You’re about to read one of the şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍřĚý°ä±ô˛ą˛ő˛őľ±ł¦˛ő, a series highlighting the best stories we’ve ever published, along with author interviews, where-are-they-now updates, and other exclusive bonus materials. Read Lisa Chase’s interview with David Quammen about this feature here.

He never founded a philosophic school, like Plato and Pythagoras did. He didn’t want followers. He simply wrote his one book and deposited the scroll in a certain sacred building, the temple of Artemis, where the general public couldn’t get ahold of it. The book itself was eventually lost, and all that survives of it today are about a hundred fragments, which have come down secondhand in the works of other ancient writers. So his ideas are known only by hearsay. He seems to have said a lot of interesting things, some of them cryptic, some of them downright ornery, but this river comment is the one for which Heraclitus is widely remembered. The full translation is: “You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing on.” To most people it comes across as a nice resonant metaphor, a bit of philosophic poetry. To me it is that and more.

Once, for a stretch of years, I lived in a very small town on the bank of a famous Montana river. It was famous mainly for its trout, this river, and for its clear water and abundance of chemical nutrients, and for the seasonal blizzards of emerging insects that made it one of the most rewarding pieces of habitat in North America, arguably in the world, if you happened to be a trout or fly-fisherman. I happened to be a fly-fisherman.

One species of insect in particular—one “hatch,” to use the slightly misleading term that fishermen apply to these impressive entomological events, when a few billion members of some mayfly or stone fly or caddis fly species all emerge simultaneously into adulthood and take flight over a river—gave this river an unmatched renown. The species was Pteronarcys californica, a monstrous but benign stone fly that grew more than two inches long and carried a pinkish-orange underbelly for which it had gotten the common name salmonfly. These insects, during their three years of development as aquatic larvae, could survive only in a river that was cold, pure, fast-flowing, rich in dissolved oxygen, and covered across its flat bottom with boulders the size of bowling balls, among which the larvae would live and graze. The famous river offered all those conditions extravagantly, and so P. californica flourished there like it did nowhere else. Trout flourished in turn.

When the clouds of P. californica took flight, and mated in air, and then began dropping back onto the water, the fish fed upon them voraciously, recklessly. Wary old brown trout the size of a person’s thigh, granddaddy animals that would never otherwise condescend to feed by daylight upon floating insects, came up off the bottom for this banquet. Each gulp of P. californica was a nutritional windfall. The trout filled their bellies and their mouths and still continued gorging. Consequently, the so-called salmonfly so-called hatch on this river, occurring annually during two weeks in June, triggered by small changes in water temperature, became a wild and garish national festival in the fly-fishing year. Stockbrokers in New York, corporate lawyers in San Francisco, federal judges and star-quality surgeons and foundation presidents—the sort of folk who own antique bamboo fly rods and field jackets of Irish tweed—planned their vacations around this event. They packed their gear and then waited for the telephone signal from a guide in a shop on Main Street of the little town where I lived.

The signal would say: It’s started. Or, in more detail: Yeah, the hatch is on. Passed through town yesterday. Bugs everywhere. By now the head end of it must be halfway to Varney Bridge. Get here as soon as you can. They got here. Cab drivers and schoolteachers came too. People who couldn’t afford to hire a guide and be chauffeured comfortably in a Mackenzie boat, or who didn’t want to, arrived with dinghies and johnboats lashed to the roofs of old yellow buses. And if the weather held, and you got yourself to the right stretch of river at the right time, it could indeed be very damn good fishing.

But that wasn’t why I lived in the town. Truth be known, when P. californica filled the sky and a flotilla of boats filled the river, I usually headed in the opposite direction. I didn’t care for the crowds. It was almost as bad as the Fourth of July rodeo, when the town suddenly became clogged with college kids from a nearby city, and Main Street was ankle deep in beer cans on the morning of the fifth, and I would find people I didn’t know sleeping it off in my front yard, under the scraggly elm. The salmonfly hatch was like that, only with stockbrokers and flying hooks. Besides, there were other places and other ways to catch fish. I would take my rod and my waders and disappear to a small spring creek that ran through a stock ranch on the bottomland east of the river.

It was private property. There was no room for guided boats on this little creek, and there was no room for tweed. Instead of tweed there were sheep—usually about thirty head, bleating in halfhearted annoyance but shuffling out of my way as I hiked from the barn out to the water. There was an old swayback horse named Buck, a buckskin; also a younger one, a hot white-stockinged mare that had once been a queen of the barrel-racing circuit and hadn’t forgotten her previous station in life. There was a graveyard of rusty car bodies, a string of them, DeSotos and Fords from the Truman years, dumped into the spring creek along one bend to hold the bank in place and save the sheep pasture from turning into an island. Locally this sort of thing is referred to as the “Detroit riprap” mode of soil conservation; after a while, the derelict cars come to seem a harmonious part of the scenery. There was also an old two-story ranch house of stucco with yellow trim. Inside lived a man and a woman, married then.

Now we have come to the reason I did live in that town. Actually there wasn’t one reason but three: the spring creek, the man, and the woman. At the time, for a stretch of years, those were three of the closest friends I’d ever had.

The post Can You Step in the Same River Twice? In Montana, I Learned the Answer. appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

Golf is a concept, like death, seldom contemplated by the young. Or so it seemed to me for the six decades during which I declined to contemplate it, except as this: a peculiarly slow sporting activity that could be left to one’s golden years.

I hadn’t come from a country-club childhood. So far as I knew, none of my friends played golf in high school or college. As a boy, during my brief caddying days, my pal Mike Karbowski and I somehow came into possession of a nine-iron or two, which we used to pitch shots through neighboring backyards, at some risk to windows. So I knew roughly how to swing a club, and I knew that hitting such a small, hard ball high and long (regardless of where the hell it went) could deliver a peculiarly satisfying sensation. But I never played an actual round on actual fairways and greens. I never lofted a six-iron shot toward a flagstick. I never sank a putt. The notion that Mike and I might step onto the first tee at Clovernook Country Club in Cincinnati—the course where we climbed over the back fence from our own scruffy neighborhood to caddy—would have seemed absurd, comically transgressive, like Spanky and Alfalfa sneaking their homemade wooden car onto the Daytona Speedway.

Unlike sandlot baseball, and bicycle dodgeball, and tree climbing, and the other athletic amusements we used to pass our afternoons and break our noses and teeth, golf was a game for grown-ups. It was another world, not ours, so never mind, no hurry. As an adult, throughout my twenties, thirties, and forties, I continued to see it that way, and my conclusion went like this: When my aging body is too decrepit for running and jumping and other rambunctious hurly-burly—Rollerblade crashes, face plants on skis, cartwheels off mountain-bike trails—then I might turn to golf.

There were exceptions to the geriatric demographic, I knew—the 12-year-old prodigy, the ace of the high school team, the twentysomething guy who hit huge drives. My own eventual golf mentor, Gene, the man who invited me into the sport (after I married his daughter), had started at eight; he carried a two handicap in high school and has happily played for 70 years now. My college roommate Skip started at 13—this I learned only later—and golfed avidly until some scumbag stole his clubs from a locker room, souring him on the sport for decades. He then returned to it, at 50, with the zeal of a thickening athlete, and now, as a retiree, owns an apartment in St. Andrews. My buddy Whisperin’ Jack, the famous medical researcher and bon vivant, started at ten and made the golf team at Dartmouth as a freshman, then went half a lifetime without playing much until he reengaged with such ardor that, in a moment of hysteria, he bought a house in Palm Springs. Several others from my gang started young, too, a piece of personal history they mostly kept on the down low. But I always saw older people as the golf crowd, white-shoed burghers of a certain tax bracket and sociopolitical tribe, for whom fast heart rates and Gore-Tex and physical risk were not part of the desired recreational experience.

A lifetime of robust sports—a lifetime of mock-epic engagements with nature—flows on its serpentine route but ever downhill, drawn by gravity, pushed by time, as inexorably as the Mississippi runs to the sea. Your body changes. Muscles get better with vigorous use, all things being equal, but joints get worse. Your hunger for conquest fades, your appetite for risk and tolerance for contusion diminish. Even if the engine under your hood—your heart and lungs—remains in good tune, your fenders start to rattle and your brake pads wear thin. It’s only natural that there be a progression from one sport, one form of exhilarating foolhardiness, to another. Bodily depreciation doesn’t always deliver you onto a golf course, but a person could do worse. A good round of golf is more strenuous than deck shuffleboard on a cruise to Aruba, after all, or lawn darts at the retirement community.

My first sporting obsession as an adult was fly-fishing, which brought me to Montana in 1973. For a decade, my life revolved around two thrilling struggles: trying to make a living as a writer (after a precocious first novel), and trying to deceive trout with bits of feather and floss and thread wound onto small hooks. At first I wrote more novels and tied mostly dry flies. Trout went for the flies, but editors didn’t go for the novels. With time and the incentive of discouragement, I broadened my literary efforts, turning to nonfiction; my fishing efforts broadened, too, into nymphs and emergers and all manner of other arcane enticements based on my studies in ichthyology and aquatic entomology. I caught fish: gorgeous rainbows, handsome broad-backed browns, native cutthroats, and—rarely but unforgettably—arctic grayling, with their luminous dorsal fins that glowed turquoise and lilac and green, until you lifted them out of the water and they began to die. So I put them back in.

I became licensed to help others catch fish. I’m sure I wasn’t the only Montana fishing guide in the past 40 years with one published novel and three others buried under rejection slips, but this was a joyous phase of life, even amid the paying of dues. And then, after my second or third summer of guiding, an odd thing happened. I suddenly fell out of love with fishing, because I had fallen too deeply in love with trout. When fishing was work, I found myself hoping that my ham-handed and meat-hungry clients wouldn’t catch anything. When it was play, it no longer felt playful. These animals were frantic, fighting for their lives. Forget the catch-and-release clause. Sometimes they got hurt. So I quit.

There was a related factor: a shift from one river sport to another. I had discovered the tumble-washed ecstasy of whitewater kayaking. I started paddling the same waters I had fished, splashing down riffles, zipping into eddies, thrilled by the liquid choreography and relieved by the knowledge that, if anyone were injured or killed by this activity, it would be me, not some innocent trout. Having squeaked through one sobering misadventure during my beginner phase, upside down in a busy Class IV rapid with a broken paddle and my chest pressed against a rock, I signed up for a week of lessons (paid for by this magazine) at a famous whitewater school in North Carolina, raised my game, and spent much of the next 20 years paddling rumbustious rivers from Montana to Tennessee to New Zealand, with only a couple of other near-death experiences. One came on the Futaleufú in Chile, amid a seething Class V rapid known as Terminator, which I ran largely upside down, never mind why. Finally I rolled up, breathless, exhausted, then fell into a recirculating hole, exited my boat, and had to swim. A friend watched from shore while the hole started to suck me forward, and as he told me later, he thought I was a goner. But I did one thing right—grabbed the tail loop of my boat as it bobbed away, pulling me back into the current—and I was rescued.

My kayak career came to an end soon after a Grand Canyon trip in September 2001, when I was 53, amid a pending divorce, feeling unmoored, my shoulders starting to get iffy. While my friends and I were deep in the canyon, nearly incommunicado for 17 days, 9/11 occurred. When we emerged, America had changed. It seemed the right time for me to change, too.

In winter I still had telemark skiing and ice hockey. Telemark as a means of downhill travel over snow is like fly- ­fishing: less efficient than some alternatives, but it feels beautiful to do.

Feels beautiful, that is, so long as your knees are healthy; my 25 winters on tele skis probably help explain the medical circumstances (about which more below) that pushed me toward golf.

City-league ice hockey, which I played for ten years with great pleasure and not much skill, had the merits of team camaraderie and another form of fluid motion. But I discovered that the fine art of puck handling, while you skate fast between charging bodies, is so difficult that you should start learning it at age six, ideally on a rink in Minnesota—­certainly not at 49 on a flooded tennis court in Bozeman. Having become part of a team at an indoor rink, with refs and a clock and uniforms and good ice, I skated wing with enough clumsy gusto to acquire the nickname Dozer, because I knocked people down, inadvertently, while contesting the puck. It was a no-check league, supposedly, and I was the city’s most eggheaded goon. But then I turned 60, and the league expanded to hold a hundred more players, including too many from Minnesota boyhoods, and I became useless. I retired but took with me two life skills of rare value: I could do backward crossovers, and I could drive a Zamboni.

By now I was happily remarried, and as my 65th birthday approached, my wife, Betsy, asked: How do you want to celebrate? Let’s climb the Grand Teton, I said. I’ve lived in the shadow of that peak for 40 years, and before my wheels fall off, I’d like to stand on its summit. So we did, with the help and fine company of an overqualified friend named Conrad Anker. That summer lark was followed in autumn by a walking tour in Wales, at the end of which my left knee swelled like a grapefruit and I fetched up lame.

Baker’s cyst. Meniscus tear. Arthroscopy. Physical therapy. More punishment, more hard use, more hiking through jungles and swamps, not for recreation but in the necessary course of my work. I was on the downside of my seventh decade, and the only consolation to that fact was Medicare. On a bad day, I walked like an elderly duck. Then it was back to an orthopedic surgeon, whose physician’s assistant, a tall young fellow wearing a short beard and a long white jacket, looked at my X-rays and said, clinically: “Your knees are shot.”

So, golf.

Right about now I can hear you saying, “That’s great, DQ. But what about the environment?”

I won’t deny that golf has a lot to answer for, not just in its bourgeois ethos but in its footprint: pesticide use, water use, fertilizer use, energy use, landscape conversion, impacts on biological diversity, and the rest. If the land in question has been converted from agricultural fields to golf-course acreage, the net impact of those other factors might actually be lessened, but that’s a wan exculpation.

