This is the story I wrote in September 2001, a few days after getting back from a three-week trip through Alaska with Mark and his family. It's, uh, comprehensive (yeah, all right, it's long), but I think it's interesting to compare this to the version published in ANG and see how much it had changed in the nearly two-year self-editing process. Mark took all the photos I've got up here, and his brother Will did some really amazing illustrations, which I've also tried to include. (The illustrations are so amazing that they almost make up for the time on the float plane ride into the interior, when we were flying low over a river, and Will screamed, "Look! Moose in the river! There's a whole group of them!" and then they all turned out to be ducks.)

	Will's sketch of a sunset on the lake.

The Alaskan wilderness, I'm told, has a spectacular variety of scenery and wildlife.

I'm told this because, although I recently spent three weeks in the brush north of the Arctic Circle, I was enveloped every day in dark gray clouds that rendered sightseeing nearly impossible.

It might not have been so bad, except the clouds were trying to suck my blood.

For most of those three weeks, the sun shone, gentle breezes blew majestic white clouds over the mountains and the lakes reflected the sky like mirrors. I hated this weather. It meant the bugs would not die that day.

I would wake up every morning praying for it to be 20 degrees and snowing.

"The sun is shining and there's not a cloud in the sky!" Mark's dad would yell in the direction of our tent. He was less concerned about the insects. He didn't seem to notice when they bit him, even when his hands were swollen to the size of grapefruits from bites. My general response to anything landing on me was to run around in circles shuddering and yelling "get it off, get it off!" This policy went for anything that landed on me, including water, tree bark, airborne seeds and the drawstrings of my jacket. Once the sun was up in the morning, the bugs would appear, descending out of the marshes and the lakes, turning the sky black and blotting out the sun with their billions of tiny bodies.

Then, around noon, things would really get bad.

	Beautiful reflection on Iniakuk Lake blah blah blah. Give me snow and bug death anyday.

I walked covered from head to toe, my hood pulled down, jacket zipped to the top to keep them off my face, sunglasses over my eyes. (This, by the way, was ineffective, as the bugs would fly in between my sunglasses and eyes. Showing remarkable patience and restraint in this situation, I would run around yelling "get it off, get it off!")

As we moved from place to place, passing explosions of yellow of birch in a sea of hundred-year old spruce and bald eagles soaring over endless fields of wild blueberries, I kept my eyes locked on my feet, to minimize the vulnerability of my throat.

A few times, I ran into problems this way. Specifically, since I couldn't see a thing above my knees, I ran into the horizontal beams of our lean-to shelter. Also trees, bushes, and, once, a big rock.

In the case of the lean-to, I'd come striding back to camp, eyes firmly on my boots, and then my forehead would stop moving with a solid "thud."

Sometimes, the rest of me would try to keep walking, but my legs never made it very far without my head, and usually they'd get tired and mosey on back to retrieve it. I'd stand there for a moment, forehead planted in the lean-to, and then step back. And with twenty-one years of accumulated knowledge firing some specially-tuned, finely evolved neurons, I'd propel myself forward again, and I would go "thud."

Because the lean-to, stubborn thing that it was, still had not moved.

Moments like these made me feel like a moose whose antlers are too wide to fit through the thick trees in the forest. I must have had about the same expression, too -- the implacable bovine calm of an animal that cannot comprehend anything more complicated than eating grass.

Once, I even tried to emulate moose, who, when confronted by that situation, tilt their head back and pass right through. I lifted my chin, ignoring for a moment the swarms of eager no see 'ums that swarmed in to attack, and walked forward, and I went, "thud."

It was a very solid lean-to.

* * *

We built two lean-tos, one for each lake we camped at, under the foolish impression that, this being Alaska, it would rain, or worse.

The first lean-to, at Iniakuk Lake, we built on our second day in the brush, after we spent the first day desperately trying to operate in the rain.

