There’s no police tape across Michael Mann’s office doorway this morning. “Always a good start,” he says, juggling a cup of coffee as he slides his key into the lock.

Mann, a paleoclimatologist, wears a sport coat over a turtleneck. As he takes a seat at his desk, a narrow sunbeam angles through the window, spotlighting a jumble of books, journals and correspondence. Behind him, a framed picture of his six-year-old daughter rests near a certificate for the Nobel Peace Prize he shared in 2007. Propped into a corner is a hockey stick, a post-lecture gift from Middlebury College, which Mann jokingly says he keeps “for self-defense.”

Mann directs Penn State University’s Earth System Science Center. Several months ago, he arrived at his office with an armload of mail. Sitting at his desk, he tore open a hand-addressed envelope and began to pull out a letter. He watched as a small mass of white powder cascaded out of the folds and onto his fingers. Mann jerked backward, letting the letter drop and holding his breath as a tiny plume of particles wafted up, sparkling in the sunlight. He rose quickly and left the office, pulling the door shut behind him. “I went down to the restroom and washed my hands,” he says. “Then I called the police.”

For someone describing an anthrax scare, Mann is surprisingly nonchalant. “I guess,” he says, “it’s so much a part of my life that I don’t even realize how weird it is.”

“Weird” is perhaps the mildest way to describe the growing number of threats and acts of intimidation that climate scientists face. A climate modeler at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory answered a late-night knock to find a dead rat on his doorstep and a yellow Hummer speeding away. An MIT hurricane researcher found his inbox flooded daily for two weeks last January with hate mail and threats directed at him and his wife. And in Australia last year, officials relocated several climatologists to a secure facility after climate-change skeptics unleashed a barrage of vandalism, noose brandishing and threats of sexual attacks on the scientists’ children.

Read the rest of the story in Popular Science

The post Battle Over Climate Science appeared first on .

Wyoming-based conservationist funds a mercenary force to combat Sudanese wildlife poachers in the Central African Republic. The mercenaries have permission to shoot poachers on sight. NPR’s Bob Edwards reports.

Listen to the full interview via NPR.org.

The post NPR’s Morning Edition appeared first on .

The post Appearances appeared first on .

Journalist Tom Clynes’s “The Boy Who Played With Fusion” will recount Taylor Wilson’s unlikely (and successful) quest to build his own nuclear fusion reactor at the age of 14. Now 17, Taylor has since won nine Intel Science awards, spoken at TED, and developed lifesaving innovations in medicine and national security. Through Taylor’s story, Clynes will explore the challenges facing gifted children and the burgeoning world of amateur science.

North American rights sold at auction to Eamon Dolan at Eamon Dolan Books (an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) for publication in 2014, by David McCormick at McCormick & Williams Literary Agency (NA). Film and tv: borowitzD@unitedtalent.com

From:

The post Upcoming Book: The Boy Who Played with Fusion appeared first on .

POPULAR SCIENCE: “Propulsion,” the nine-year-old says as he leads his dad through the gates of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “I just want to see the propulsion stuff.”

A young woman guides their group toward a full-scale replica of the massive Saturn V rocket that brought America to the moon. As they duck under the exhaust nozzles, Kenneth Wilson glances at his awestruck boy and feels his burden beginning to lighten. For a few minutes, at least, someone else will feed his son’s boundless appetite for knowledge.

Then Taylor raises his hand, not with a question but an answer. He knows what makes this thing, the biggest rocket ever launched, go up. And he wants—no, he obviously needs—to tell everyone about it, about how speed relates to exhaust velocity and dynamic mass, about payload ratios, about the pros and cons of liquid versus solid fuel. The tour guide takes a step back, yielding the floor to this slender kid with a deep-Arkansas drawl, pouring out a torrent of Ph.D.-level concepts as if there might not be enough seconds in the day to blurt it all out. The other adults take a step back too, perhaps jolted off balance by the incongruities of age and audacity, intelligence and exuberance.

As the guide runs off to fetch the center’s director—You gotta see this kid!—Kenneth feels the weight coming down on him again. What he doesn’t understand just yet is that he will come to look back on these days as the uncomplicated ones, when his scary-smart son was into simple things, like rocket science.

This is before Taylor would transform the family’s garage into a mysterious, glow-in-the-dark cache of rocks and metals and liquids with unimaginable powers. Before he would conceive, in a series of unlikely epiphanies, new ways to use neutrons to confront some of the biggest challenges of our time: cancer and nuclear terrorism. Before he would build a reactor that could hurl atoms together in a 500-million-degree plasma core—becoming, at 14, the youngest individual on Earth to achieve nuclear fusion.

Read the rest in Popular Science

Click photo above to see slide show.

The post The Boy Who Played With Fusion appeared first on .

Tom Clynes’s first book, “Wild Planet!” (1995, Visible Ink Press) provides access to the world’s extraordinary events for travelers who want to participate in the life and culture of the places they visit. You could call this book a collection of the earth’s amazing moments: festivals, celebration, ceremonies, and other gatherings that capture locales when they’re at their most brilliant, open, artistic, musical – when they’re most alive.

Buy on Amazon.com

The post Wild Planet! appeared first on .

