He flipped through some papers and located a map. With his disheveled brown hair falling into his eyes, the strands at least six weeks past the need for a trim, and the glasses already slipping again, he looked a little like an absentminded professor as he unfolded the map and studied it. “Here.” He pointed to a circle in red ink. “Here’s Anchorage. See it? We’re going to land there, then take a float plane up King Solomon River to…here.” He tapped his long, work-roughened finger on another spot on the map. “There we’re going to be dropped off at a spot where we can rent a Jeep and ride up a short road to Hideaway.”

Apt name for a B &B in the wilds of Alaska, I decided.

He looked up, his eyes meeting mine. “You know all this already.”

Yes, and I knew that in this current leg of the trip, we were heading nearly three hundred air miles to the Alaska Peninsula, directly into unspoiled, unpopulated wilderness.

No highway system touched the area. Access was by small plane only.

Unimaginable.

And yet here we were. Willingly heading into isolation, into unstable weather, into an area where even the winds could be life threatening, where time seemed to be measured in terms of pre- and postvolcanic eruption, judging by all the articles I’d read.

Good God. Volcanic eruption…

“Somehow it all seemed far less threatening from inside my apartment,” I said, “surrounded by four walls and electricity, with the comforting sounds of traffic coming in my window.”

“No traffic here.” Kellan leaned over me and glanced out the window, his bony shoulder poking me. “Unless you count the four-legged variety.”

“Oh God.” This was a whole new horror I hadn’t considered. I looked down at my pink ruffled top and Capri jeans. Not much protection against wild animals. “You think there’ll be wolves?”

“I was thinking even bigger.”

“Moose,” I said. Were moose friends or foes?