	The inflatable kayak, resting on the beach at Iniakuk under cloudy skies.

It rained on our flight to the bush pilot airfield, it rained as the bush pilot flew us out, it rained as we fished and it rained as we ate. After dinner, there seemed to be a break, so Mark and I paddled across a small bay to a beach to fish. As we stood on the banks not catching fish, I noticed a big, dark band hanging over the horizon.

I pointed it out to Mark, who said we would go just as soon as we'd explored the other side of the beach, beyond where our inflatable kayak was beached.

"Ok," I said. We started walking back toward the boat, which was about 50 yards away.

About halfway down the gravel beach, Mark said maybe we should just explore real quick and then head back.

"Ok," I said. By now, the black band had stretched, enveloping mountains and sky in dark clouds.

At the boat, Mark said maybe we should just head back right now and explore tomorrow.

"Ok," I said.

We got in and started paddling calmly in the direction of camp. The shortest route involved heading straight across the bay, which took us far away from shore. At the furthest point, the storm moved over us.

It hit like a sledgehammer. My hat flew off in a blast of icy wind. My hair began dripping, my knuckles froze onto the aluminum paddle. Water was firing out of the sky, riddling the lake around us with bullet-hole ripples and filling the bottom of the boat.

The wind flew directly in our faces and we paddled desperately into the clouds. Water splashed and flew from the paddles as we churned toward the bank. The storm was so thick we couldn't recognize the beach near camp; we missed by several hundred yards. Too tired to paddle anymore, we pulled the boat onto shore and tied it to the nearest tree, then walked back.

We stood around a fire Mark's dad had built, which hissed and smoked in the rain. Mark noted, philosophically, that adventures are never fun while you're having them.

Neither, I imagine, is an autopsy.

* * *

	Will's sketch of the wolf skull we used to decorate our lean-to (obviously, we used a wolf skull to decorate our lean-to. We used it to hold our toothbrushes); and a photo of the finished product.

It rained all night, and the next morning we set to work building a shelter.

We found three trees in a triangle, and lashed beams horizontally between them. Mark's dad built another support pole, to make a square, and we filled the top in by lashing thin tree trunks over our crossbeams. We forgot our tarp, and had to slash up a tent liner to cover the top.

The liner was florescent orange, and unnoticeable from above unless you were closer than, say, high-earth orbit.

I assume the shelter would have worked for keeping away the rain. Unfortunately, we never got to test the lean-to in a real-life rain situation, since it promptly cleared up and stayed sunny for the next three days.

Just in case, I tested the crossbeams extensively for durability and strength. They made a satisfying "thud," which reflected their fine construction, as well as the malleability of my forehead.

Alas, my testing went to waste. The sun shone brightly all afternoon over the lean-to, and the clouds overhead started to break up.

Mark's dad, Mark and I hiked that afternoon in the sun, in T-shirts. The forest was thick, and only a fool would have tried walking through it. About halfway up a mountain, we stopped for a moment to collect ourselves, as well as any appendages that we had left behind in the brush.

We damaged several limbs, most of which belonged to trees, so we could find our way back. We headed roughly toward the Iniakuk River, about three miles from camp, with the knowledge that we couldn't get lost, since any direction led to water.

Why the Iniakuk River?

"Because," Mark's dad said, "it is there."

We got to talking about George Mallory, whose frozen body was found at the top of Mt. Everest decades after he tried climbing it.

	A pleasant forest clearing, near where we shot a grouse and found the wolf skull.

Mallory probably had an easier time climbing than we did. Everest, at least, has solid footing in some places. We had to adopt a strategy of walking 100 feet up the hill to a clear spot (defined as a square foot with only three or four trees, as opposed to, say, 16), then walking down from that clear spot to find another clear spot, then up, then down, then up, then down, then up, then ...

Our horizontal progress was about a foot per minute, which was a slow but efficient way of making it a mile in a day. Luckily, we found a moose trail.