Felisa Wolfe-Simon at Mono Lake, California, where collected the GFAJ-1 bacterium. Her paper in the journal Science, which suggested that the microbe could substitue arsenic for phosphorus, generated significant controversy in the scientific community. Click photo for slide show.

This should have been Felisa Wolfe-Simon’s moment in the sun. But as the television crew takes positions, the 34-year-old scientist glances at the gray, churned-up lake behind her and gathers her collar around her neck. On cue, she begins her explanation of this lake’s unique chemistry, her voice rising in volume and pitch above the wind.

She’s halfway through the take when the gulls arrive. They swoop and swirl above the shoreline in a swarm, calling in harsh, jeering tones that drown out her carefully chosen words. As the sound technician pulls off her headphones in frustration, the director Oliver Twinch halts the taping and ventures a smile in Wolfe-Simon’s direction. “How about we try that one again?” he says.

“I think we’ll have to move,” Wolfe-Simon says, peering down toward her boots. “I’m sinking in the mud.”

It is this mud, and the peculiar microbes in it, that have stuck Wolfe-Simon in the middle of one of the most extraordinary scientific disputes in recent memory. Last December, at a highly publicized NASA press briefing, Wolfe-Simon announced that her research team had isolated bacteria from Mono Lake, on the edge of California’s Eastern Sierra mountain range, that could subsist on arsenic in place of phosphorus, one of the elements considered essential for all life.

The research, financed mostly by NASA and published initially in the online edition of Science, jolted the scientific community. If confirmed, scientists said, the discovery would mean that this high mountain lake hosts a form of life distinct from all others known on Earth. It would open up the possibility of a shadow biosphere, composed of organisms that can survive using means that long-accepted rules of biochemistry cannot explain. And it would give Mono Lake, rather than Mars or one of Jupiter’s moons, the distinction of being the first place in our solar system where “alien” life was discovered.

This should have been Felisa Wolfe-Simon’s moment in the sun.But within days, researchers began to question Wolfe-Simon’s methodology and conclusions. Many of them cast aside traditions of measured commentary in peer reviewed periodicals and voiced their criticism directly on blogs and Twitter. Then, asthe conflict spilled into the mainstream, the scientific community witnessed something few would have predicted: meaningful public engagement over a serious scientific issue. For several days, at least, a good many watercooler conversations revolved around the metabolic capabilities of a Gammaproteobacterium.

Among academics, the debate devolved into something more vitriolic and personal. One researcher questioned whether Wolfe-Simon and her team were “bad scientists.” Another called her work “science fiction.” One blog post bore the title “Is Felisa Wolfe-Simon an Alien?”

In early June, a few days before going to Mono Lake, Wolfe-Simon and I met at a café in Palo Alto. Standing just over five feet tall, she has curly brown hair and wears a tiny diamond stud in her nose. She ordered an espresso at the counter, sat down, and pulled a digital audio recorder from her bag.

“Mind if I tape this?” she asked.

Wolfe-Simon had spent much of the previous six months avoiding the media, insisting that she and her colleagues needed to focus on their formal “technical response” to the criticisms leveled against them. The months we’d spent negotiating this face-to-face interview had featured several last-minute cancellations, including one issued when I was on the plane out to meet her. She told me she had been misquoted and misunderstood by both her scientific peers and reporters who focused heavily on the doubts raised about her work, while disregarding its strengths. Hence the recorder. “Now I understand what’s going on,” she told me, “when you see ‘So-and-so’s office has been contacted, but they will have no comment.’ ”

Wolfe-Simon has learned to be cautious in her dealings with the media—she has learned that it can be dangerous to reveal too much of herself—but she does have comment. The daughter of trumpet players, she earned two bachelor’s degrees from Oberlin College, one in oboe performance and one in biology (with a chemistry minor). When she talks about the process of science, she talks about rigor, the need to build in yourself the tools necessary to answer the questions you ask. She talks about endless repetition. “When musicians go up there and it looks like they’re having fun,” she says, “what you’re seeing are the long hours in the practice room.” She says this in a way that suggests that to her it’s the long hours that are fun, or at least deeply satisfying. “Science isn’t easy,” she says. “But there’s a joy and synergy in coming to a deeper understanding of the nature around you.”

After graduating from Oberlin, she earned a Ph.D. in oceanography from Rutgers University. She studied algae and phytoplankton to better understand how organisms evolved to use metals, such as iron and manganese, for biological functions. During a postdoctoral fellowship in which she split her time between Arizona State and Harvard universities, Wolfe-Simon began to describe herself as a geobiochemist and to edge her research into the growing field of astrobiology, which involves the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe. “I could see that you can be smart in science, but it will only get you to a certain point,” she says. “The really smart scientists were the ones asking the best questions, the very big, very simple questions.”

For Wolfe-Simon, the question was, How flexible is life? Every known living thing on Earth shares certain chemical and biological characteristics: They all ingest some form of energy, use it, and release it in a different form. They all use the same 20 amino acids to build the proteins that enable that activity, and they all use DNA and RNA molecules to store genetic information. And as far as scientists have found, they all require six elements—carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur—to survive. Within those constraints, though, are many variations. For instance, our blood contains iron—that’s why it’s red—to ferry oxygen around, but blue-blooded crustaceans use copper. Most living things use oxygen to burn sugar for energy, but some, including many bacteria, use nitrogen or sulfur.

