keeping in control the human population of places like Borneo, Angola, Italy and Mississippi. No organism can be condemned as totally useless.

Nevertheless, one does not wish them well. I would not kill them all, but I will certainly kill every one I can catch. Send them back where they came from.

We sleep. I dream that I hear robins, two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. Dreaming of Home, Pennsylvania.

JUNE 25— Today we climb a mountain. We follow a brook up a deep ravine, over the rocks and a deep-pile carpet of tundra, lupine, buttercups, forget-me-nots, campion, mountain avens, bayrose, eight-petal dryas, kinnikinnick, saxifrage (“stonebreakers”), woolly lousewort (a favorite of mine), Labrador tea, drunken bumblebees, piles of caribou droppings like chocolate-covered almonds, pictographic lichen on the limestone and many little yellow composites. What are these? asks Ginger. Don’t know, says Mark. Water gurgles under the rocks. Call it a virus, says Dana; that’s what doctors do when they don’t know. Ain’t that right, Doc? Doctor Mike smiles, chuffing along with me in the rear guard of the party. Aside from myself, he is the only person here over the age of thirty-five.