“Oh, another year, maybe two.”

“Then where?”

“Oh…back to the other world.”

JULY 4— Mark celebrates with four blasts of the shotgun, shattering the morning air. Thinking a GRIZ is raiding the camp, I go running back only to see Mark and the others drinking coffee around the fire. Mark is always drinking coffee, and he makes strong coffee, stout and vigorous, powerful enough to deconstipate a sand-impacted Egyptian. “Listen, mate,” he says, explaining his secret formula, “you don’t need near as much water to make coffee as some people think.”

John stands by the river with his camera, photographing another dead fish. He lost most of his rod to the Kongakut days ago but didn’t let that stop him; he attached his reel and a new line to his rod case and went on fishing. We’ve had char and grayling coming out our ears for a week. We’re up to our asses in fish. But good—beats bacon and beans by a country mile. And I like bacon and beans.

Last stop on the river. We’re encamped at the place known as Caribou Pass, near another straight gravel bar on which Gil Zemansky will land to pick us up for the last flight to Barter Island, where we then will catch, tomorrow we hope, the Air North DC-3 for the journey over the Brooks Range to Fairbanks and points south.

Caribou Pass—but where are the caribou? They’re supposed to be massing out on the coast one hundred thousand strong. So far the biggest bunch we’ve seen was twenty-five head. But here is where they should pass, through these low hills, on their annual trip into the Yukon and south from there to the edge of the forest, where they spend—where they endure, somehow—the dark and six-month-long Yukon winter.

On the hill above us, a mile away, stands a white wall-tent and a little below it four small bivouac tents—Bear Camp. A squad of wildlife students from the University of Alaska is living up there, trapping (alive) and identifying the rodents in the tundra, watching for the caribou herds, the wolves, the GRIZZ. Mark has told them about my grizzly problem, and when a young, blond-haired, brown-skinned man named Mike Phillips comes rushing down the hillside I climb up the hill to meet him. “A male grizzly,” he reports, “one mile east of Bear Camp.” He rushes up the hill, I trudge after him. When I get there, on the high point, the bear has disappeared. “Down in that willow thicket along the creek,” says Mike, pointing. We glass the area for an hour but the bear is gone. “Probably took off behind the ridge,” Mike explains, “and ambled over the divide.” Of course, I think, it would, knowing that I was coming.

“The grizzly bear,” I explain to Mike, “is apocryphal, like the griffin, the centaur and the yeti.”

“You wouldn’t think so,” he replies, “if you’d been with me two days ago.” And he tells me about the scene at the caribou birthing grounds, the leisurely arrogant grizzlies he’d observed circling the great herd, chasing the cows and devouring some of the newborn young.