Still, no organism has been discovered that can survive without phosphorus. The phosphate ion maintains the structure of DNA and RNA, combines with lipids to make cell membranes, and conveys energy through the molecule adenosine triphosphate.

Arsenic, directly beneath phosphorus on the periodic table, is so similar to its neighbor that cells often mistake it for phosphorus—with fatal results. In 2009, Wolfe-Simon co-authored a paper in the International Journal of Astrobiology hypothesizing that “ancient biochemical systems . . . could have utilized arsenate in the equivalent biological role as phosphate. Organisms utilizing such ‘weird life’ biochemical pathways may have supported a ‘shadow biosphere’ at the time of the origin and early evolution of life on Earth or on other planets. Such organisms may even persist on Earth today, undetected, in unusual niches.”

“They carried out science by press release. They are now hypocritical if they say that the only response should be in the scientific literature.”Wolfe-Simon’s knee-high boots crunch along Mono Lake’s salt-crusted shore, making the only sound in what is certainly a very unusual place. Snowy peaks and volcanic hills line the horizon and funnel mineral-rich water down from the high country and into the lake, which has no natural outlet. As the water evaporates, the minerals become increasingly concentrated, giving the lake its elevated levels of alkalinity and, in certain coves, high levels of arsenic. In some places, tufas, crinkled spires of calcium carbonate, rise from the water.

Wolfe-Simon says that “otherworldly” is the word that came to mind when she first visited the lake in 2009 on a grant from NASA’s Astrobiology Institute. She was there with several other researchers, including Ronald Oremland, a senior scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park who has studied the biogeochemistry of Mono Lake for 30 years. The two had met at a conference in 2006. “She was always persistent,” Oremland says. “She kept on talking about arsenic substituting for phosphorus. Every two years, her argument became a little more complicated and a little more compelling. Finally, I said, ‘Look, I don’t think this is going to work, but it might. Come on out to the lake—what have we got to lose?’ ”

Now, for the first time since last summer, Wolfe-Simon has returned, not to do fieldwork but to pretend to do it for the benefit of a two-part Nova television documentary that will air this fall when NASA launches its Mars Science Laboratory, a mission to determine the habitability of the Red Planet and to search for chemical signatures of life. The video crew has flown in from London for what will turn out to be a one-day shoot.

At Wolfe-Simon’s invitation, I had arranged to come along. I was intrigued by the prospect of seeing the media and entertainment side of NASA at work, but when the space agency learned of the invitation, it promptly retracted it. I came anyway, figuring that I shouldn’t need permission to attend a taxpayer-funded shoot on public property.

Wolfe-Simon has spent much of the morning arguing with the video crew—about the schedule, the placement of props, and how far she’ll wade into the lake. As she crouches to retrieve a collection tube from the water, she looks like she’d rather be anywhere else.

A few days earlier, her life seemed to be calming down. Then Science republished her paper in its print edition, followed by eight “technical comments” that formally raised many of the criticisms circulating in the blogosphere, and capped off by her research team’s defense. Wolfe-Simon found herself besieged again by a new round of criticisms and interview requests from media outlets in half a dozen time zones.

With the camera following her movements, she takes a sample over to a microscope and loads a slide. On Twinch’s instructions, she peers into the eyepiece. “Now let’s have you do a bit of knob-twiddling,” he says, “and let’s have you look up so we can see your eyes.” She scowls. “Can we just hurry it up?” she says.

Shortly after her first visit to Mono Lake, Wolfe-Simon joined Oremland’s lab. There, she took the samples from the lake and added the sediment to a series of test tubes. She mixed vitamins, sugars and salts into sterile water to mimic the mineral composition of Mono Lake. Those were the controls.

To some of the samples, she added arsenic but left out phosphorus. To a different batch, she added phosphorus but left out arsenic. Then she watched the samples for signs of growth. Nothing grew in the control tubes that lacked phosphorus and arsenic, but one bacterium, a strain of Halomonadaceae, seemed to grow in the arsenic environment. (It also grew in the phosphorus one.) After isolating the microbe, Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues needed to give it a name. Joking around late one night, they settled on GFAJ-1—short for “get Felisa a job.”

Wolfe-Simon started boosting the arsenic, wondering how much the bacteria could tolerate. As she steadily brought the level up, ultimately to 500,000 times the limit for EPA-regulated drinking water, she began wearing a second pair of gloves. She says that every day she entered the lab, she expected to find the bacteria dead. But it continued to grow.

Thinking that the results might be an error, the team repeated the experiment multiple times. “We were pretty self-critical the entire time,” she says. But after six trials, GFAJ-1 seemed clearly able to survive and reproduce using arsenic instead of phosphorus. The question was: how?

To find out whether, and in what way, GFAJ-1 was incorporating arsenic into its biochemical machinery, Wolfe-Simon would need collaborators outside her field. Among the first colleagues she contacted was Samuel Webb, a beam-line scientist at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource. Located in the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Palo Alto, the synchrotron can be used to determine the molecular structure of a sample. The device circulates electrons in a vacuum at nearly light speed until ejecting them into one of 30 experimental stations, producing the high-intensity x-rays needed to elucidate molecular structures.

