I couldn’t have wished for better conditions: the sun was shining, the breeze was fresh, and the meaty hand on the tiller belonged to Gary Paulsen, among the manliest authors in the world. Who better to cruise the waters off the California coast with than a sailor planning to round Cape Horn alone? Who better to entrust my life to than an outdoorsman with 27,000 miles of dog mushing under his belt, a man who could pilot a plane, resuscitate a heart, navigate through Arctic storms, turn rabbit skins into winter garments, whittle his own bows and arrows, and, crucially—if we were to wreck on a deserted island—make a fire with only a hatchet and a rock?

It was that small ax that sucked me into Paulsen’s orbit in the first place. My young daughter and I had recently read , his famous 1987 novel about a 13-year-old plane-crash survivor, then ripped through its four follow-ups. Likely the most prolific young-adult author of all time, Paulsen has written more than 200 books since the mid-sixties, which together have sold more than ten million copies. Just this month he came out with , the fourth book in a series about a charming teenage prevaricator, which appeared only four months after , about a father and son’s madcap journey to rescue a border collie, which came out just seven months after … you get the picture. Paulsen has published about two books a year for the past decade—mostly lighthearted romps written to pay the bills. But the body of his work, those loners-in-nature sufferfests, have made him a hero to every child in thrall to the literature of survival.

Hatchet starts at 4,000 feet, when the pilot of a small plane succumbs to a fatal heart attack. With fuel running low, the panicked 13-year-old in the copilot’s seat crash-lands on a remote Canadian lake. He struggles to the water’s surface, passes out on shore, and awakens to assess his situation. Materials on hand: just a hatchet. The story of how Brian Robeson endures the next 54 days—how he finds shelter, crafts weapons, kills animals for food and warmth, and learns to make fire—became a bestseller. The novel won a prestigious Newbery Honor Award, for runners-up to the Newbery Medal, and despite the current Y.A. vogue for wizards, vampires, and dystopian futures, it continues to rotate heavily through classrooms.

I’d put Paulsen on a hardcore pedestal long before we met, because I knew that nearly everything Brian does in Hatchet, the author, who is 74, has done in real life. And much more: in just three phone conversations with Paulsen last spring, I learned of his epic runs on Harleys, his bar fights and moose fights, the close calls with frostbite, the storms and starvation, his runaway horses and run-ins with the law. The dude was tough. (And chatty.) Just trying to arrange a face-to-face interview turned into a feat of endurance.

Should we rendezvous at his hideous plastic house in Willow, Alaska? Out of the question: marauding moose. Moreover, the last journalist he invited onto his dogsled ended up with a broken arm, a fist-size cranial hematoma, and temporary amnesia.

Then there was his New Mexico ranch. “We could camp,” I suggested, thinking of Paulsen’s Tucket series, about a boy and his mare alone on the Oregon Trail. “You can show me how to make fire or whittle a spear.”

“I don’t camp anymore,” he said.

“Just a hike then?”

“My knees are shot.”

Paulsen considered. “You know, it’s very muddy and windy in New Mexico now. This kind of wind can peel the paint right off a tank.”

“Huh,” I said. Once, Paulsen was in an Alaskan storm so ferocious, he claimed, that the winds “blew his sled dogs over his head.” On another run, the wind “blew so hard at times it would suck your eyelids away from the eyeball and put snow inside.”

That left his sailboat, a 31-foot cutter named Reunion, which he docked in Southern California at a marina I can’t name (“Too many fans will show up”). Since at least 1997, Paulsen had been talking about his next—or final, depending on his mood—great adventure: sailing single-handed around Cape Horn. Now, all of a sudden, the trip seemed imminent. Paulsen just needed to do a little bit of work on the boat, then he’d run to Hawaii on a shakedown cruise before heading south—big south—in the fall. If I wanted to meet the man, now was my chance.

I hoped there would be enough wind for us to sail.

“I shaved for you,” Paulsen said when we met at his hotel, taking off his billed cap and running his hand around the gray bristles that circumscribe his basketball-size head. He’d also installed on his sailboat a new sleeping bag, a new towel, and a new bucket for me to vomit in. It was hard not to like a guy who showed such consideration.

Paulsen was dressed, as he would be for the next three days, in black Carhartt overalls and a black long-sleeved T-shirt—half hipster, half biker. “Are you hungry?” he asked. My thoughts immediately turned to the exalted morsels of Dogsong (1985), in which Eskimo children tuck into meat that’s “red and had coarse texture and rich yellow fat. All over the children’s faces and in their hair the grease shone and they were happy with it.” Instead we headed toward a seaside restaurant, where the author had a standing order of white rice, veggies, and tofu, hold the veggies. He ordered one of the roughly eight Diet Pepsis he consumes daily.

The meal was surprisingly anemic, but Paulsen compensated with juicy narrative, free-associating from his childhood (“My parents were fucking awful”) to his ailing (and since deceased) mother-in-law (“She hates my guts”) to how animals, over and over again, saved his life. Literally, in the sense that deer fed him when the fridge was empty and sled dogs refused to pull him across thin ice. And metaphorically, when he was in the Army, building warheads that he knew were “gonna just fuck up the block,” and a Weimaraner eased his soul by listening patiently to his doubts.

Unlike dogs, humans have almost always let Paulsen down, starting with his birth in 1939. His father, Oscar: away in the war. His mother, Eunice: a glamorous-looking, round-heeled alcoholic. When a drunk tried to molest four-year-old Gary, she kicked him to death in the alley behind their Chicago apartment. At the age of seven, Gary sailed with Eunice on a Navy troop ship to meet up with Oscar, stationed outside Manila. Crossing the Pacific, the pair watched as a transport plane ditched in the ocean and sharks consumed the women and children swimming for the safety of lifeboats. Paulsen tells these tales, some of which seem beyond fabulous, in his 1993 memoir, which chronicles the first nine years of his life.

Ensconced in a Philippine military compound, Gary escaped his authoritarian, alcoholic father and his philandering mother by tooling around Manila on a bike with the hired houseboy. Once, they crept into a cave filled with cadavers being eaten by rats “as big as small dogs.” On another outing, he visited a prison where American POWs had been burned to death with flamethrowers. Soldiers guarding Paulsen’s compound routinely shot intruders, and the young housemaid, traumatized by the Japanese, routinely sought solace by pulling young Gary into her bed.

Instead of learning to read, Gary played in a downed Mitsubishi Zero and fought in the streets. During a typhoon, he saw a metal roof fly off a building and slice a man in half. His legs continued in one direction, Paulsen remembers, while his head and shoulders pivoted to watch. Other highlights of this period include biting his tongue almost in half, nearly drowning, and watching his houseboy chop the head off a 12-foot snake that had just eaten the neighbor’s pet monkey.

How could so many remarkable things happen to one small boy? I was starting to wonder. But Gary’s adventures were only beginning. In 1949, Oscar Paulsen was restationed in Washington, D.C.—a disaster for the preteen Gary, who had few social skills, couldn’t stand being cooped up, and could barely read. Discharged a couple of years later, Oscar moved the family to Thief River Falls, Minnesota, where they ran a chicken farm. Eunice, trying to counter her son’s slide into juvenile delinquency, frequently shipped him off to rural farms, where kindly Norwegian uncles put him to work: harnessing draft horses, plowing, repairing fences. Gary learned to hunt and trap and, crucially, discovered that the woods were a sanctuary, a place where he was, fundamentally, OK. To avoid his parents, he slept in the woods or in the boiler room of his apartment building. To fill his belly, he hunted with a rifle and a handmade bow and arrow. He lived off of rabbit, grouse, beaver, and deer, which sometimes took him days to drag home, propped on his rattletrap bike.

As a young teen, Paulsen labored for minuscule wages in beet fields and on wheat farms. At 15, he traveled with a carnival. But the wilderness pulled at him. Every cold night on the ground, every missed shot, was a lesson for him. Spending time alone in nature transformed Paulsen, just as it would the characters he’d later invent. Toward the end of Brian’s ordeal in Hatchet, Paulsen writes, “He was not the same now—the Brian that stood and watched the wolves move away and nodded to them was completely changed.”

Paulsen appeals to young people, says Lisa Von Drasek, curator of the children’s literature research collection at the University of Minnesota, “because his characters have to solve their problems using their intelligence, working independently and making alliances. The appeal is less about nature per se than how a child can survive in a world without parents.”

“These are orphan books,” Elizabeth Bird, the New York Public Library’s youth materials collections specialist, says. “They allow no supervision. These books let you live by your wits.” And yes, they’re as much a fantasy as Hogwarts. “But with Harry Potter you know, on some level, that magic doesn’t exist. With Paulsen’s books, you could be that boy surviving in the woods.” Such stories may have new currency, she thinks, at a time when most children don’t go outside. “It’s escapism for kids with helicopter parents.”

I was desperate to get aboard Reunion, Paulsen’s Horn-bound cutter. But the weather wasn’t promising. “It’s blowing 30 knots,” Paulsen said, staring at a supersecret military weather website he pulled up on the hotel computer. “You’ll be puking your guts out.”

“I’ve got Dramamine,” I said.

“With this wind, it would take three days to tack back.”

Who was I to argue? We climbed into Paulsen’s Camry and cruised the coast, poking into a boatyard here, a beach parking lot there. Engine idling, Paulsen looked at the waves, the fluttering flags, a digital forecast that scrolls across a brick building. A hibiscus blossom ripped from a shrub and streaked across the parking lot, and suddenly, a trash-can lid took flight, headed for open water. I dashed to intercept it, and Paulsen asked, derisively, “What did you do that for?”

“Maybe we can find a place to rent a boat and do some inland paddling,” I said, picturing the nearby river that wound, through willows and cattails, down to the sea.

“We’re not gonna do that,” he said.

“Why not? I’ll paddle you.” I was thinking of his knees and his three hernias.

“There are scary people in there,” he said. “Homeless druggies.”

I was confused. First it was the wind, then the moose, then the mud around his New Mexico ranch. Now the homeless. Was Paulsen just being protective of me? Or was he perhaps contemptuous of my interest in outdoor recreation? In Paulsen’s world, nature isn’t a theme park to be enjoyed for its own sake. It’s cruel or indifferent, a source of salvation or a potential killer. But it’s never just “fun.”

I dropped the subject, and this minor emotional storm lifted. “This isn’t the real world,” Paulsen mused as we drove on, inspecting the waves from various angles. He was referring to the bike paths that looped all around, the boats bobbing in the harbor: it was all too easy. The real world is when you “go inside the diamond”—Paulsen-speak for getting slammed for three days in a violent storm at Point Conception, puking those aforementioned guts out, your useless mate tied to the mast. The real world is getting moose stomped on the Iditarod, bleeding into your bunny boots at minus 40 degrees, the wind so strong it could…

“I’ve gotta get some gas,” Paulsen said, pulling into a service station. “You want a Coke or something?” He filled the tank and went inside. When he returned with a brace of Diet Pepsis, he was scowling.

“Fuckers wanted to charge me ten cents for a bag,” he said, dumping his fix in the backseat.

Paulsen didn’t write his breakout novels, Dogsong and Hatchet, until he was in his forties. But their clarity of tone and specificity owed everything to the crucible of his brutal youth. At 17, Paulsen had had enough of mom and dad. He forged his father’s signature and enlisted in the Army. The experience was hateful, but it honed Paulsen’s electrical-engineering skills so that he could, upon discharge in 1962, track satellites in the California and New Mexico deserts for Lockheed and then Bendix. Until the day he suddenly quit, that is, and split for Hollywood—leaving behind his wife of three years and two children, Lynn and Lance—to become a writer. Why? “I just had to,” he told me. “I didn’t know anything about it. I wanted to write.”

Paulsen was 26. He hired on at a company that published girly magazines, but his bosses quickly realized he couldn’t actually write. And so every Friday night, Paulsen bought three editors martinis in exchange for their critiques of assignments he’d given himself: fiction, nonfiction, essays. This same determination and focus would come into play whether Paulsen was learning to live off the land, run dogs, sail single-handed, or motorcycle long distances.

His articles were eventually published, and he wrote for a few TV shows. “But I started liking the life,” he says, “even while I realized it was full of phonies and people jacking each other up.” Within a year he bolted again, heading for northern Minnesota with his second wife, Pam, in tow.

Back in the woods, Paulsen fished and trapped. A neighbor gave him some dogs and a broken-down sled: he learned to run a team, which allowed him to expand his trap lines by 20 miles. While the dogs rested in the snow, he wrote. Two books found publishers. Fancying himself successful, he left Pam and moved to Taos, New Mexico, to be among the artists. But instead of writing, Paulsen—like his parents—drank.

For six years, he picked bar fights, almost always losing. His marriage broke up. Standing in line at the post office, Paulsen met the artist Ruth Wright, whom he’d eventually marry: “I was like Quasimodo; she was a stocky Mary Tyler Moore.” The couple moved back to northern Minnesota, where Paulsen started attending 12-step meetings and writing—a lot. During the 1970s, he produced as many as seven books a year: westerns, mysteries, how-to’s. The couple had a son by then, Jim. Ruth painted and tended four vegetable gardens. “It was a beautiful life,” she remembers. “It was a fun adventure every day.” All the while, Paulsen continued to trap, running ever longer under starry nights in the bitter cold. Inevitably, Alaska beckoned.

In 1983, Paulsen entered his first Iditarod, finishing 41st, and in 1985 tried again but pulled out early due to injury. (He started again in 2006, at the age of 65, but after his sled hit a gate at mile 85, opening a vein, he scratched.) These trips weren’t a total bust, though: on Paulsen’s first Iditarod, he conceived of the novel that would kick-start his career. features 14-year-old Russel Susskit, who travels for months in the Alaskan wilderness with little more than a dog team, a killing lance, and the trance-induced advice of an elderly Inuit. The novel is characterized by rhythmic sentences that loop and repeat à la Hemingway: “The man kept his back to Russel but Russel knew why and didn’t care. He knew that he was the man, knew it and let that knowledge carry him into the man.”

