We should have eaten the basket, fed the figs to the horses.

I crawl from my tent on hands and knees, vomit on a harmless cluster of forget-me-nots, state flower of Alaska (there are flowers everywhere on the tundra in the bright, jocund Arctic spring), crawl back in the tent and open The Dancing Wu Li Masters. The title is not encouraging but I am sure that I will find something nice to say about this book. I have never met a book yet that did not have something good about it.

Until now.

Hours later I am stirred from a deep stupor by Mark Jensen, bringing me with his own hands a bowl of hot celery soup and a plate containing chunks of fish with noodles and mashed potatoes. It looks good and I am hungry.

“How’s it going, partner?”

“Fine, Mark, fine. Say, this is damn good fish. You catch another char?”

“That’s turkey. Out of a can.”

“Damn good. See any GRIZZ?”

“Had a glimpse of one going over the next ridge. Only for a minute. A true silvertip—we could see the fur shining on the shoulder hump. You should’ve been there, mate.”

“I know. What else?”

“Lots of sheep. A wolf. A lone bull caribou.”

“Sure sorry I missed that bear.”

“We thought of you, mate. If I’d had a good rope with me I’d have lassoed the son of a bitch and led him back here. Better take some more of these pharmaceuticals.”

JUNE 30—Another gay, sunny, brisk, breezy Arctic morning. We carry the boats to the river, since the river will not come to us, and proceed as before, downstream. My flu has entered its terminal phase, and I am ready to meet my Maker, eyeball to eyeball, way up here on top of the world, as we say in these parts.

The top of the world. But of course, the giddy, dizzying truth is that the words “top” and “bottom,” from a planetary point of view, have no meaning. From out here in deep space, where I am orbiting, there is no top, there is no bottom, no floor, no ceiling, to anything. We spin through an infinite void, following our curving path around the sun, which is as bewildered as we are. True, the infinite is incomprehensible—but the finite is absurd. Einstein claimed otherwise, I know, but Einstein was only a mortal like us. No ceiling, no floor, no walls…. We are 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle, and we flow as we go, like spindrift, like bits of Styrofoam, through the outliers of what Mark says is the northernmost mountain range in the world, i.e., on Earth. Will we ever get back to downtown Kaktovik?

I think of the Eskimos, holed up all day inside their $250,000 air-freighted prefab modular houses (paid for with oil royalties), watching “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” on their brand-new color TV sets. A few grinning kids race up and down the dirt street, among the melting snowbanks, on their Honda ATCs. What we call “road lice” back in the Southwest. (Girls love horses. Little boys love machines. Grown-up men and women like to walk.) The kids seem to have nothing else to do. A dead bowhead whale—rare species—lies rotting on the waterfront, partially dismembered. Slabs of whale blubber—muktuk are stacked in the yard of each house, along with empty plywood crates, diesel spills, oil drums, Ski-doo parts, caribou antlers, musk-ox bones, wolf pelts, moose heads, worn-out rubber boots, tin cans and liquor bottles and loose papers and plastic potsherds. In each yard lies one howling arthritic Huskie dog, token souvenir of former days, short-chained to a stake, out of reach of the muktuk. The dogs are never released from the chain.