A few days before the shoot at Mono Lake, Wolfe-Simon gave me a tour of the place. We entered the huge, circular building that encloses the synchrotron’s 768-foot acceleration ring and made our way toward the instrument hutch where Webb bombards biological and medical samples with x-rays. As we traced the ring halfway around the building, Wolfe-Simon told me, “This is what we did when we were up late waiting for results.”

To take full advantage of their allotted beam time, Wolfe-Simon and Webb worked in stints of up to 72 hours, setting up experiments and then sealing the leadlined door and directing the narrow beam of x-rays at the GFAJ-1 cells. Webb used two tests, x-ray fluorescence imaging and extended x-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) imaging, to determine the location and chemical structure of arsenic in the GFAJ-1 cells.

“I had thought we’d see some free arsenic in the cells,” Webb would tell me later, “but the data were showing that the arsenic was being chemically bound in the cells in a way that’s consistent with the role you’d expect phosphorus to play. It’s not a golden bullet that absolutely proves it’s in the DNA, but it’s definitely some very interesting chemistry that’s different than anything we’ve ever seen. It certainly looks like arsenic is capable of performing phosphorus’s job in the cell.”

Wolfe-Simon also took GFAJ-1 to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Arizona State University and Duquesne University. She and the paper’s 11 co-authors used inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry to confirm that arsenic was inside bacterial cells, rather than just a contaminant fixed to the exterior of the cells. They used radioactive labeling to determine that arsenic existed within the protein, lipid, nucleic acid and metabolite fractions of the cells.

“At that point,” Oremland says, “we were getting out of the doubting stage.” With encouragement from her collaborators, Wolfe-Simon wrote up the results and submitted the paper to Science. “I would have loved to have had an additional two or three experiments,” she says. “But we had six lines of evidence that this microbe was doing something new. It seemed to be a story that held together. It seemed like something we should tell our friends about.”

On November 29, NASA’s media team posted an enigmatic announcement: The agency would hold a news conference at 2 p.m. the following Thursday, “to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.” (“For just a few days,” science writer Carl Zimmer later wrote on the Web magazine Slate, “a lot of us wondered if NASA had discovered aliens.”) Although NASA awards about $50 million annually in astrobiology grants—many of which have produced newsworthy results—it has shied away from big announcements about extraterrestrial life since 1996.

That year, the space agency issued a press release announcing that scientists had identified features consistent with extraterrestrial life in a Martian meteorite. By the time David McKay, the lead researcher, reported his findings at a news conference a few days later, the media had already made up its mind. Though McKay never claimed absolute certainty that the meteorite had contained living microbes, news outlets ran with the proof-of-extraterrestrial-life story.

As quickly as McKay’s work was lauded (President Clinton even praised the results on the White House lawn) the scientific community began tearing into it, citing contamination issues and the fact that no microbes as small as McKay’s reported microfossil had previously been found. “The media had trouble getting their arms around the story and seeing what was really there,” McKay told me. “They jumped on every sensational criticism of our story, and what people are left with is that ‘life on Mars’ has been disproved—even though a lot of what supposedly disproved our story has itself been disproved.” Since then, NASA has taken a measured approach to its astrobiology announcements—at least until it learned about Wolfe-Simon’s paper.

By the time Wolfe-Simon took her seat at NASA’s news conference on December 2, science-related websites had been abuzz for four days. General interest outlets such as Gawker and Fox News had joined the speculation as well, running headlines and segments about the discovery of “alien life.”

Although NASA brought chemist Steven Benner, who heads the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, to offer a skeptical counterpoint (“I’m the curmudgeon chemist,” he said at the conference, “brought in to throw wet blankets on things and dampen some of the enthusiasm”), his perspective was largely drowned out by the prevailing hype.

“I can’t bring myself to watch the conference again.”“[It’s] not life as we know it,” said Mary Voytek, director of NASA’s astrobiology program, who said at the conference that science textbooks might now have to be rewritten. She called the discovery “a huge deal” and compared it with the Star Trek episode in which the Enterprise crew finds Horta, an alien life-form that they can’t detect with tricorders because it’s based on silicon rather than carbon. Later that day, Edward Weiler, NASA’s associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, said, “The definition of life has just expanded.”

Wolfe-Simon’s performance came off as both patronizing and overly dramatic. She seemed more concerned with defining her discovery’s place in history than offering a clear-headed explanation of the paper’s findings. “We’ve cracked open the door to what’s possible for life elsewhere in the universe,” she said. “What else might we find?”

“I can’t bring myself to watch [the conference] again,” says Oremland, who didn’t attend. “There was a tone of arrogance, and they seemed carried away, feeding the desire to make something more of it. There were mixed messages. An entirely new microorganism? Wrong. Thriving on arsenic? No—it managed to make do. An example of hidden life-forms? We have no proof.”

As Oremland correctly notes, the paper was actually quite understated and conservatively written. But reporters mirrored the oversimplified urgency of NASA’s press conference; “alien life discovered on Earth” was the dominant theme. Soon Wolfe-Simon began to crop up in stories that seemed more related to celebrity than science. Time magazine selected her as one of its Time 100, an annual list of “the most influential people in the world.” Glamour interviewed her for a “5-Minute Mentor” column titled “This Rising Star’s Four Rules for You.” She says her inbox swelled by hundreds of e-mails every couple of hours.

