Great excursions almost always lie close at hand.
I started back toward camp in lengthening shadows. With the slippery going along that narrow, loose-cobbled beach near the Hubbard Glacier, I was focused more on my feet than the brushy cut bank a few yards to my right. Weaving toward the bank to get around a scattering of boulders, I glanced through a break in the alders, up into the eyes of a female grizzly and her yearling cub.
“Easy girl …let me see,” Vic Walker murmurs, gently prying the jaws of his canine patient and leaning close to inspect teeth, then peering into the back of her throat. He examines paws, feels along flanks and belly. For Walker, it’s an everyday veterinary moment—except the formidable jaws he’s spreading and the powerful musculature he’s probing belong to an adult wolf. Sure, Walker knows Isis well—for all but the first four weeks of her five-year life. But no matter that she’s captive-born, remarkably bonded to Walker and seemingly tame at this moment; a wolf is definitely not a domestic dog. Wolves are far more independent and complex, hard-wired to a feral consciousness that doesn’t tend to accept human dominion. Yet there are plenty of family pooches that are far less willing patients than Isis. Walker’s being paid a compliment of the highest order—one that he’s earned and doesn’t take lightly.…
Crouching, I cast into the sort of clear, eddying pool in deep, mountain-edged wilderness that might bend any devout angler’s knee. My marabou jig swept off a gravel ledge and tumbled along the bottom, past a snag, and downstream, its movement telegraphed through my light rod and thin line.
It was a hard day for going anywhere, let alone up the Redstone Valley and over Iviisaq Pass. My Eskimo buddy Clarence Wood and I plowed through loose, rolling drifts from the previous day’s blizzard, our snowmachines dragging basket sleds loaded with gas, gear and grub, bound for a week in the upper Noatak. Barely making headway on my long-track Arctic Cat, I leaned forward over my skis, teeth gritted as the engine howled. Clarence, with his shorter, heavier machine, was having even more trouble. He lagged behind—totally uncharacteristic Clarence behavior— then stopped. I doubled back to where he stood by his half-buried rig. “No use, buddy,” he shrugged. “Need to drop our sleds and break trail.” People who have never driven a snowmachine might have the impression they float like boats, and cross-country travel amounts to riding some sort of mechanized flying carpet. But anyone who’s driven long distances…
You could travel the wildest reaches of Alaska for a lifetime and not witness a scene like this—a pack of wolves feeding on a caribou kill on the edge of a rushing river. From the crest of a tundra bluff, I watched the gray alpha male tug at a hindquarter as others waited their turns. Then a female grizzly with two cubs arrived and drove the pack off. As she and one cub fed, the other hammed it up, standing on hind legs, rolling his eyes, gnawing on an antler. I sat transfixed behind my camera tripod, glued to the eyepiece, squeezing off shot after shot. It was easy to imagine that I sat alone somewhere up some far arctic valley, hundreds of miles from the nearest road. But to my right and left, crowds gathered—several busloads of people jammed against he windows, plus a half dozen professional photographers and…
“This doesn’t look good,” Seth Kantner muttered, peering at the pale gray end of a spark plug, then passing it to Vic Walker and me for inspection. The top plug on my side looked even worse—grains of aluminum piston speckling the electrode, sure signs of a damaging, possibly fatal, engine overheat. My jet skiff lay against a cut bank up the Nuna River in northwest Arctic Alaska on a fading September evening. Globs of icy rain hissed on the still-hot engine. At the very least, we were bound for a three-mile slog over swampy, slush-coated tundra to Seth’s cabin, and after that, a chain of logistical headaches trailing over the horizon, featuring a crippled skiff far from home. It was one thing if an impossible-to- dodge boulder or a twitch of fate had caused the mess. But none of it had to happen. I had three rapid-fire chances to avoid…