It wasn’t always like this. The modern history of golf traces back to Scotland in the 18th century, when it was played on windswept links laid upon the natural contours of coastal dunes, with “grasses on sandy stretches…fertilized by the droppings of seabirds and cut short by grazing rabbits,” according to one account. That tradition survives today on many British links courses, where the rough is rougher, the sand is native, the fairways are patchy landing zones and not continuous carpet, the diversity of birds and insects is still good, and the golf is more feral. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Augusta National, site of the Masters each April, so exquisitely manicured for television that, according to some critics, the place inflicts an Augusta National Syndrome on the expectations of golfers and managers at less grandiose courses.

There has been an effort among some of the sport’s organizations, including the United States Golf Association, to promote mitigation strategies—less mowing, less watering, less poisoning, more accommodation of wild plants and animals—but no golfer should pretend that enough has been done. We should be playing on uniquely American links courses, where the ponds harbor alligators and the woody roughs are patrolled by black bears, copperheads, cougars, woodpeckers, and mosquitos. We would lose a lot more balls, but the R&D people at Titleist or Callaway ought to be able to make a biodegradable version, appetizing to squirrels and raccoons.

For all its flaws, golf is still about beautiful landscapes. It’s about the flat, grassy pad where you start and the metal cup at the end of each hole, true, but it’s also about the hills you climb, the trees you klonk or don’t klonk, the thickets you skirt, the swamps that engulf you, and the ponds into which you go kerplunk.

Note that I say “you” do those things, not “your ball,” because the ball is your avatar, your effigy, it is you, traveling one leg of this perilous journey after another. That’s why your playing partners say “You’re away,” not “Your ball is farthest from the cup,” when they’re telling you to get busy and putt. That’s why they say, with a pitying cringe masking their schadenfreude, “You’re wet,” after your ball has failed to clear the creek. You’re gone. You’re out of bounds. You bounced three times on the cart path and were last seen on a fast roll toward the irrigation ditch. Take it personally: you. Drop another you and try again. The journey continues.

Bill Vaughn, a deft writer and Montana native son, understood that truth more than 20 years ago when he published a piece in this magazine about golfing the Lewis and Clark Trail (“How the West Was Bogeyed,” July 1996). Vaughn teed off with a five-iron from a shallow Missouri River sandbar, just south of Great Falls, on what he reckoned would be a 2,140-mile course, over land and water, traveling by raft and car when he wasn’t walking between shots, to the starting point of the Corps of Discovery in Saint Charles, Missouri. The round took him an entire summer and part of fall, more thousands of strokes than he bothered to count, hundreds of cheap range balls lost in the marshes and riverside woods, until he teed up for his final shot in a small park by the riverbank in Saint Charles, near the Lewis and Clark Monument, and hit his last ball into the river.

He called it wilderness golf, and I think that’s the right spirit. Sure, most of us confine ourselves to 150 acres of groomed and sculpted “wilderness” at our preferred local course, but the psychological dimension is the same.

Three reasons golf should be easy, according to me:

1. The ball isn’t moving.
2. You can hit it as many times as you want.
3. And (this one highlighted by my hockey experience) there’s no checking.

But golf isn’t easy, it’s very hard, and there are obvious reasons for that. The first is that it’s so unforgiving of imperfection. Ted Williams batted .406 in 1941 for the Red Sox, and no baseball player since has broken .400 for a season. But imagine if a professional golfer made good contact on, say, only four shots of every ten. His handicap would be 43, he’d be laughed out of every clubhouse on the PGA tour, and St. Andrews wouldn’t even let him step onto the Old Course.

Intermittent proficiency is one thing. It’s not that difficult, even for a duffer like me, to hit two or three good shots. But it’s unimagin­able to hit 72 in a row. The second point is that every single shot, no matter how short, registers as an equal unit on your score. You can reach all the greens in regulation, hitting superb tee balls, making good approaches, and avoiding the traps and the trees, and still card a lousy number simply by three-putting every hole. A straight drive of 250 yards counts as one stroke. A tap-in putt, after two other putts, counts as one stroke. Perversity.

But the difficulties can yield moments of mirth, as elegantly noted by the late John Updike, a devoted though mediocre player, in his 1982 essay “The Bliss of Golf.” Bad shots, he wrote, “are endless fun—at least the other fellow’s are.” Notably:

The duck hook, the banana slice, the topped dribble, the no-explode explosion shot, the arboreal ricochet, the sky ball, the majestic OB, the pondside scuff-and-splash, the deep-grass squirt, the cart-path shank, the skull, the fat hit, the thin hit, the stubbed putt…

Each bad shot is produced by a momentary lapse, an imperfect swing, and the laws of physics. And yet there is transcendence to be achieved, as Updike’s title suggests, even under the pressure of unachievable perfection—or at least consistency—and even for us weekenders who give far less time, passion, and money to the sport than Updike did. The bliss of golf resides not in victory over partners, nor in breaking 80, but in hitting one terrific shot, a shot so good that a pro would be satisfied with it. This is possible in golf, for some reason. I could never hit a curveball coming off the fingers of Justin Verlander, no matter how long I tried, but I can hit an inspired and lucky gap wedge from 60 feet out that goes in the hole. Not often, but it happens.

This is what keeps a person with middling skills and embarrassing scores coming back to the game. I usually shoot in the nineties or worse, but I remember the blissful moments, however rare, more vividly than the foozles and flops. Case in point: One day on the 12th hole at Cottonwood Hills, the unpretentious public course in Bozeman that serves as my local, I was playing with a group of friends that included Timothy, my spiritual adviser in golf, a lanky fellow with a white ponytail bundled behind his avuncular smile. Timothy is almost exactly my age, but he’s more practiced and skilled, with the additional advantage of a Scottish Presbyterian (preacher’s kid) background, which somehow nurtures his aplomb on the course. Also with us was Thomas, a Czech-born architect who plays in a straw hat and  with a nimbus of heedless enthusiasm, and whose approach to golf is: “Hit the ball as hard as you can, then go try and find it!”

Cottonwood’s 12th, which I sometimes call Everest, is a 541-yard par five, gently doglegging left, then climbing more than a hundred feet to a green you can’t even see. Out-of-bounds on the right there’s a grainfield, where I often push my drive. Along the left are knolls and trees, preventing any decent second shot if your first lands over there. The approach slope to the green would make a good ski hill: 50 feet up it, you still can’t see the top of the flagstick.

On this day, I hit an unusually solid and straight drive. Then, surprising myself, I hit a seven-wood and got all of it, leaving my ball halfway up the approach. I lobbed a pitching wedge toward where I reckoned the cup might be, my ball disappeared over the horizon, and gloriosky, when I climbed up there, it was 15 feet from the pin. I putted, gently, then watched, amazed, as it rolled, curled left, and dropped. Timothy, who had been busy tracking his own shots, gave me a big smile and a fist bump, saying: Good par, brother. I said: Actually, that was a birdie. And I was left to wonder, all winter: If it feels so easy when done right, why do it wrong?

As my knees have gone to bone on bone, as I’ve moved toward double replacement surgery, my interest in golf has increased more quickly than my skill. Yes, it’s a hard game—fortunately, because if it were easy, it would be stupid and dull. Hitting straight drives consistently, no hook, no slice, is hard. Hitting fairway woods without scuffing out grounders is hard. Little chip shots from thick, short rough, five feet off the green, are hard. Putting downhill is hard, but then so is putting uphill, especially those three- or four-footers you need to make after putting downhill. Updike wrote a whole essay about missing them, calling such moments hateful.

He was kidding, of course. The game is never hateful; it’s just fiendishly frustrating and comically humbling, except when it’s weirdly, unforeseeably sublime. There’s that old saw about golf, apocryphally credited to Mark Twain, calling it a good walk spoiled. But the walk isn’t spoiled by hitting 80 or 90 or even 100 golf shots along the way, not if three or four of them fly true, and not if your company on the stroll is excellent.

That last part is crucial. “Don’t play golf with assholes” is a rule Thomas the architect has learned to live by. Don’t play with people you dislike, or who bore you, or who will come at you with a competitive edge. Whisperin’ Jack knows this. His playing partners sometimes suggest that they “put a little money” on each hole to “make it more interesting.” Jack answers: “Bet? No. I want all you guys to shoot birdies on every hole.”

If it weren’t for good company, such as Jack and Thomas and Gene and Skip and Timothy and the other Mike (not Karbowski but my doctor, six foot ten and hits the ball a mile) and Kathryn and John and Ira and Earl and the others, I wouldn’t play. If it weren’t for companions like Robert, a great storyteller, especially when it was his turn to hit, who left us early because of pancreatic cancer, I wouldn’t play. (Approaching what might be an eight-iron shot, Robert would say, “My eight-iron goes 126 yards,” and then be mildly surprised if it didn’t. After his funeral, by decision of his wife, I inherited that eight-iron and the rest of his clubs, now serving as physical tokens for remembering him as I play. The eight-iron sometimes goes 126 yards.) If it weren’t for the imperfectability of golf, especially my own game, I wouldn’t play. If it weren’t for the learning curve angled so gently upward, and the laughter, and the astonishing moments of pure swing with a ball rocketing off toward its intended target, and the fact that even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while, I wouldn’t play. If it weren’t for the numinous, brief moments in which a whacking, chunking, shanking, dribbling striver like me is vouchsafed a taste of what golf can be, I wouldn’t bother.

Another case in point: I was playing at Cottonwood several years ago with Timothy and his friend Andy, a captain on the local police force, an amiable guy, and a solid golfer. I had stunk up the first seven holes, during which Andy and Timothy breathed not a wisp of condescension. I was doing my best, they knew, and we were having fun. Also, I had explained I could only play the front nine that day, because of an appointment back in town. On the eighth, a short par three that drops down over a creek to a round green looped by a bend of the same creek, with the pin on this day placed right, I landed my tee shot on the left fringe. From there I stubbed a chip barely onto the green. I was still the away man, about 25 feet uphill from the cup. I studied the putt and felt like I saw the line. I tapped. The ball rolled and rolled and angled and rolled and then, to the shock of us all, went in. Andy and Timothy, whooping, awarded me high fives. A saved par, the hard way. So far, so good.

On the ninth, a par four straight uphill to the clubhouse, I hit a good drive followed by a long, floating six-iron that left me, saints be praised, several feet onto the green. I’d never before made this green in regulation. Now came a 20-foot uphill putt. The line looked obvious, and I was in a mindlessly confident zone, so I just stepped up and gave the ball a bonk. It rolled and rolled and homed to the hole like a gopher and dropped in. Birdie.

This time Andy bent double in disbelief and grabbed his head with both hands. Then he straightened and, warmly amused, aware of my schedule, plus trying to spare me the inevitable disillusionments of the back nine, said: “You should definitely quit now.”

Quit? I thought. I’m just getting started.

The post David Quammen Is a Golfer Now, Sorry Not Sorry appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

When you're a kid, the world seems big and ordained. Things are as they are because they are. Even your neighborhood seems big and ordained, until you outgrow it, depart, and consider it again from a distance. Then you might start to see its deeper dimensions—its ­layers of time, contingency, and meaning. You might notice how geography and history, as well as sheer chance, played a role in making the place what it was. You might discover the turbulent boundary between nostalgia and revelation. That’s the boundary I discovered, almost 60 years after the fact, when I looked at my childhood through .

There was a house on a street in suburban Cincinnati. The street, barely more than a mile long, was called Belmont Avenue. Belmont: beautiful mountain, though this mountain was tiny. The neighborhood, for reasons I never thought to examine, was known as College Hill. The house sat at 6071. It was a ranch house with two stories and dormers, built in 1950, on a remnant half acre of farmland, by a young couple named Will and Mary Quammen, my parents. ­Before that they had lived in an old redbrick farmhouse, first erected in the 1830s, ­later expanded, still later divided into apartments, just a few hundred yards down the hill. That farmhouse, which we knew as the Runck place—after Reno Runck, the resident patriarch and landlord—was where I spent my first two years of life. An ancient well stood in front, beneath its little wooden well house, and a gazebo, and an old concrete swimming pool, full of green water, into which I could have toddled had my mother not harnessed me to a dog run wire. Moving up Belmont to our new house, this one owned and not rented, was our leap into the postwar middle class. 

Behind the house, stretching to the south, lay a weedy zone of thistle scrub and tall grasses, and beyond that a forest. A trail led through the weeds to the trees, then deep into them, and that trail was kept open in large part by my feet. I had a best friend named Eddie who shared my fascination with insects, reptiles, nature in all forms, and what seemed at the time to be wild landscape. In this part of College Hill, Eddie and I were Lewis and Clark.

The forest had no name. We called it simply the Woods. Within it grew oaks and maples and sycamores and catalpas and black walnut trees, some of them draped with grapevines as thick as nautical rope, flaky with cinnamon-colored bark. If you chose the right vine and hacked through its base with your sheath knife, you could swing on it over a ravine, Tarzan style. You would do that with reckless persistence until it broke and you dropped. The black walnuts and maples, with their open limb structures, invited climbing. Sycamores, in my recollection, were as brittle as pretzels. A big limb could snap and you plummeted. But you were 11 years old, elastic, and immortal.

Downslope through the Woods flowed a small stream, also nameless, across ledges and plates of broken limestone. We called it the Creek. Under those flat rocks, some of them cobbled with shell fossils, Eddie and I found salamanders and crawdads. (My method of catching crawdads was artless but effective: stick a finger down the hole and wait for a pincer to clamp it, then pull the little monster out.) In the leaf litter, on a good day, we might encounter a box turtle or a garter snake or a shrew. Tiger swallowtails flitted on their yellow and black wings through the sunny gaps. Cecropia moths, velvety umber and huge, were subtler and more nocturnal. Eddie was a year older and a better lepidopterist than I; he possessed, expertly spread and mounted in frames, a zebra swallowtail (rarer than the tiger), a luna moth, and a polyphemus, named for the Homeric Cyclops because of its big glaring eyespot on each lower wing. Magnificent creatures, all of them, even when dead.