Meanwhile, the initial tide of astonishment quickly turned to skepticism, with academics claiming that the paper had overreached. Some, including Benner, didn’t believe that the team had found an exception to one of the fundamental rules of life on Earth. “Their hypothesis would, if true, set aside nearly a century of chemical data concerning arsenate and phosphate molecules,” he wrote in one of the responses published in Science. He and other chemists objected that the arsenic linkages purportedly holding the DNA of GFAJ-1 together would quickly fall apart in water. Also, critics said, arsenic in the cytoplasm would be reduced to arsenite, which wouldn’t be able to substitute for phosphorus.

Other researchers suggested that mineral salts in the bacterial cultures could have contributed enough phosphorus to meet the needs of GFAJ-1—although Wolfe-Simon counters that in her control batches, similarly minute levels of phosphorus couldn’t fuel the microbe’s growth or even sustain its life.

Rosie Redfield, a microbiologist at the University of British Columbia, led the criticism, with her blog, RRResearch, becoming a clearinghouse for challenges to the paper. Redfield called the research “a shabby trick,” with “lots of flim-flam, but very little reliable information.” She said, “I was shocked at how bad the science was. If this data was presented by Ph.D. students at their committee meeting, I’d send them back to the bench to do more cleanup and controls.” Redfield was also the one to publish the “Is Felisa Wolfe-Simon an Alien?” post, which was an anonymous undergraduate essay that satirically suggested that Wolfe-Simon wrote a deeply flawed paper to discredit more serious research into the existence of alien beings like herself.

Redfield’s technical criticisms—that trace phosphorus in the culture media could have fueled GFAJ’s growth, and that Wolfe-Simon had inadequately purified the DNA—degenerated into speculation about the motivations of Wolfe-Simon and her co-authors, as well as those of NASA and Science. “I don’t know whether the authors are just bad scientists,” she wrote, “or whether they’re unscrupulously pushing NASA’s ‘There’s life in outer space!’ agenda.”

Overwhelmed with questions from the media, Wolfe-Simon went underground. Guided by NASA’s PR team, she and Oremland and the paper’s other co-authors began citing NASA spokesperson Dwayne Brown’s position that the authors would not be responding to individual criticisms. The agency, Brown said, didn’t feel it appropriate to debate science using the media and bloggers. Discourse should occur in scientific publications.

“I wasn’t hiding, but I didn’t want to get involved in a Jerry Springer situation, with people throwing chairs,” Oremland says. “There are hundreds of blogs some viable and some off the wall, and they all want an immediate response. To try to engage in scientific commentary that way seems like a descent into madness.”

Microbiologist Jonathan Eisen of the University of California at Davis called the lack of response “absurd” and told Carl Zimmer from Slate, “They carried out science by press release and press conference. They are now hypocritical if they say that the only response should be in the scientific literature.”

In a short article that appeared in Science in late December, Wolfe-Simon asked for time and patience, writing that she wanted “to be able to have that discourse in the scientific community, as a record.” But her appearances in Time and Glamour only seemed to fuel the indignation. (Here’s science writer Ed Yong’s response to the latter in a post on Discover magazine’s website: “Felisa Wolfe-Simon wouldn’t discuss her arsenic-life findings with the press, but she’s happy to share keys to success with Glamour. Wikipedia has this to say on glamour: ‘Glamour originally was a magical-occult spell . . . Today, glamour is the impression of attraction or fascination that a particularly luxurious or elegant appearance creates, an impression which is better than the reality.’ Mm-hmm.”) In March, Wolfe-Simon spoke at the glamorous annual thought-leader summit known as the TED Conference, touting the transformative potential of her findings but neglecting to mention her critics, a performance that also didn’t sit well in certain circles.

With Science’s June publication of the formal critiques and technical response, the debate moved briefly from the blogs back to the scientific literature. The eight criticisms focused mostly on the possibility of contamination and on whether arsenate compounds would be stable enough to survive in the cells.

Redfield presented calculations that supported her assertions that trace amounts of phosphorus in the mineral salts in the culture media would be enough to fuel GFAJ-1’s growth. In their response, Wolfe-Simon and her co-authors wrote that background phosphorus levels weren’t high enough to create all the necessary biomolecules required for growth. Addressing the stability question, Wolfe-Simon cited two new papers by other researchers, each of which suggested that DNA with arsenic could indeed retain its phosphorus-based structure.

To corroborate her results, Wolfe-Simon is collaborating with researchers who plan to subject the microbes to mass spectrometry, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and genomic sequencing. She says she has also been encouraging independent studies. Oremland has fulfilled about 10 of the more than 40 requests he has received for samples.

One sample went to Redfield, who has, characteristically, posted regular blog updates throughout the experimental process—most notably an installment on August 2 entitled “First evidence refuting Wolfe-Simon et al.’s results.” She replicated Wolfe-Simon’s experiment using a medium that contained trace amounts of phosphorus similar to what GFAJ-1 would have encountered in Wolfe-Simon’s arsenic sample—but without the arsenic. “The sample grew just fine,” Redfield says. “I went into this with a very strong expectation that the arsenic results would not be reproducible, so I wasn’t surprised by the findings. I assume the things I see, other researchers will too.” Of course, it’s worth noting that these are preliminary results, not yet submitted for journal publication or subjected to rigorous peer review.

