AS THE DALAI LAMA might say, torturing a fish ain't kosher. That night, our fifth in camp, I had a nightmare in which my karmic payback was to be reborn as a worm. The next morning Jim looked over from his Mickey Mouse mattress on the far side of the ger and said he too was sleeping badly, dreaming a lot.

"War dreams?" I asked.

"No," he replied, rolling over. "Those are different."

There was no escaping the world, even here. Jim carried a tiny short-wave radio, but in these high valleys we could hear only Chinese and Russian voices. Fishing is thieving time from that outer world, a way of escaping from responsibilities, news cycles, and the tiny vibrations under the floorboards that signal the approach of some new existential tsunami. Fly-fishing may be an indefensible activity, but play, rest, beauty, and freedom are crucial to sanity and survival. Time, however, doesn't pause just because we do. Charlie had a satellite phone in his tent, and I used it to call home. Normally I preferred my wilderness deep and disconnected, but my expectant wife had been feeling poorly before I left.

The signal bounced off a geosynchronous bird and jingled a receiver in Brooklyn. My wife picked up, in tears. Something was wrong. She was in terrible pain.

The signal coughed and sputtered, making gibberish of the simplest words. "Miscarriage," she said. "The doctors think it might require surgery." In less than a week, perhaps, depending.

For 13 minutes and 46 seconds my wife and I talked, and I hung up the phone to the sound of her crying.

The love of remote places, the unreasonable desire to know all of this world, leaves us hostage to fate. My father had been diagnosed with terminal cancer when I was living on another continent. Standing in an airport once, I learned from voice mail that my apartment and everything in it had been destroyed by fire. And now another lost pregnancy.

Surgery. In days. After I hung up, I said to myself what I had just said to her, in the 13th minute: I will be there.

I wanted to go home. Now. But wilderness is unmoved by our needs. That is the point in seeking it, and it is a sharp point. Now, in Mongolia, means three days from now. There was no way out until Monday, when the orange Mi-8 would pick us up shortly after dawn.

I counted the days on my fingers. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. A lifetime. If I could get out of Ulan Bator by Tuesday, I might reach South Korea Wednesday, Los Angeles the day after that. Then, just maybe, I could make it to New York in time.