I envied Eddie’s trophies, fraternally and respectfully, like a deer hunter envies a man with a roan antelope head on his rec-room wall. I was advantaged, though, by parents who saw no reason why a boy shouldn’t keep snakes and salamanders and the ­occasional bat caged as “pets” in his room. My two sisters had their own interests, and I, the middle child, was indulged to run a menagerie. But the real point of going to the Woods was not bringing zoological hostages home. The point was to wander loose in a universe of birdsong and spiderwebs and greenery. This was the place to which, for a handful of years in the mid-1950s, I gave my time and my heart. Then the bulldozers came.

Nameless or not, the Woods turned out to have owners, though we had never heard of them nor seen a NO TRESPASSING sign. And those owners, a partnership of home-­building brothers, had decided to develop a large hunk of it. They started just beyond my family’s back fence. The thistle scrub went. Then the trees and vines and cool woodland shade disappeared, scraped away, all as I watched. The bare dirt may have smelled like progress or profit to the brothers, but not to me. A grid of streets was laid down, by trucks full of concrete and the men who finished it. One time two vandals—um, OK, a friend and I—pulled up survey stakes and moved them, a resentful prank that accomplished nothing except to insert a peculiar bend between one end of Blue Bell Drive and another. Then came house foundations, and houses atop them. In a blink a new suburb of neat, boring ranch homes sprouted—houses that were not so unlike ours, except for being appallingly ­regimented—intruding between me and whatever remained of the Woods. It was a formative experience. 

In the six decades following, given trends of urban growth in America, pressures of population worldwide, and the relentless human thirst to convert landscape for our own conveniences, I came to assume that the loss of that forest would be total. If it was half gone by 1959, what hope could there be for the rest?

My family left Cincinnati in 1966. Strangers bought our home on Belmont, and somehow, in the late 1990s or thereabouts, its owners managed to burn it down. If you want to experience a sense of severance from childhood’s golden glow, I recommend this: let someone torch your very house, shovel its ruins away, replace it with another. That’ll chill your nostalgia.

Then one day, several years ago, I happened to revisit the old neighborhood in virtual space. I typed our address into Google Maps and scanned the area as seen from a thousand feet up. The street contours were familiar, even that blip in Blue Bell Drive, and I recognized all the names, except one. 

Inside an empty zone, south of Belmont, between the loathed suburb and the next road a mile farther below, I saw the words “Fox Preserve.” Fox what? Never heard of it. Since when did Cincinnati care about foxes? But wait, no—I rechecked the location, south of Belmont and north of a road called Kirby Avenue, descending from College Hill to the lowlands, and realized: this must be what’s left of the Woods. That poignant surprise put me to wondering whether the whole story wasn’t so simple.

I've spent much of my adult life as a writer who walks through jeopardized forests. I’ve slogged for weeks across the Congo Basin. I’ve bashed through the Amazon on foot. I’ve climbed the slippery green hillsides of Madagascar and pushed my way through the thickets of northwestern Tasmania. I’ve walked the cliff lines and savanna forest of Komodo, an island in Indonesia, where if you’re not careful a 200-pound lizard will jump out of the brush and bite you on the ass. These have been privileged opportunities; I’ve been lucky and blessed. It’s a job, it’s a vocation, it’s a literary beat—following field biologists through forests. And none of it would have happened, probably, if not for the hikes through my first forest, the one in College Hill.

My circuit from there to the others of my adulthood was roundabout and haphazard. By chance as well as by choice, I never became a herpetologist, as I once thought I might. My path was influenced by great teachers, three in particular, each of whom touched the ship’s wheel of my life, ­delicately but astutely, lovingly, turning the rudder just a few degrees, and helped set my course into literary efforts, not science. The first two were Jesuit English teachers at a private high school in Cincinnati. The third was , novelist and poet and critic, one of America’s great men of letters, who became my mentor and friend while I was a student at Yale. Warren helped find a publisher for my first book, a novel. He also wrote me a ticket, by way of a Rhodes scholarship recommendation, for two years at Oxford. If these three men had been biologists, not literati, my life would be different.

The other person whose guiding touch mattered was my Norwegian American father. (But of course it wasn’t just males: my mother was Irish and caustic and funny, and I flatter myself that her genes nurture my sense of the absurd.) What my father did was keep open the path that led into forests, along rivers, up mountains, toward the cold white places and the deep green places distant from libraries. First he taught me to fish. He started me cross-country skiing at a time, around 1959, when the phrase cross-country skiing didn’t even compute, certainly not in Ohio. Then in 1962, the summer after I turned 14, he took me into Quetico Provincial Park, in western Ontario, where we traveled by canoe for a week and lived off smallmouth bass. Two months after that, as a clueless high school freshman, pubescent and confused in a new school among strangers, I met the first of the life-changing Jesuits. 

This dazzling young seminarian, Jerry Lackamp, forced us to write, every week—which for me was like forcing Brer Rabbit into the briars. In biology class, I dissected a fetal pig. In English, I dis­sected stories and sentences, and began seeing how they were put together. In terms of engaging my interest, there was no contest between these two disciplines. So my path for the next decade led through classrooms and literature—most valuably, the novels of William Faulkner, which engrossed me for years—and not through labs or forests. But that path would eventually bend back around, like an elliptical orbit shaped by gravity as well as momentum, to wild places and wild creatures.

Having got a bellyful of ivy at Yale and Oxford, I moved to Montana in 1973. I rediscovered my yen for fishing and cross-­country skiing and biology. I paid dues, working ­menial jobs. Bartender. Waiter. Fishing guide. I established by empirical test (several long manuscripts and many ­rejections) that the world didn’t need me to be a novelist. And then, by luck and wide reading, I stumbled upon a glorious epiphany: nonfiction, too, could be artful. . . . . If you were stubborn and had some skill, it could earn you a living. I became a magazine writer and then an author of nonfiction books. Once you get this license in your wallet, you can take it almost anywhere, including back to your old neighborhood with new eyes.

My re-exploration of the place was, at first, distant and idle—a couple of books, a little online noodling. College Hill, I discovered belatedly, is a distinguished locale in the history of racial struggle in America. A bit of digging revealed that this modest green highland—above the downtown business district of a complacent, conservative midwestern city—had played a crucial role in the saga of the Underground Railroad.

In 1799, a circuit-riding Methodist preacher named Danforth Witherby bought 100 acres of farmland and dug a well in the area, along a path that would eventually become Belmont Avenue. (The Witherby homestead, more than a century later, was the Runck place.) Around the same time, U.S. forces under General “Mad ­Anthony” Wayne cut a dirt road up a ravine to the hilltop, opening their way to prosecute battles against a confederacy of Shawnee and ­Miami Indians. The ravine road would become Hamilton Avenue, connecting hilltop to lowlands, as Cincinnati grew quickly into a busy, dirty entrepôt on the Ohio River. By 1820, a village had been platted on the hilltop and named Pleasant Hill, because the air was cool and the green rolling highland more agreeable than the hog-slaughter pens and riverboat docks downtown. The founding families of Pleasant Hill included some affluent Quakers and radical Presbyterians, abolitionist by conviction and serious enough to take action and assume risk. A modest number of free blacks also settled in the area, some of them inhabiting small cabins in “sequestered places”—a phrase from the sketchy historical sources, which I take to mean woodlands away from the roads. These groups helped escaped slaves travel north to freedom and safety, even after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made that a severely punishable crime.

Eventually, the hilltop got a new name. One son of a wealthy farming family went off to Miami University, in a nearby Ohio town, and returned with a zeal for learning. He founded a boys’ academy in Pleasant Hill that developed into an institution called Farmers’ College. Its mission wasn’t just to teach farming but to educate the sons of farmers for leading positions “in any of the industrial pursuits.” Benjamin Harrison, later the 23rd president of the United States, studied there in the late 1840s, and the school attracted students from all over the region. Growing large and successful, Farmers’ College moved to a new building on what became Belmont Avenue. A separate school for women, the Ohio Female College, began operating not far away. Such educational opportunities were preciously rare at the time, west of the Alleghenies, in what was still considered the wild “northwest” of America. So when the village of Pleasant Hill incorporated in 1866, its proud residents renamed it College Hill. 

Meanwhile, from the 1830s into the 1850s, Cincinnati quietly emerged as a major ­nexus for fugitive slaves crossing the river from Kentucky, from slave state to free. It’s important to remember that a Free State like Ohio didn’t represent safety and security for escapees from slavery. The Ohio River marked the northern boundary of legalized slavery, yes, as an extension westward of the Mason-Dixon Line, but the Fugitive Slave Act applied throughout the north, mandating the forcible return of any escapee captured there. So the movement of fugitives up through Ohio, to Lake Erie or ­Detroit, then across to Canada, all had to happen ­secretly—and Cincinnati was a tunnel through which much of that traffic passed.

A man named Levi Coffin, a Quaker businessman and a leader in Underground Railroad activism, moved to the city in 1847, ostensibly to run a warehouse selling free-labor goods, such as cotton grown in Mississippi by paid freedmen workers, not slaves. Less overtly, Coffin continued his efforts to help runaway slaves escape north. He lived in a different part of town, harboring hundreds of fugitives at his own house as they moved north, and he colluded carefully with the abolitionists of College Hill.

Two factors gave College Hill its tactical importance: all those Quakers and radical Presbyterians, and the fact that it was on the safest route to Detroit. The route followed Hamilton Avenue, a well-traveled pike that had a deep wooded ravine on the east side, offering cover, and then one of its branches took the gentle diagonal of Belmont Avenue, angling toward byways beyond. One family along Hamilton, the abolitionist household of Zebulon Strong, provided stopover support. When a group of fugitives came up the gully, Strong’s children would play back there, leaving food; after dark, Strong would hide the escapees in his wagon, beneath a false bottom, and drive them along Belmont to another safe house. If you type “Belmont Avenue, Cincin­nati” into Google Maps today, then zoom out, you’ll find this little street ambling northwest to connect with U.S. Route 27, which leads straight up to Fort Wayne, Indiana. Next stops from there: Toledo, Detroit, and Ontario. Canada meant true freedom.

In other words, though I had no inkling of it when my family lived on Belmont, nor did my parents or sisters, nor anyone I knew, the Underground Railroad had run right past our front door. Retroactively, it gave me, as you can imagine, a jolt of awe and entirely unearned pride.

Curious about Fox Preserve, I flew back to Cincinnati recently for a little shoe-­leather reconnaissance. First I met with a man named Larry Parker, west region manager for the . From him I got a good map and advice on how to read it. Parker also gave me documents showing that Fox Preserve consisted of just 14.3 acres of forest, donated to the city in 1980 by Edward and Patricia Fox, residents of 5807 McCray Ct. in College Hill, who were giving away their extended, unusable backyard. McCray Court, I saw from the map, was one of the deepest penetrations of that hated 1950s subdivision into the Woods. Fox Preserve was protected as green­ space by the city but not developed to invite visitation—no sign, no trailhead, no ­benches, though it was public. Yes, I could access it. To get in, Parker said, I should just drive to McCray Court and walk between two houses.

It seemed intrusive. This was not far from where my friend and I had moved the survey stakes almost 60 years earlier. So I felt a little vestigial guilt (though no regret) when I went in. As I emerged from my short walk, gaping around for landmarks, a sandy-haired woman appeared from one of the houses and called, “May I help you?” Now I’m in trouble, I thought. But when I explained my mission, she responded brightly. Her name was Peggy St. Clair, a journalist herself, formerly gardening columnist for the Cincinnati Enquirer, and she had written an article about Fox Preserve. Her parents had lived here for decades, next door to Mr. and Mrs. Fox, in the house she now occupied with her husband. St. Clair had loved walking the preserve with her children. It was full of deer, she told me, and harbored coyotes, too. Neither animal was present when Eddie and I patrolled this forest—the deer population must have rebounded from earlier eras of unregulated hunting, and the coyotes were invaders, having expanded their range east of the Mississippi, filling niches left vacant by wolves. St. Clair was attuned to another invasive species: Asian bush honeysuckle, an ornamental plant that had gone ­feral, choking the forest understory in some ­places. She invited me to return, tramp through her side yard, and explore as I wished. I told her I might bring a friend.

The friend was Thane Maynard, director of the , and famous to NPR listeners as the . Before he became a zoo professional and a conservationist, Thane was a nature kid growing up in the woods of central Florida, and I guessed correctly that this mock-epic expedition might amuse him. Early the next morning, we turned up on Peggy St. Clair’s doorstep for a courtesy visit and a bit more information about the green highlands of College Hill. “We breathe a little better here,” she told us. “We experience life differently because of the healing quality of these woods.” Thane and I plunged off her backyard and into the forest, fighting our way downslope through a thicket of honeysuckle. After 15 minutes the stuff thinned, and beneath a cooling canopy of hardwoods, we came to a rocky streambed. “You found your creek,” he said. “It even has a trickle.” Not much, but a start.

Part of Thane’s job on this mission was to identify birds by their songs, a skill I never mastered. (I was a reptiles and insects guy.) Red-shouldered hawk, he reported now, probably a young one, from the sound of that squeak. He listened more: Blue jays, of course. Carolina wrens. And there’s the train whistle of a nuthatch. We both noticed that, although the forest looked verdant and natural, most of the big trees were standing dead, and almost all the live trees were youngish, less than about 50 years old. (Sprouted from seeds since my last visit—take a guess whether that didn’t make me feel like a codger.) In the mud of the creek bottom, there was a single deer track. Around it lay flat shards of limestone embedded with clam shells and other fossils. “Ordovician,” Thane said. “We’re the epicenter of trilobites.” Good: at least the rocks were older than me.

We walked the creek bottom and, as it gathered more water, hopscotched our way on the dry stones. I turned over a few, looking for crawdads and salamanders. No luck. Just one small fish and a few worms. I didn’t bring a water-quality test kit and could only wonder how much unsavory effluent might flow down this ravine from the suburbs above. If the deer had returned and the trees were still growing, but the amphibians and crustaceans had been poisoned out, was this still the Woods of my youth? I knew of Heraclitus and his dictum about time and rivers, but was it true also that you can’t step in the same forest twice?