“The results of our study were interpreted in ways that we had not intended,” Wolfe-Simon tells me in a phone conversation a few weeks after the shoot at Mono Lake. “GFAJ-1 is not ‘weird life,’ nor do we ever state that. It is not alien or anything like that—again, nothing we ever say. Our paper shows compelling data that suggest that GFAJ-1 can use arsenic in a similar way to phosphate in its major biomolecules.”

One reason for the confusion, she says, could be the explanatory video NASA produced for the press conference, which shows all the DNA’s phosphorus atoms being replaced by arsenic. “It clearly says ‘artist’s interpretation,’ ” she says, “but maybe that doesn’t work for biology. With astronomy, people seem to be comfortable looking at cartoons and not holding the scientists accountable for those purple planets. But with biology, it’s looked at as data.”

But in focusing on this one small feature of the press conference, Wolfe-Simon is casting culpability onto too narrow a target. She’s neglecting to notice that the entire affair was rife with oversimplification and unearned celebration. Add in the “extraterrestrial life” press release and the four-day media embargo and it’s clear that Wolfe-Simon was, like McKay before her, inadvertently set up to fail by pressures at NASA that have little to do with science.

Because NASA is dependent for funding on Congress, and therefore its constituents, it needs to project an ongoing sense of relevance. But the agency also needs to maintain its scientific credibility. The controversy over GFAJ-1 demonstrates the risks inherent when a scientific institution assumes a media role. NASA’s publicity blitz created expectations that weren’t matched by the paper’s data, and this vastly amplified the criticism that followed.

Dwayne Brown, the NASA spokesman, has said that the agency is comfortable with how it handled the affair, particularly the use of the term “extraterrestrial life.” In a story posted on the Embargo Watch blog, he said, “It’s easy to play Monday morning quarterback. However, the statement was accurate. The real issue is that the reporting world has changed because of the Internet/bloggers/social media, etc. A ‘buzz’ term like ET will have anyone with a computer putting out anything they want or feel. NASA didn’t hype anything—others did.”

Brown, too, appears to be willfully ignoring some of the facts. NASA’s media team did hype the arsenic-life findings—through the timing and wording of the press release, through the tone of the news conference, and through a follow-up tweet that claimed that the discovery “will change how we search for life elsewhere in the Universe.” Furthermore, many of the bloggers who he dismisses as “anyone with a computer” were in fact distinguished researchers and members of established media organizations. (Brown did not respond to several requests for comment fromPopular Science.)

Wolfe-Simon was at first reluctant to criticize the agency that writes her checks. But by July, her anger was beginning to show. “I’m not a NASA employee, and I’m not a vehicle for their ideas,” she told me. “They have their own agenda, which I have nothing to do with. I’m a pawn at best.”

While NASA deserves some blame for the arsenic life affair, scientists have also criticized Science. “Where were the peer reviewers, who should have seen the most obvious problems?” asks Michael Eisen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California at Berkeley (and brother of Jonathan Eisen). Yet there’s no indication that the paper’s reviewers were asleep at the switch. As is usual, the reviewers requested more research before accepting the paper. In line with their request, Wolfe-Simon and her co-publishers used high-resolution secondary ion mass spectrometry to confirm that the isolated DNA contained arsenic.

Bruce Alberts, the editor in chief of Science, wrote in a statement accompanying the print edition that “the fact that the paper received so much feedback suggests to us that science is proceeding as it should.” Later, though, he conceded that, in hindsight, he would have done things differently. “When we receive papers like this one that involve a set of specialized techniques from different laboratories,” he wrote in an e-mail, “we need to create a process to ensure that the reviewers who provide their feedback to us on the manuscript are sufficient—in aggregate—to deal with all of its many different aspects.”

No matter how the peer-review process is amended, the arsenic-life affair laid bare the challenges of scientific discourse in a new media age. The productive collision of ideas and personalities and opinions has long been refereed and filtered by science journals. If that process has made science seem, from a distance, civilized and rational, it has also made it slow and undemocratic. It can take months for a response to be published, if it is published at all. Now scientists are taking the review process into their own hands, creating a fluid communal verdict that’s both immediate and infinitely open to revision. Theoretically, at least, peer-review-by-blog has the potential to move science forward faster, humanize it, and communicate it more openly. But it also risks upending a system that provides a credible scientific record and an impartial forum for rigorous, professional and civil scientific debate.

“I still think science is the coolest thing on Earth,” Wolfe-Simon tells me when we meet the morning after the video shoot in a coffee shop overlooking Mono Lake in Lee Vining. “But it’s quite possible that my career is over.”

In June, Science reported that Wolfe-Simon had left Oremland’s USGS laboratory to look for a location with better molecular and genetic research facilities. “Actually,” Wolfe-Simon says, “I didn’t leave out of choice. Ron basically evicted me from the group. It was a political decision on his part that I don’t understand, and I didn’t see it coming.” Although she received a NASA fellowship in 2010 that provides support through 2013, she is still seeking a new home for her work.

I find it hard not to feel sympathy for her. In a matter of weeks she was catapulted to fame, then singled out and assaulted with professional and personal criticism, some of which resulted from missteps beyond her control. Wolfe-Simon is an early-career researcher in a field dominated by older men. Few scientists, no matter how established, would have the skills to navigate the situation that she found herself in. What made the level of criticism so extraordinary is that the paper, in itself, is not so flawed that it should not have been published. The argument was compelling, the conclusions were measured, the data was thorough, and the paper made it through the same peer-review process as other articles in Science.

