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start back to the beach, to look for the kayak, when a bit of motion caught my eye. Something was coming down through the forest.
    It was a bear as big as a haystack, with a wide face and a prominent hump behind its shoulders.

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    T HE BEAR PAUSED TO SNIFF THE AIR. My heart was jacked up full throttle, but I didn’t so much as blink an eye. Time slowed to a suffocating standstill as the bear looked all around. I pictured those front claws, long as my fingers, gutting me like a trout. At last the behemoth lumbered toward the beach along the trail that passed through the devil’s club.
    The trail. Of course it had been a bear trail. The red jelly on the trail, that was bear scat. The hundreds of black dots in the scat, those were berry seeds.
    This animal was nothing like the black bears back home. It was a dark brown and it was a walking mountain of muscle and fat. As the bear disappeared through the thicket onto the beach, I finally took a breath. I wasn’t going onto the beach to look for the kayak and paddle anytime soon.
    Finally I began to see straight. What an insanely stupid fantasy—rescuing myself, getting the search called off. Embarrassment was the least of my worries. Search planes were my best hope, maybe my only hope.
    The problem was, would anybody even look here?
    As I tried to pull bristles of devil’s club from myright hand with my teeth and my fingernails, I racked my brain to remember whatever I could about Admiralty Island. Julia had pointed it out across the strait during her last campfire. Admiralty was about a hundred miles long, I remembered her saying that. It was one of the big three, along with Baranof and Chichagof. They were often called the ABC Islands.
    I cast my memory back to the view from my tent. Admiralty was a uniform dark green from tidewater up to timberline. It had never been logged. The slopes of Baranof and Chichagof looked much different, like patchwork quilts. Some of the patches were dirt brown, where all the trees had recently been taken off. Admiralty’s trees were old growth. Admiralty was wilderness.
    Wilderness. Under the circumstances, I couldn’t imagine a more ominous word, unless it was bears.
    What else did I know about Admiralty? “All three of the ABC Islands have brown bears,” Julia had said early in the trip. I knew for an awful fact that the bear I’d just seen was a monster grizzly. Brown bears, the naturalist had gone on to explain, were the same animal as grizzlies— Ursus arctos. Brownies, as Julia called them, got a lot bigger in southeast Alaska than the grizzlies in the interior because of all the extra protein that salmon added to their diet. Some topped a thousand pounds.
    Tell me about it.
    Julia said there was another name for Admiralty, the Indian name. The Indians called it the Fortress of the Bears.
    I felt sick, remembering what she’d said next. “Admiralty Island has the densest population of brown bears in the world. One per square mile.”
    Bears went onto the beach here, I knew that already, and the beach was where I was going to have to be during daylight. An airplane wouldn’t have a chance of spotting an elephant under this forest, even if it was painted orange.
    Raindrops spattered around me all night, and with my mind spinning its wheels, I couldn’t fall asleep. I had a raging thirst and my stomach was balled up into a stone. I hadn’t eaten in more than thirty hours. When I almost felt like I could sleep, that’s when the howling started.
    It had come from the direction of the beach, close enough to tear out my heart and hand it to me on a plate. The howls were long drawn out and mournful, deeper pitched than the wailing of coyotes. I didn’t have a shred of doubt they were coming from the throats of wolves.
    A video I’d seen about wolves being brought back to Yellowstone said there was no record of a healthy wild wolf killing a human in North America. I