After 45 minutes, Thane and I came to a stonework culvert, where the creek poured under a road. This was Kirby Avenue, traversing down from College Hill to the lowlands. It marked the end of the first leg of a walk through the Woods but not the final end, because you could climb over it and drop back into the creek. What I hadn’t known in the 1950s was the role Kirby Avenue had played in the annals of American heroism. 

In April 1853, some 28 fugitive slaves came out of Kentucky together, crossed the ­river by night in skiffs that nearly sank from overloading, and made their way after dawn into Cincinnati. From a few tireless local ­researchers, whom I reached through the College Hill Historical Society, and an 1876 book titled , I learned about this signal episode, known as the Escape of the 28. 

The escapees were helped by a friendly white man, who accompanied them from Kentucky, and a black deacon at Cincin­nati’s Zion Baptist Church. From the deacon’s house, they sent a message to Levi Coffin, that daring Quaker, who came and plotted the next moves. Hamilton Avenue was considered too dangerous at this point, notwithstanding the Zebulon Strong stopover, because of a southern sympathizer who also lived along the road. Coffin thought of a subterfuge and an alternate route. “I suggested that someone should go immediately to a certain German livery stable in the city and hire two coaches,” he ­recounted later. Riding in the coaches, and a few buggies driven by free black men, with ­other folks walking alongside, the group should “form a procession as if going to a funeral” and march solemnly out a road leading toward the Methodist Episcopal cemetery, which had one section set apart for “colored people.” Instead of turning in for a burial, the cortege would go past, proceeding gently uphill to a fork in the road, where the right branch climbed steeply to College Hill by the back way. The right fork was Kirby Avenue.

Coffin’s trusted contact and collaborator was Reverend Jonathan Cable, an abo-li­tionist Presbyterian minister who lived on the far end of Belmont, in a house just north of the Witherby farmstead. Cable made ­arrangements to have shoes and traveling clothes ready for the fugitives when they arrived. Along the way, a sick child died and was buried quickly and quietly in College Hill; another escapee joined the group there, though, so they were again 28. During the stopover in College Hill, Reverend Cable hid some of the fugitives in his house, while others stayed with black families along Belmont or in the Woods. Reading this fact about Cable’s role, and realizing his home was only steps from the one where I lived until age two, the Witherby farmstead, a.k.a. the Runck place, I felt another of those edifying jolts: as a toddler, all unaware, I had toddled on historic ground.

“We never know what we have lost, or what we have found,” Robert Penn Warren wrote in his poem cycle about John James Audubon, published in 1969 as Audubon: A Vision. “We are only ourselves, and that promise.” Audubon, an errant Frenchman, an explorer of American wilderness, and a brilliant depicter of nature as he saw it in the sublimity of birds, had always ­fascinated Warren, who’d been a boy naturalist himself in early 20th-century Kentucky, with a passion for taxidermy and red-tailed hawks. But to Warren, the overriding fascination was story, not science, and he turned to literature. He helped turn me to literature, too, without denying the tug of the forest. The benign tension between those two realms exemplifies Warren’s conundrum: never knowing “what we have lost, or what we have found.”

It’s hard to tally the prices of choice and happenstance. Yet part of a reflective life is to try, as Warren well knew. Myself, I lost half a forest. I lost a boyhood home, site of my richest memories, to fire. I surrendered one possible life for the chance to seize another. I lost touch with a place. Then I looked again and found Fox Preserve, and the noble his­tory of Belmont Avenue.

A few hundred yards down the creek, Thane and I came into a maple glade, fully canopied, a lovely area with almost no honey­suckle clogging the understory. The ravine was still steep, and still wooded, though paralleled now by Kirby Avenue, not far away. “Saved by the hills,” said Thane. “You know, if this was flat, people would have developed it.” He was right. All the hillsides were slippery and unstable, with layers of clay and brittle Ordovician limestone beneath shallow soil. That explained why several other parcels of steep wooded property hereabouts had also been donated to Cincinnati by generous but realistic owners over the decades, and pieced together by the Parks Department into a sizable urban forest. Kirby Valley, some people called it.

Now we saw a house, just upslope on the road. We saw a white pit bull running down to investigate us. Uh-oh, we thought. But the dog turned out to be a tail-wagging sweetheart who only wanted to sniff and have her ears scratched. A man shouted down to her, and then shouted to us: Are you the guys from the city? Are you from Sewer? Thane and I were in green shirts, remotely official looking, and I had a notebook. No, I called back, we’re not from Sewer. We’re just a couple of nature nerds on a hike.

The man’s name was Chris Leonard, and he had concerns about stream-bank erosion. Two years ago, a hundred-year flood on this creek carved the bejesus out of his back lot. This spring he lost another three feet behind his driveway. Couldn’t anything be done? Just as I was starting to take Mr. Leonard for one of those control-of-nature guys, he climbed down into the creek with us and started talking about tree frogs.

He rescued them when he could. He had a little backyard swimming pool, covered seasonally so it wouldn’t fill with leaves. Last year the frogs laid eggs in the standing water on the pool cover, and as they grew—as the water evaporated and the tadpoles were in jeopardy—he transferred them into his canoe, still holding rainwater. Why? “I wanna hear the damn tree frog noise.” He had a complaint: “This year there’s not been one damn tree frog.” But, on the bright side, plenty of snakes. When he walked elsewhere in the Woods, if he saw a snake, he would catch it and release it on his own property. Kept the mice down—plus he liked them. He had an albino corn snake, a pet, in the house.

His children lived just a ways down Kirby, with his ex-wife, an amicable arrangement, and Leonard hosted occasional nature outings for them and their friends. His property went deep into the forest off Kirby Avenue, including the section of creek in which we stood and a swath beyond, where he had a campfire area. He held cookouts for the kids, taught them a little natural history, and sometimes they’d see a barred owl or a flock of wild turkeys. Once in a while, they found trilobites. Salamanders? I asked. “They’re here. Salamanders galore.” I was relieved. Deer and coyotes? “A shit ton,” said Leonard. Also pileated woodpeckers, box turtles, scarlet tanagers.

You’re taking a lot of notes for a nature nerd on a hike, he told me. OK, full truth, I said, I’m a nature nerd on a magazine assignment. That sufficed. We introduced ourselves and shook hands, and he lit up with recognition of Thane’s name.

I asked Chris Leonard his line of work. Building communications networks, he said. Whatever that might mean, I was impressed by the communications he was building with the next generation. Seemed to me he was helping give the Woods a future as well as a past.

Thane and I climbed back up the ravine. He had a zoo to run, and I had an appointment at the archives. Following my nose, my memory, and my compass, we missed Peggy St. Clair’s backyard by only about five degrees. We emerged from the Woods through someone else’s side yard, on a different little dead-end circle just adjacent to hers. A man saw us and came to his back door. Now we’re in trouble, I thought. But when I asked forgiveness, he hollered back cheerily, saying, Sure, it’s fine to cut through. These woods belong to everybody.

Editor at Large David Quammen () was şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř's Natural Acts Columnist from 1981 to 1996.  is an şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř contributing artist.

The post Whose Woods These Are appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

It goes by the name Kakadu, a white man’s skrawky approximation of a softer Aboriginal word, Gagudju. History is long, in this place, and one reality is layered atop another. Old meanings rise up through newer surfaces like pentimento in a painted-over painting. The uppermost layer, and arguably the most insubstantial, is the pattern of neat map lines demarcating Kakadu National Park, a political oxymoron reflecting good intentions, contrary purposes, and uneasy compromise arrived at within the past three decades. Those lines encompass 7,600 square miles of territory and more than one pig in a poke. The bottommost layer is a geological basement of granite and gneiss that dates back 2.5 billion years, comprising some of the oldest rock on the planet. In between is a record of ebbing and flowing volcanism, sedimentation, orogeny, erosion, and the awakenings of human imagination and dread.

You can see that awakening given shape in splendiferous rock art. Kakadu is more than a landscape; it’s a gallery of dreams and nightmares. And now recent news from this extraordinary place — news about a mineral lease called Jabiluka — suggests that the nightmares were uncannily prescient.

Slashing out across the Kakadu landscape is a great ribbon of red sandstone cliffs, an escarpment, rising hundreds of feet high and stretching hundreds of miles in a wobbly diagonal, roughly northeast to southwest. This escarpment is the divider between a high, hard eastern shelf, known as the Arnhem Land Plateau, and the seasonally flooded lowlands to the west. Its sheer verticality looms over those lowlands like some awesome wall of religious megaliths left behind by a vanished race of predecessors. Unlike religious megaliths, though, the escarpment offers shelter.

Kakadu is Australia’s Mesopotamia, its Garden of Eden, with the difference being that from this garden Adam and Eve never left. For the past 50,000 years people have lived here, finding habitable caves and niches in the escarpment’s tall shadow, taking food from the wetlands and forests, and (at least for much of that time) painting eerie humanoid figures and decorative animals on the sheltered sandstone walls. Many of those paintings have survived. Executed in red, orange, and yellow ochers and other mineral pigments, they depict some of the great mythic figures of Aboriginal cosmogony, the founding heroes who lived their outsize adventures and appetites during a numinous ancestral prehistory called Garrewakwani, sometimes rendered in English as The Dreaming. There are gracefully spooky images of Almudj, the Rainbow Snake, a preeminent being who delivers freshening rain, fertility, and sometimes punishment; of Algaihgo, Namorrorddo, and other menacing spirits; and of the fey, skinny figures known collectively as Mimi, who dwell among and sometimes inside the rocks themselves. Spookiest of all is Namarrgon, the Lightning Man, bringer of thunderstorms and terror, a skeletal elf encircled by an arc of pure energy. There are fish, kangaroos, long-necked turtles, monitor lizards, and people portrayed in the arresting X-ray style for which Kakadu is famous, their backbones and internal organs showing through carapace, scale, and skin, as though the paintings are a record of ritual dissection. The work left on these walls represents an extraordinary legacy from a lineage of spiritual, imaginative hunter-gatherers. They were people who lived simply and made great art. I suppose that could be taken to mean they were rather less enterprising than philosophic.

Layer has gone atop layer, stratum upon stratum, culture upon landscape, while beneath the sandstone itself lurks something equally stony but more problematic: uranium. Though Kakadu looks sublime on its surface, from its innards it’s radiant with complications.

In the predawn hours of May 19, 1998, those complications came into personified focus with the arrest of a quiet, stubborn Aboriginal woman named Yvonne Margarula. The charge against her was trespass. Along with six other people, she had climbed over a fence using a bamboo ladder. There was some irony to the criminal charge, since Yvonne Margarula is by birth and by law the senior traditional owner of the land upon which she had trespassed. But that land is also subject to the Jabiluka mineral lease, held by Energy Resources of Australia Ltd., for extraction of what’s underneath: one of the world’s largest known deposits of uranium ore. ERA is a uranium-mining company that last year did $128 million in sales to electric utilities in Asia, Europe, and North America. Margarula is a leader of the Mirrar Gundjehmi people — about two dozen adults and a passel of children — whose traditional country lies along the west bank of the East Alligator, near the northeast corner of what is now Kakadu. Country itself is a potent concept for Aboriginal clans anciently resident among the West Alligator, South Alligator, and East Alligator Rivers, and to look after Country is a phrase that comes up when these people are pressed to describe, in English, their complicated sense of stewardship duties. Although her late father signed the lease agreement in 1982, Yvonne Margarula reportedly considers it her responsibility to look after Country by preventing Jabiluka from being dug.

The lease is invalid by reason of coercion, she argues, and her argument is not without basis. You have a white-fella piece of paper signed by a black-fella hand, but the black fella was under duress; he was trapped, conquered, merely acceding to a treaty of surrender. What you don’t have, she says, is free and legitimate consent. I’m paraphrasing now from secondhand reports.

I’m paraphrasing because Margarula declines to make herself quotable. She’s a shy person, reticent in English, even slightly mysterious, who holds a central role in this controversy more by inheritance than by voice. Born in the bush, educated in ancient tradition and survival skills, she worked for most of the past dozen years as a laundry employee at one of Kakadu’s tourist hotels. She doesn’t speak often or elaborately in public, nor to the press, nor to the minions of white Australian governance. She has refused, for the past couple years, to meet with representatives of ERA. Her wisdom and her adamantine convictions are conveyed to the world generally through the protective (and manipulative?) people who surround her. She may indeed be a natural leader as courageous as Mandela, as savvy as Gandhi — but if so, it’s hard to confirm. Maybe, on the other hand, she’s only the Wizard of Oz.

From a comfortable distance — say, across an ocean, with facts and perceptions arriving by the Internet — this looks like a simple story. Kakadu National Park, that spectacular assemblage of wetland ecosystem and ancient rock art, is threatened with defilement by a uranium mine. Australian conservationists are appalled, and a protest camp has blossomed in the forest not far from Jabiluka. The World Heritage Committee of UNESCO, which recognizes Kakadu as a World Heritage Site both for its natural and its cultural richness, has sent a group to investigate. The business-oriented government of Prime Minister John Howard has approved the mine project, as expected, and so have all the requisite agencies. Meanwhile, one Aboriginal woman has said no, it must not happen. Wizard or mahatma, she’s facing steep odds. The courts have denied her appeals. Ground has been broken at the Jabiluka site.

And the broader question, the one that extends beyond Australia to an uncomfortable distance, seems clearly framed: Is there any parcel of landscape on Earth so precious that economic imperatives won’t eventually mandate its ruin? Given the inexorable pressures from an inexorably growing human population, is there any national park that won’t be ripped open, in time, to supply us with cheap energy and jobs? If Kakadu isn’t safe, what place is?

That’s how I’d framed it, anyway, until I stepped off the plane.

“The first thing that surprises people, the general public, is that uranium is natural,” said Greg Hall, a mining manager at ERA’s Kakadu offices. It didn’t surprise me, but I let him continue. “Natural uranium is just part of the evolutionary process. It’s part of the world, part of everything we’ve gone through.” Of course one could also assert that, while natural, uranium is the weirdest and most pernicious thing that humankind didn’t invent. But I had come for a briefing, not a debate.

