John Herschleb, skipper of the Pagan, slumps in the wheelhouse of his boat. He has heard that the 15 or so fishing vessels trying to protect the sound's hundreds of miles of threatened shoreline have been dubbed "the mosquito fleet," and that's what he feels like. He feels desperate and strong, like he should be able to do something. "But there's such a futility to it all," he tells Corral.

Corral goes ashore on Knight Island. Six waterfowl have beached themselves and are trying to preen, but when he tries to work close enough for photographs, they flush back into the sea, into the oil. He grimaces. He won't do that again.

Along the beach he finds two dead loons, a scoter, a merganser. Over a small rise he sees a frozen waterfall, an icicle-walled cliff irresistible to his photographer's eye. He shoots it until, shifting to another vantage, he comes across a deer carcass and bear tracks and scat. Uneasy, he retreats over the rise and sees a bald eagle, its golden talons oiled black, lifting off the beach, leaving behind the half-eaten body of an oil­-smothered bird

Corral goes down and looks at the wet red against the wet black. He knows that no one can really feel what has happened here unless they come out into the sound, into the sensuousness of it.

He needs a break. Three helicopters have landed down the beach, and he bums a ride back into Valdez. On the way, riding high, he sees the oil from the air for the first time. Ahead and below is a single boat, towing a length of floating containment boom. For perspective, he holds his right hand at arm's length and measures between thumb and forefinger. The boat is a quarter of an inch high. Then he spreads his arms as wide as they will go, but he can't measure the oil.

Ultimately, the fishermen's defense saves the hatcheries and helps protect some of the bays and spawning-stream estuaries. In the meantime, however, the oil slick grows to 750 square miles, then to 1,000, then to 2,500 and beyond.

In what Grimes calls a heart of the earth, there is a clot. The fishermen have no way of knowing whether the shoreline, the wildlife, or the fisheries will recover. The answers are probably years and hundreds of millions of dollars in the future.

"I guess the satisfaction is in knowing that we've done what we could," says Lamb. "This is our home. I don't know how we could have stood it if we couldn't have fought."

Grimes has found himself looking at life much differently the past couple of days. He has sensed the shiftings, from outrage to resistance to concession to faint hope. He looks to the future and wonders whether the ripple from Prince William Sound will jolt us, help us realize just how much killing power we have in our complacency.

"For those of us here," he says, "life has taken on an utter clarity, because in the face of something like this you have to drop all the white lies of your life and know who you are."

It is two o'clock of another morning, and Grimes is exhausted, almost unconscious. "The world may lose a last best place," he says.

Steiner scratches his beard. "Iarossi says he's going to polish every single rock."

"It won't be the same rock," Grimes replies. "Even if you scrape off every drop, it won't be the same rock."

"Well, we'll hold him to it anyway."

"Yeah." As if sleepwalking, Grimes barefoots over to a cassette player on the floor and puts in a tape he made during his New Guinea trip. He stands there for a while, listening to the song of the girls patting flour cakes onto the rocks, the chant of the boys to the rhythm of their dugout paddles, and the fluting call of a bird of paradise.

"Life is music," —he says, "and we have to sing the song we are."

Then he crawls under the magistrate's table, stretches out full length, and falls asleep.