Dogsong won a Newbery Honor and put the author in turnaround. “Movie shitheads started calling,” he says. There were speeches to make. Suddenly, instead of living off of $3,000 a year, the Paulsens had $100,000. After Hatchet came out two years later, winning the second of Paulsen’s three Newbery Honors, the family moved from their remote cabin to a house with a washer and dryer, 15 miles from the small city of Bemidji. “The book changed our lives,” Jim Paulsen, a sculptor in Minnesota with two kids of his own, says today. “We had no running toilets for most of my childhood.”

Hatchet will never approach the stratospheric figures of the Harry Potter or Hunger Games series, which have sold 450 million and 50 million, respectively. (Paulsen has read neither series.) But this slim novel appears annually on the backlist of bestsellers, and it was recently named one of Scholastic Parent and Child magazine’s 100 Greatest Books for Kids.

“Our life didn’t change after Hatchet,” Ruth Paulsen remembers, “just our ability to pay the bills. Gary’s always been the same: nothing has changed him.”

The books and the money kept coming: so, Paulsen says, did a crooked publisher, who he alleges swindled him out of an advance, and then a lawsuit, ultimately dismissed, from a cop in his boyhood town who recognized himself in Paulsen’s (1977). Great sums came in, and great sums went out—to lawyers and stockbrokers, for taxes and real estate. Today, Paulsen lives in relative poverty, he says, and carries some serious debt. “That’s why I keep writing. I do one or two books a year,” he says. “I can’t take time to reflect. I’m pulling a thirty-person train.”

In the morning, we sailed.

“Do you have any sunblock?” Paulsen asked me at the marina. He slathered his Scandinavian skin and shuffled around the boat, hand-folding his legs to climb down into the cabin, stocked with Hormel low-fat chili. He plugged in his electronics, I uncovered the sails, and we motored cautiously out of the harbor, aiming for the Channel Islands.

Paulsen, ever restless, had taken up sailing in the 1990s. He cruised up to Alaska, down to Mexico, and around the South Pacific islands. (During this period, he also motorcycled from New Mexico to Fairbanks, Alaska, and straight back, a road trip of 9,000 miles in less than a month.) Soon, he was dreaming about that voyage around the Horn.

On this day, however, Paulsen and I would stay just a few miles offshore, giving wide berth to an area where humpbacks were recently spotted. “They can turn a boat over,” Paulsen said, warily. I was disappointed to learn that we wouldn’t be sleeping aboard after all: any potential anchorages were dicey, Paulsen said, should the wind come around. The motor stayed on, despite the ten-knot breeze, and the auto-tiller engaged.

Hours passed, dolphins leaped, then my hero briefly shivered. “If I weren’t so tough, I’d be cold,” Paulsen said, laughing. Finally, he decided that it was safe to cut the engine. In the blessed silence, it was my turn to shiver: I was wearing four layers to his two. We watched the pelicans and the ducks. We talked about the recent spate of books about dog intelligence—“The science is all bullshit,” he said—and what Paulsen sees as the public’s misconception of wolves, due mostly to “that drunk” Farley Mowat. “Wolves do kill people, you know.”

The sun passed its zenith. A slave to those Diet Pepsis, Paulsen peed off the bow every 45 minutes. I asked if he ever made up with his parents.

“I was giving a talk in a town where my mother lay dying in the hospital,” he said. “I wouldn’t even visit her.”

And your dad? “That bastard tried to borrow money from me.” No money was lent.

My face must have registered disapproval, for Paulsen ruefully added, “Everyone likes me until I get real.”

Paulsen, it seemed to me, inhabits several different personas, depending on his milieu. He exists angrily in the built environment, which he calls unreal, and more peacefully the farther he gets from people and institutions. And then there’s the alternate world of his fiction, a place where his characters, while confronting their demons, remain nonviolent. Wise and introspective, they don’t curse or beat each other up. They often seek some purity of experience and in the process meld with nature or the object at hand—becoming the doe, the dogsled, the ironworker’s forge.

Paulsen morphs frequently between compassionate authority figure and raging bull. When a football coach invited Paulsen’s son to try out for the team, Paulsen tells me, he threatened to kill him. Football was way too dangerous a sport. Ditto with a high-school Army recruiter, and with an electric-utility clerk who tried to cut the juice for late payment. (It worked: lights on.) As recently as two years ago, Paulsen punched a man who opened his mail. “But he didn’t go down,” he told me.

This is dismaying for Paulsen, a mark of his waning strengths. He mourns not only aging out of fisticuffs and Iditarods, but also the changing social mores. “I’m going extinct,” he said. “I’m not allowed to be anymore: I open doors for women and they get mad. But if someone fucks with you, I’ll fuck them up.”

We tacked toward home. When Paulsen moved shakily afore to lower the mainsail, the boat rolling with the swell, I suddenly realized that he wasn’t wearing a life jacket and that we hadn’t discussed any contingency plans. Where was the life ring? The boat hook? Earlier, Paulsen had said, “When I’m ready to go, I’ll just drop over the side. The sharks can finish me off.”

But surely not any time soon?

“I think I’ve got about a year.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“Accidents, health issues,” he answered vaguely. “I don’t want you to think I’m a hypochondriac.” Hardly. But I was starting to wonder how much of what Paulsen said, and has written, about himself is true. His life story has the whiff of James Frey’s Million Little Pieces or Jerzy Kosinski’s Painted Bird.

“How can I fact check some of the things that happened to you?” I asked point-blank.

“You can’t, really,” he said, unfazed. “Everyone’s dead.”

I understand that Paulsen writes fiction and that young-adult literature has a glorious tradition of exaggeration. Still, I would have been remiss if I didn’t poke around just a little. Later, I learned that planes ditching in the Pacific during wartime were not uncommon, and whitetip sharks were among the first scavengers. Guards at Clark Air Base, where his family was stationed, did indeed shoot intruders.

I checked out the Hollywood restaurant where Paulsen bought all those martinis: it existed. His three mentors? All dead. The girlie mags? Gone. Top-secret military work in the desert? Bendix, now owned by Honeywell, would neither confirm nor deny Paulsen’s gig. He did start the Iditarod three times and finish once. And that journalist who allegedly broke his arm on Paulsen’s dogsled? It’s true, the journalist told me, a bit sheepishly. “And it was entirely my fault.”

I asked Paulsen’s son, wife, literary agent, publicist, and editor, as well as a New Mexico neighbor, if they ever had reason to doubt his childhood stories. “Never,” they said, surprised by the question. “Gary is an unusual person,” Wendy Lamb, his editor, said. “But he’s consistent and true.”

“I spent time with his dad before he died, so I’d heard about the time in the Philippines,” Jim Paulsen told me. “I’ve seen photos my dad took of the sharks.” Do you think he might embellish just a little? “Not really,” Jim said. “He has an uncanny ability to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

I had one last day with Paulsen, and it didn’t look like I was going to eat yellow fat. We drove to the beach for the 47th time—Paulsen, as usual, wasn’t wearing his seatbelt—and looked at the waves. He cursed a couple for crossing the street when he wanted to make a left. “Fucking idiots.” A woman stepped into his path at a restaurant. “Stupid, rude bitch.”

Must Paulsen react so vehemently to everything? What makes him so pugnacious, so misanthropic and foul-mouthed? It’s facile to lay this behavior on his hellacious youth. I developed another theory: without any imminent threat to his life—whether from a “shit for brains” moose or an arctic blast—the stuff of everyday life must suffice. The ordinary must be heightened, for a compulsive writer of adventure fiction, into the dramatic.

In the months that followed, I checked in with Paulsen periodically. Did he train in the winter storms off Point Conception? No. Did he tune his boat and make that run to Hawaii? No. But he churned out another two books, made some public appearances, and, with work issues squared away, he was talking, once again, about setting sail for the Horn this fall.

On our last day in California, Paulsen and I ended up on a commercial whale-watching boat and got lucky with a humpback that glided alongside our hull, rolling slowly over and over. The wind tugged at Paulsen’s hood and billowed the sleeves of his foul-weather jacket. After three hours standing at the rail, I asked if he’d like to go inside. “Sure, if you want to,” he said. We sat on a banquette, facing the bow. It was warm inside the catamaran, and the thrumming of the engines and the slap of the swell against the boat was lulling. Within moments, Paulsen’s big, doughy head tilted forward onto his chest, his eyes relaxing into sleep. It occurred to me that outside, only the briskness of the wind had been holding him up.

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IN THE FALL OF 2009, Taylor Mitchell, a 19-year-old folksinger from To­ron­to, was touring the Maritime Provinces of eastern Canada in support of her critically acclaimed first album, For Your Consideration. With a free afternoon between gigs in Nova Scotia on October 27, she pulled into Cape Breton Highlands National Park and set out along the heavily visited Skyline Trail. The temperature was in the high thirties; birch and maple leaves would have crunched beneath her feet.

Taylor Mitchell

Taylor Mitchell

Glowing eyes of eastern coyote hunting at night.

Less than half a mile ahead of Mitchell, two other hikers were making their way along the boreal trail. When a pair of coyotes came padding toward the men, they paused. Surely the animals would turn tail and disappear into the forest. In fact, no: This pair acted fearless, and came closer and closer to the astonished hikers. When a mere 20 feet separated man from canid, one hiker raised his camera to his eye. The resulting photograph would soon become crucial evidence: Within minutes of the shutter click, the coyotes, who had moved down the trail, intercepted and viciously set upon Mitchell. The singer screamed and may have tried to run, an action that would have exacerbated the attack. Drawn by the commotion, hikers from both directions raced to her side, scared off the coyotes, and dialed 911. But Mitchell was already in critical condition. Airlifted to the hospital with bite marks covering most of her body, she died the following day.

Cape Breton Highlands rolls over 366 square miles of elevated forest and open swale. About 100 eastern coyotes make their living inside the park, though the animals have inhabited it only since the 1980s. The coyote evolved as a hunter of small mammals in the Great Plains, but within the past half-century the species has expanded its range to the entire lower 48 and to every Canadian province. “We’re among the last places to get them,” says Derek Quann, the park’s resource-conservation manager. In Quann’s park, the animals eat hare and small rodents but, working in groups in the deep snows of late winter, have also been known to take down 1,200-pound moose an astonishing feat, considering that western coyotes neither hunt in groups nor prey on anything larger than sheep or calves. Wolves, however, routinely do both, which raises the question: What exactly is an eastern coyote?

MITCHELL’S DEATH only the second fatal coyote attack recorded in North America sent park managers into a scramble. What had provoked such bold behavior? Was the public safe? After the attack, employees closed the Skyline Trail and shot two coyotes. Analysis of the animals’ stomach contents confirmed that these were indeed the antagonists. Necropsies found that the coyotes weren’t rabid or otherwise diseased, and inspection of the attack area indicated that they hadn’t been guarding a kill.

In the past 20 years, reports of human-coyote interactions which run from “I saw one in my neighbor’s field” to “That rangy bastard killed Snowball” have increased exponentially: up fourfold in Texas, for example, and 16 times in California. That’s not surprising: There are more people and more coyotes out there than ever before. Highly adaptable creatures, coyotes make themselves comfortable whether hunting, resting, or observing in farm fields, woodlots, and suburban backyards.

“The coyote is an experimenter,” Quann says. “It will try things, and if it succeeds it will learn that behavior and pass it on.” Unfortunately, many coyotes have learned to link people with food: sometimes garbage, sometimes kibble intended for pets. Though Cape Breton forbids feeding wildlife, visitors do it all the same. In the days following the Mitchell attack, Quann says, “we went to extensive lengths to curtail that learning.” He has since killed four additional animals, including one that, rangers determined, was also involved in the attack. These coyotes, he says, were “possible pack mates of the first two.”

Quann uses the word pack warily, preferring the wonkier “cohesive family social group.” That’s because pack is associated with wolves, and wolves, as we know, can bring out the worst in people. But, yes, Quann says with a reluctant sigh, “it’s pretty well accepted these coyotes are wolf hybrids.”

This is, to some, unsettling news. It’s only within the past three years as monitoring technology has improved and the price of genetic analysis (of scat, hair, and hide from museum specimens) has dropped that scientists have proved definitively that wolves and coyotes have interbred. Now, with the attack on Mitchell, many are left wondering whether the resulting combination of traits, both behavioral and physiological, could be a recipe for future attacks on lone hikers.

The coyote that occurs in the northeastern United States and eastern Canada has been an enigma to scientists since it first appeared about a century ago. Its story began when western coyotes (Canis latrans) migrated into Canada probably through the area around Sarnia, Ontario, where wolves were absent and land had been cleared. A group that headed east through southwestern Ontario soon crossed paths with remnant populations of eastern wolves (Canis lycaon). Out west, gray wolves (Canis lupus) don’t breed with coyotes; they’re a distinct species. But those were hard times for Canis lycaon, and eastern wolves and western coyotes could, and did, inter­breed. The mingling of genes gave the resulting hybrids exceptional behavioral plasticity, allowing them to rapidly expand into territory where the top predators mountain lions and wolves had long been wiped out and to assume, in some places, the wolves’ biological niche.

