I CAME DOWN WITH A FEVER my first day alone. Chills and nausea worked their way through my body. I didn't know what was wrong, so I settled on calling it buffalo fever. At one point, I was walking along the Chetaslina, soaking wet from having just fallen into it, when a black wolf cut across my path. Before trotting off, he actually looked me in the eye and licked his lips.

One night, I wandered about four miles away from my main camp. Carrying a buffalo that distance alone would be a backbreaking nightmare, but I was feeling desperate about my prospects of ever finding an animal. I'd seen some buffalo in the area a couple of days before, and I thought I'd return to look for them again. Toward dusk it

"Man in the Copper! Man coming down!" Je¤ screamed. I thought, That's me! That's why everything's so quiet. It was pure darkness. I had this strange sensation, not altogether unpleasant, that I was almost done living.

started snowing like a bastard. Visibility was nil, so I climbed to the crest of a small ridge and found a buffalo wallow sheltered by an overhanging spruce where I could get out of the weather. Buffalo use the wallows, which look like shallow-sided bowls ten feet in diameter, to coat themselves in dust and mud. I could smell a buffalo; it had been here, but it was gone now. I spread out my tarp and sleeping bag, then stoked a small fire using dry buffalo chips. The chips emitted a bluish smoke that smelled like a bathroom after someone had smoked a joint. I dipped my face into the heat of the smoke, as though it might metaphysically convey information concerning the whereabouts of the herd, and dozed off as the snow fell.

There's a Comanche legend that the earth replenishes buffalo by spitting them from the ground. I became a believer when I woke up in the snowy wallow and peered over the crest of the ridge. A herd of buffalo was there, not 30 yards away. They were traveling below me in a long broken line, maybe 20 in all. Excitement does a hunter no good, and when your quarry arrives you've got to focus on the pure mechanics of making a clean kill. I picked a large cow, centered my scope's crosshairs on the rib behind its shoulder, and squeezed the trigger. A fury of hooves and fur followed. A buffalo fell from the fleeing herd and slid down the mountainside.

The momentary joy I felt about killing a wild buffalo was dulled almost immediately by the massive amount of work I had in store. I've butchered more than 100 big-game animals in the field, but the immensity of the buffalo made an elk seem like child's play. The carcass had come to rest in a stand of aspens. Usually I start by gutting an animal, but the only part of the buffalo that I could roll from the tangle was a front leg. I skinned the leg and cut it free of the body. With the severed knee joint resting on the ground, the leg reached up to my chest.

For three days, I worked on butchering the carcass and hauling the meat down to my makeshift camp on the Chetaslina. That's when the grizzlies began showing up. Every morning, I'd notice more and more tracks. I tried to enhance my human presence, thinking that I could keep the animals at bay. I pissed on trees, then drank bladdersful of creek water and pissed some more; I draped dirty clothes over the meat and constructed a scarecrow out of long johns. Finally I was ready to head to my main camp at the Chetaslina's mouth, about three miles downstream. When I walked up, I was thrilled to see Jeff waiting for me.

He had brought along one of his most trusted mountaineering partners, Hardcore Jeffy. Hardcore looks like the actor Willem Dafoe and is about the same age, 47. True to his nickname, he was amped to go up the Chetaslina. "We've got to retrieve that meat before those bears do it for us," he said.

"And we've got to get the hide out, too," I said. "I'm going to make a queen-size comforter for my bed out of this."

"We'll tie it to the top of the load," Hardcore said.

"What about the skull?" It weighed as much as a small child and had a sharp, raft-poking horn coming out each side.

"We'll tie it up front, like a Viking ship," Jeff said.

Jeff and Hardcore had each brought along their portable 70-inch Alpacka rafts. Jeff thought we could fit all the meat in the rafts and then float it down to camp. When I looked at the mound of buffalo next to the dinky little rafts, the plan seemed as reasonable as floating out 500 pounds of meat on a pair of water wings. But we loaded them up and pushed out at dusk.

Jeff and I donned drysuits, figuring that we'd guide the rafts downstream with ropes while Hardcore followed on the bank with a headlamp. A good idea in theory, but the overloaded rafts quickly took on water and floated like pieces of wet bread. I was damn happy to put the grizzlies behind me and leave them with whatever buffalo guts and bones they could scrounge from the kill site, but I immediately discovered a new nemesis: My alleged drysuit was filling fast, and my legs were going numb. They quickly stopped working properly, so I just lay in the water, hanging on to the load of meat as if I were holding a life ring.

The river got faster and rougher as we went downstream. I knew I was hitting the early stages of hypothermia. I was obsessed with the idea of how thirsty I was, but I couldn't think straight enough to do anything about it. I'd lost track of Hardcore on the bank, and I knew only that Jeff was out in front of me somewhere. Earlier, Jeff and I had discussed what might happen if we blasted out of the mouth of the Chetaslina and into the Copper. We joked about how they wouldn't find our bodies until we floated down to Prince William Sound and got snagged in a salmon net. This image was stuck in my mind as I became aware of a great rushing noise, like two rivers colliding. From somewhere in the dark, Jeff was yelling at me to get over to the bank. I focused all my energy on my legs, but they banged lifelessly against the rocks, like two pieces of firewood suspended from my torso.

Then, suddenly, the sound of the colliding rivers vanished. It was pure darkness. "Man in the Copper! Man coming down!" Jeff screamed. I thought, That's me! That's why everything's so quiet. I'm in the middle of the goddamn Copper! Jeff's voice receded. I had this strange sensation, not altogether unpleasant, that I was almost done living. I was so busy thinking about how thirsty I was that it took me a minute to remember I still had two arms. I started paddling with one while I held on to the raft with the other.

And then a miracle happened. I felt a dull thud on my feet—thump, thump, thump—and I stopped, beached on a gravel bar. The silence was broken by Jeff laughing and splashing his way into the river to help me out. "What a ride, man. You looked like you were going to die. We should come back here and try to kayak that thing. You all right?"

"You guys didn't bring any beer down, did you?" I asked.