Moose probably have very little idea where they are walking when they are walking.

"I wonder if this moose has any idea where it's going," Mark said, as we followed its windy path through the trees.

"Probably not," I said. Fortunately though, even if it didn't know where it was going, the moose at least had the sense to take the same route to get there.

"Some random collision of atoms made a neuron fire, like cattle," Mark said.

Of course, we had an absolute idea where we were going, and how we were going to get there. We were going somewhere in the direction of a distant mountain, and we were getting there via the moose trail.

Good thing, too. Eventually, the ground opened up into scattered spruce trees. A thick white moss covered the ground like snow. The sun filtered gently through the trees, lighting up trails through the forest and twinkling on the moss. We stopped to take pictures.

The forest was still and silent and beautiful. That night, the lake was so calm it looked like we could walk on it. The mountains stood silhouetted against a bright pink sky and the lake lit up reflecting the crimson clouds.

* * *

I went to Alaska expecting to be miserable. Mark went once, when he was 10, and it rained the entire time, for 14 straight days. I packed hundreds of pounds of rain gear with me. I had waterproof boots, jackets, pants, socks and gloves.

The first three days were clear and sunny and colorful, more like a resort vacation than three days in the bush. We ate blueberry pancakes and had hot chocolate in the morning under tranquil skies the same blue color as the berries.

	Now doesn't that look nice?

The third day was the most gorgeous day of the trip. The lake was shining like every cliche applied to lakes - like a jewel, a mirror, a diamond -- like the whole catalogue from Tiffany's. It ran from deep blue to almost black in the middle, to forest green along the edges, where the trees were shining in the water. I expected Monet to come running out of the bushes with his easel and set up shop for the day.

From the middle, in our kayak, we could see the entire five miles of water, the mountains circling it, the sky, the clouds, all of it perfectly still and hushed, as if even the breeze did not want to disturb the silence.

We picked that day to scout out the outlet, where we would have to travel to make it to our next destination, a lake about 30 miles away.

The plan was to float down the outlet, connect up to the Malamute Fork of the Alatna River, follow that to the Alatna and cruise from there to our take-out point a mile from the second lake. The trick would be floating the outlet, since no one could tell us whether we could get a canoe down it.

Since the alternative was to pack up 400 pounds of gear and hike 30 miles, which would have taken several days and several trips, I hoped the outlet was floatable.

* * *

It was.

	Will's sketch of the wolf at the Iniakuk outlet.

Far from the shallow ditch we had feared it might be, the outlet was 30 feet across, two or three feet deep, lined with blueberry bushes and overflowing with grayling. At every eddy along the way, we would stop to catch five or six, release them all, then move on. We got so confident in pointing out fish holes that we would turn on our video camera and point at a spot, then cast. And the fish would still hit.

We got to the outlet after paddling across the lake for an hour, and tied up our boats to investigate. We got about 100 yards down the bank, where we were fooling around chasing pike, when Bill looked back and saw a wolf standing near our boat.

"Wolf!" he cried.

I looked back, and saw a big, black dog standing on a rock overlooking the boat. Mark's dad flipped on the video camera, and we watched.

The wolf looked at our boat for a minute, then grabbed one of the strings and yanked it. Then he disappeared into the bushes.

When we returned later in the day, fish we had tied up to stringers along the bank had also disappeared. The wolf, we figured, must have learned that if he pulled a string, he got a fish.

	The Northern Lights. Whoa.

Even north of the Arctic Circle, humans have left their impact.

We paddled back to camp that night and ate cheesecake and took baths and watched the sun set over the mountains for the second night in a row. At 11:30, Mark and I got up and saw the Northern Lights for the first time.

Mark peeked out of the tent first.

"Oh my god," he said.

The aurora was bright enough to outshine the full moon, large enough to trace a glowing green path across the entire night sky. It stretched in a ring, flowing over the constellations, pulsating and glowing in waves as it contorted and lengthened, then contracted.