Hall was a bright and cordial fortyish fellow in a polo shirt. On his grease board he drew me a diagram to explain the geological history of the Alligator Rivers region: how uranium had been released from the deep basement rocks due to pressure and heat, how uranium-bearing fluids had migrated upward along fault structures, how the uranium had finally become concentrated into rocky lodes upon contact with carbonates and schists near the escarpment. That’s why, at more than one point in the area, there exists what Hall called “an economic deposit.” Although Jabiluka is the one around which controversy presently swirls, another deposit known as Koongarra lies untapped nearby. And still another, comprising several ore bodies aggregately labeled Ranger, has been mined since 1980. The Ranger mine, with its own milling and packing operation, occupies an inholding not far south of Jabiluka, beside a waterway known as Magela Creek, and the room where I sat with Greg Hall was part of that Ranger compound. Surely, it occurred to me, Kakadu must be the world’s only national park that’s a major exporter of uranium.

How much of Australia’s electricity comes from nuclear generation? I asked Hall.

“None,” he said.

Australia burns coal, oil, and gas. The uranium oxide produced from Jabiluka will go where the Ranger product goes — abroad, to fuel reactors in the world’s nuclear-electrified countries, of which the most deeply committed are France, Japan, Finland, Sweden, Taiwan, South Korea, Chile, and Belgium. Some uranium from Ranger has also come to electric utilities in the United States. But the mine tailings from Jabiluka, with their remnant radioactivity, will stay at Kakadu.

The Jabiluka lease encompasses 18,000 acres of rolling hills, swales, sandstone outcrops, and forest, of which only about 400 acres will be visibly disturbed. A mine portal will lead toward underground shafts; nearby will be ore-grinding and chemical extraction facilities (including an acid plant), an ore stockpile, support buildings, and pits to hold tailings. Two crucial questions about the tailings remain unresolved. First, how will that 21 million tons of powdery radioactive slag be permanently dealt with after the mine is played out? Will it be left in pits at the surface, and perhaps capped with a layer of clay, water, or rock? Will it be mixed with cement to form a pasty gunk and squirted back into the underground shafts from which it came? Second, how long will the tailings remain dangerous? A standard estimate is 1,000 years, and by the code of practice governing Australian uranium mining (the U.S. and Canadian codes are similar), that’s how long a tailings-containment structure should last. But within the full diversity of expert opinion on the abiding menace of tailings, 1,000 years appears optimistic. On the wary side, estimates range from 200,000 years into the billions. The short-term danger derives from radium, radon gas, and the highly radioactive decay products of radon, which can cause lethal havoc to living tissues exposed at close range. The long-term danger comes from the continual, incremental resupply of short-term danger by slow decay of the isotopes thorium 230 and uranium 234, with their respective half-lives of 76,000 and 245,000 years. Though the milling and extraction process gets 95 percent of the uranium, it leaves behind 85 percent of the radioactivity, largely in the form of other hot elements.

According to ERA’s figures, the Jabiluka mine will yield about 99,000 tons of uranium in the course of its 30-year run, and will leave about 21 million tons of tailings. Although uranium ore is relatively innocuous when left buried as natural rock, it’s far less innocuous when mined and milled. Things happen. Wind carries dust. Tailings pits sometimes leak. Tailings dams sometimes break. Exceptionally soggy monsoon seasons cause pits and dams to overflow into creeks and floodplains.

At the atomic level things happen too. Thorium 230 becomes radium 226. This occurs by spontaneous decay with the emission of one alpha particle and one gamma ray. Radium 226 goes to radon 222, again by shedding an alpha and a gamma. Radon 222, a heavy gas that will flow downhill, goes to polonium 218 when one alpha pops out of the nucleus. The insidious thing about radon gas is that it has a very short half-life, only 3.8 days, meaning that it releases its radioactivity within the scope of a modest number of human breaths; and from there the decay cycle proceeds even faster. Polonium 218 goes to lead 214, lead 214 to bismuth 214, bismuth 214 to polonium 214, and then that goes to lead 210, all within minutes, amid a crackle of alphas and betas and gammas. These latter isotopes are what used to be called, before gender sensitivity reached nuclear physics, “radon daughters.” Nowadays, radon progeny. If you inhale a few wisps of the radon itself, long before you start coughing you’ll have taken a serious hit. Your lungs will be lit up like the swim bladder in an X-ray fish.

My first chance to hear Yvonne Margarula, though I didn’t foresee it then, turned out also to be my last. She was leading a large party of visitors through the forest on the Jabiluka lease site. This was not an act of pointed trespass but merely a “culture walk,” an outing offered by way of thanks and farewell to the hundreds of protestors who had lived for weeks in the camp nearby, serving as foot soldiers in her fight against ERA. That fight — or at least the latest battle — now seemed lost. A blockade of sorts had been attempted, there had been hundreds of arrests, press stories had reached Sydney and Melbourne and even overseas, and the protestors (many of whom were young and adorned with the usual share of lip rings and dreadlocks and tie-dyed shirts, though some middle-aged professionals and elderly matrons were among them too) had achieved, if nothing else, a high sense of purposeful bonding and righteousness. ERA, with help from the local and territorial police, had pushed unrelentingly forward, and work on the mine tunnel had begun back in June. Now it was October, with the wet season imminent. Monsoon rains would turn the dry forest green and sumpy, raise all the rivers, creeks, and billabongs, bring waterfalls crashing down off the plateau, and transform Kakadu below the escarpment into a single great wetland. The protest camp would soon be abandoned to wallabies and mud. Before the campaigners went back to their jobs or their schools or their other diversions and campaigns, they were being granted this audience with Margarula.

She was a small woman, barely five feet tall, with a dark round face, a wide easy smile, and a full corona of black hair just touched with gray. She walked slowly and spoke quietly. People leaned in to hear. Crowd control and courtesies of a more stentorian sort were performed by a handful of functionaries from the Gundjehmi Aboriginal Corporation, the legal entity established several years ago to represent Margarula’s clan. Each of the Gundjehmistas was a light-skinned Aboriginal woman wearing a T-shirt with a stop jabiluka logo on the front and, on the back, a statement attributed to Yvonne Margarula: “We will fight to protect our country, and that is a fact of life.” Margarula herself wore a green-and-white print dress. Reaching a sandstone wall graced with rock paintings, she pointed to one figure done in red and orange. Here’s a Mimi spirit, she said. I scuttled closer with my notebook, hoping to catch a clarion quote.

When I was young, she said, my family came through and camped here during the Wet. March or April. Going to visit my uncle and aunt. We would make beds of paperbark. Long ago. My father used to hunt the crocodile, she said, and brushed her finger at a crocodile image on the wall. We’d eat them, roasted with bark, she said. Again this is all paraphrase. Clarion quotes weren’t her style, and the exact words didn’t hold shape long enough for me to scribble them.

Later we gathered up into a natural amphitheater of sandstone boulders and heard a thank-you speech from one of the functionaries. Your presence here at the blockade camp has been invaluable, this woman said. The campaign has been a hard road, she said, and at times we’ve all felt like roadkill. But your effort has been recognized, and is much appreciated by us. Now have a good look at the landscape around you, she said. Take it all in. This is Mirrar country. Remember it well. Remember it until you’re asked to come back again, with your shovels … to fill in the unfinished tunnel. After the cheers to that died, she added, “By the way, you’re all arrestable,” drawing a burst of laughter. It was a good piece of oratory.

And then the functionary stepped aside for Margarula, whose speech in total was: “I’m happy to see you all. Thank you for coming.”

There are thousands of art sites throughout Kakadu, of which many are still held secret by the Aboriginal clans and kept strictly off-limits to tourists. Among the sites that an outsider may visit, the most impressive are two great sandstone massifs known as Ubirr and Nourlangie Rock. Ubirr is notable for its abundance of work in the X-ray style — lunker barramundi and catfish that seem filleted open, see-through wallabies and turtles, even humans with their internal anatomy laid naked. All the X-ray figures at Ubirr and elsewhere represent relatively modern paintings (that is, done within the last 8,000 years), and many are superimposed upon older images in earlier, less clever styles. The whole X-ray convention seems an uncanny coincidence, if not an act of artistic clairvoyance, in this landscape now known to be radiation-riddled. But even the older images include a few chilling intimations of that prescient, primordial dread I mentioned earlier.

On one wall at Ubirr, for instance, is a gangly stick figure of red ocher in the Mimi style, its stem-thin arms and spine tortured by large nodules. A park service plaque nearby reads: “A HEALTH WARNING. The bones of this person have been swollen by Miyamiya, a sickness you can contract if you disturb the stones of a sacred site downstream near the East Alligator River.” Such sites, the plaque adds, are not only sacred but extremely dangerous if disturbed. And at Nourlangie Rock there’s a riveting visual homage to Namarrgon, Lightning Man, who presides over his own sacrosanct place, a set of three tall cliffs known as Namarrgon Djadjan, or Lightning Dreaming. If you pass by the portrait of Namarrgon in an undercut alcove at Nourlangie, and then follow a trail northeastward until it begins to climb, within a few minutes you’ll come to a low lookout. From there, gazing southeast toward the distant escarpment, you’ll see the pillarlike cliffs of Namarrgon Djadjan. Disturb this abode of Lightning Man, warns another plaque, and dire trouble will result for everyone.

The plaque omits one interesting fact that can only be gleaned from a good map: Directly between your lookout and Namarrgon Djadjan is the Koongarra mineral lease, third of Kakadu’s big three, with its lode of so-far-undisturbed uranium. Lightning Man stands guard.

Having witnessed Margarula’s taciturnity before a crowd of white people, I could imagine her distaste for interviews, and I knew she’d be indisposed to any airy journalistic Q&A about uranium mining or regulatory squabbles. That’s not what I want anyway, I told her functionaries. Let’s don’t even call it an interview, I said, let’s call it a conversation. What I want is to ask a few questions about her family, her upbringing, her connection to the landscape we saw at Jabiluka. She’s unavailable today, they told me. No, not tomorrow either. Each day for a week I heard the same.

Meanwhile I learned what I could from ERA, from other Aboriginal people, from the rock art by gazing at it and the landscape by walking through it, from scuttlebutt over the rail of a local bar, and from the historical record. The historical sources were far too abundant for a mere week’s cramming, but even a hasty browsing gave me a sense of all the conflicts built into Kakadu National Park from the get-go.

The problem at the soul of Kakadu is that it reflects a devil’s deal meant to satisfy three irreconcilable interests. Conservationists had wanted a national park to protect the Alligator Rivers region, with its rich wetlands and its amazing art. Aboriginal people had wanted legal tenure and real control over land that had once been solely theirs. Mining companies had wanted access to what their exploratory research had identified as one of the world’s great Easter-egg gardens of uranium. Each of those three parties had felt entitled (by law, by traditional tenure, by scientific and humanitarian logic), and no one, in the upshot, was denied. This realization — that there had been three spoons in the soup since before Kakadu became Kakadu — was my first signal that, contrary to preconceptions formed from a comfortable distance, the broader question damn well wasn’t clearly framed. The broader question of what it all meant for the world, like the narrow question of whether to dig at Jabiluka, was a rat’s nest of political, scientific, historical, and ethical ambiguity.

The issue of land rights dates back into the mid-19th century, when the European invasion was in its early stage. A German explorer named Ludwig Leichhardt traversed the Alligator Rivers region in 1845, the first white man to do so, and he reported finding the native people numerous and friendly. Soon after him came cattlemen, gold prospectors, and buffalo shooters (the shooters to prey upon Asian water buffalo, which had been introduced and gone abundantly feral on the soggy Alligator Rivers floodplains). The landscape was difficult, but not so difficult that these tough opportunists weren’t beginning to elbow Aboriginal people aside. As early as 1892, the territorial administration designated small patches of land near the West Alligator as Aboriginal reserves — a first attempt at cooping the traditional proprietors into ghettos. The far bigger Arnhem Land Aboriginal Reserve, stretching eastward from the East Alligator, was declared in 1931. A white man named Dr. Cecil Cook, nominally Chief Protector of Aborigines, conferred his “protection” about the same time; a large Arnhem reserve, Cook hoped, would allow Aborigines to keep their distance from the corrosive attractions of white settlements and Christian missions. His concern about cultural corrosion was percipient, but a reserve east of the East Alligator was no consolation to clans — such as the Mirrar — whose homelands lay west of that river.

The idea of a national park arose separately and then, in the push-pull of politics, became connected. Park proposals made in the mid-1960s had died for lack of support. The idea was revived, in the early 70s, by a commission appointed to study something else — the issue of Aboriginal land rights. The chief commissioner, Justice A. E. Woodward from the Northern Territory’s high court, wrote almost offhandedly: “It may be that a scheme of Aboriginal title, combined with National Park status and joint management, would prove acceptable to all interests.” In 1976 a landmark law, the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, granted title for some areas to the traditional Aboriginal owners and established procedures for securing other title claims. Still there was no national park, not until the advice from that one panel of white men converged with the advice from another.

This second panel, formally known as the Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry, was appointed to ponder what by then had become a fierce national controversy — whether or not uranium should be mined in Australia. In particular, should it be mined from the Ranger lease along the East Alligator River? The chief commissioner was Justice Russell Walter Fox, of the federal Supreme Court, and the resulting document became known as the Fox Report. Justice Fox and his colleagues listened to 303 witnesses, including many Aboriginal people, and amassed 13,000 pages of transcript. They emerged from this exercise wary of uranium mining, its long-term impacts, and its ramifications (including nuclear weaponry) but not, finally, opposed. As for the Ranger lease, they suggested a compound arrangement addressing land rights and conservation concerns along with mining.

The Fox Report embodied four salient recommendations: 1) that the Ranger mine be allowed to proceed; 2) that a national park be established in the same region; 3) that land rights be granted to Aboriginal owners, again in the same region, for claims filed under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act; and 4) that other uranium leases in the region (such as Jabiluka and Koongarra) be mined “sequentially at appropriate intervals,” whatever that might mean. Although the Fox Report was an advisory document, not a law, it has carried great force in Australian history.