By 1940 the hybrid coyotes had crossed over the St. Lawrence River into New York State. But these weren’t exactly the trickster coyotes of Native American lore: Eastern coyotes have bigger jaws than their western counterparts, are heavier and less man-shy than wolves, hunt in packs (unlike western coyotes), and commonly take down prey as big as white-tailed deer. By the 1950s they were as far south and east as Cape Cod. Today, tens of thousands of eastern coyotes roam the Northeast, while small numbers of eastern wolves make occasional forays into northern Maine. Meanwhile, western coyotes continue to migrate, via more southerly routes, into the mid-Atlantic states.

Biologists call this mixing and mingling “Canis soup,” a testament to the mutability of a tremendously successful lineage. Says Roland Kays, curator of mammals at the New York State Museum, “The eastern coyote is, in the grand scheme of things, a new character on the landscape.”

AS WORD OF MITCHELL’s death spread, the anti-wolf crowd renewed its calls for trapping campaigns, the right to bear firearms in Canada’s national parks, and a return of bounties on coyote pelts. Some deer hunters, many of whom consider coyotes their competitors, called for culling in the park. (New York and some of the New England states have limited coyote-hunting seasons, while many other states allow coyotes to be killed year-round.) But just how dangerous were these coyotes?

In most places, no one knew. Enter Robin Holevinski, a doctoral candidate at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, in Syracuse. Soft-spoken, with chestnut hair and blue eyes that seem more Disney princess than coyote trapper, Holevinski has been capturing coyotes in Steuben and Otsego counties for two years, collaring them with GPS units and transmitters. “We’re trying to estimate coyote population and figure out how many deer they actually take,” Holevinski says. “We’re also trying to see whether coyote and deer density are related.”

On a sunny day in early December, Holevinski and her undergraduate assistant, Jennifer Kurilovitch, parked their truck on a dirt road alongside a farm outside the town of Worcester. Kurilovitch raised an antenna overhead and slowly rotated, listening for the telltale beeps of M31, a male collared in April. Next, Holevinski attempted to sync her GPS unit to M31’s. But the two computers failed to connect. “He could be behind a rock, in a den, or curled up on that hillside with his paw blocking the collar,” Holevinski said, pointing to a brushy rise.

For the next eight hours, Holevinski calmly drove, stopped, listened, and triangulated four coyotes’ positions, using her compass and the beeps. Now and then she’d shoulder a backpack and dive into the woods, scouring areas that had seen heavy coyote use for den sites, kills, and scat, which she could analyze back in the lab to identify individual animals.

Holevinski routinely comes upon coyote-killed deer, turkey, hare, and woodchucks. But on this day she came up empty. With the sun low in the sky, she tromped around a final hilltop, where bleached fragments of cornstalks tantalizingly resembled deer bones. “This is so frustrating,” she said. Then, to the elusive M31, “Why did you spend 80 minutes in this one place?”

Otsego County, with its farms, scrub brush, and miles of second-growth forest, is textbook habitat for coyotes. And here, as in many other places, their populations are on the rise. “It’s difficult to say why,” Holevin­ski says. “It may be more about prey than habitat, but there’s certainly more of both.” Studies show that abundant supplies of food result in bigger coyote litters. And in response to hunting and trapping, females decrease their age of first breeding another brick in the species’s wall of indomitability.

STILL, IT MAY BE the recent changes in coyote behavior, more than their numbers, that’s causing the most consternation. Between 1960 and 2007, there were 142 reported coyote attacks on people in the U.S. and Canada. (Compare that to 4.5 million domestic dog bites.) The vast majority occurred within the past two decades in heavily populated areas of California: a ten-year-old bitten on the head while sleeping on a porch; a stargazer bitten on his foot; a woman hiker nipped on the buttocks. In the region occupied by eastern coyotes, there have been at least ten attacks in the past several years. Among the victims was an elderly man walking in the woods of central Massachusetts; a woman at a rest-stop McDonald’s in Connecticut; a country-club security guard on Cape Cod who interrupted a coyote foraging for garbage; and a three-year-old playing on his swing set, also on Cape Cod.

Robert M. Timm, a wildlife specialist at the University of California at Hopland, has studied how good coyotes go bad. First, he says, they appear in yards and streets at night, possibly attracted by pet food, compost piles, fruit-bearing plants, and landscaping that harbors rodents and rabbits. Next they start killing unleashed pets and facing off against leashed dogs, then chasing joggers and cyclists. As habituation progresses, coyotes appear in children’s play areas at midday. Finally, they attack adults.

The number of attacks on humans by both western and eastern coyotes will, experts believe, continue to rise. According to Timm, “the pattern seems to be that when canids of various species” whether wolf, coyote, dingo, or wild dog “move into close proximity to humans, or vice versa, and then [people] either ignore them or in some cases intentionally feed them, a few of the canids will become aggressive to the point of attacking.” Eastern coyotes may be more dangerous than their western cousins, Timm says, “simply because of their size and physical capabilities.” (If a coyote does attack, don’t act like prey. Yell and throw things. The point is to reinstill avoidance behavior.)

Both wolves and coyotes learn about people’s routines by sitting and watching them attentively. Nowhere are those routines more regular than on the trails of parks. “You’ve got lots of people walking in a confined area,” Derek Quann says. “Coyotes realize they’re not getting off the path. They may think they can get close because people haven’t scared them away or shot at them.”

Quann investigates coyote “interactions” year-round. “We go to the area to see if the behavior is repeated,” he says. But if the aggression continues, the animal will be killed. “We want the public to understand it’s not to make the guilty party pay but to stop the cycle of learning. If a coyote passes on that knowledge, it’s more dangerous.”

Taylor Mitchell’s death forces us to confront how much wildness we’re willing to tolerate and where to draw the line between natural and unnatural. We like to hear coyotes at night, but we’re horrified when they maul our cats. Whether coyotes “belong” in the East or not is at this point irrelevant. The animals migrated here on their own, and they’re almost impossible to eradicate. Furthermore, they’re an animal we’ve helped to create by opening an ecological niche through the extirpation of wolves and by expanding coyote habitat when we abandon farms to brush and add wildlife corridors in urban areas.

In a statement following Mitchell’s death, the singer’s mother wrote, “We take a calculated risk when spending time in nature’s fold it’s wildlife’s terrain. When the decision had been made to kill the pack of coyotes, I clearly heard Taylor’s voice say: ‘Please don’t. This is their space.’ She wouldn’t have wanted their demise, especially as a result of her own.”

It may be small comfort to Mitchell’s family, but new coyotes will almost certainly move into the old pack’s spot.

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The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan’s astonishing look at where our food comes from, received near-universal acclaim in 2006. But while the book laid out what’s wrong with the average American diet, it left many bewildered about what, and how, we should eat. With his follow-up, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (The Penguin Press, $22), Pollan gives it to us straight: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” You’ll be healthier, happier, and you’ll do more to help the planet.

In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

Buy at Amazon.

Much of the nutritional advice of the past half-century, he argues—eat margarine, not butter; dial back the carbs—has made us fatter and sicker. He fingers the food industry, hell-bent on selling us “enhanced” food products, and slams the reductionist science of nutritionists, who focus on individual nutrients but ignore the benefits of foods considered as a whole. He also blames journalists, who uncritically report the latest, often contradictory nutritional studies, and the government, whose diet guidelines are influenced by political pressure. “As eaters,” Pollan writes, “we find ourselves increasingly in the grip of a Nutritional Industrial Complex.”

Pollan recaps some of Omnivore—the industrialization of food, the phenomenon of the overfed, undernourished American—but his focus is on prescriptions. “Avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable, c) more than five in number, or that include d) high-fructose corn syrup,” he advises. “Eat more like the French. Or the Italians. Or the Japanese.” By letting culture and tradition be your guide, you’ll quit agonizing over nutrients and spend more time in the produce aisle and in your kitchen. “When you cook at home,” he writes, “you seldom find yourself reaching for the ethoxylated diglycerides.” You’ll also take far greater pleasure in eating.

Not everyone will like Pollan’s approach, especially if they’re time-stressed or poor. But spend more on good food, he insists, and your health-care costs will drop. If you can pay for cable TV, why not carrots?

In Defense of Food isn’t as rich a meal as Omnivore—there’s no gagging on the gut pile or gunning for wild boar. It’s more of a multivitamin—scholarly, fearless, and funny—and for that, it goes down easy.

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ON OUR FIRST DAY at camp, I sat in a small screened dining room, poking at the fly larvae wriggling through my fish. Next, a chicken foot appeared in the rice—a choice piece of meat if you like that kind of thing. Later, the screams of our guide would yank us from our rooms: He had been stung by eight wasps, now holding him captive 20 feet up a tower. Clearly, the rough edges of Parque Nacional Noel Kempff Mercado had yet to be smoothed.

Lying along Brazil’s western flank, this 3.8-million-acre, Connecticut-size park sees fewer than 250 people a year. Low visitation means the place feels only marginally more explored today than when Colonel Percy Fawcett, the British naturalist, first explored it nearly 100 years ago. To get here, my companions—a tour operator from Seattle and a writer from Boulder—and I had opted against a 12-hour bus ride and sprung for a two-and-a-half-hour flight from the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz. During this flight, one gazes down—in wonder or horror, depending on one’s cultural references—at hundreds of miles of unbroken rainforest canopy, a view that magnifies the unsettling feeling of having slipped, irretrievably, behind the back of beyond.
Hiking in such an undervisited park appealed to my misanthropic side: There’d be no enthusiasts on the trail asking if I’d spotted the razor-billed curassow. Wandering among some of the richest animal and plant diversity in the hemisphere appealed to my biophilic side. Last December, UNESCO designated the park a World Heritage Site, a seal of approval that puts it—in terms of scientific value—in the same league as the Great Barrier Reef, the Galapagos Islands, and 135 other sites worldwide. South America has 17 such sites, but in none of them, Tim Miller, our American guide who runs Neblina Forest Birding and Natural History Tours in Bolivia, assured us, can visitors see so much wildlife with so little effort. By day, we’d move by plane, boat, and truck; by night, we’d sleep at rustic camps. Backpackers are welcome at Noel Kempff, but their options are limited: The park has only 28 miles of marked trails and only 43 miles of dirt roads. Like most visitors, we planned to day hike from an interior camp, then fly north, go by boat to another camp, and then hike to the park’s feature attraction—the 250-foot-high Arco Iris waterfall.

At camp one, Los Fierros, which consisted of a few screened dorms, a kitchen, and a dining room, we dumped our gear and hopped into a truck bed for a drive through the rainforest. The landscape obliterated any notion of Bolivia as the Tibet of South America. This was unadulterated Amazonian jungle, replete with high heat, high humidity, and high hymenoptera—ants, bees, and wasps that covered our clothing and packs at every static moment. We walked ahead of the truck to examine purple dragonflies of paleolithic proportions and the tracks of a maned wolf, a rare nocturnal creature. It was so hot, a white-tailed hawk was panting.

Several miles to the east loomed the park’s defining physical feature, the imposing Huanchaca Plateau. Like a vast shoebox, it rises 1,800 feet above the surrounding plain. The 93-mile-long escarpment, comprised of steep-sided Precambrian sandstone, was first explored in 1910 by Percy Fawcett, whose accounts inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World in 1912.

Sixty-nine years after Fawcett’s wanderings, the Bolivian government named the region a national park. It was expanded in 1988 and renamed for Noel Kempff Mercado, a Bolivian conservationist who was murdered in 1986 while exploring the Huanchaca Plateau. He had landed on a covert airstrip where Brazilians tended the world’s largest cocaine factory. The coca processors gunned him down on the spot.

Protecting the unique fauna of the plateau and its surrounding forest and grasslands is crucial to the park’s mission. The Brazilian state of Rondonia, notorious for clear-cutting and for slash-and-burn agriculture, flanks the park’s northeastern edge: an 80-mile border with environmental disaster. Brazil’s inability to enforce environmental law has made Noel Kempff—where poaching and logging are fairly well controlled—a last refuge for many species driven to extinction just a mile or two away.

Would we see any of those species? Tim had given us fair warning that the rainy season wasn’t ideal for mammal sightings, yet we’d spot black spider monkeys and a tropical rodent called an agouti in the forest, and giant river otters, pink dolphins, capybaras, and brown capuchin monkeys along the waterways. PastĂłr, our local guide, would claim that a puma streaked in front of our truck, but the group decided he was hallucinating.

Tim tried to refocus my attention on birds, of which the park contains some 600 species. “Stand right here,” he’d say, manhandling me into position and pointing toward far-off snags. “Follow that whitish branch to where it intersects at ninety degrees, go over two feet, and you’ve got a motmot.”

He was right. And so I birded.

WE LEFT LOS FIERROS early the next morning for a 3.5-mile hike. Our goal: El Encanto waterfall. If the dry season lures visitors intent on spotting neotropical mammals, the wet season brings out the waterfall freaks. El Encanto leaped 262 feet off the plateau at the back of a winding, shaded canyon. Layers of billion-year-old red stone loomed overhead, and the wind bore curtains of cool spray. Acting as an enormous catchment, the plateau funnels precipitation into some of the most impressive waterfalls on the continent. These cataracts, in turn, form deep, churning pools—just the thing for a sticky hiker.

Stepping off trail to struggle into my swimsuit brought a scary revelation. Choked with lianas and close-growing palms, the forest was nearly impenetrable. It took me five minutes to move 20 feet into this green hell.
The numbers mattered because my companions, for days, had delighted in telling jungle-survival epics: about the lost adventurer who wandered for three weeks without food until he was rescued, or the hapless soul devoured by swarming insects. By now I was phobic about getting into the Cessna waiting on the nearby runway. I obsessed over the park map; I memorized scant landmarks; I kept strict track of my lighter. In the event of a treetop landing, I asked Tim, how long would it take to carve a runway in the rainforest? “A year,” he said soberly.

