We wait. The plane comes and goes again with most of the cargo and all passengers but Maureen, John and I. Two more hours.

John sleeps. Maureen is reading a book and watching the hills and meditating. I go for a walk beside the river, over the gravel bars and through the willow, heading north. The cold green waters rush past at my side, breaking over the rocks with a surflike turbulence, bound for the northern sea. A mile beyond the airstrip I am cut off by a headland. I stop and look back. The shining river races toward me. The velvet-covered hills rise on either side, the great jagged wall of the Brooks extends across the southern horizon—seven hundred miles of largely unknown mountains, reaching across Alaska from the Yukon to the Bering Sea. The end of the Rockies. The final American wilderness.

Where is he?

The willow leaves flash their silvery undersides in the wind, McCone poppies and the purple lupine and red bayrose and yellow composites dance on the hillsides. Wordsworth would enjoy the spectacle. I think. But he might not care much for what I’m waiting for. Expecting. Both shotguns lean on the last pile of duffle where John lies sleeping, out of sight, out of hearing. I am unarmed, ready, open. Let it come.

Two shrikes watch me from the willows. Three screaming gulls pursue a golden eagle high above the river, diving and pecking at its head, trying to turn it into a bald eagle. I long to see that eagle flip on its back in midair, snatch one of those gulls in its deadly talons and—rip its head off! But the eagle sails on in straight, steady airline toward the hills, and the gulls drop away, bored.

My bear does not come.

AS THE PLANE takes off Gil says, “I’m going to show you something.” He banks and turns off course and enters a pass through the foothills west of the river. We fly a thousand feet above the lion-colored tundra. Little ponds and bogholes wink, sparkle, glitter in the light. We cross another ridge.

And there below, suddenly, the hills appear to be in motion, alive, as if the skin of the earth had begun to crawl over its rockbound bones. A broad river of caribou streams in waves west-southwesterly up the ridges and through the valleys, all its elements in rapid, parallel advance. It takes me a moment to realize that I am looking down on the greatest mass movement of untamed four-hooved animals I may ever see. It’s like the stampede of the wildebeests on the Serengeti Plain.

“My God,” I say. “How many?”

Gil banks and circles, looking down. “Hard to tell. It’s only a part of the Porcupine River herd. Maybe forty, maybe fifty thousand.”

John and Maureen are busy taking pictures. I’m too excited to get out my binoculars. “Any GRIZZ down there?”

Gil looks again. “Bound to be a few,” he says. “But they blend in so well we’d never see them.”