Some who initially blasted Wolfe-Simon have since changed their mind. Blogger Alan Townsend, who directs the environmental studies program at the University of Colorado, says he was guilty of rash judgment, and that his preliminary opinions—expressed in writing and conversations with his colleagues—contributed to a response from the scientific community that was “often unprofessional, and at times became downright shameful.” He says, “Absent major ethical violations, no junior scientist full of passion for an idea deserves crucifixion for a professional failure or two. If a paper is flawed, it should be dismissed. The scientist should not.”

Even Redfield has struck a more conciliatory tone. In an e-mail to Wolfe-Simon following her initial critical burst, she wrote, “What matters in science isn’t whether we make mistakes (we all do) but how we handle them, and I think you’re handling the situation well.”

In Lee Vining, Wolfe-Simon and I settle into seats by a window, and again she pulls out her tape recorder. “This whole thing has been so strange,” she says. “ ‘Challenging’ doesn’t fully encompass the experience I’ve had in the past six months.”

It will take a few years to better answer the questions surrounding GFAJ-1. In the meantime, Benner—who says he would be “more than astonished” if arsenic replaces phosphorus in any genetically relevant molecule in GFAJ-1—says Wolfe-Simon’s hypothesis is ultimately useful if it motivates people to look in new places and ask bigger questions.

Wolfe-Simon says the paper’s publicity attracted new collaborators who she wouldn’t have otherwise met, some of whom are already analyzing GFAJ-1. And her fame has played out in surprising ways. Recently, her husband, Jonathan, an engineer, was speaking with a colleague who asked if he happened to be married to Felisa Wolfe-Simon. When he said yes, the colleague said, “My seven-year-old daughter dressed up as Felisa for her school’s science day!” The girl wore a sun hat, with her pants rolled up and flip-flops on her feet, dressed for a day wading the waters of Mono Lake in search of bacteria.

“As difficult as things have been in the past months for me personally,” Wolfe-Simon says, finishing her espresso, “if my work can make this little girl have that kind of inspiration, then maybe it’s all good.” She gazes out the window, at the flat, gray lake. “Then again, considering what’s happened, maybe now she’s thinking it’s not such a good idea after all. Maybe she should go into marketing.”

As the interview winds down, I ask Wolfe-Simon if she has any children of her own. She says she doesn’t but that she has a young niece she spends a lot of time doting on. “I know there will come a day,” she says, “when she will ask me two questions: Are we alone?And how did we get here? These are things that humans have been asking for a long time. And right now, we don’t know the answers.”

The post Scientist in a Strange Land appeared first on .

Virus hunter Nathan Wolfe, director of the Global Virus Forecasting Initiative (GVFI), and GVFI ecology coordinator Matthew LeBreton discuss field work in Cameroon. Click photo above for slide show.

It’s nearly midday when Brice Bidja steps out of the tangled forest surrounding the African village of Messok in southeastern Cameroon, gripping a Russian 12-gauge shotgun in one hand and the limp body of a mustached monkey in the other. Bidja usually returns alone after his hunts, but on this morning a handful of foreigners tags along with him as he approaches his mud-brick hut. Among the researchers, logisticians, and documentarians is American virologist Nathan Wolfe.

Wolfe stands just outside as the others duck through the low doorway; inside, the glare of the tropical sun gives way to an easy reddish glow of firelight on the faces of Bidja’s wife Sandrine and their two small children. Bidja sets the monkey down on a palm frond and pulls out a sheet of filter paper provided by Wolfe’s organization, the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative (GVFI). Sandrine crouches and picks up a machete, then slices off one of the animal’s front legs and holds it over the paper, aiming the dripping blood at five printed circles. Once the targets are saturated, the hunter tucks the blood sample into a ziplock bag filled with silica gel packets and hands the bag to one of Wolfe’s colleagues. The group will run tests later to see if the animal that Bidja and his family would soon devour is infected with a particularly nasty virus that could jump to humans, ultimately becoming the next deadly pandemic.

Sandrine thrusts the monkey’s leg into the flames, perfuming the hut with burnt hair and skin. She sets it aside and continues the butchery as the foreigners come in closer with their cameras and notepads, documenting the blade’s passage through legs and tail and neck. At the doorway, Bidja chats with Wolfe, their simple French mixing with the sounds of splitting bones and separating tendons. Sandrine begins to open the monkey’s rib cage with sharp hacks of her machete, each of which unleashes a fine spray of blood. It’s too much for one of the visitors, who darts outside and makes a panicked reach into her backpack, pulling out a bottle of antibiotic gel.

“Oh, good, you brought hand sanitizer,” Wolfe says, exaggerating a stifled smirk. “That’ll protect you, don’t worry.”

Meanwhile, Sandrine uses a smaller knife to finish readying every part of the monkey, except the entrails, for her family’s use. Seeing the children growing restless, she reaches into the animal’s chest cavity and cuts out its heart and liver. She tosses the floppy organs to the kids, who roll them in their hands like Silly Putty, showing them proudly to Wolfe.