From the air we got a good sense of the five distinct ecosystems responsible for Noel Kempff Mercado’s high biodiversity: its savanna wetlands, semideciduous forest, humid evergreen forest, riverine forest, and subtropical thorn scrub.

We touched down on the park’s northern border at Flor de Oro, a scattering of screened dorms and a kitchen. After plates of rice and vegetables, we motored up the ItĂ©nez River. Alex, our man from Boulder, flopped overboard to commune with the pink river dolphins arcing off the bow.

In the morning, Fernando—a blond Brazilian—motored us down the ItĂ©nez, then made a hairpin turn up the Paucerna River. For hours, he whipped the skiff around oxbow turns, burying its gunwales in black water. Through a trick of sunlight and shadow, the water seemed to flow through the tree trunks and over the edge of the world. Going upriver, we counted close to 100 bird species.

AT AHFELD CAMP (one screened lodge and a rough kitchen), we mentally prepared ourselves for the next day’s nine-mile hike to Arco Iris. Tim roused us before dawn. Coffee, instant oatmeal, headlamps. The trail ascended steeply up the plateau, and we hauled ourselves along fixed ropes. When the trail leveled, we stopped to poke at a few sap-sucking insects disguised as styrofoam flecks and pocket lint scuttling over plant stems. Such weird organisms are exactly what one hopes to see in this hothouse of evolution.

After a final scramble, we ledged out opposite the great Arco Iris. Cascading more than 15 stories from behind a Seussian spire of red rock and green hummocks, Iris easily fit the Platonic ideal of tropical waterfalls. It had taken us nearly five hours in a boat and three hours on foot, after four days of travel, to get here.
Was the trip worthwhile? I took measure of this place as I inhaled a sandwich. The waterfall was certainly stunning, but it seemed slightly unreal to me. The problem could have been a matter of scale. Arco Iris was more than a hundred feet across a deep chasm.

So after lunch, our intrepid guide led us over the side of a ledge. We slid down lianas, crashed through spiky bromeliads, and skidded down several hundred feet to the swiftly flowing Paucerna River. We scouted the swirling eddies, dived, and made for the opposite bank.

Stroking slowly upstream, we rounded a turn and clambered up the red boulders that formed Iris’s spill cup. The noise was deafening, the water white. I shouted to Tim, who was grinning like a Cheshire cat a couple of rocks over.

“Have you brought many groups up here?”

“None,” he said. “I didn’t even know the river could be crossed during the rainy season; I didn’t know if we could get up here.”

Sitting inside Arco Iris, the setting was equal parts The Lost World and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Tropical foliage tinted the air, the purest water swirled around our feet. I scanned the towering red amphitheater and wiped cold spray from my face. Treetop Cessna landings no longer concerned me. If for some reason our exit strategy failed, I’d be content to await rescue right here.

Outfitter: Neblina Forest Birding and Natural History Tours: 866-868-4797;
Cost: Four- to 15-day trips cost $1,500 to $6,700 and run year-round. (Price varies depending on number of days and group size.)
When to Go: The wet season (December through May) is best for waterfall viewing; the dry season (June through November) is best for bird- and wildlife-watching.

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THIS FALL, FRODO THE CHIMPANZEE, who has starred in primatologist Jane Goodall’s nature documentaries since he was born in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park 26 years ago, will make his biggest debut yet—on 90-foot IMAX screens across the country in Jane Goodall’s Wild Chimpanzees. But last spring the simian star, known for his violent outbursts, found himself on the other side of the thin strand of DNA that separates human law from instinct.

Frodo hoots in the Gombe forest

One morning last May, the wife of Moshi Sadiqi, a Gombe park attendant, was collecting firewood near the shore of Lake Tanganyika when Frodo appeared from the shadows and ripped her 14-month-old daughter from her back. The 120-pound Frodo slammed the child into a tree over and over. By the time guards arrived, the chimp had disemboweled the toddler and begun to consume her brain.


Resident primatologists were horrified, but they weren’t entirely surprised: Goodall herself had established that chimps can be ill-tempered and cannibalistic. Colobus monkeys, which chimps frequently prey upon, carry their offspring on their backs, as Mrs. Sadiqi had been doing. At first, TANAPA, the Tanzanian parks agency, considered euthanizing Frodo, but after careful contemplation decided instead to monitor his movements and behavior.


“Our hearts go out to the family,” says Fred Thompson, 56, president of the Silver Spring, Maryland—based Jane Goodall Institute. “But this is a natural part of chimpanzee behavior. Frodo’s actions were not inconsistent with those of other alpha males.” Even so, TANAPA is negotiating an undisclosed settlement with the Sadiqi family.


Goodall, for her part, has been alerting the public to chimp violence for years, and in her new film calls Frodo, who once almost broke her neck, a “bully.” Over the decades, she’s let the cameras roll as Frodo struggled his way to alpha male. As a leader, he’s ruthless and violent. He has a taste for fresh meat—which he exchanges for sex—and during one four-year period he single-handedly eliminated 10 percent of Gombe’s colobus monkeys.


Even so, chimp violence didn’t begin with Frodo, something Goodall knows all too well—two attacks on human infants were documented before 1960, and during the 1970s Goodall’s own son was terrorized by a chimp. Despite their peaceful image, with chimps, as with humans, there are always a few rotten bananas in the bunch.

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25. Lance Armstrong

ROAD CYCLIST

Age: 29 Specs: 5-foot-11, 158 pounds

Homes: Plano, Texas; Nice, France

THE CASE: Try to forget the cancer. Forget his best-selling autobiography and his picture on the Wheaties box and his general cultural apotheosis. Even forget that he won a bronze medal in the Olympic time trial not five months after breaking his C7 vertebra on a training ride in a head-on collision with a vehicle—a show of toughness that carried his habitual heroism to the edge of absurdity. Focus instead on Armstrong's moment last July atop Mont Ventoux at the 2000 Tour de France. He's dragging Italian Marco Pantani, one of the sport's most storied climbers, up the final kilometers of a mountain ascent so torturous that organizers include it on the route only once every few years.Then Armstrong, in a stroke of psych-out noblesse-oblige genius, eases up and lets Pantani pass him for the day's victory; he's so sure of his overall lead that he need not trifle with a stage win. Humiliated, Pantani comes unglued and withdraws a few days later, and Armstrong pedals imperiously to his second Tour win. Overlooked in the incident was an astonishing fact: Armstrong's average heart rate during the hardest moments on Ventoux averaged 184. His normal training rate for such grades—188 to 192. “What this means,” says Armstrong's coach, Chris Carmichael, “is that he was well below his lactate threshold.
What that means is he wasn't even winded.

SECOND OPINION: A trio of former Tour winners bowed to Armstrong in a media scrum following his 2000 victory.
*Jan Ullrich (1997) after losing to Armstrong this go-round in one of the fastest time trials in Tour history: “I did not have the measure of Lance. It's hard that he was 25 seconds faster, but he showed again that he rightfully carries the yellow.”

*Eddy Merckx (1969–1972, 1974): “He's not only the best rider, but the most serious. He races all season, not just one month, like so many others.”
*Greg LeMond (1986, 1989, 1990), the only other American champ: “I haven't seen anybody dominate a race like that. Ever.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: October 2, 1996, the day he was diagnosed with testicular cancer.

WHAT'S NEXT: A Tour hat trick.

24. Francine Moreillon

FREESKIER

23. Giovani Soldini

SAILOR

Around-the-world single-handing is not so much a sport as it is “a complete career,” says the 34-year-old Italian. “You need to know a little bit of everything: The designing of the boat, the reading of the weather, the fixing of the generator…”

And let's not forget the throwing of the hammer. In February 1999, midway through the epic Around Alone race, Soldini sailed 200 miles back into the heart of a merciless Southern Ocean storm to rescue competitor Isabelle Autissier, whose yacht had capsized. When he got there, Autissier, sheltering inside her upturned hull, couldn't hear his shouts over the shrieking wind. Soldini reached into his toolbox, pulled out the heaviest thing he could find, and flung it across the water at the Frenchwoman's hull. A few minutes later Autissier opened her escape hatch, tossed out her life raft, and made her way over to his boat.

Such resourcefulness is the product of Soldini's youth, spent working in boatyards and on the foredecks of other people's yachts after dropping out of school in Milan at 16. By his midtwenties he was chafing for his own command. “If you work on a cruising boat, the owner is always wanting to stop, to take a swim or something,” he says. “The boat never goes.” With a tiny budget but a fierce desire to race in the 1994 BOC Challenge (since renamed the Around Alone), Soldini enlisted a dozen patients in a drug-rehab clinic to work for free on the construction of an ultralight sloop. With it, he won two legs of the race, battling the more experienced Australian David Adams right to the wire in the regatta's 50-foot Class II. Four years later, with backing from Fila, he built a 60-foot boat and, after rescuing Autissier, easily won the elite division of the race. He was the first non-Frenchman to do so.

Soldini is known to his peers for his bold tactics—he often sails away from the fleet on speculative “fliers”—as well as his ambitious race schedule, which includes both single-handed and fully crewed events. The latter have not always been kind to him. In early 1998, he and four friends attempted to set a transatlantic record on Fila and capsized in rough seas 400 miles short of the English Channel. Despite a sturdy safety harness, Soldini's codesigner and best friend, Andrea Romanelli, was washed overboard, never to be seen again. “It was terrible, my worst experience ever,” Soldini says. “When you are alone, you have only yourself to worry about. When you are five people sailing, you have to think about much more.”

22. Andrew McLean

SKI MOUNTAINEER

21. Shannon Carroll

STEEPCREEKER

Age: 22 Specs: 5-foot-10, 152 pounds

Home: Nevada City, California

THE CASE: Born buff and brassy, Carroll began paddling at 11, ran her first Class V at 15, and then raised the stakes even higher. Since then she's claimed the women's world-record waterfall descent (a 78-foot prayer off the McKenzie River's Sahalie Falls near Eugene, Oregon), won the women's world championship of surf kayaking, and put her churning aquatic luge maneuvers on display in Twitch 2000, a video of stupefying kayaking footage.But her first love is steepcreeking—running precipitous torrents that plunge as much as 500 feet per mile and are choked with logs and tenacious holes. It's just the type of paddling she grew up on in Thurmond, West Virginia. “I was lucky to get an early start paddling,” she says, “and there are still frontiers to push.”

SECOND OPINION: “Shannon's very aggressive on the water,” says fellow competitor Jamie Simon. “Yet afterwards everyone loves to be around her. The only thing I enjoy more than paddling with her is listening to her sing.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: Getting pinned on West Virginia's Upper Gauley with her bow wedged deep into a colander of rocks for 20 minutes. Just before going under, rescuers pulled her out by the stern.

WHAT'S NEXT: Trying to qualify for the U.S. rodeo kayaking team next season.

20. Bjorn Daehlie

NORDIC SKIER

Age: 33 Specs: 6 feet, 172 pounds
Home: Nannestad, Norway

THE CASE: In the oxygen-deprived nightmare that is nordic skiing, it helps to be a freak of nature. Thanks to an off-the-charts VO2 max of 96, a resting heart rate of 45, anda hypermotivated training ethic, Daehlie has captured 12 Olympic medals—more than any other winter Olympian. Perhaps he's best known, however, for his histrionic come-from-behind finishes. After kicking past Swede Niklas Jonsson in the 50k freestyle in the 1998 Nagano Games, he collapsed at the tape and didn't stand for two hours. Melodramatic showmanship say some, but hey, what do you expect from a guy wearing pastel tights?

SECOND OPINION: “He's the complete package,” says U.S. cross-country ski team member Justin Wadsworth. “He's got the genetic gift, the work ethic, and he can suffer better than anyone he races against.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: Getting outsprinted on his home turf by Italian Silvio Fauner in front of 100,000 stunned spectators while racing the anchor leg of the men's 4x10k relay at the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics.

WHAT'S NEXT: Barring catastrophe, Daehlie will compete in his fourth winter Olympics, in Salt Lake City. Should he win more medals, he may propel his record well out of reach.

19. John Howard

ADVENTURE RACER

18. Karleen Jeffery


FREERIDE SNOWBOARDER

They don't call her Gnarleen for nothing. Karleen Jeffery spent five years hiding out in Chamonix, storming down rules-free steeps with the world's most hell-bent snowboarders, but now she's back. Even while she was away, she managed to sneak in a competition here and there: The 27-year-old Canadian is a two-time World Extreme Champion, a six-time winner of the Mount Baker Banked Slalom, a four-time winner of the Rip Curl World Heli Challenge, and a three-time winner of the Canadian Nationals (twice for half-pipe, once for giant slalom). She's a North American Boardercross champion, a North American Big Air champion, and twice a Swedish Queen of the Hill. And did we mention that she's a redhead?

The 5-foot-2 femme fatale from Kelowna, British Columbia, got her start as a ski racer. Her father was a Canadian national ski team jumper, and her grandfather pioneered a 165-mile ski route from Jasper to Banff. Then one day back in 1990, a couple of guys dared her to learn snowboarding in time for the national championships six weeks later. She did, and she won. She was 16. (“Speed events were always my favorite,” says Jeffery, who now lives in Mammoth Lakes, California.)

Although she used to compete in the half-pipe, the Burton rider has turned her full attention to freeriding, where she outruns avalanches and cracking cornices. “Half-pipe just wasn't that challenging anymore,” she says. After a grueling climb up a peak, she might jump into a chute and carve through it at 50 mph, launch into a big-air inversion over a boulder, and spend the next few thousand feet spinning and slaloming down the face. “My sister can be pretty intimidating,” says older brother Scott, who stuck with skiing. “She rides really hard. She just charges.”

