THE BACKCOUNTRY
We ride west higher into the mountains, through dapplings of cold sun and shadow, saying nothing for long stretches of time. We cross the last braid of river and start up the steep canyon cut by the Dead Dog River, heading up toward caribou country. The gold sea of aspen falls slowly away below us as we ascend, our horses grunting and laboring. The Tuchodi sprawls and widens farther and farther below, a skein of glinting threads, a silver-green stitch in a roadless expanse that stretches as far as the eye can see in all directions. Not in a dozen lifetimes could you see or learn all this country. There is no telling how much science remains undiscovered upon this landscape, nor, for that matter, how much traditional knowledge has been lost, or remains uncollected, from the native people who lived here at the top of the forested world for 10,000 years or more.

On this shaded, wetter, steeper slope, the forest is mainly black spruce, frosty and lonely-feeling after the bright forest of aspen and pine. The woods are quiet, and often we dismount and walk in front of our horses, holding their reins, to help ease their burden.

We're headed for a place Peck calls "the caribou range," near where the treeline ends, just below the glaciers. We take a late lunch in a high meadow, a plateau just beneath a stony ridge, then ride higher upstream into a narrow V-canyon, through another little forest, and then back out into a widening valley, with the frosted breath of the glacier sweeping down onto us. It's a stony basin -- so many stones and boulders that it seems we can almost hear the last echoing clatter of their emplacement -- a world of stone, with fringes of stubborn forest clinging here and there. Then suddenly, it seems, we are amidst the caribou -- not the teeming herds of barren ground caribou, but the little clans and bands of woodland caribou, whose male and female members both sport antlers. Because we are mounted on horses, the animals lift their heads and stare at us but do not flee. We're able to ride fairly close to them before they finally understand who and what we are and shy away, crossing the river and easing back into the forest, entering it like a threaded needle passing into fabric.

Less frightened of us are the moose, large as myths and so chocolate-brown as to appear almost black, their great size having evolved over the millennia to retain core body heat more efficiently. Their darkness, too, allows them to absorb as much precious solar radiation as possible. They watch us from the other side of the river and then continue browsing as we ride into camp. Winter's coming: They're huge furnaces, they have to eat, and there is little time in wild nature for loafing at this time of year.

We hitch and unsaddle and groom the horses in gathering dusk. More moose and caribou drift through the willows across the river, the caribou the color of smoke in that poor light, and the moose darker than anything else on the landscape, darker than even the approaching night.

The cabin's windows are boarded up. When Peck shoves against the door, ghosts seem to come flying out. We step inside; he lights some candles, and the lone room (a stove, a table, a bunk bed) comes slowly and waveringly into focus, in yellowing light. Ross gets a fire going in the stove, and soon meat is sizzling in an iron skillet, fresh from the shoulder of a Stone sheep that one of his hunters shot earlier in the week. All my life I'd heard about such meat -- how many feel it's the best there is -- and when I eat it, with no more cooking preparation than salt, butter, and pepper, I can see why. The grain is firm and the taste sweet and clean.

Making conversation, I ask Ross about which technology advances he thinks the old trappers, hunters, and miners would have most appreciated, or which ones he himself has witnessed since his father's time. "Power saws," he says immediately, with not a single synapse-width of hesitation, recalling half a lifetime of clearing trails with axes and crosscut saws. Then, after a pause: duct tape. Ziploc bags. Good rain gear.

n the morning, there's a steady snow falling. We break camp and go for a walk higher up the mountain behind us. The clouds break to tatters. The sky opens to cold blue, you can see forever, and the Muskwa-Kechika appears as it might have when it was last covered entirely by glaciers, 10,000 to 20,000 years ago.

The snow begins to melt and steam, and wildness seems to stir vibrantly, pouring forth as if from the stones themselves, or like the breath of some living thing, awakening. Peck has his spotting scope, a telescopelike instrument with which he might be able to discover distant planets. With his bare eyes, he spies a skein of elk, smaller than ants, on a faraway mountain on the other side of the valley, and we peer at them through the astronomer-scope, which magnifies them to slightly larger ants.

Higher still, and closer to us, we watch an immense golden eagle swoop and haze a small herd of sheep, chasing them along a rocky trail toward a dead-end cliff. The eagle bats at them with its wings, trying to drive one of them off into the gorge below, where it can later feast on the carcass. The herd scatters, though, forges back up a seemingly impossible slope, and then reconvenes on safer ground, protected, for now at least.

We ride out that same day, all the way back to the main camp some 20 miles downriver, through the spruce forest on the cold north slope, down toward the broad valley of aspen and cottonwood. Along the way, Ross points out some trees with old blazes and ax marks made by First Nations people long ago, and yet not so long ago -- a hundred years, perhaps -- though much has happened in the world since.

Despite the bounty of game, I can't imagine surviving in such a northern landscape, century after century, in the deep snows and the long, lightless winters. Wet elk-hide moccasins, wet hands, a cough, a rattling chill; a yearning for one more sheep, one more caribou, one more day. The Kaska Dena nation -- whose descendants stretch from the Arctic Circle down to Navajo land, all along the flanks of the Rockies -- did this, day after day, millennium after millennium. Peck points out some of the larger trees where starving people would gnaw the bark late in winter and early into the spring, desperate for anything -- the signature of their hunger made manifest, even a century later.

We pass by a waterfall, where another golden eagle is sitting on a crag, looking down into the water. We come around a bend in the trail and surprise it at quite a close distance. It studies us for but a fraction of a second, then leaps into flight, and flaps its way strong and hard down the narrow little canyon.