In 1978, an Aboriginal council leased Kakadu lands to the Director of National Parks and Wildlife for use as a national park. The 100-year lease stipulated several conditions: that local people be trained and employed as park workers, consulted in its management, and allowed to continue living traditionally in its backcountry; and that park interpretative programs promote understanding of Aboriginal culture. The park became law in three geographic stages. Stage One, declared in 1979, was a jagged-shaped parcel encompassing the escarpment, a chunk of lowland forest, a wedge of the East Alligator floodplain, and the artistic riches of Ubirr and Nourlangie. The mineral leases at Ranger, Jabiluka, and Koongarra were explicitly excluded. Stage Two, declared in 1984, added more forest and floodplain in the north, thereby enclosing Ranger and Jabiluka within the park perimeter. Stage Three, in 1987, connected more lowland, escarpment, and plateau along the south. By then, uranium mining and milling were long since under way at Ranger.

This dry thumbnail history omits much political wrangling, among which just one question is crucial here. Under what circumstances of free assent, coercion, or alcoholic despondency did Yvonne Margarula’s father, a Mirrar leader named Toby Gangale, sign the lease granting mineral rights at Jabiluka? “After a process of meeting after meeting — described often as ‘being humbugged’ — traditional owners consented to the Jabiluka mine in June 1982,” according to a Web site release from the Gundjehmi Aboriginal Corporation. Toby Gangale, by this account, was too ill to sit during the final meeting. Disgusted by what he’d seen done to the land at Ranger, discouraged by the false promises about health care and employment for his people, spiraling into his cups, he lost heart. The endless coaxing and argument by white men, who came with corporate and government powers behind them, seemed ineluctable. “His despair at the desecration of his Country and the unrelenting pressure to permit yet more development drove Toby Gangale to drink and he died young in 1989.” So said another release.

That sounded plausible, but was it fair to the man’s memory? These unsigned releases were written in a stiff functionary voice whose veracity I had no way to judge. Had Toby Gangale in truth become a dispirited drunk, not responsible for his actions, or had he made a sober choice? I wanted to hear it from his daughter.

Mick Alderson is a fit 50-year-old man with graying hair and wire-frame glasses. One of the steadiest and most respected Aboriginal figures in Kakadu, he serves on the park’s board of management (as does Yvonne Margarula) and as chairman of the Gagudju Association, a representative body that receives mine royalties from ERA and invests them in commercial enterprises on behalf of the local Aboriginal people. He also holds a job on the park staff. Back in the early years he worked closely with Toby Gangale, and still speaks respectfully of him. Smoking a hand-rolled cigarette on the veranda of the ranger station where I found him, beneath a gentle ceiling fan, Alderson talked judiciously of Aboriginal politics, money management, land rights, the disappearance of Aboriginal languages, the oppressive buildup in humidity and heat just before the breaking rains of the monsoon, and all the other factors that make Kakadu prickly.

What if uranium had never been discovered here? I asked.

“The park wouldn’t have been set up,” he said. Or it might have been set up differently, without the underlying acknowledgment of Aboriginal ownership. “We wouldn’t have had the land back.” There’s no denying that Aboriginal people have benefited from the mining, he said — in health care, material conveniences, various ways. But the chief benefit, to his mind, derived from that peculiar three-way deal over the land itself: “At the moment, we know we own it. By white-fella law.”

Sure, uranium produces some negative impacts, he added. But if you want to gauge really negative impacts, consider the damage done by Christian missionaries. Mick himself had been sent away at the age of 10 to a mission school on an island off the coast, where grim priests stripped students naked and tried to beat the Aboriginality out of them with a sewing-machine belt.

Victor Cooper, another member of the park’s board of management who helped direct a social impact study of the Ranger mine, is a slight man behind a dour frown. He consented reluctantly to speak with me, and chose his words carefully, but from him I heard something similar. Their study suggested that the relationship between ERA and Aboriginal people at Kakadu has not been good, he said. Too many promises, too much disappointment, in terms of substantive long-term benefit. But if you’re concerned about health impacts, never mind uranium and its tailings. Never mind polonium 218. Look instead, as the study did, at the damage done to the Aboriginal community by alcohol.

Elsewhere I heard further variants of the same theme: Don’t demonize uranium while overlooking the other forms of toxin. Consider tourism. Consider booze. Consider religious imperialism. Consider the losses of sovereignty, freedom, privacy, spirituality, remoteness, linguistic diversity, culture. Consider all the ways in which Kakadu National Park has been laid down upon a human-occupied landscape, like one painting superimposed on another.

After nine days, I drove down to Darwin, on the coast. At the Northern Territory Library, a civic cathedral near the waterfront, I found a copy of the Fox Report, its two volumes bound in institutional mustard-yellow paperback and titled Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry. The second volume dated from May 1977, back when the notion of Aboriginal land rights was a fresh promise made against a history of oppression and theft, and when the Jabiluka mine was just a dream in the mind of a smooth-talking young fellow named Tony Grey, whose company later sold its lease to ERA. On page nine, in a section headed “Aboriginal attitude,” I noticed a passage in which the commissioners had let fly some bold but saddening candor.

The evidence put before them, they said, showed that the traditional owners were opposed to uranium mining at Ranger or anywhere else in the region. But those owners seem to feel, the commission observed, that nothing they say or do is likely to matter — that nothing will stop the white man. Justice Fox and his colleagues regretted that all talk of leases, land rights, consultation, and self-determination had been perceived by the local people as sham. This passage was followed, oddly, by one conceding that perception to be correct. “We have given careful attention to all that has been put before us by them or on their behalf. In the end, we form the conclusion that their opposition should not be allowed to prevail.” Too bad about the piteous Aboriginals, but we’ll need to trample them beneath our manifest destiny again.

Five years after the Fox recommendations were accepted as national wisdom, Toby Gangale signed the Jabiluka lease. You tell me whether his act was a free choice.

My other stop in Darwin was at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, which held a certain celebrated piece that I wanted to see. A large painting by a Yindjibarndi-speaking artist named Jody Broun, it had won first prize in the year’s national competition for Aboriginal art. The title was “White Fellas Come to Talk ‘Bout Land.”

An art critic, I suppose, might call Broun’s style naive, in some not-unflattering sense of that word; the sensibility behind the style is anything but, no matter how you define naivete. The painting shows a circle of Aboriginal people seated on the ground and amid them two white men in neckties and hats. All the figures are faceless. Dogs and black-skinned children loll distractedly among the black-skinned adults. The white man at center stands with his hand out, as though making an elaborate, specious point. The people listen patiently but they seem to have heard it before. The ground beneath them is bare, curved at the horizon into a world all itself, and red like Kakadu sandstone.

Back in the park, my remaining few days were spent talking with a naturalist about lizards, with a scientist about uranium tailings, and with a boozy mining official about all manner of relevant local gossip. The mining official, a round-faced Scottish expat with a long history of Kakadu schmoozing and a certain roguish charm, insisted that Toby Gangale was not a defeated drunk when he signed the Jabiluka lease. That phase of Toby’s life, said the Scotsman, came later. Follow the money trail that leads from ERA to the Gundjehmi Aboriginal Corporation, said the Scotsman, and then compare that against Gundjehmi’s righteous posturing. This was bar talk, of course, and made me only more keen to hear Margarula’s side. I called again and still again at the Gundjehmi office, a little tin building with an awning in front and a brusque sign on its back door saying NO ENTRY / NO SMOKING / NO MINE. Again and still again I was told: no Yvonne. So I hiked among the rocks. I revisited the portrait of Lightning Man. I watched white cockatoos flocking nervously at sunset in the gum trees. There were black cockatoos too, but those were rarer, and more calm.

On my last try I found Margarula at the office, lingering there after a consultation. She seemed to recognize, with a glance, that I was the American journalist who’d been asking for her so persistently, and then she withdrew behind a door. Hoorah, I thought, finally. Patience pays off. But after a few minutes I heard the gatekeeper’s voice, offering the same phony regret I’d heard for two weeks. “Bad news, David. Too many meetings.”

Say what?

“Too many meetings this week. Yvonne can’t see you.”

I was startled. I gaped. After all the temporizing, all the runaround, I hadn’t expected quite such a clumsy no. And I couldn’t comprehend what made them so foolish. Didn’t they know I had come here with high sympathy for the Mirrar and low sympathy for multinational merchants of uranium? Didn’t they know that I wanted to hear Yvonne’s plain, heartfelt words so I could balance them against the other side’s slick assurances? Were the functionaries worried that I’d interrogate her rudely? Were they scared that I’d fix on that question of where the Gundjehmi Aboriginal Corporation gets its money? Were they annoyed that I had declined to sign the ridiculous press-relations agreement — promising censorship power and a share of all publishing revenue to the Gundjehmi Corp — that they had foisted on gullible semipro journalists at the protest camp? Had their grapevine alerted them that I was welcoming all voices, including the Scotsman’s? This final turndown was infuriating but, as I realized quickly, in its blatancy it was also intriguing. What’s the real reason, I asked, for keeping me away from Yvonne?

“Beg pardon?” said the gatekeeper. “That’s all I have.”

I was convinced they were hiding something. But was it something that existed, or the negative fact of something that didn’t — namely, Yvonne Margarula as portrayed by the Gundjehmi apparatus? Was she really a forceful, implacable leader arisen from simple origins, as we’d all been told? Or was she an illusion, a political construct shaped and promoted by someone else, upon no basis except her compelling face, her trusting and malleable nature, her loathing for alcohol and its ravages, and her birth status within the Mirrar clan? Was she a noble lie?

Weighted with that ugly suspicion, I left Kakadu. After a few days of mulling and some more bar talk, I still felt confused. There existed a simple alternative to the Wizard-of-Oz explanation, I recognized. Maybe Yvonne Margarula was indeed what she seemed. Given all she’d been through, all she was going through, maybe no courtesies and no excuses were owed. Maybe this Aboriginal woman just didn’t care that I’d crossed an ocean to meet her, nor that I might tell her story to a large American audience. Maybe, from her point of view, I was just another white fella come to talk ’bout land.

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IT’S TWO HOURS AFTER SUNSET on this snow-clogged Romanian mountain, and in the headlight of a stalled snowmobile stand five worried people and two amused dogs. One of the dogs is a husky. Her name, Yukai, translates from a distant Indian language to mean “Northern Lights.” Her pale gray eyes glow coldly, like tiny winter moons. One of the worried people is me. My name translates from Norwegian to mean “cow man” or, less literally, “a cattle jockey who should have stayed in his paddock”—neither of which lends me any aura of masterly attunement to present circumstances. The temperature is falling.

Unlike placid Yukai, we five humans are poorly prepared for a night’s bivouac in the snow, having long since abandoned most of our gear in an ill-advised gambit to lighten our load and move faster. Three of us—myself, the American photographer Gordon Wiltsie, and a German visitor, Uli Geertz, from the conservation group Vier Pfoten (“Four Paws”)—are on backcountry skis with skins, schlepping along steadily behind a biologist named Christoph Promberger and his biologist wife, Barbara Promberger-Fuerpass, who are driving the two snowmobiles.

Christoph is a lanky, 34-year-old German whose raucous black hair and almond-thin, lidded eyes make him appear faintly Mongolian—that is, like a young Mongolian basketball player with a wry smile. Though officially employed by the Munich Wildlife Society, he has worked here in the Carpathian Mountains since 1993, collaborating with a Romanian counterpart named Ovidiu Ionescu, of the Forestry Research and Management Institute, to create a new conservation program called the Carpathian Large Carnivore Project. Barbara, a fair-haired Austrian, joined the project more recently and is now beginning a study of lynx. Both of them are hardy souls with considerable field experience in remote parts of the Yukon (where Christoph did his masters work on the relationship between wolves and ravens, and where later they honeymooned), so they know a thing or three about winter survival, backcountry travel, problem avoidance, snowmobile repair. But tonight’s conditions, reflecting an unusually severe series of January storms and an absence of other human traffic along this road, have caught them by surprise.

Gordon and I are surprised too: that Murphy’s Law, though clearly in force, seems unheard-of in Romania.

At the outset Christoph was towing a cargo sled, but that had to be cast loose and left behind. Even without it, the Skidoos have been foundering in soft six-foot drifts, and much of our energy for the past few hours has gone into pushing these infernal machines, pulling them, kicking them, cursing them, nudging them ever higher toward a peak called Fata lui Ilie, ever deeper into trouble. The sensible decision, after we’d bogged at the first steep pitch and then bogged again and again, would have been to turn back at nightfall and retreat to the valley.

Instead we went on, convincing ourselves recklessly that the going would get easier farther up. Ha. Somewhere ahead, maybe three miles, maybe five, is a cabin. We have one balky headlamp, a bit of food, matches, two pairs of snowshoes as well as the skis, but no tent and, since ditching even our packs back at the last steep switchback, no sleeping bags. The good news is that the forest is full of wolves.

“I believe the term is goat-fucked,” Gordon says suddenly. “A situation that’s so absurdly bad, it becomes sublime.” Gordon’s own situation is more sublime than the rest of ours, since he’s suffering from a gut-curdling intestinal flu as well as the generally shared ailments—cold hands, exhaustion, frustration, hunger, and embarrassment. “We could easily spend the night out here, without sleeping bags,” he adds.

On that point I’m inclined to disagree: We could do it, yes, but it wouldn’t be easy.

CHRISTOPH’S MISSION with the Carpathian Large Carnivore Project is to investigate the biology and population status of Romania’s three major species of predator—the wolf, the brown bear, the European lynx—and to explore measures that might help conserve those populations into the future. His immediate purpose, with this snow-trek toward Fata lui Ilie, is to use the cabin as a base for three or four days of wolf-trapping. The trapped wolves, if any, will be fitted with radio collars for subsequent tracking.

