We drift on, silently, down the clear gray waters. After a while my friend says to me, When’s the last time you saw something like that in Arizona? In your whole crowded, polluted Southwest?

Me?

You.

Moi?

Vous.

Another pause. Never did, I say.

You ought to be ashamed of yourself.

I am.

You ought to take back everything you’ve said.

I take it all back. (But, I think, all the same…)

Now the river tangles itself into a dozen different channels, all shallow. The main channel runs straight into a jungle of willow. We unload the boats, portage them and our gear around the obstruction. As I’m lugging two tengallon ammo cans across the damp silt I see a pair of tracks coming toward me. Big feet with claw marks longer than my fingers. The feet are not so long as mine but they are twice as wide. Double wides, size 10-EEEE. I stop and look around through the silence and the emptiness.

Old Ephraim, where are you?

He does not appear.

We go on. We camp for the day and the daytime night at what Mark calls Buena Vista—a grand view upriver of the Portal, Wicked Witch Mountain, the hanging glaciers of the high peaks beyond. Charbroiled char for supper. A female char, and Mark has saved the pinkish mass of hard roe for possible use as bait. “Ever eat fish eggs?” I ask him.

“I ate caviar once,” he says.

“Only once?”

“Once was enough.”

I’m inclined to agree; once was enough for me too. Caviar is cold, salty, slimy stuff—tastes like fish eggs. As Shakespeare says, caviar is for the general; let him eat it.

John and I go for a long walk into the hills, over the spongy tundra, taking one of the shotguns with us. Peacock can face his bear with only a camera; I want firepower. As we walk uphill toward the sun we see the mosquitoes waiting for us, about two and a half billion of them hovering in place above the field, the little wings and bodies glowing in the sunlight. “It looks like a zone defense,” John says. But they part before us, lackadaisical atoms unable to make up their pinpoint minds, yielding before our scent and our more concentrated nodules of organic energy, as Alan Watts would say.

John is a quiet fellow, likable, attractive despite his Yasser Arafat-type beard. He tells me a little about life in Whittier, Alaska. To get to his classroom in winter he walks from his bachelor apartment in a dormitory through an underground tunnel to the adjacent but separate school building. The wind outside, he says, would knock you down; when there is no wind the snow comes up to your armpits. Yet Whittier is in the far south of central Alaska—the balmy part. (You have to be balmy to live there.) When the one road out of town is closed he buckles on touring skis and glides five miles over the pass to the railway station for a ride to the heart of Anchorage. He likes his life in Whittier. (He says.) Likes his students, the bright and lively Indian kids. Doesn’t mind the isolation—he’s a reader of books. Is fond of snow, ice, wind, mountains, the soft summer—bugs and icicles both. “How long do you plan to stay there?” I ask him.