WHILE I WAS IN the Arctic, it was never far from my mind that, in some ways, the archaeologists' work has more to do with Big Oil than with early Americans. The team members have developed various ways to deal with this. Dale Slaughter practices willful denial. "I don't like to see this work as a prelude to anything," he says. Baker had his own pragmatic way of looking at it: "If I don't do this, they'll just get some other jerk-off to do it, and he won't do as good of a job as I do." Mystery Man told me, "As far as I'm concerned, these artifacts could sit here forever, unrecognized, if they weren't compromised by oil exploration and drilling. But they are compromised, so we've got to do this. What makes me uncomfortable is that the oil companies suck off our work."

That's true. Infrastructure set up in the seventies as part of the archaeological survey—scattered camps, helicopter equipment, fuel depots—is routinely utilized by oil-company geologists and engineers. As a career BLM man, Mike Kunz sees it this way: "You can't just throw your pack in your pickup and do archaeology out here. Those helicopters are our pickups, and they're expensive. A helicopter costs $2,700 a day to rent, whether it turns a blade or not, plus $550 per hour of flight. Helicopter fuel costs $6.80 a gallon, delivered. We wouldn't be able to do this work without money from oil and gas leases. One lease can pay for all this. That's just the way it is in the Arctic. If you don't scratch each other's backs, nothing will get done."

There's a terrible irony in using fossil-fuel revenues to finance research about the ice age. As my time hunting arrowheads in the Arctic slipped by, I became nervous that I would miss my chance to find an ice-age artifact in a place that allowed me to envision the world in the same way that the first Americans saw it, a way that may no longer exist in the not so distant future.

When my last day in the Arctic arrived, rainstorms and fog came with it. Mad Mel announced that the helicopter was grounded. I thought my hopes of finding a major artifact were crushed, but later in the day I was given a final chance. During a break in the rain, Baker offered to take Mylène and me to a site along the Utukok where Mystery Man had found a Sluiceway point earlier that summer. We hiked a couple miles through the fog. The three of us paced around in circles at the site.

"It should be right here," said Baker. He pointed to an exposed shard of rock. I reached down and took the rock between my thumb and forefinger, then pulled the piece free of the ground. The projectile point was perfectly sharp and nearly intact, except for a slight break near the tip. It was about as long as my pinkie, and it fit my hand as comfortably as a handshake.

The rain kicked up as we admired the point. We were soaked. Mylène and Baker headed toward camp, but I stayed behind to keep looking. Eventually the fog got so thick that I was worried about finding my way back. I started toward camp, but the ground dropped away toward a tangle of willows right where I thought it should be rising up toward a hill. I turned around and tried again. Still no hill. A panic rose in my chest. I could walk out here for months and never be found.

When the fog lifted, I could see the hill that Baker and I had come down. I had to laugh at myself. What would the ice-age hunters have thought about my little panic attack? As I walked back to camp, I was already thinking about next summer. I wanted to return, to keep looking. As I stooped down to touch a piece of chipped stone that caught my eye, I thought of something that Mike Kunz had told me: It's just a matter of time.