Both in competition and while starring in industry films—her latest is with XX Productions (that's a chromosome reference, dude) —Jeffery walks a fine line between safety and insanity. “It's me versus the mountain, just trying to anticipate what the mountain can do to me and how I can outwit Mother Nature,” she says. “I always have an escape plan if things go awry, some rock I can duck under.” It doesn't always work: Five years ago in the Alps she landed badly on a jump, breaking her pelvis and fracturing a vertebra.

Next year, aside from competing again in April's world extreme championship in Valdez, Jeffery and her fiancĂ©, BASE jumper Dave Barlia, plan to film each other's exploits around the world with her new 16mm camera. So, what does Barlia call her? “Well,” she says, “when I'm in a bad mood he calls me Snarleen.”

17. Göran Kropp

ADVENTURER

16. Louise Hose

GEOLOGIST/CAVER

Four thousand feet below the surface of the earth, in a cold, dank hole that exists on no map, the chances of rescue for a stranded caver are close to zilch. Louise Hose doesn't care. “You take the risks you can handle,” says the 48-year-old karst geologist, who once witnessed a partner die when he got trapped and drowned in an underground stream. “You don't allow yourself to break a femur.” Her matter-of-fact tone leaves little doubt why her colleagues, working alongside her years ago in a Mexican cave, nicknamed her “Macha.”

In 22 years of studying cave-forming rock, Hose has explored more than 230 underground holes, 80 of them virgin passages, and published her findings in periodicals with catchy titles like Chemical Geology: Special Geomicrobiology Issue. “Some go deeper, and some do more dangerous work or more science,” says Dave Luckins, a former president of the National Speleological Society who spent ten years on the NSS's board with her, “but few combine these elements and do it with her level of skill.”

Hose, a former national-level competitive cyclist, ventured into her first cave in 1970 as a freshman at California State University at Los Angeles. “I grew up in Los Angeles surrounded by people, so I really liked the isolation,” she says. To feed her jones for subterranean nooks, she earned a doctorate in geology from Louisiana State University. She's currently digging into the bizarre ecology of Mexico's Cueva de Villa Luz, where a recently discovered microbial colonies live off hydrogen sulfide and fart out sulfuric acid. In addition to stinking to high heaven, the atmosphere is poisonous, so Hose wears a gas mask as she works.

In a field known for its swashbuckling one-upmanship, Hose often arrives first at a site, where she rappels down hundreds of feet of rope with a 70-pound pack and then shimmies through insanely skinny passageways. Her body has been so badly bruised that a doctor once asked her if she was a victim of domestic violence. Nope, she told him, I'm a caver.

15. Laird Hamilton

WATERMAN

14. Doug Swingley

DOGSLED RACER

Age: 47 Specs: 5-foot-11, 160 pounds
Home: Lincoln, Montana

THE CASE: Owner, manager, friend, racer, and trainer of the fastest dogs alive, Swingley wears down opponents by charging from the gun; where most mushers cautiously modulate speed throughout a race with a foot brake, Swingley just lets 'em rip, convincing his dogs that long hills are a treat. The former mink rancher, who still trains his dogs in Montana, didn't start racing until he was 36, but he quickly made up for lost time. In his third Iditarod, in 1995, Swingley posted the first sub-ten-day time, thus becoming the first non-Alaskan to win the grueling 1,100-mile marathon. After finishing second in '96 and '97, he reclaimed the crown in 1999 and smoked the pack again in 2000, breaking his '95 record by nearly two hours.

SECOND OPINION: “Every year Doug's won the Iditarod, he's usually stayed one checkpoint ahead of the other mushers,” says 1989 winner Joe Runyan. “He pushes it a little bit every year.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: Beginning the 1999 Iditarod by breaking two ribs. “We took a 90-degree corner, and as I went down with the sled my chest was driven into a battery pack,” says Swingley. How'd he manage a victory? “A lot of Aleve.”

WHAT'S NEXT: Come this March, he'll aim the dogs straight for Nome, Alaska, the Iditarod's finish line, and a possible fourth victory.

13. Scott Lindgren

EXPEDITION KAYAKER

Age: 28 Specs: 5-foot-11, 155 pounds
Home: Auburn, California

THE CASE: There's a handful of paddlers who can run the big-river first descents that Lindgren relishes, and there's a handful of filmmakers who can capture the shots he does, but no one else can do both time after time and still manage to come back alive. The Rocklin, California, native, who began paddling at 19, has marshaled countless remote river expeditions—Nepal's Thule Bheri and Tibet's upper Karnali, to name a couple—in which he navigates raging gorges studded with Class V-plus drops in a heavily laden kayak, wearing an awkward head camera. His company, Scott Lindgren Productions, is known for making videos (Flood 2: The Last Drop, Thirst) and films that defy belief, even among grizzled whitewater paddlers. “When I discovered kayaking, it was a release I hadn't found in other sports,” says Lindgren. “It was never about being a high-profile athlete; it is strictly about going out and finding the deepest, hardest rivers.”

SECOND OPINION: “There are a lot of good extreme paddlers, but Scott can predict water flows like no one else I know,” says fellow first-descenter Clay Wright. “When you go on an expedition with Scott, you know it will be dialed.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: “Trying to get me to talk about my most harrowing moment,” sniffs Lindgren, “is like trying to take spinach away from Popeye.”

WHAT'S NEXT: A three-week voyage on the White Nile in Uganda and the wrap of Liquid Cubed, a film about his surf kayaking exploits in Indonesia.

12. Anne-Caroline Chausson

MOUNTAIN-BIKE RACER

11. Johan Reinhard

ARCHAEOLOGIST/EXPLORER

Someone once asked Johan Reinhard how many close calls he'd survived. When he finished tallying them, the total came to 34. “I haven't been broken up too badly,” says the 57-year-old Illinois native, “but I've been nearly killed almost every way you can think of.” To thrive as the world's foremost high-altitude archaeologist, it helps to be both lucky and wise. When an avalanche wipes the slope you just exited—that's luck. When a Nepalese tribe of hunters orders you, upon pain of death, to stop shadowing them, and you beat feet—that's wisdom.

For two decades Reinhard, who holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Vienna, has scoured remote Andean mountaintops seeking clues left behind by ancient South American civilizations. His discoveries have blown minds in the science world: In 1995 he recovered the famous 500-year-old Incan “ice maiden,” the most well preserved body from pre-Columbian times. Last year he and his team battled 70-mph winds and snow to unearth three more mummies on the summit of Argentina's 22,000-foot Mount Llullaillaco. “The DNA samples we sent to George Mason University were as intact as a living person's,” says Reinhard.

The archaeologist, who's been climbing mountains since college, has bagged more than 100 South American peaks over 17,000 feet, making him one of the world's most prolific Andean climbers—a record he didn't consciously seek. “What keeps me going up is that [those high mountains] have the world's best-preserved mummies,” he says, “and they're soon going to be destroyed.” Earlier this year Reinhard scrambled up to a burial site on an Argentinean peak to find that thieves had gotten there first. With dynamite. “All we found were remains of blown-up textiles and bones,” he says.

Now funded as a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, Reinhard retreats to his home near Franklin, West Virginia, to sift through his findings when he isn't in the field. “I've had to give up a lot for this life,” he says. “But I've always had the freedom to go out and explore.”

10. Josune Bereziartu

ROCK CLIMBER

9. Børge Ousland

POLAR EXPLORER

Age: 38 Specs: 6-foot-2, 187 pounds

Home: Oslo, Norway

THE CASE: A former deep-sea diver in the icy North Atlantic waters off Norway, Ousland has redefined what it means to be a masochistic loner. In 1994 he became the first man to travel solo, and without assistance or resupply, to the North Pole. A year later he skied solo to the South Pole, and in 1996 he became the first to cross Antarctica alone and unassisted—a trip that took 64 days. While those before him have relied on resupply caches and airdrops, Ousland lugs his provisions behind him on a sledge, trekking across perilously thin ice in whiteout conditions that can reach minus 55 degrees Celsius. He has an almost pathological attention to detail and an uncanny knack for discerning safe ice from sketchy ice. Fine, but how's he stay warm and sane? A diet loaded with olive oil and butter, and a Walkman blaring Jimi Hendrix.

SECOND OPINION: “Ousland is Roald Amundsen incarnate,” says polar sage Will Steger, invoking the turn-of-the-century Norwegian explorer who made the world's first trek to the South Pole. “He is strong, well prepared, cautious, and he understands ice better than anybody.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: On a 1993 ski expedition from Franz Josef Land to Spitsbergen, in the Arctic Ocean, he awoke to shotgunlike sounds—ice cracking—and found himself and his teammate bobbing on a raft of ice. The men spent two days adrift at sea, their ice-island eroding at the edges, before rescuers plucked them to safety.

WHAT'S NEXT: In January Ousland will attempt what's considered the last great feat in polar exploration: the first unsupported traverse of the Arctic, from Russia to Canada via the North Pole.

8. Eric Jackson

WHITEWATER PADDLER

7. Tomaz Humar

´ˇł˘±Ę±ő±·±őł§°Ő


Age: 31 Specs: 5-foot-10, 157 pounds
Home: Kamnik, Slovenia

THE CASE: To get a sense of the audacity of Tomaz Humar's November 1999 solo ascent of the 4,000-foot wall of ice and rotten rock on the south face of Nepal's Dhaulagiri, consider this: Upon returning home, he found that climbing's greatest living legend, Reinhold Messner, had flown in and was waiting to congratulate him. An epic in 1997 on the west face of Nuptse, Everest's 25,921-foot neighbor, and a 1996 first ascent of the northwest face of Nepal's Ama Dablam also rank as two of the boldest climbs of the 1990s. A fiercely self-reliant mountaineer who typically goes solo, Humar prides himself on his mental strength: “When I start a climb, I become some kind of animal,” he says. “I turn off everything—hunger, pain, freezing—in order to survive.”

SECOND OPINION: “Humar is willing to take on dangerous climbs with the understanding that if he moves fast enough, he'll get through without getting killed,” says Christian Beckwith, editor of the American Alpine Journal.

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: “Saying good-bye to my children before each expedition.”

WHAT'S NEXT: “I'm cooking it in my head right now,” he says. “When it is the right time, the mountain will tell me so.”

6. Lori Bowden

TRIATHLETE

Age: 33 Specs: 5-foot-6, 115 pounds

Home: Victoria, British Columbia

THE CASE: When the Canadian swapped her bike for her running shoes to start the final leg of her Hawaii Ironman professional debut in 1996, she was in 30th place. “When I finished eighth,” she says, “I knew I'd eventually have a shot at winning it.” Indeed. Owing to her running prowess, these days Bowden routinely gobbles up seemingly unbeatable competitors' leads. Take her first Hawaii Ironman win, in 1999: Entering the run three minutes down, Bowden recorded the event's first sub-three-hour marathon by a woman, winning by seven minutes. In 2000 she sealed her arrival with two major triathlon victories, in Australia and Canada. Now just imagine how good she'll be when she improves her shabby swimming ability. (In her Hawaii win she finished the swim in an abysmal 89th place.)

SECOND OPINION: Karen Smyers, who finished second in Hawaii in 1999, says: “The biggest thing she's got going for her is that she really has no idea how good she is.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: Nearly drowning in the pounding surf during the swim leg at a sprint triathlon in Chile last January.

WHAT'S NEXT: Erasing the 4 minutes and 45 seconds standing between her Ironman best and Paula Newby-Fraser's world-record time (8:50:23), set in 1994.

5. Kevin Pritchard

WINDSURFER

4. Layne Beachley

SURFER

Age: 28 Specs: 5-foot-5, 121 pounds
Home: Dee Why Beach, Australia

THE CASE: Already considered the planet's premier female big-wave rider, this powerful, exuberant Australian is also the first woman to get into the high-testosterone sport of tow-in surfing. But her performance in contest surfing is another story. For years Beachley battled chronic fatigue syndrome, depression, and Lisa Andersen—the fluid Floridian surfer who piled up four straight world titles. In 1998, thanks in part to the support of mentor-boyfriend Ken Bradshaw, a 48-year-old big-wave legend from Sunset Beach on the North Shore of Oahu, Beachley located the “competitive beast” within, and has won two world titles since. With one contest remaining on this year's circuit, she's all but assured of a third.

SECOND OPINION: “She rides waves that most guys would want to be nowhere near,” says Bill Sharp, publisher of California's SurfNews. “Things that are 18 to 20 feet on the Hawaiian scale, which means a 35- to 40-foot face.

“MOST HARROWING MOMENT: Last winter, filming for the Australian edition of 60 Minutes, Beachley got Bradshaw to tow her into Backyards, a giant, unruly break offshore of Sunset Beach. “I was way too deep when I let go of the rope,” she says. “An entire section of the wave closed out—18 feet of white water—and before Ken could get to me, three more waves broke on top of me. I was just sitting there underwater, singing to myself.” The refrain? “Rag doll, rag doll.”

WHAT'S NEXT: Getting towed into Jaws, the steep, hollow monster wave off Maui pioneered by Laird Hamilton and Buzzy Kerbox.

3. Jeremy Jones

BIG-MOUNTAIN SNOWBOARDER

Age: 25 Specs: 5-foot-7, 145 pounds

Home: Truckee, California

THE CASE: Jones rips the seemingly convex pitches of Alaska's intimidating Chugach Mountains, pointing his board straight down the fall line of slopes where you drop 20 feet with each turn. He rails open faces at 60 mph and then shoots off 50-foot cliffs. Apparently fearless, Jones first earned his reputation as snowboarding's primo big-mountain freerider from stunts in the 1997 snowboard flickTB6, but he's equally famous for riding the Chugach's fluted spines—steep, wind-carved ribs of snow that protrude from the guts of the mountain. On such terrain, you don't outrun your slough, you ride in it, cascading down waterfalls of snow. In the premiere this fall of the ski film Further, Jones's gonzo descent cemented his status as a snowboarder of Homeric proportions. In the words of innumerable viewers, Jones isn't just the best, “He's sick.”

