“Like you,” says Ginger.

“Like me. When I—” He points to the high mountainside on our left. “Sheep.”

A herd of Dall sheep are grazing up there, a dozen of them—ewes, lambs, rams with curling horns. Placid, motionless, they watch us—phantom beings out of nowhere—drifting through their world.

“When I come back,” continues Mark, “I want to come back as a raven.”

“Crawling with lice,” Ginger points out. “Smelling like a dead fish.”

“With a beak even bigger than the beak you’ve got now,” says Maureen. “Proportionately speaking.”

Smiling, Mark stands up between the oars to survey the channel ahead. Like most Alaskan rivers, the Kongakut is a shallow river, broad and braided, hard to read, forcing the boatman to search constantly for the one navigable channel among many false options. We’ll portage twice before this voyage is done, and jockey the boats several times over submerged gravel bars. Following us in the second boat, Dana watches carefully. Only Mark has seen this river before.

All goes well today. In the evening we make camp on another bar, a pleasant site with limestone cliffs overlooking the river, a grove of little ten-foot cottonwoods on the other shore, a vista upriver of the valley we have come through and the splendid craggy snowy mountains beyond. The classic Alpine-Arctic scene—photogenic, fundamental, perfect.

Why are there almost no trees on the north slope of the Brooks? Because of the permafrost two feet below the surface, a substratum of rockfike ice, which prevents trees from sinking roots. Only close to the river, where the ground is warmer, can the dwarf willows and midget cottonwoods take hold.

Years ago I was employed briefly as a technical writer for the Western Electric Company in New York City. The company had a contract with the War Department to prepare training manuals for the workers building the Arctic radar stations and air bases of the Distant Early Warning system. One hundred of us sat at desks in one huge office ten floors above Hudson Street in lower Manhattan. Fluorescent lights glared down upon our bent, white-shirted backs. (All technical writers were required to wear white shirts. With tie.) Since my security clearance had not yet come through, I was assigned the menial task of editing the manual called How to Dispose of Human Sewage in Permafrost. I told the boss I wanted to be sent to the Arctic in order to conduct first-hand field studies. He told me that my job was spelling, grammar and punctuation, not shit research. I returned to my desk among the other stuffed bent white shirts—we all faced in the same direction—and stared moodily out the window for two weeks, watching the sun go down over Hoboken, New Jersey.

The boss came to me. “Abbey,” he says, “do you really want to work for Western Electric?” “No, sir,” I said, “not really.” “I thought not,” he said; “we’re letting you go as of seventeen hundred hours today.” I could have kissed him—and knowing New York, I probably should have. “That’s all right, sir,” I said, “I’m leaving right now, as of thirteen-thirty hours.” And I did. Spent the afternoon at the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street, then with cronies at Minsky’s Burlesque in Newark. Reported to my wife, drunk and happy, at twenty-two hundred hours with what was left of my first and final Western Electric paycheck. Pointed the old Chevy pickup south and west at twenty-three hundred hours headed for Arizona. Never did learn how to dispose of human sewage (is there any other kind?) in permafrost.