It moved like fog, clouding and misting over the mountains, seeping between the stars and pouring off onto the horizon beyond the lake.

* * *

From then on, the nights were cloudy or the lights never came on. But the weather during the day was sunny. Too sunny.

At the first lake, we couldn't catch fish. It may still have been too warm. It may have been the lake. We couldn't be sure. But it wasn't getting any better, so we decided to leave.

Mark and his dad have a theory of lake trout behavior. Scientific fisherman, they believe that the trout won't touch a lure until the lake is 50 degrees or less. They arrived at this exact number, to a degree, through exhaustive testing. That is to say, Mark went to the lake once when it was colder than 50 degrees and caught trout.

	Hey! Fish! What's the water temperature?

I remained skeptical. How could a fish learn to read a thermometer? Would it even know which end was up?

The theory needed to be tested, but we needed to test it at the other lake. Helpmejack lake (named, I think, because the guy naming it called up his friend Jack and said, "I need to name a lake, Jack. Help me"), offered the perfect experimental ground, because we knew the fish were there.

On past trips, Mark and his dad had caught monster after monster, on consecutive casts, until their weary arms could haul in fish no longer.

In the pursuit of knowledge and in the name of science, we set off for Helpmejack on the fourth day of the trip (actually, I think it was mostly because the weather was good).

The float trip turned up the first day where I had nothing to say for my trip journal.

"Float, walk, float, walk, float, walk," I wrote. "Kill all mosquitoes."

And that, pretty much, sums up the first day on the river.

We camped on the Alatna that night, 15 miles upriver from Helpmejack. From our campsite we could see Helpmejack peak.

It seemed close.

But, as I found out the next day, it was not.

* * *

The weather had clouded over a little on our first day of floating. Occasionally, the sun would make a pretense of shining through the clouds, but for the most part it was overcast. It even rained (this was fine, since we no longer had our lean-to).

On the second day, the sun made no pretense.

It started raining as we started floating, and it never stopped.

There's that Creedence Clearwater Revivalsong, called "Who'll Stop the Rain?" that has a line, "Long as I remember, the rain been comin' down." I had this song stuck in my head all day, no doubt due to environmental stimuli. Everything was wet. Especially though, me.

There came a point where I was no longer cold on the outside, but cold all the way through. I was absolutely numb. Everything I was wearing was wet. Everything else was wet. There was no way not to be wet, and there was nowhere to go that wasn't wet.

	One of our diversions during that day on the river: Measuring grizzly tracks on the banks.

We floated helplessly, while glaciers completed their journeys and fell into the ocean and empires rose and fell.

After slightly less than several eternities, we reached a bank that Mark and his dad said was familiar, and pulled our boats out of the water.

Then we loaded up our backpacks and took off uphill through the brush. It was 0.8 miles to the lake, according to the GPS, and it took us about an hour of walking.

When we got there, huge rain clouds were parting over the lake like curtains. One was dark gray, loaded with rain to carry up to the mountaintop, which had disappeared into the mists. The other was a white, fluffy cloud, which moved out over the river valley.

The stage they opened over was a lake unreachable except by floatplane for three months every year, and unreachable by anything once winter started. We had reached it, and found it less welcoming than it sounded.

Wisps of clouds passed over the surface, which was dull and dark. Burned trees, victims of a massive forest fire that had claimed millions of acres of forest in 1991, stood like ghosts against the gray sky. Black stumps and fallen logs reached out everywhere from the steaming ground with long, scratching claws.

The deadfalls were twisted and contorted, and lay in the barren fields where they had died, in silent and frozen agony. Mark and I paddled out into the rain as night fell, hoping desperately to find dinner. The float trip had taken a long time and we had no food for that night. We caught a pike, which was chewy and bland. But at least we ate. In an hour, we were unable to catch a trout. The water temperature in the shallows was 53 degrees.