SECOND OPINION: “Jones attacks terrain,” says veteran snowboarder and writer Jeff Galbraith. “He does lines you don't see anyone else do, without straining.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: Walking from helicopter landing zones along knife-edge ridgelines, where his soft-soled boots offer little grip and the board he's holding easily catches homicidal wind gusts.

WHAT'S NEXT: A helicopter tour deeper into Alaska's imposing ranges with his two filmmaker brothers, of Teton Gravity Research, who'll capture Jeremy's first descents using long lenses from distant (read: safe) vantages.

2. Tommy Caldwell

ROCK CLIMBER

The Immovable Object Meets the Unstoppable Force

Step by step, year after year, summit after summit, never altering, Ed Viesturs has planted his flag across the top of the world. And everybody loves him. What's the deal with this guy?

The Immovable Object Meets the Unstoppable Force

Step by step, year after year, summit after summit, never altering, Ed Viesturs has planted his flag across the top of the world. And everybody loves him. What's the deal with this guy?

The Immovable Object Meets the Unstoppable Force

Step by step, year after year, summit after summit, never altering, Ed Viesturs has planted his flag across the top of the world. And everybody loves him. What's the deal with this guy?

The Immovable Object Meets the Unstoppable Force

Step by step, year after year, summit after summit, never altering, Ed Viesturs has planted his flag across the top of the world. And everybody loves him. What's the deal with this guy?

“Lots of Fun”: The Viesturs ResumĂ©

“Only when guiding,” says Ed Viesturs of his philosophy on using supplemental oxygen, “but never when attempting to climb a mountain for the first time.” A testament to titanic lung capacity, Viesturs has etched a record on 8,000-meter peaks surpassed by no other American. Here are the highlights, along with Grateful Ed's vivid recollections:

The post Superheroes appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

Yep, We Got Cable

A proposed tramway threatens to transform Machu Picchu into yet another mass-market tourist stop

Last Leap

A protestor becomes the latest casualty in the war over BASE jumping in Yosemite

Talk Dirty to Me

Alison Dunlap’s mud-splattered affair with the sport of cyclocross

Leaving a Trace

Paul Petzoldt, wilderness giant, left behind an indelible legacy

The Incredible Edible…Mess Kit?

News from the frontier of nutritious biodegradable gear

Sorta Like Stonehenge–With Pumpy Crux Moves

A Salt Lake City rock climber crusades for America’s first urban bouldering park

The post Hawaii Gung-Ho appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

“Most people think I'm an idiot.”

That's Ray Waterman, giant pumpkin impresario, talking to the media from ground zero in Collins, New York, just south of Buffalo. While it's true that °Â˛ąłŮ±đ°ůłľ˛ą˛Ô’s entire life revolves around what he calls the “sport hobby”Ěýof growing record-breaking specimens of Cucurbita maxima, he isn’t exactly an idiot. °Â˛ąłŮ±đ°ůłľ˛ą˛Ô’s a wily operator, and tomorrow, October 5, 1996, is his ’s yearly weigh-off. He's got CNN on the line and USA Today on hold while the Today people book the live feed. Tomorrow, Waterman hopes to present a $50,000 check to the grower who produces a pumpkin that hits or surpasses the mythic 1,000-pound mark. It’s a grail that pumpkin green thumbs have been talking and dreaming about for over a decade, a grail that now actually seems within reach. (Two years ago, in fact, of Brockville, Ontario, stunned the pumpkin establishment with a leviathan that weighed in at 990 pounds.) °Â˛ąłŮ±đ°ůłľ˛ą˛Ô’s expectations, and his knack for cultivating the media, have been building for years: Tomorrow’s weigh-off, should it yield a monster fruit, will be an apotheosis of sorts.

It will also be an occasion requiring considerable diplomacy on °Â˛ąłŮ±đ°ůłľ˛ą˛Ô’s part. For as it turns out, there is trouble in the ranks of the pumpkin world—schisms and petty jealousies and internecine conflicts. And not everyone is on Ray °Â˛ąłŮ±đ°ůłľ˛ą˛Ô’s side.

In the popular imagination, the world of pumpkin growing is a happy one, peopled with rustic farmers and punctuated with familiar orange orbs that bring smiles to the faces of children. What could these growers possibly argue about? The proper ratio of cow manure to hog manure? A better way to carve a jack-o’-lantern's nose? No. Unfortunately, competitive pumpkin growers, world-class growers, argue about things like hypodermic needles and silicone gel. They accuse one another of cheating, lying, hoarding prize seeds. They scheme and spread rumors. They file lawsuits.

You wouldn’t sense any of this upon first meeting Ray Waterman. Initially he comes across as nice, fastidious, soft-spoken, perhaps a little stern. He wears blue jeans and a farmer’s plaid shirt. He keeps his graying blond hair neatly trimmed. The day before the weigh-off, I drink a cup of coffee with him in the dining room of , the familyĚýrestaurant he owns and runs in Collins. It’s a Naugahyde-stool-and-Formica-table sort of joint where the dessert special is—what else?—pumpkin pie. Next door is °Â˛ąłŮ±đ°ůłľ˛ą˛Ô’s party lounge, The Pumpkin Room.

Waterman seems bored with our conversation until I bring up the bad blood between his World Pumpkin Confederation and its dreaded rival, the . Then he leans forward, and a trace of a smile stretches across his thin lips. Suddenly Waterman has turned into something dark and strangely sacerdotal, a master of esoteric intrigues: the archdruid of the vine.

Humongous pumpkins, really, really, really humongous pumpkins, pumpkins with the kind of heft and girth and pleasant rind-thumping tonalities that will turn the head of a man like Ray Waterman, are freaks of nature. Nearly all of the champs have come from highly prized, highly specialized seeds—most notably the , a strain that a Nova Scotia dairyman named Howard Dill hybridized back in the 1970s with an eye toward the record books.

Giant pumpkins are nursed on a rarefied diet of manure, composted vegetable matter, and vast quantities of water. For plants that seem to advertise their own robustness, giant pumpkins can be astonishingly fragile. If exposed to the summer sun, their skin burns and blisters. If they go thirsty, they wilt. Neglect to remove a stone from the soil under the fruit, and you lose five pounds as the pumpkin grows around it. A thumbnail dent can cost several ounces.

Giant pumpkins prefer long, sunny days and cool nights, which is precisely why most of the world champions have been grown along the 43d parallel—especially around upstate New York and southern Ontario. Here in the Great Pumpkin Belt, it takes just 70 days for a Dill’s Atlantic Giant to grow from the size of a handball to the size of a doghouse. At the peak of their growing season—in July and August—championship pumpkins can take on 35 pounds a day. Some people say you can even hear them growing.

I took my first innocent step into the world of competitive pumpkin husbandry on a crisp October afternoon, just a few days before °Â˛ąłŮ±đ°ůłľ˛ą˛Ô’s big event. The aroma of crushed grapes filled the air as Craig Lembke, of Forestville, New York, led me past his vinyl-sided farmhouse, through his vineyard, and on toward his pride and joy: a vaguely ominous-looking patch of vegetation, some 3,600 square feet in all, with leaves as big as tea trays bobbing a foot above the ground. Vines as thick as my forearm snaked through the dirt.

In the middle of it all slumbered the behemoth itself. Like a pampered celebrity, it had its own personal windbreak, and a sunshade too. As I drew closer to the orange mound, however, I found the object of Lembke’s devotion a sad spectacle indeed.

If the perception of the giant pumpkin is something out of Playboy, pneumatically plump and rounded, the reality is more along the lines of National Geographic, where gravity and time's inexorable march have left their mark. Lembke’s fruit looked wrinkled, flaccid. The pocked and dimpled skin conspicuously sagged. Superficial wounds and soft spots added further insult.

I tried to hide my disappointment, for love had obviously blinded Lembke. His eyes gleamed as he pointed out the thickness of his pumpkin’s rind. “She took a thousand gallons of water a day in August,” he said, beaming with pride.

Lembke figured his pumpkin for about 650 pounds—not enough to win him first place, though probably good enough to make the top ten. But he had something that excited him even more, in the next plot over. We waded through the tall leaves and carefully lifted a blue tarp. There, at the end of the vine, lay a giant green squash.

The squash, he explained, comes from the same seed as the pumpkin. If the gene for color expresses itself as orange, the fruit gets called a pumpkin and starts down a path toward glory that could culminate in an appearance on David Letterman and a cross-country tour, hitting state fairs and casinos in Atlantic City and Las Vegas and bringing thousands more dollars to the proud owner. If the fruit grows up green, on the other hand, its fate is more circumscribed. It competes with other green squashes for paltry prize sums, and its chances of ever going on a victory tour are slim to none.

Lembke thought his green prodigy weighed about 750 pounds—quite possibly the next squash champion of the world. The only question was where to take it. The closest weigh-off was °Â˛ąłŮ±đ°ůłľ˛ą˛Ô’s event, the WPC contest over in Clarence, a mere 30-minute drive northeast from here. But over the last few years Lembke had turned sour on the WPC. He believed that WPC members hoarded prize seeds. He accused Waterman of corrupting the hobby with his $50,000 payout offer. Lembke said he really didn’t want to talk about the WPC, but the whole subject was like a scab he couldn’t stop picking. At any rate, his mind was all made up: Tomorrow morning he planned to drive all the way over to Oswego, a four-hour trek, to enter a contest held by the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth. If his squash were to win there, he’d fetch $200—and a ribbon.

Lembke showed me his squash’s stem, which was about nine inches in circumference. “Long, big, thick,”Ěýhe said, nodding. “That's an ideal stem.”ĚýThen he experienced a momentary reality check, adding, “But who wants to see a giant squash?”

Craig Lembke planted his first pumpkin patch in 1981, purely to amuse his young daughter, Angela. Right off the bat he got a 50-pounder and was hooked. In the 15 years since, through a regimen of hard science and meticulous care, he’d managed to increase his best pumpkins’Ěýweight by more than 650 pounds. Last year, he took two 700-plus pounders to a weigh-off in Canfield, Ohio, and came home with third prize—$250 and a “real nice plaque.”

The season begins in early April, when Lembke pokes ten seeds into small cups of soil in his greenhouse. Within a few days, the sprouts emerge. He inspects them daily, . Around the first or second week of May, he transplants the sprouts into the ground. The mother vine begins to lengthen, about a foot a day. When the plant blossoms, Lembke transfers pollen from a male blossom into a female. To prevent bees from horning in on this private genetic experiment, he covers the blossoms with plastic bags.

If Lembke’s handiwork is successful, the tiny fruit that's present under every female blossom “takes off.”ĚýHe’ll bury each vine so it will throw down a taproot and bring up more nutrients. To get maximum nourishment and water into the potential prizewinners, he’ll gradually winnow the number of fruits on the plant to five or six and then, after about 30 days, to one.

This last fruit, known among horticulturists as a “sink,” will be the beneficiary of the entire plant’s photosynthates. Some vines and leaves will also be carefully pruned. “You want the nutrition going into the pumpkin, not those other parts,”ĚýLembke says.

While Lembke’s methods are certainly labor-intensive, they seem fairly straightforward when compared to those of growers like Leonard Stellpflug, of Nunda, New York, who is known to use a divining rod to find water caches and energy fields. Other growers have installed 1,000-watt grow lights or heated their irrigation water to avoid shocking the roots. In Pennsylvania, a man chopped down a dozen oak trees just to get another half-hour of sunlight on his patch. Some top growers, wary of vandals who might slice up their pumpkins and abscond with the seeds, set up roving security cameras.

The bigger a pumpkin is, the more likely it is to split and the more susceptible it is to disease. Every ten days, Lembke sprays his pumpkins with insecticide. He dusts small bruises with captan, a fungicide. He fertilizes with a compost of rice hulls and grapes. He spreads cow manure. He plucks off insects and frets when the wind comes up. “A windstorm could flip the whole vine over!”Ěýhe told me. When the pumpkin achieves “propane tank”Ěýsize—that's well after lemon, baseball, and basketball size—Lembke erects the plastic sunshade, and the coddling begins in earnest.

By September, Lembke is a nervous wreck, checking his patch three or four times a day. September is the do-or-die month. It was in September, just a few weeks ago, that three of his most promising young beasts had split on him. “You get cold nights and the skin toughens,”Ěýhe said. “Then you get a hot day and—boom.”

At about five o’clock, two reporters from the Syracuse University TV station arrived to interview a very excited Lembke. His eyes were bright, and he smiled while he talked. What are you feeling right now? they asked. “I feel a little shaky. It's five months of hard work. All the worrying about bugs and weather and vandalism. I won't sleep Friday night.”

A little later, as the sun oozed behind Lake Erie, Lembke solemnly asked if I’d like to cut the pumpkin from its vine. He removed a penknife from his pocket and pointed to a spot two inches from the fruit. I knelt and prepared myself for the great moment—a gush of umbilical fluids, perhaps, a faintly audible death rattle as the life forces receded. But the knife bit easily into the stem, and in two dry strokes, I was through.

People have have been for 10,000 years, and pumpkin weigh-offs have been a staple of county fairs and harvest exhibitions since the early 1800s. But competitive growing didn’t attain international stature until 1900, when William Warnock, of Goderich, Ontario, sent a to the Paris World’s Fair. In 1903 he bettered his record by three pounds. That record held until 1976, when a Pennsylvania man exhibited a 451-pounder at the U.S. Pumpkin Contest in Churchville, Pennsylvania.

