The Koktuli River rises in the flatlands at the base of the Jackrabbit Hills and winds like a snake to join the Mulchatna. Not far downstream from this bend, splinter bands of a herd of caribou, 45,000 strong, cross on their way to summer range. The sockeye run here in July, lighting the waters a brilliant ruby red, and even a few giant kings end up in its deeper holes. Chum salmon roll and thrash in the shallows, spawned out and waiting for the bears. You can hear the wolves that follow the caribou herd, howling in the endless summer afternoons.

In the wide open country here, from a bush plane, it's easy to see how it all really works. Thousands of trails made by caribou vein the land. Rivers wind and braid, shifting everything southward, to the great magnet of the ocean. The Koktuli pours into the Mulchatna, the Mulchatna pours into the Nushugak, the Nushugak (born in the Alaska Range from the glaciers of 20,000-foot Mount McKinley over 200 miles away) delivers all the waters of the interior to Bristol Bay, and on to the ocean. All five of the Pacific salmon spawn in this watershed: the kings, silvers, sockeyes, chums, and pinks, the accumulated energy of the seas, pouring upstream every summer and back into the land.