* * *

	Will's sketch of a trout (top), grayling (middle) and northern pike. Let's all take a moment to decipher his note in the bottom-right corner of the pike sketch: "Largest caught (Eric) 34 1/2 inches, 11 pounds."

We continued not catching trout for a few days. The water temperature remained above 50, and so far Mark's theory was holding true. Through extensive effort, Mark and his dad managed to get one or two each day, enough for us to eat at night.

The sacrifices they made were so horrible I couldn't take part: Somehow, the two of them managed to get up at six in the morning every day and fish. Well, it was awful, and I appreciated them taking one for the team, so we could all eat.

In the meantime, while the water temperature was high and the fish stayed picky, we amused ourselves by climbing mountains and getting eaten alive by insects.

I began to believe that lake trout really wouldn't bite until it was 50 degrees. They sure weren't biting now.

I started having dreams about fish. A big school of 10-pound lake trout was sitting around, in Hawaiian shirts, wearing sunglasses, sipping on colorful drinks with umbrellas in them, enjoying their tropical vacation.

Every so often, one of them, a big colorful fish in an orange shirt with palm trees on it, would go over and check the thermometer.

"Still too warm!" he'd say. And then he'd go back and join a huge trout conga line dancing across the bottom of the lake.

Finally, one day, I walked down to the lake and plunked the thermometer in, and it climbed to 50 and stopped.

"Heh, heh," I thought. "I can't wait to fry that sucker in the ugly orange palm tree shirt."

At this point in the trip, I was having some difficulty sorting out reality from my dreams.

Possibly this was due to hunger.

We had two phases to the trip: the first, with Mark, his brother Bill, his dad and me, was Iniakuk Lake, the float trip down the river, and a week at Helpmejack. After that, Mark's mom would fly in with supplies, and stay for the final week.

Mark's dad had calculated the food very precisely, to minimize weight, and we realized about five days before his mom arrived that we were short on food.

Mark's dad, as Mark pointed out, still packed like Mark was ten.

By the final days before his mom arrived, we were desperate. Mark fantasized about Snickers bars. I fantasized about anything other than trout, which we ate twice a day, for breakfast and dinner. Lunch was a handful of trail mix, and sometimes, peanut butter.

We started out by eating the peanut butter on spoons, straight out of the jar (we were long since out of bread), but quickly evolved by mixing it with trail mix.

"It's almost like a Snickers," Mark said. Mark was getting very, very desperate.

I told him maybe we could mix it with syrup.

When Mark's mom arrived a few days later and showed concern for our diminishing waistlines, they promptly stopped diminishing.

* * *

The fishing was at least producing enough for us to eat, although it was a little repetitive. But the trout weren't biting like they were supposed to.

Even after the water hit 50, the bite stayed calm.

Mark and his dad started to try to explain why the theory wasn't quite working.

"I'm starting to think the ecology of the lake has changed," Mark suggested.

"I don't remember those big bait schools being here last time, do you, dad?" he asked once.

"Last time, they were always here. There must be schools, and they're just not here right now," he said as we trolled through the vast and desolate lake.

	Those are large fish, caught in 49-degree water.

The water stayed at 50 degrees for a week. The sun came out and warmed the lake during the day, and then the lack of cloud cover would freeze it at night. While we weren't starving, particularly after Mark's mom arrived, we weren't exactly pulling them in until we literally did not have the strength to take another over the side of the canoe.

I began to think that either the theory or the lake was over-hyped.

And then the water hit 49 degrees.

As I reeled in my sixth fish in an hour, at the same time Mark was struggling with his eighth, I figured we had scientifically proven his theory.

For the record, the boat Mark and I were in was responsible for 14 fish between 9:30-10 a.m. and 12-2 p.m. I stored the theory of lake trout behavior under my brain file of immutable laws of nature.

* * *

Another of those laws, which I consider to be one of the best I've come up with so far, is that a person shouldn't encourage large predators to stop by and chat. Inviting them, for example, over for cookies and coffee is completely out of the question.