From then on, the numbers steadily climbed. Starting in the late seventies, Howard Dill coaxed his Atlantic Giant seeds into world-championship pumpkins for four years running. Ray Waterman was duly impressed. In 1982 he contacted Dill, and together they founded the World Pumpkin Confederation. “A lot of county fairs were weighing off,”Ěýexplains Waterman, “and they needed credibility and standardization.”

Soon the rules were codified and competition grew immeasurably stiffer. Quantum advances in seed genetics led to consistently larger pumpkins: in the 700-pound range, then up to 800. As the prize money inched upward, competition became cutthroat and cheating more common. People doctored cracks in their pumpkins with automotive body filler. They injected water into the cavity with a hypodermic needle. Then there was the guy who razored off the stem of his pumpkin, filled it with water, and sealed the whole thing with superglue. He got caught when a judge jabbed a knife into the base and orange water poured out by the gallon.

In 1993, a number of disenchanted WPC officials, including the renowned pumpkin seed savant himself, Howard Dill, bolted from °Â˛ąłŮ±đ°ůłľ˛ą˛Ô’s group and created their own, the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth. From the start, there was bad blood between the two organizations. Dill’s group claimed that most of the WPC sites didn’t pay out and that Waterman cared more about publicity than the growers themselves. WPC loyalists, on the other hand, argued that the fledgling GPC tolerated cheaters and the rigging of contests.

In the fall of 1993, the year that a Winthrop, New York, grower named Don Black raised an enormous pumpkin, the infighting took a turn for the worse. On October 1, Black placed his pumpkin, along with the large tarp in which it was wrapped, on the scales at a GPC site in Nova Scotia. Afterward, officials weighed the tarp alone and subtracted the six-pound difference. Black’s pumpkin weighed 884 pounds-easily the largest pumpkin in the world at that time.

Meanwhile, Norm Craven, a realtor from Stouffville, Ontario, won a WPC contest near his home with a pumpkin that weighed a mere 836 pounds. Ignoring Brown's record altogether, Waterman reported Craven's lesser pumpkin to the Guinness Book of Records.

When Black saw the , he went ballistic, as did Howard Dill. Not only did they charge Waterman with willfully misreporting the record; they also accused Craven of cheating—of bracing a split stem with silicone.

To this day, however, Ray Waterman defends the Craven fruit and maintains that Black’s pumpkin was improperly weighed. Waterman, it seems, is a strict constructionist. “WPC rules state that you cannot weigh the tarp!”Ěýhe says.

“Yeah, but then they subtracted the tarp,”ĚýI say.

Waterman only shrugs. Rules are rules. There’s nothing that can be done. But when I press Waterman further, I gather that all this to-the-letter quibbling over tarps is really immaterial. “We wouldn’t be inclined to recognize any GPC record,”ĚýWaterman finally admits. “Because if you take that group, they really have no rules! We’re not going to put the credibility of the whole Confederation on the line.”

I ask Waterman where Paula and Nathan Zehr of Lowville, New York, are going to weigh off this year. He claims he doesn’t know. Last year, the Zehrs won at a GPC site with a pumpkin that weighed 968 pounds. It was certainly the largest pumpkin in the land that year, but of course Waterman declined to recognize it. This year, the Zehrs are refusing to announce where they’ll weigh off. Apparently they’re afraid of sabotage. Rumor has it their pumpkin is big. Real big. But to claim the $50,000 prize money, there’s only one place they can take it: °Â˛ąłŮ±đ°ůłľ˛ą˛Ô’s gig in Clarence.

Waterman doesn’t know where Craig Lembke is going to weigh off either, and this clearly bugs him. So I spill the beans: Lembke is going to Oswego. Waterman shakes his head in dismay. “That's a long way to drive to win very little money.”ĚýWell, I reply, he’s got a fine squash this year, and he thinks it will place in Oswego. Waterman is positively incredulous. It’s hard for him to understand why anyone would deliberately miss out on history in the making, the chance to see the world’s very first kilopounder. “He's going all the way to Oswego with a stupid squash?”Ěýhe asks, squinting.

It’s just above freezing as the first specimens arrive at the Great Pumpkin Farm, a sprawling roadside patch in Clarence, New York. Steve Baldo Chevrolet has a half-dozen new pickups parked out behind the candy apple and fried dough stands. From their antennas, red, white, and blue flags snap in the breeze. A hundred normal-size pumpkins—Pick Your Own!—dot a dry, brown field.

WPC officials wearing orange jackets register each giant, El Markoing a four-digit number onto the skin. Waterman is in operations mode, barking commands into a walkie-talkie, directing pickups, and telling the man from Fairbanks Scales where to park it. By nine o’clock, about 75 people are milling around. Twenty giant pumpkins are lined up and waiting. “That looks like a squash to me,”Ěýa man whispers to his wife.

Paula and Nathan Zehr arrive in a pickup pulling a horse trailer. WPC officials remove the first of three pumpkins with a forklift. “Whoa,”Ěýsays the crowd. All three are monstrous. Paula is inside the truck flossing her teeth, and she won’t say a word to anyone until she’s done.

The Zehrs look like the kind of people you might see in a Publisher’s Clearinghouse commercial. She has a light brown bob and wears pink lipstick and a pink parka. Her white blouse is buttoned to her throat. Nathan has bristling brown hair and looks sportif in a white cardigan and Top-Siders. Nutrition consultants by trade, the Zehrs began growing pumpkins as a hobby ten years ago. When Waterman issued the 1,000-pound challenge, they took up the call, devoting five hours a day for six months to three promising-looking pumpkins, which they named My Secret Prayer, The Great Can Do, and Do It Again. Last night the fear of a last-minute disaster compelled Nathan to sleep, Linuslike, in his patch.

Giant pumpkin growers talk like sports stars. The Zehrs are no exception. What do you think of the competition? “I think we've got a real good pumpkin here today, and we just came out here to have some fun.”Ěý(That’s Nathan.) How do you explain your success? “We never gave up believing that we could go for it. God’s blessed us. We're just the caretakers.”Ěý(That’s Paula.)

Earlier, I asked Paula if the animosity between the WPC and the GPC bothered her. Then she sounded less like a sports star and more like a schoolteacher. “If you want to talk dirt with other people, you do that, but we're just trying to grow pumpkins.”

Plant physiologists and university extension services have little to teach people like the Zehrs, who represent . Growing these things is largely a mystical process. Because you can’t interrupt a giant’s growth, you can’t completely assess its health until you cut it from the vine, at which point it’s too late to make corrections. Although they keep meticulous logs of each pumpkin’s genetic lineage and the precise amounts of food, water, and other stuff each pumpkin consumes on any given day, growers like the Zehrs don't completely understand what makes one so much larger than another.

With the crowd swarming around him, Nathan Zehr cuts a slice from Can Do’s stem and points at a few rust-colored spots in the woody-looking conductive tissue. What are the spots from? I ask him. “We don't know, but it may be some kind of bacteria,”ĚýNathan says. Couldn’t the local ag experts tell you? He cuts me a look. “We’ll listen to them when they grow a pumpkin as big as ours.”

The weighing commences at 10:30. We get some 500-pounders, some sixes and sevens. It quickly becomes apparent that the emcee, a man named Kelly Schultz who is the owner of the Great Pumpkin Farm, plans to drag out the ceremony as long as possible. Weights over 700 pounds draw polite rounds of applause. I’ll soon learn that the visual difference between a 600-pound pumpkin and a 700-pound pumpkin is negligible. Most of the weight is in the rind, which can grow up to 14 inches thick.

A carousel spins nearby; essence of corndog bathes the crowd. I wander over to some tables covered with giant sunflowers, giant rutabagas, giant gourds, giant kohlrabies, giant cornstalks, and giant radishes. This is the grand arena for Waterman's Olympics of Gardening, the green hall of fame. Prizes will be awarded in each of these categories, but so far these attractions have drawn little notice.

With the larger pumpkins, Schultz heightens the drama by covering the readout of the digital scales until he can focus the crowd’s attention. It's one o’clock by the time the first of the Zehrs’ pumpkins makes it to the scales. Do It Again, an exhibition-only pumpkin, weighs in at 845. “Folks, I have to ask ya to please stand back and make way for the forklift,”ĚýWaterman exhorts the crowd, now eight people deep. My Secret Prayer, also exhibition only, weighs 917 pounds.

The Zehrs are beaming. Paula has shed her parka and freshened her lipstick. She holds Nathan’s hand as the forklift delivers The Great Can Do to the scales. The pumpkin is knobby and off-kilter, and looks like the prow of a sinking ship. The forklift backs away. An assistant shades the digital readout. It’s a nail-biting moment.

“If we get a thousand-pounder,”Ěýshouts Waterman, “we gotta let the folks in the next county hear it.”ĚýOswego is in the next county, where at this very moment Craig Lembke is winning $100 for his second-place squash.

Finally, the suspense is unbearable. The shade comes off the scale and Waterman pronounces the weight: “One thousand and 61 pounds!”ĚýThe crowd roars. Nathan and Paula hug conservatively and then raise their arms in champion salute. The great barrier has been shattered at last, the Mach One of the vegetable world, and the Zehrs are $50,000 richer.

Waterman passes Paula the microphone. “We'd like to thank God, our community, our friends, and our church.”ĚýWaterman presents the Zehrs with their check. Then he implores the crowd, “Folks, when you get your photographs of the pumpkin, do not let the kids sit on it.”ĚýHe steps back a little and lets the TV crews swarm. Waterman is in heaven. It’s everything he ever dreamed of. He lets the moment percolate, lets the reporters have their way. Then the forklift returns the kilo-pounder to its pallet, and people start drifting toward their cars.

Waterman gets right back in front of the mike. “Don’t go away folks,”Ěýhe pleads. “We’ve got a lot more things to weigh.”

Correspondent Elizabeth Royte wrote about the Iditarod sled dog race in the December 1996 issue.

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I am not a squeamish person and at times even delight in freakish experiences. But these bats are treading dangerously close to my subliminal fear threshold. They're quick-moving, sharp-toed, and feral. Am I imagining things, or are they a little panicked?

Thankfully, I have the ideal person to cower behind: Merlin Tuttle, de facto PR agent to the bats of the world. Tuttle, 54, founded and is the executive director of Bat Conservation International, based in Austin, Texas, an organization devoted exclusively to promoting and preserving bats. Tuttle has observed more bats in more places than anyone in history, and he is perfectly at ease with bats in his face.

When not among bats, Tuttle likes to talk, to spin yarns about the places he's been, the scrapes he's gotten out of. He'll tell you about the drunken rednecks in Tennessee who threatened to shoot him, the jaguar that leapt into his path in Honduras, and the time he fell 25 feet in an Alabama cave and broke his leg. He has been kidnapped by communist guerrillas in Uruguay and chased by South American Indians wielding curare-tipped arrows. Recovering from a bout of paratyphoid fever–disease is a constant in his line of work–Tuttle says he once hiked 12 miles through the Peruvian jungle, rappelled down a cliff face on vines, and swam across a pond filled with piranhas and electric eels to get to a reputedly excellent bat cave.

Tuttle has brought me here, to Bracken Cave, because it contains as many as 40 million Mexican free-tailed bats–the largest concentration of warm-blooded animals in the world. The cave lies 20 miles north of San Antonio; it is surrounded by private ranch land but is owned by Bat Conservation International. Though the cave is off-limits to the public, the bats emerge each evening from March to mid-November in a magnificent swirling stream that can flow for upward of three hours.

At first, Tuttle had said he was too busy to make this field trip. When I told him I wanted not only to witness the emergence but also to see the bats before they left the cave, he started to ponder. “It's dangerous to go in,” he said. “There's diseases, and there's high ammonia levels from all the guano.” He rubbed his large, squarish chin. He swept back his hair, which is ruler straight, mostly brown but with a surf zone of gray around the lower edges. He narrowed his eyes as his alter egos–creatures as different from each other as day is from night, as bats are from birds–battled: The executive director was a slave to his professional responsibilities; the naturalist was thrilled at the prospect of wallowing in guano. The executive director gave me a long lecture about histoplasmosis, a respiratory disease contracted by inhaling fungal spores found in guano, and airborne rabies, which is extremely rare but a possibility. I nodded to all that, and Tuttle said, “You really are stubborn. You remind me of me.” I knew then that the naturalist had triumphed. Still, Tuttle handed me two pages of liability waivers and allowed himself a split second of doubt: “When it gets out that Tuttle brought this girl to Bracken…” He cocked his head and let out a deep, gnarly laugh. I got out of there as quickly as I could, before he changed his mind.

Back at my hotel, I kept the bat karma on track by steeping myself in BCI propaganda. I read Bats magazine and various bat tracts and fact sheets. Then I watched The Secret World of Bats, an award-winning BCI video. The film contains many dramatic moments: fisherman bats sweeping down in super slow mo to snatch fish from lakes, lesser long-nosed bats pollinating important food crops by shoving their little noses deep into flower pistils, insectivorous leaf-nosed bats using long folds of skin on their faces to fine-tune their echolocation, a vampire bat sucking the lifeblood out of a roosting chicken. Tuttle filmed this bat, the creature for whom most of the world's bat horror is reserved, creeping furtively along the underside of a branch toward a sleeping chicken. Heat sensors located above its nose help it select a spot on the chicken's leg where blood vessels lie close to the surface. The bat licks the leg to soften the skin, punctures it with one swift strike, and begins to slurp blood with its pink, darting tongue. All while the chicken sleeps!