Since 1994, Christoph and his coworkers have collared 13 wolves, at least three of which have been illegally shot. Two have dispersed beyond the study zone, and four others have fallen cryptically silent, probably because their transmitters failed. One of the missing animals is a female named Timis, the first Carpathian wolf Christoph ever touched. Timis, the alpha bitch in her pack, was a savvy survivor, and she opened his eyes to the range of lupine resourcefulness in Romania. Originally trapped and collared in a remote valley near the city of Brasov, Timis and her pack soon relocated themselves closer and began making nocturnal forays into town. On Brasov’s south fringe was a large meadow where they could hunt rabbits, and by skulking along a sewage channel, then crossing a street or two, they could find their way to a garbage dump, rich with such toothsome possibilities as slaughterhouse scraps, feral cats, and rats. In 1996, Timis denned near the area and produced ten pups. With the aid of a remote camera set 50 meters from the den, Christoph spent many hours watching her perform the intimate chores of motherhood. But times change and idylls fade. Timis disappeared, the fate of her pups is unknown, and in the enterprising ferment of post-Communist Romania, the rabbit-filled meadow is now occupied by a Shell station and a McDonald’s.

At the time of our visit, only two wolves are still transmitting, one of which is a male known as Tsiganu, recently collared in another valley not far from Brasov. The wolf population of the Carpathians is sizable, but the animals are difficult to trap—far more difficult than wolves of the Yukon or Minnesota, Christoph figures—probably because their long history of close but troubled relations with humans has left them more wary than North American wolves. Romania is an old country, rich with natural blessings but much wrinkled by conflict and paradox, and history here is a first explanation for everything, including the ecology and behavior of Canis lupus. Go back 2,000 years, before the imperial Romans put their stamp on the place, and you find the Dacia, a fearsome indigenous people who referred to their warriors as Daois, meaning “the young wolves.”

Just after World War II, wolves roamed the forests throughout Romania, even the lowland forests, with a total population of perhaps 5,000. They preyed on roe deer, red deer, and wild boar, but were also much loathed and dreaded for their depredations against livestock, especially sheep. In the 1950s the early Communist government, under a leader named Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, sponsored a campaign of hunting, trapping, poisoning, and killing of pups at their dens to reduce the wolf population and make the countryside safe for Marxist-Leninist lambs. That anti-wolf pogrom worked well in the lowlands, which were more thoroughly devoted to agriculture and heavy industry. On the high slopes of the Carpathians, though, where lovely beech and oak forests were protected by a tradition of conscientious forestry and where dreams and memories of freedom survived among at least a few of the hardy rural people, wolves survived too.

The Carpathians also served as a refuge for brown bear and lynx. The bear population stands presently at about 5,400, a startling multitude of Ursus arctos considering that in all the western United States (excluding Alaska), where we call them grizzlies, there are only about a thousand. The wolf population, at somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000, represents a large fraction of all Canis lupus surviving between the Atlantic Ocean and Russia. Why has Romania, of all places, remained such a haven for large carnivores? The reasons involve accidents of geology, geography, ecology, politics, and the ironic circumstance that a certain Communist potentate, successor to Gheorghiu-Dej, came to fancy himself a great hunter. This of course was the pipsqueak dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who for decades ruled Romania as though he owned it.

Born in the village of Scornicesti and apprenticed to a Bucharest shoemaker at age 11, Nicolae Ceausescu made his way upward as a gofer to early Communist activists during their years of persecution by a fascist regime. He served time in prison, a good place for making criminal and political contacts. He was cunning, he was ambitious and efficacious though never brilliant, he bided his time, sliding into this opening and then that one, eventually gaining ultimate control as general secretary of the Communist Party in 1965. He styled himself the Conducator, a lofty title that paired him with an earlier supreme leader, Marshal Ion Antonescu, the right-wing dictator who had ruled Romania during World War II. Ceausescu distanced himself from certain Soviet policies such as the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and thereby made himself America’s favorite Communist autocrat, at least during the administrations of Nixon, Ford, and Carter. His manner of domestic governance remained merely Stalinism in a Romanian hat, but for a long time the United States didn’t notice.

Ceausescu’s dark little shadow cast itself across Romania for 25 years, with the help of his Securitate apparatus of secret police and informers, which included as many as three million people in a nation of just 23 million. Such institutional menace wasn’t uncommon in the Communist bloc, of course, but it may have weighed more heavily here, due to a certain wary, fatalistic strain in the national spirit. Romania under Ceausescu had a few brave dissenters, but not the same sort of robust underground network of dissidents that existed in the Soviet Union or, say, Czechoslovakia. There’s a nervous old Romanian proverb, counseling caution: Vorbesti de lup si lupul e la usa. Speak of the wolf and he’s at your door.

Ceausescu’s industrial, economic, and social policies were as wrongheaded as they were eccentric. Though he was Stalinist in style, he had that self-important yearning for independence from Moscow, and so he pushed Romania to develop its own capacities in oil refining, mineral smelting, and heavy manufacturing. During the 1970s his industrialization initiative sucked off a huge fraction of the country’s GNP and generated a big burden in foreign loans; then in the 1980s he became obsessed with paying off those loans and made the Romanian populace endure ferocious austerity in order to do it. He exported petroleum products and food while his own people suffered in underheated apartments without enough to eat. He instituted a systematization campaign, as he called it, which essentially meant bulldozing old neighborhoods and villages in order to force their inhabitants into high-rise urban housing projects, where he could better control the flow of vital resources. His systematization created a larger proletariat living amid ugly urban blight, and his industrialization resulted in some horrendous point-source pollution problems, such as the smelter at Zlatna and the gold-reprocessing plant at Baia Mare, which just recently let slip a vast wet fart of toxic sludge from one of its containment ponds into the Danube drainage, poisoning fish downstream for miles. But for some reason Ceausescu did not become obsessed with exporting timber, and so the Carpathian highlands remained wild and sylvan while other parts of the country grew grim.

The Conducator himself lived a life of splendorous self-indulgence and paranoia, like a neurasthenic king. He had food-tasters to protect him from poisoning. He had germ obsessions like Howard Hughes. He trusted only his wife, Elena, who was his full partner in megalomania and his chief adviser on how to govern badly. With her, he sealed himself away in palatial residences, letting the people see him mainly through stagey televised ceremonials. For bolstering his ego and political luster he depended also on occasional mass rallies, for which tens of thousands of citizens were mandatorily mustered to express—or anyway, feign—adulation. The last of those, on December 21, 1989, went badly askew and led to his fall. All the other Communist leaders who got dumped during that dizzy time, from Gorbachev down, were content to go peacefully, but Nicolae Ceausescu required execution.

CEAUSESCU’S SHADOW still lingers in some places, including the snowed-over road that may or may not eventually carry us to Fata lui Ilie. The forest is thick. The spruce trees are large and heavily flocked with snow. While the Skidoos are mired still again, on another steep switchback below a ridgeline, I wonder aloud whether this route was originally cut for hauling timber.

“No, this was a hunting road for Ceausescu,” Christoph tells me. “He’d fly in by helicopter. And his people would come in by four-wheel-drive to organize the hunt.” Among other fatuities, Ceausescu prided himself as a great killer of trophy-size bears. Although his name went into record books and his trophies can still be seen at a museum in the town of Posada, Ceausescu’s actual accomplishments were contemptible: squeezing off kill-shots at animals that had been located, fattened, and baited for his convenience. The sad irony is that, so long as he arrogated the country’s bear-hunting rights largely to himself, the bear population flourished. Records show that it peaked, at about 8,000 animals, in 1989. The end of that year was when the ground shifted for everyone—carnivores, citizens, and the Conducator himself. The people finally revolted, and Ceausescu, losing his nerve, tried to flee but was captured. On Christmas Day, before a firing squad, the great hunter got his.

Farther along, when we pass a spur road to Ceausescu’s helicopter pad, I feel tempted to ski up and inspect it. But by now Christoph and Barbara are far ahead on the snowmobiles, Gordon is with them, and I’m skiing through darkness with only Uli’s dim headlamp as a point of guidance. Ceausescu is dead, the bears are asleep, the new government is led by a center-right coalition of parliamentarians, the Carpathian forests are being privatized to their great peril, the currency is weak, the mafia is getting strong, and all idle contemplation of the pungent contingencies of recent Romanian history is best left, I realize, for a time when I’m not threatened by hypothermia.

THE WOLF KNOWN AS TSIGANU was trapped on December 19, 1999, near a valley called Tsiganesti. The handling, collaring, and release were done by a Romanian wildlife technician named Marius Scurtu, a sturdy young man with an unassuming grin and a missing front tooth. Marius had blossomed into an important member of the Carnivore Project, absorbing well Christoph’s field training in wolf capture and showing great appetite for the hard backcountry legwork. In recognition of his role, he was allowed to christen the new animal. Besides relating the wolf to that particular valley, the name he picked—Tsiganu—means “Gypsy.”

At the time of trapping, Tsiganu weighed 95 pounds. He was notable for the lankiness of his legs and the length of his canine teeth. Since collaring, he has rejoined a small pack of four or five animals, though whether he himself is the alpha male remains uncertain. He now broadcasts his locator beeps on a frequency of 148.6 megahertz, and several times each week either Marius or another project technician goes out with a map, a radio receiver, and a directional antenna to check on him. Tsiganu seldom lets himself be seen, but from his prints and other evidence in the snow, a good tracker can learn what he has been doing. In the past month he has killed at least three roe deer, two dogs, and two sheep.

On a warmish day not long before our misadventure on the trail toward Fata lui Ilie, Gordon and I skied along with a tracker named Peter Surth. We followed him up a tight little canyon into the foothills above a village. It was slow travel, through wet heavy snow along the bank of a small stream, but within less than a mile we came to a kill. The rib cage and hide of a roe deer, partly covered by overnight snowfall, confirmed that Tsiganu and his pack hadn’t gone hungry. Continuing upward, we passed an old log barn from which we could hear the companionable gurgles and neck bells of sheep, safely shut away behind a door. Moments later we met a man in country clothes, presumably the sheep-owner, trudging down a steep slope. Peter spoke a few words with him, then told us the gist of the exchange. Wolves, you want wolves? the man had said. Wolves we’ve got, around here. Lots of them.

We angled up a slope, rising away from the creek bottom. A half-hour of climbing brought us, sweating, onto a ridge. Peter took another listen with the receiver, catching a strong signal that seemed to place Tsiganu within 300 yards. Which direction? Well, probably there, to the northwest. But the tempo of beeps also indicated that the animal was active, not resting, and therefore his position could change fast. We hustled northwest along the ridgeline. When Peter listened again he got a much different bearing, this one suggesting that Tsiganu and his pack were below us, possibly far below, on the opposite slope of the creek valley we’d just left. Or maybe the earlier signal had been deceptive because of echo effects from the terrain. Or maybe this one was the echo.

Such are the ambiguities in tracking an animal that doesn’t want to be found.

NOT FAR FROM where we stood, pondering the whereabouts of Tsiganu, lay a snowbound hamlet of thatch-roofed cottages, conical haystacks, and a few shapely farmhouses with gabled and turreted tin roofs, all hung like a saddle blanket across the steep sides of the ridge. It was called Magura. It seemed a mirage of bucolic tranquility from the late Middle Ages, but it was real.

Gordon and I had been there a few days earlier with another project worker, Andrei Blumer. In bright sunshine and stabbing cold, we had skied up from another valley on the far side, stopping to visit an elderly couple named Gheorghe and Aurica Surdu. The Surdus live in a trim little cottage they built 50 years ago to replace a 500-year-old cottage on the same spot, in which Aurica had been born. Aurica is a pretty woman of seventysome years, with a deeply lined face and a wide, jokey smile. We were greeted effusively by her, Gheorghe, and their middle-aged son, another Gheorghe but nicknamed Mosorel, who himself had boot-kicked up through the snow for a Saturday visit. Passing from deep snowbanks and icy air into a small narrow room with a low ceiling, a bare bulb, and a woodstove upon which simmered a pot of rose-hip tea, we commenced to be steam-cooked with hospitality. Aurica, wearing a head scarf and thick-waled corduroy vest, spoke as little English as Gordon and I did Romanian, but she made herself understood, and her motherly eyes missed nothing. She stood by the stove and fussed cheerily while Andrei traded news with Mosorel, Gordon thawed his lenses, and I waited for my glasses to clear. Have some rose tea, you boys, get warm. Here, have some bread, have some cheese, don’t be so skinny. The tea was deep-simmered and laced with honey. Have some smoked pork. And the sausage too, it’s good, here, I’ll cut you a bigger piece, don’t you like it? You do? Then don’t be shy, eat. We had set off without lunch, so we were pushovers. Mosorel, give them some tsuica, what are you waiting for? Mosorel, grinning broadly, poured us heated shots of his mother’s homemade apple-pear brandy, lightly enhanced with sugar and pepper. Tsuica is more than just the national moonshine; it’s a form of communion, and we communed.

Mosorel’s right hand was swaddled in a large white bandage. It testified to a saw accident several months earlier, Andrei explained, in which Mosorel had sliced off his pinky and broken his fourth finger while cutting up an old chest for usable lumber. Mosorel is a carpenter, sometimes. Sometimes too he’s a tailor; his nickname means, roughly, “Mr. Thread.” Until the saw accident he had also been pulling shifts at a factory down in the nearby town. Like his parents, who still raise pigs, cows, sheep, onions, corn, beets, potatoes, and more than enough apples and pears for tsuica, Mosorel is a versatile man of diverse outputs. The hand injury didn’t seem to dampen his spirit, possibly because some joyous aptitude for survival runs like a dominant gene through the family, homozygous on both sides of his parentage. As the sweet liquor spread its heat in our bellies, the talk turned in that direction—to survival, and how its terms of demand had changed.