It's a rule I've often thought of, but never really had the opportunity to put into practice.

"Hoooo, bear!" Mark's dad is yelling at a mature, potentially lethal, 600-pound grizzly bear. "Hey!"

	Will's sketch of the grizzly bear. It's much scarier than in the photo.

The bear was about 80 yards away and hadn't noticed us last I checked.

As a strong supporter of natural wildlife, I had intended to keep it oblivious to our presence, so as not to disturb the precarious balance of the Alaskan ecosystem by rudely projecting myself into the picture.

"Hoooo, bear!" Mark's dad yelled again.

I couldn't see the bear at this time, since I had been slowly backing down the mountain since the bear got closer. Mark was right next to me.

"OK, Dad," he said. "I think the bear's close enough now. Dad. Dad. The bear, Dad. It's close enough, now."

His dad said OK, and Mark and I started edging backwards, down the ridge.

All we could see was his dad, who was standing there waving at the bear.

We could determine the bear's reaction by his reaction.

He reached down and unholstered his gun.

Later, he told us that he was merely checking to make sure he knew where it was.

At the time, however, Mark and I figured the bear had responded by turning around and running up to investigate.

"At least," I thought, "I've got a head start."

"I wasn't all that interested in sticking around to see what the bear was going to do," Mark told me later. I replied that I was extremely interested in what the bear was going to do, and that I had suddenly taken a great interest in the life and times of said bear.

Mark laughed. It was much funnier afterwards.

Evidently, the bear didn't care in the slightest that we were there. It looked up from eating blueberries. "What?" it said. "I'm eating here."

And then it went back to plowing through the bushes.

* * *

	Making a full-frontal assault on Helpmejack Mountain.

The bear was near the top of a mountain. After doing 90 percent of the work to climb Helpmejack peak, the grizzly was the only thing between us and the top of the world.

It was a 2,400-foot climb over two miles of difficult terrain. The contour map was marked with huge brown marks, where all the contours ran together and fused into a single, sheer cliff.

As we climbed, fallen trees reached out and grabbed our ankles, while living trees slapped our faces and whipped our legs. Clouds of no see 'ums moved in ready for a battle. They soon launched fighter units to investigate. Some of the more daring pilots fought through my heavy defenses (running around yelling "get it off! Get it off!"), and penetrated my nose and ears.

Bugs that weren't up to the rigors of military life contented themselves to land on my pants and jacket by the hundreds, making tiny popping noises like a bag of popcorn as they hit Gore-tex.

It took three hours to get to the tree line, where, finally, the trees and bugs thinned out.

We proceeded to walk across a quarter-mile of treacherous falling slate, picking daintily through the rocks to avoid spraining an ankle and dying on the top of the mountain.

We picked our way to the top ridge, where we could look almost straight down and see the lake and the river valley spreading out below us.

Mark and I were jogging along, humming the theme song from "Rocky," and then Mark stopped.

"Grizzly!" he said.

I stopped, too.

We never did make it to the top of the peak, and a few days later we left.

* * *

I rode home in a daze. I found it hard to believe I was not in the woods anymore. I'd been there for what felt like forever.

The daze was also induced by the smell.

Our six-seat plane, on the way back, had six passengers, a pilot, and 1,200 pounds of rotting moose meat. I sat in the back (really, really dumb to get on the plane last), strapped in right next to a bleeding hindquarter.

Alaska has laws that require moose meat be shipped to the city, to prevent hunters from coming in, shooting the moose, taking the antlers and leaving. In this case, the hunter didn't want the meat, so he left it for his guide to deal with.

The guide, in turn, left it sitting around in unseasonably warm weather for a couple days before putting it on our flight to the city.

The bags were bleeding. Blood was on the floor.

The sad thing is, the moose didn't smell much worse than I did.

I guess that's why I left.