At dusk, I followed a gaggle of white-headed tourists down to Austin's Congress Avenue Bridge to take in America's most popular urban wildlife display: the nightly emergence of about a million and a half Mexican free-tailed bats. The bats roost under the bridge from March till early November. They took up residence here in 1980, after the Department of Transportation retrofitted the bridge and, by happy accident, created long crevices that have just the right humidity and temperature for Mexican free-tails.

Austin did not always love bats. Citizens at first petitioned the city to eradicate the colony. The bats carried disease, people thought. They would spread rabies. Flying rats that mobilized under cover of darkness, they would attack people, fly into their long hair, and drive them insane. Their ideas, in short, were not modern.

Throughout history, bats have figured in folktales, fables, and myths. They have been, variously, male sexual totems, the ghosts of murderers' victims, the souls of the dead, harbingers of rain, partners of witches, deterrents to locusts, and the central ingredient in love potions. In the East, the bat is a good omen, denoting happiness, wealth, peace, virtue, and long life. In the West, the bat is mainly a harbinger of evil, unlucky and unclean. In the Middle Ages, bat blood was believed to prevent the regrowth of plucked hair; the Awakiutl people of Mesoamerica placed bat intestines in cradles to help babies sleep; bat skin is used as a poultice for rheumatism in India. Recently, Merck Pharmaceuticals discovered that the vampire bat's saliva contains an anticlotting compound 25 times more effective than anything on the market today.

“People fear what they don't understand,” Tuttle says. So when Austin geared up to eliminate the bats, he went into educational overdrive, making speeches, going on TV, and producing brochures. Bats, he told anyone who'd listen, are gentle animals. Less than 0.5 percent of the bat population carries rabies, and if a bat does get sick, it lies low. Fewer than 20 people in North America have died of any bat-related disease in the past 45 years.

Tuttle played the ecological-web card: He told Austin that clearings in rainforests would not regenerate if bats weren't around to help disperse the seeds of pioneer plants. He played the utility card: The world would have fewer wild stocks of tropical fruit without bat pollinators, and agave, from which tequila is made, would die. But the most effective ploy in winning the hearts and minds of Austin, not surprisingly, was the personal-comfort card. The Congress Avenue bats, Tuttle said, ate 10,000 to 30,000 pounds of insects a night. A little brown bat, the most common of North America's 44 species, can eat up to 600 mosquitoes in an hour. “I don't want to demonize insects, but I have to say this because that's what people relate to,” Tuttle says. Eventually he prevailed. The petitioners backed down, the city set up special bat-viewing areas, and a tourist attraction was born.

At Congress Avenue, a lady from Lubbock said she's afraid of bats because they carry rabies. I gave her the straight dope. She didn't seem convinced. “I would be afraid if I were isolated with a bat,” her husband said. Why? “Because they're blind.” I told him that bats can see but that because they make their living in the dark, they also navigate with an echolocation system so refined they can detect a human hair in their flight path. “Hmmm,” he said.

By eight, about 50 people were arrayed under and on the bridge, camcorders in hand. They were bored and restless. Finally, at 8:15, the bats began to emerge, spooling out in a ribbon, east over the lake. They swooped and darted, making a beautiful flapping sound, like the pitty-pat of a million people clapping one finger against a palm.

Austin's bats are probably among the best-protected animals in the world. They are the city's totem and its organic pest patrol. Their patron saint lives nearby, and anyone who observes their remarkable exodus becomes complicit in their preservation. But elsewhere in the world, bats are in big trouble. Habitat loss and environmental pollution take the usual toll, but the biggest threat to bats is human ignorance. Entire colonies are lost when people shove burning tires or dynamite into their caves. In Asia, bats are eaten as aphrodisiacs. But surprisingly, it is mine closings, according to Tuttle, that have most devastated bat populations; about a million bats were buried in the last year. “In the last century,” he says, “bats have been chased and harassed out of caves and into mines. They imprint on the mine, and then, when the mine is closed, they die. They have no place else to go.”

Tuttle and I meet the next evening and speak not at all of histoplasmosis. It's 6:30 when we get to Bracken Cave, and immediately we begin to gear up with headlamps, battery packs, and respirators. Years ago, Tuttle inhaled copious amounts of ammonia deep in a nearby bat cave. He walked around for a couple of weeks feeling fluish, became weaker, and then got a friend to drive him to the hospital, where he stayed for ten days. His doctors said his lungs were emphysemic, burned by the gas. They warned him that another exposure could be fatal.

We barely have the headlamps on when I look to the still bluish sky and spot a thin stream of bats. “It's started!” I cry. I had wanted to see the bats asleep, hanging from the cave ceiling. It never occurred to me that we might be entering while the bats were exiting. We hurry up a neatly mowed path to the cave entrance, which sits at the bottom of a crater and rises about ten feet high. The grass around the opening is dead, killed by wafting ammonia fumes. Already there's a warm, pissy smell in the air. “Actually, I've grown to like it,” Tuttle says.

Together we walk down the rocky slope into a vortex of bats. They're coming faster now, in clusters of a hundred or more and then a thin, steady stream. I squat down, about 15 feet from the cave's mouth. Every so often, the wind changes direction and dashes some bats to the ground, victims of wind shear. They quickly recover.

All around us, bats whirl in a counterclockwise pattern, a maelstrom of dark angles. I feel like I've stuck my head in a blender and someone's pushed the puree button. The flapping wings make that beautifully soft sound I heard at Congress Avenue, but multiplied tenfold. Improbably, I'm giggling, overwhelmed by this spectacle, delighted beyond words. Tuttle laughs too, and then he stands up and stretches an arm into the air. He opens a palm and with a swift snatching motion pulls down a bat.

“See how soft they are?” He flips the bat into an upright position and holds it out for me to stroke. The creature is about two inches long, brown and mousy. “Mexican free-tails are the least cute bats on earth,” Tuttle told me earlier. “But people always say, 'How cute,' when I show them one in my hand.”

“How cute,” I say to Tuttle now. The bat's face is tiny, wrinkly, and feels like velvet. Tuttle gently pulls open the wings to a span of about a foot. He holds it up in the fading light to show me the veins running through the thin, leathery skin, the four fingers and the thumb, which has a curved nail used for grooming, eating, gripping, and climbing up T-shirts. The hand bones are super-long and super-skinny; they remind me of skeletons and of evil.

I urge Tuttle into the cave. “Stay close to me,” he says. “Some of this guano is like quicksand. I once fell in up to my neck. What a way to go!” The guano is a soft brown color and about the consistency of flour. It blankets the floor in a layer at least six inches deep. It contains about a thousand species of bacteria and makes a superior fertilizer. Guano mining supports entire communities in some Third World countries, and it helps balance Tuttle's budget, too: Bracken Cave droppings are sold through a San Antonio nursery, and BCI receives a percentage of the profit.

We continue deeper into the cave. The smell of ammonia intensifies. The respirators aren't doing much. The slope of the cave floor becomes steeper, and our dim headlamps make out shadowy rocks on either side. At one point the passageway narrows, and our presence causes some bats to miscalculate their route. They whack into us and fall to the ground, or they whack into us and just cling. It feels like we're being pelted with wet tissues. We have to be careful where we walk, too, because bats are bouncing off our bodies and getting half-buried in guano under our feet.

One bat smacks into my back and scrambles up, higher, higher, until its creepy chiropteran toes are almost at my throat. “Merlin!”

“What?”

“Get this bat off me!” I turn, and he removes the quivering creature. “Maybe we should get out of their way,” Tuttle suggests. “They're coming around the corner fast here, and they don't have time to adjust.” Tuttle tugs his respirator strap and shuffles in the guano. He laughs–whether at me or at the situation, I don't know–and heads for the side of the cave.

About 600 feet in, the temperature seems 30 degrees warmer, and the ammonia is twice as strong. But the bat action is a little slower, and it seems safe to stop and glance at the cave's ceiling. The Chinese say that bats sleep head down because their brains are so heavy. This isn't so; they sleep upside down so they can take off with the glide they need to gain flight speed. Swooping toward freaked-out homeowners waving brooms in the middle of the room is not their intention.

I scan the cave ceiling, but my lamp is dim, and it's hard for me to say what is lumpy limestone and what is bat. If I were here in early June with a more powerful headlamp, I'd see newborn bat pups clustered on the ceiling at densities of 500 per square foot. In pictures, pink, hairless babies are crammed so tight they make the cave ceiling look like a Rose Bowl parade float. The mothers apparently have no trouble locating and nursing their own young.

Something lands in my eye, and I give it a swipe. Tuttle turns and says, “Oh, you don't have glasses on.” He seems surprised. “Don't rub.”

“But I have bat shit in my eyes,” I tell him, blinking.

“That's not shit!” he yells, practically crowing. “That's piss!”

As a boy growing up in Hawaii, the son of Seventh-Day Adventists, Merlin Tuttle had no particular interest in bats. “At two, I collected monarch caterpillars in jars,” he says. “I knew when a chrysalis would open, and I'd call my parents to come and watch. We moved to California when I was five, and I got into herpetology. I dragged six-foot snakes into the house and terrified my mom. Then I practiced falconry. I had relationships with all kinds of strange animals.”

When Tuttle was 16, his family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee. In a cave about two miles from his house, he discovered a colony of gray bats, described as nonmigratory in the scientific literature. He and his father banded the bats, recaptured them a few hundred miles north, and proved the experts wrong. At the University of Tennessee, Tuttle photographed every frog species in eastern North America and then went on to earn his B.A. in zoology from Andrews University, in Michigan, and a Ph.D. in ecology and evolution at the University of Kansas.

A year after receiving his doctorate, Tuttle took a job as curator of mammals at the Milwaukee Public Museum. He did a lot of bat fieldwork and, in an effort to combat the animals' bad press, began photographing them in winsome poses. Alarmed over the decline of bat species–more than 50 percent of North American bat species are considered threatened or endangered–he approached the major environmental groups for help. “In Washington I was ignored,” he says. “They would give $300,000 for a panda, but they couldn't give $250 for a bat.” The Chiroptera, he learned, just weren't cute enough. Tuttle took matters into his own hands in 1982 by forming BCI and, in 1986, quitting his museum job and moving to Austin to run the foundation full time. Along the way, he married and divorced; his ex-wife remains a member of BCI.

Although Tuttle has published more than 46 papers based on his fieldwork and written several books, his expertise today is conservation, not science. He has a genius for raising money–BCI operates on a $1.2 million annual budget–and for reaching compromise with potential antagonists. In the bad old days, the Texas Department of Transportation might have taken a blowtorch to the bat crevices in bridges. Now the agency is funding a research project with BCI to figure out how to build bridges with more bat habitat. Tuttle has also changed the minds of farmers who want the “flying vermin” off their property and cavers who tear down protective gates over the entrances to bat caves. He got them to explore when the bats aren't in residence and to leave sensitive parts of the caves alone. He's now an honorary life member of the National Speleological Society.

“I do bats because no one else wanted to do it,” Tuttle says today. “It would have been easier to raise money to kill them than to save them.”

At the back of Bracken cave, about 150 feet underground, the bats are gone, and we take stock of our situation. The floor is more than eight inches deep in guano, and the surface is roiling with dermestid beetles, flesh-eating insects that prey on dead adults and fledglings that crash on their virgin flights. When a pup falls, it's reduced to bare bones within minutes. Fascinated, I start picking through the guano for tiny chiropteran skulls and skeletons, but all of a sudden Tuttle barks, “This mask isn't doing anything at all. Let's get out of here.”

He's breathing hard. The air is terrible. “This is a carbon-dioxide sink,” he says, sternly. “If you kept your head down near the ground for five minutes, you'd pass out.” My eyes are burning, and I can't get a full breath of air, but I'm too excited to leave. I put a handful of skulls in my pocket and reluctantly start to follow him out of the cave. The torrent of bats is now but a trickle. The respirators aren't worth a damn, and I'm worried about Tuttle's lungs. I start figuring out how many feet I'd have to drag his body through guano before fresh air revived him. I think about all those waivers I signed, never guessing it would be the bat man himself who succumbed.

Finally at the mouth of the cave, Tuttle rips the mask from his face and swallows great gulps of air. “Wow,” he says. “That was intense. I think the ammonia level was about 50 percent of what's lethal.”

We walk up the opposite side of the crater and sit down on a rock to regroup. Tuttle thinks that there will be another emergence tonight, that we haven't seen the last of Bracken's bats. He pulls a comb out of his pocket and goes to work on his head. “I can feel the mites crawling across my scalp,” he says.

Now that he mentions it, so can I. I flick a dermestid beetle off my arm and crush what I believe to be a mite. I'd like to scratch something on my face, but I think about where my fingers have been. I look at Tuttle, neatly combed but still sweaty and flecked with who knows what. “Do I have bat shit on my face?” I ask him.

“No,” he answers, “but would I tell you if you did?”

At 8:05, another emergence begins. It's slow at first but quickly picks up speed. Soon there are more bats than sky. Tuttle has seen thousands of emergences the world over, but still he seems transfixed. Sitting on a rock in the dark, he smiles beatifically. Later I ask whether his smile was of bored tolerance or old-fashioned wonder. “Definitely wonder,” he says. “I just love watching bats.”

“You're not sick of leading journalists through caves?”

“You're the first writer I ever brought in,” he says.

“During an emergence, you mean?”

“No, ever.” I'm surprised enough, but then he drops the bombshell. “In fact, that was the first time I'd ever walked in during an emergence.” The full horror of what we've just done now strikes me.

“You mean you've never walked into a cave during an emergence? You never pushed your way past seven million bats?”

“Hell no,” he says, grinning.

In that moment it becomes clear that Merlin Tuttle's dominant and true personality is the naturalist. The executive director has been left behind, back at his desk, a lowly creature of the day.

Elizabeth Royte, a frequent contributor to şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř, lives among little brown bats in Gotham.

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