During the Communist era, Gheorghe and Aurica Surdu had been required to supply 800 liters of milk each year to the state. Andrei translated this fact, Aurica nodding forcefully: Yes, 800. There were also quotas to be met in lambs, calves, and wool. Since the revolution, things had changed; no longer were Gheorghe and Aurica obliged to deliver up a large share of their farm produce, but market prices were so low that, rather than selling it, they fed their milk to the pigs. So, I asked simplemindedly, is life better or worse since the fall of Ceausescu? The talk rattled forward in Romanian for a few moments until Andrei paused, turned aside, and told me that Mosorel had just said something important.

“At least we’re not scared now,” he had said.

JUST BELOW THE high village of Magura, at the mouth of the small river valley draining from Fata lui Ilie and other peaks, sits a peculiar little town called Zarnesti. Narrow streets, paved with packed snow at this time of year, run between old-style Transylvanian row houses tucked behind tall courtyard walls closed with big wooden gates. Horse-drawn sleighs jingle by, carrying passengers on the occasional Sunday outing. Heavy horse carts with rubber tires haul sacks of corn, piles of fodder, and other freight. Young mothers pull toddlers and grocery bags on metal-frame sleds. There are also a few automobiles—mostly beat-up Romanian Dacias—creeping between the snowbanks, and along the south edge of town rises, with sudden ugliness, a cluster of five-story concrete apartment blocks from the Communist era, like a histogram charting the grim triumph of central planning. Beside the train tracks sits a large pulp mill that eats trees from the surrounding forests, digests them, and extrudes the result as paper and industrial cellulose.

You can walk all afternoon along the winding lanes of Zarnesti, down to the main street, past the Orthodox church, past the pulp mill, looping back through the post-office square, and not see a single neon sign. There are no restaurants and no hotels, none that I’ve managed to spot, anyway. Yet the population is 27,000. People live and work here, but few visit. For years Zarnesti was off-limits to travelers because of another industrial plant in town, the one commonly known as “the bicycle factory.” The bicycle factory was really a munitions factory, built in 1938, when Romania was menaced by bellicose neighbors during the buildup toward World War II. Later, in the Communist era, it thrived and diversified. It produced artillery, mortars, rockets, treads for heavy equipment, boxcars, and—yes, as window dressing—a few Victoria bicycles. For decades it was Zarnesti’s leading industry. But the market for Romanian-made rockets and mortars has been wan since the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact, and the bicycle factory, which once employed 13,000 people, has laid off about 5,000 since 1989. At the pulp mill, likewise, the workforce has shrunk to a fraction of its former size. The town’s economy now resembles a comatose patient on a gurney, ready to be wheeled who knows where. Still, Zarnesti is filled with stalwart people, and a few of those people are energized with new ideas and new hopes.

One new idea is large-carnivore ecotourism. It began in 1995, when Christoph Promberger was contacted by a British conservation group, working through a travel agency, that had heard about the Carpathian Large Carnivore Project and wanted to bring paying visitors to this remote corner of Europe for a chance to see wolves and bears. They came—not actually to Zarnesti, but to another small community nearby—and the money spent on lodging and food, though modest, was significant to the local economy. Two years later Christoph and his colleagues repeated the experiment as an independent venture. They welcomed eight different tour groups totaling some 70 people, who were accommodated in small pensiunes, vacation boardinghouses run by local families. By now the wolf fieldwork had come to focus on the wooded foothills and flats of the Barsa Valley, which stretches 30 miles into the mountains above Zarnesti. Although the likelihood of actually glimpsing a wolf or a brown bear in the wild is always low, even for experienced trackers like Marius and Peter, some nature-loving travelers were quite satisfied to hike or ride horses through Carpathian forests in which a sighting, or a set of tracks, was always possible. Large carnivores, it turned out, were attracting people who wouldn’t come just for the edelweiss and primrose.

One of the pensiunes where the travelers stay is owned by Gigi Popa, a 46-year-old businessman whose trim mustache, balding crown, and gently solicitous manner conceal the soul of a risk-taker and a performer. Give him three shots of tsuica, a guitar, and an audience—he’ll smile shyly, then hold the floor for an evening. Give him a window of economic opportunity—he’ll climb through it. In the 1980s, Gigi worked as a cash-register repairman for a large, inefficient government enterprise charged with servicing machines all over Romania. The machines in question were mediocre at best and destined to be obsoletized by modern electronic versions. Gigi couldn’t divine all the coming upheavals, but he could see clearly enough that mechanical Romanian cash registers were not a wave to ride into the future.

“After the revolution, I change quickly my job and my direction,” Gigi says. He got out of cash-register repair and opened a small grocery and dry-goods store in the back of the house.

He was ready for the next step, not knowing what the next step might be, when Christoph told him about English, Swiss, and German travelers who would be coming to Zarnesti, drawn by the wolves in the mountains but needing lodging in town. Gigi promptly remodeled his home and his identity again. He became a pensiune-keeper, with four guest rooms ready the first summer and another four the following year. He now plays an important partnership role to the Carpathian Large Carnivore Project’s program of tourism. Gigi’s pensiune is where Gordon and I have been sleeping, for instance, when we’re not sublimely geschtuck in the mountains.

One morning I ask Gigi the same question I asked Mosorel: Has the new order made life better or worse? “The good thing of the revolution is everybody can do what he have dreams,” Gigi says. “Because everybody have dreams. And in Ceausescu time you can do no thing for your own. Must be on the same”—he makes a glass-ceiling gesture—”level. Everybody.” Whereas now, he says, a person with initiative, wit, a few good ideas and a willingness to gamble on them can raise himself and his family above the dreary old limit. The bad thing, he says, is that free-market entrepreneurship involves far more personal stress than a government job in cash-register maintenance.

ONE DAY IN THE summer of 1999, Christoph and Barbara noticed a sizable construction job under way in the Barsa Valley, some miles upstream from Zarnesti. The foundation was being laid for a hundred-room hotel.

This was not long after Christoph had begun discussions with the town mayor about a vision of sustainable ecotourism for Zarnesti. The crucial premise of that vision was to let the Barsa Valley remain undeveloped while the infrastructure to support visitors would be built as small-scale operations down in the town. If the valley itself were consumed by suburban sprawl and recreational development, Christoph had explained, then the carnivore habitat would be badly fragmented if not destroyed, and the Large Carnivore Project would be forced to move, taking its ecotourism business with it. But if the Barsa habitat were protected, then the project could remain, channeling visitors to whatever small pensiunes might be available in Zarnesti. Everyone had seemed to agree that this was the sensible approach. Yet now the hotel construction revealed that someone else—an investor from the city of Brasov, 50 miles away—intended to exploit the area on an ambitious scale. And belatedly it was revealed that the town council had approved open-development zoning for the entire valley.

“So this was disaster,” Christoph remembers thinking. “Absolute disaster.”

Christoph himself had to leave the country just then for a short visit back in Germany. He and Andrei Blumer, who joined the project as a specialist in rural development, hastily shaped their best argument for valley protection, so that Andrei could present their case to the mayor.

Zarnesti’s mayor at the time was a man named Gheorghe Lupu, formerly an engineer in the bicycle factory before Romanian bicycles lost their tactical military appeal. Bright and unpretentious, his dark hair beginning to go gray, Mr. Lupu wore a black leather jacket at work, kept his office door open to drop-by callers, and described himself jokingly as a “cowboy mayor.” About the problems of Zarnesti, though, he was serious. Tax revenues yielded only 10 percent of what they did before the revolution, he could tell you; the pulp mill had laid off 2,000 people, the bicycle factory even more; the sewage system and the gas-supply network needed work; the roads too cried out for repair. There was little basis to assume that this harried man would muster much sympathy for protecting wolf habitat—notwithstanding the fact that his own name, Lupu, translates as “wolf.” But would he be able, at least, to grasp the connection between large carnivores, open landscape, and tourism? It was a tense juncture for Christoph, having to absent himself while the whole Barsa Valley stood in jeopardy.

Just before leaving for Germany, he received a terse electronic message on his mobile phone. It was from Andrei, saying: “Lupu stopped everything.” The mayor had moved to reverse the council’s decision. Let the tourists eat and sleep in Zarnesti, he agreed, and pay their visits to the wild landscape as day-trippers. He had embraced the idea of zoning protection for the valley.

BUT TO ANNOUNCE a policy of protection is one thing; real safety against the forces of change is another. Barbara and I get a noisy reminder of that difference, in the upper valley, during an excursion to set traps for her lynx study.

We’re twentysome miles above Zarnesti, where the Barsa road narrows to a single snowmobile trail. Barbara has driven her Skidoo, loaded with custom-made leg-hold traps and other gear, me riding my skis at the end of a tow rope behind. In the fresh snow at trailside we’ve seen multiple sets of lynx prints, as well as varied signs of other animals—deep tracks from several red deer that came wallowing down off a slope, fox tracks, even one set from a restless bear that has interrupted its hibernation for a stroll. Late in the afternoon, just as Barbara finishes camouflaging her last trap, we hear the yowl of another snowmobile ascending the valley. At first I assume that it must be Christoph’s. But as the machine throttles back, I see it’s a large recreational Polaris, driven by a middle-aged stranger in a fur hat, with a woman on the seat behind him. Then I notice that Barbara has stiffened.

She exchanges a few sentences in Romanian with the stranger. He seems rather jovial; Barbara speaks curtly. The man swings his snowmobile around us and goes ripping on up the valley. When he’s beyond earshot, which is instantly, Barbara explains what just transpired.

Claims he’s from Brasov, she says. But he is not Romanian, to judge from his accent. Probably a wealthy Italian with a second home. When he heard what Barbara was doing—setting traps to catch lynx—he thought she meant trapping for pelts, and he acted snooty. When she added that it’s for a radio-tracking study, he graced her with his patronizing and ignorant approval. Oh, you’re doing wildlife research—OK. His ladyfriend, on the other hand, was worried. “She asked if it would be dangerous to continue, with all the lynx in here. Ya, it would,” Barbara says caustically. “Keep out.” The upper valley is closed to joy-riding traffic, and those two have no business being here, Barbara explains. Unlimited motorized access, along with development sprawl and other symptoms of the new liberty and affluence, are now a damn sight more threatening to the lynx population—and the wolves, and the bears—than fur-trapping, judicious timbering, or even the crude, spoliatory hunting once practiced by Nicolae Ceausescu, with all his minions and helicopter pads.

Barbara has never before seen a recreational snowmobile in Zarnesti, let alone up here. “Aaagh,” she says, as the roar of the Polaris fades above us. “It all starts with one. There are so many rich guys in Brasov now.”

THE FOLLOWING DAY, Christoph receives a disturbing piece of news by mobile phone from Marius: Tsiganu has been shot.

The details are still blurry, but it seems that a couple of boar hunters let fly at the wolf for no particular reason except his wolfhood. Probably they were poaching, since no gamekeeper was present, as mandated for a legitimate boar hunt. Tsiganu is wounded, hard to say how badly, but still on his feet at last report. Marius, having heard the shots, came upon the hunters a few moments later. Marius is still out there, Christoph tells me, following a trail of radio beeps and blood spoor through the wet snow. Before long he will either find Tsiganu’s fresh carcass or else run out of daylight without knowing quite what’s what.

A day passes. Still there’s no definite news of Tsiganu. On the morning of the second day, I set out tracking with Marius and two project assistants.

We park the Dacia truck on a roadside above a village and begin hoofing along a farm lane into the foothills. We follow a snow-covered trail on a climbing traverse between meadows, along wooded gullies, beyond the last of the farmhouses and the last of the barking dogs, past two men hauling logs with a pair of oxen. Marius moves briskly. He’s a short, solid fellow with good wind and a long stride. He cares about this animal—both about Canis lupus as a denizen of the Romanian mountains, that is, and about Tsiganu as an individual. But Marius is a home-bred Romanian forestry worker, not a foreign-trained biologist, and his attitude is complexly grounded in local realities.

“Last year the wolf was killing for me two sheep,” he says as we walk. “Because the shepherd was drunk. Was like an invitation to eat.” Some farmers moan about such losses, Marius says, but what do they expect? That the wolf, which has lived as a predator in these mountains for thousands of years, should now transform itself into a vegetarian? As for hunters who would offhandedly kill a wolf for its fur, he can’t comprehend them. “Also I am a hunter,” he says. He shoots ducks, pheasants, wild boar, and in self-defense he wouldn’t hesitate to kill a bear. But a wolf, no, never. It’s much nicer simply to go out with his dogs, hike in the forest, and know that in this place the ancient animals are still present.

Two miles in, we pick up a signal from Tsiganu’s collar. The bearing is south-southwest, toward a steep wooded valley that descends from a castle-shaped rock formation among the peaks above. Farther along, we get another signal on roughly the same line, and now the tempo of beeps indicates that Tsiganu is alive—at least barely alive, because he’s moving. Here we split into two groups, for a better chance of crossing his trail. Marius and I continue the traverse until we find a single set of wolf tracks, then back-follow them up a slope. The tracks are deep, softened in outline by at least one afternoon’s melting, and show no sign of blood. Yesterday? Or earlier, before the shooting? They might be Tsiganu’s or not. If his, is the stride normal? Has his wound already clotted? Or is he lying near death with a slug lodged against his backbone, or in his lung, or in his jaw, while his packmates have gone on without him? Are these in fact his tracks, or some other wolf’s? No way of knowing.

So we hike again toward the radio signal, post-holing our way through knee-deep crust. We round a bend that brings us into the valley below the castle-shaped peak. Here the radio signal gets stronger. We stare upward, scanning for movement. We see none.

Marius disconnects the directional antenna from the receiver. He listens again, using the antenna cable’s nub like a stethoscope, trying to fine-focus the bearing. Again a strong signal. So we’re close now. Maybe 100 meters, Marius says. He tips back his head and offers a loud wolfish howl, a rather good imitation of a pack’s contact call. We listen for response. There’s a distant, dim echo of his voice coming off the mountain, followed by silence. We wait. Nothing. We turn away. I begin to fumble with my binoculars.

Then from up in the beeches comes a new sound. It’s Tsiganu, the gypsy carnivore, howling back.

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