This particular hell is due to the outfitter's needing to catch up with a weather-induced backlog of hunters awaiting transport into or out of the bush. I am on this hunt at the invitation of a buddy, David Draper, who works for Cabela's, and whom I last saw at an ice-fishing festival in Brainerd, Minn., where he had taken off most of his clothes in an effort to raise beer money by posing for photographs. (It is a measure of Cabela's strength that it can dominate the outdoor market with somebody like Draper on the payroll.) At the moment, I'm trying to keep from strangling him. For the last hour, every time the show's laugh track has gone off, Draper has joined in with a reflexive, mirthless, and identical giggle of his own. If it keeps up, I may have no alternative. He now resembles nothing so much as a recently dissected frog, something dead that nonetheless continues to kick if poked in the right spot. And what makes it worse is that the four other guys, whom I just met, don't seem to be bothered by it in the least. Which makes me think they are crazy, too.

Crazy in Kotzebue
Truth is, we've all veered off the track. Kotzebue, which lies a few miles north of the Arctic Circle and is the jumping-off point for a good chunk of northwest Alaska, is a dreary little village of peeling houses landscaped with old shipping crates and rusting heavy equipment parts. We arrived at 7:30 a.m. three days ago on the early flight from Anchorage, expecting to be out of here and into camp by noon. But a previous stretch of bad weather (even by Alaskan standards) had backed up the hunters ahead of us going in and coming out of the bush. So we are sitting in the outfitter's rental holding tank, waiting for the word to mount up that never comes. We drink coffee until noon, switch to beer after, and watch one of three channels on satellite TV all day. We fight over the one bed and floor space each night, listen to sled dogs on short ropes 12 feet outside our window bark all night (average bark rate by my watch: 80 times a minute), and eat gummy, insanely overpriced Chinese food in restaurants run by Koreans (don't ask).