Mark has caught an eighteen-inch char for breakfast; four to five pounds. He packs it with herbs and butter, wraps it in aluminum foil and bakes it on a grill over the low driftwood fire. The flesh is firm, sweet, pink, something like fresh salmon but better, not so oily, much like the Dolly Varden we used to eat, years ago, from that little lake—Akakola—below the Numa Ridge fire lookout in Glacier Park. The Dolly Varden, in fact, is a type of char.

Today we plan to set out on the Kongakut. We inflate, rig and load the two neoprene rafts, strike tents, police the site. Like all good professional outfitters, Mark Jensen practices no-trace camping. Everything noncombustible is hammered flat with a stone and packed out. The ashes from the fire, collected on the metal firepan, are dumped into the river, where they will end their chemic lives blended with the Arctic Ocean. Even our footprints—since we’ve made camp on the floodplain—will be obliterated by the next rise in the river.

None of these measures is yet required by official regulations, although we are in the heart of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a federal preserve. Mark does it because he believes in it, because it’s right and because we may be followed, someday, by others. And he takes the opportunity to grumble a bit about the Eskimos, Indians, trophy hunters and oil-company exploration crews, who have left so much of Alaska littered with empty fuel drums, toilet paper, Pampers, whisky bottles, broken-down Ski-doos, Pop-Tart wrappers, tangled fishing tackle, Cat-train tracks, the swash plates and lag hinges from dilapidated helicopters.

Pampers? Oh yes, the plastic diaper is quite popular now with the natives. Universally used. Whereas the Alaskan women formerly employed fingers and tongues to clean their babies, they now prefer the synthetic substitute, like most mothers everywhere else (though cotton is better for babies’ bottoms). Old ways die easily—they tumble over themselves in a rush to die—when confronted by the frills of high-tech Western civilization. However, it does seem hypocritical of the natives to complain, as they eagerly embrace the worst of our culture, that we are destroying the best of theirs. They can’t have it both ways. The role of victim can be pushed too far. There even may be a limit to the white-liberal-guilt neurosis.

Back off, mate. You’re stepping on taboos again. I can hear the stir and crackling of tired old middle-class hackles rising all around me.

We launch forth onto troubled waters. Check the time by Maureen’s quartz crystal wristwatch: 2:00 P.M., Fairbanks time. We have again failed to crack the noon barrier. But here where high noon lasts for hours, it does not matter.

We float downstream through the treeless hills, among the golden tundra mountains. It’s something like boating through Colorado at thirteen thousand feet. We see golden plovers out on the flats, another golden eagle overhead. And the gulls. And the robins. And a raven.

“My favorite bird,” says Mark. “Smart, talented, handsome—”