In Cordova, 70 miles south of Valdez, Rick Steiner is awake but still lounging in his underwear when the phone rings at 7 a.m. He answers and listens. "Holy shit!" he says, and is on his feet, pulling on jeans, sweater, and sneakers. Within minutes he is out the door, heading for his office on the creaking Cordova dock.

Steiner, a 36-year-old assistant professor of fisheries for the University of Alaska's Marine Advisory Program, is stationed in Cordova as the maritime counterpart of a Corn Belt county agent. Most of the town's fishermen think of him simply as the guy on the dock who either knows the answer or will find out. They like his real-time credentials. He is a fisherman. He owns a 43-foot seiner, the Buddy; has crewed long months on draggers, trollers, long-liners, and gill-netters; and has had his leg crushed by a 700-pound crab-pot in the Gulf of Alaska. He is an expert on salmon, herring, and halibut, as well as on ocean currents, killer whales, sea lions, and otters. He is six-foot-four, with a stride that he says varies according to what he's running from. Before moving to Cordova, he was the university's marine advisory agent in the Eskimo village of Kotzebue, where the locals called him Ivalu, which means sinew. He looks like a skinny Viking, with unkempt blond hair and a full beard, all of it framing an almost constant smile and crinkling blue eyes.

Today Steiner is not smiling. His territory—which ranges along more than 4,000 miles of the world's most pristine coastline—has just suffered the worst oil spill in the continent's history. Steiner gets to his desk and starts collecting as much information as he can by telephone. As he talks, he looks down at the water below his office, where an otter he has watched for three years floats on its back, cracking open a crab. The news over the phone doesn't get any better. He sees one knot of fishermen gather, then another. Abruptly he stands and goes outside to plug into the dock talk, then heads down to the union hall three blocks away.

The offices of the Cordova District Fishermen's United are quiet. Steiner finds four people there, all apparently in a state of shock. CDFU Executive Director Marilyn Leland is listening to someone on the phone. The other three will eventually wind up with Steiner in the Valdez command post: Jack Lamb, David Grimes, and Jeff Guard.

Blocky, clean-shaven Jack Lamb, father of three, is the only married man among the four. A former salmon gill-netter who now owns and operates a 66-foot tender, the Poncho, he has lived in Cordova for 26 of his 43 years. He has one artificial leg. Generally Lamb is conventional, but he has panicked more than one skipper by nonchalantly dangling his prosthesis over the gunwale to absorb the shock of collision between his tender and vessels that come alongside.

Jeff Guard, 30, is the quartet's angry young man. This, he says, has been his winter of discontent. Until the oil spill, he has been going at it tooth and nail with the timber industry, which he says is priming Prince William Sound for clear-cut logging like they've done down in the Tongass. Guard says he's just a fisherman who was never involved in politics until he found out what they're planning to do to the woods up here. "And now this," he says. "Prince William Sound is being raped on both sides of the waterline."

David Grimes, 35 years old, six-foot-two, wears his brown hair in a ponytail. He has blue eyes and a tanned, chiseled face. Outdoors he wears thongs, indoors he's usually barefoot. A native of the Missouri Ozarks, he is fresh back from wandering the jungles of New Guinea, where tribal girls sang as they patted flour cakes on rocks, boys chanted to the rhythm of dugout paddles, and Grimes carried a penny whistle to mimic the call of the bird of paradise. He is a salmon and herring fisherman, a wilderness guide, a river runner, a mountaineer, and a musician. He is an articulate gypsy. Above all, he is a spiritualist. To him, Prince William Sound is a Gaian heart—the clear, plankton-rich Gulf of Alaska water pulsing into the southeast side of the sound, swirling through the tidal valves, feeding the higher forms of life, and flushing out through the Montague and Knight Island straits on the southwest. To him, the oil spill is a clot in this remarkable heart.