Solidly built, with curly hair and plump, whiskered cheeks, Wolfe, 38, is at the muddy-boots vanguard of an ambitious movement that seeks to shift the way the world approaches disease control, from containing outbreaks to launching preemptive strikes against emerging viruses. “If we look at AIDS or smallpox or Ebola, or any of the really bad shit that has emerged over the past century,” says Wolfe, “the vast majority of these pathogens has passed from animals to us. What we’re trying to do now is get upstream, way upstream, and catch the next HIV before it can explode into a killer pandemic.”

To do that, Wolfe has spent much of the past decade running alongside hunters like Bidja, collecting blood from them and their prey. That he chose the wilderness of southeastern Cameroon — one of the most challenging environments on Earth — is no accident. It was here, scientists now believe, that a chimp virus that would mutate into HIV made its first foray into the blood of a hunter like Brice Bidja. From its unwitting first host it would fan out around the world with a deadly, methodical efficiency, infecting more than 60 million people.

Now Wolfe is taking his “viral surveillance” project on the road, fueled by a burst of grants that will allow him to set up shop in other tropical hot spots that have histories of spawning deadly viruses, including cholera, bird flu, and SARS. Eventually he aims to create a worldwide infrastructure to supply researchers with a steady stream of blood from “sentinel populations,” such as bush-meat hunters in Africa, poultry farmers in southeast Asia, or vendors in the Chinese “wet markets” where live animals are bought and sold for food.

“Nathan’s work will help us fill major gaps in our understanding of what viruses are coming out, on an almost real-time basis,” says Mark Smolinksi, director of the new Predict and Prevent Initiative from Google.org, the tech giant’s philanthropic arm, which backs GVFI. “It’s not going too far to say that Nathan could find the next HIV — hopefully while it’s still circulating in animal reservoirs and hasn’t fully made the transition into humans.”

—-

What’s driving interest in Wolfe’s work — and money to his projects — is the terrifying prospect that a new and unstoppable infectious disease could burst out of the jungle, blindsiding healthcare professionals and killing millions before an effective response can be organized. Of the more than 300 new infectious diseases that have struck humans since 1940, almost three-quarters have jumped from wild animals. The risks are increasing as modern societies stack the decks in favor of opportunistic microbes, with our closely packed cities, our changing climate, and our growing numbers of elderly.

Although science optimists predicted that serious infectious diseases would be conquered by now, the potential for outbreaks is growing as more global travelers carry viruses across borders. And as loggers and miners slash deeper into microbe-rich rain forests, more humans are coming into contact with animals that host rapidly mutating viruses.

Meanwhile, there is concern that global warming may be pushing “tropical” pathogens into temperate latitudes and mountain regions. Established scourges such as human monkeypox, dengue, and tuberculosis are staging comebacks, occasionally in drug-resistant strains that target people and places once thought to be exempt. West Nile virus, ensconced in Africa for thousands of years, first appeared in New York in 1999. Within three years it had made its way across the continent, becoming one of North America’s endemic diseases. In November of 2007 a biologist at Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona died of pneumonic plague — part of the Black Death that transformed medieval Europe into a vast, open-air morgue — after performing a necropsy on a mountain lion.

Even without factoring in potential bioterror agents, modern humans have created what Wolfe calls the ideal recipe for microbial emergence. And yet, though the next hemorrhagic fever may be just an intercontinental flight away, the global public-health system remains largely focused on responding to epidemics after they’ve taken off. That’s not rational, says Wolfe, who compares the current approach to that of cardiologists in the 1950s “just waiting for heart attacks to happen, then patching up the survivors with bypass surgery.”

—-

Wolfe grew up in suburban Detroit and studied biology at Stanford and Oxford before heading to Harvard for a Ph.D. in immunology and infectious diseases. In 1998 he was in Borneo, researching orangutans, when the head of the U.S. Army’s AIDS research program tracked him down and invited him to Cameroon to run a study of hunters in remote villages.

When Wolfe arrived here in 2000, researchers hadn’t yet pinpointed this corner of Cameroon as the likely birthplace of HIV/AIDS. In fact Wolfe and his colleagues knew very little about the scope of pathogens in the animal kingdom, or the way they entered human bloodstreams and spread. But he and others had a hunch that hunters like Brice Bidja might have played a big part in the HIV transmission story.

Though HIV and AIDS came to the world’s attention in the early 1980s, when a mysterious illness began to cut a deadly swath through gay communities in California and New York, the pandemic’s roots were planted much earlier. New genetic analysis techniques and discoveries of old tissue samples have pushed back the probable date that HIV’s predecessor jumped from chimpanzees to humans. The most recent insight came late last year, when University of Arizona researcher Michael Worobey analyzed a preserved biopsy of a lymph node taken from an HIV-positive woman in 1960. Worobey’s genetic analysis of the tissue — discovered in a university storage room in the Democratic Republic of the Congo — moved the likely date of the chimp-to-human jump back to about 1900. The findings also reinforce mounting evidence that it took decades — more than half a century — before HIV was able to gain its pandemic-producing momentum.

“This tells us that concerted prevention efforts can prevent local epidemics from gaining a foothold,” says Worobey. “If we had known then what we know now, we could have stopped it.”

—-

Apart from Brice Bidja’s missionary-imported T-shirt, it’s not hard to imagine him as the villager who stepped out of his mud-brick hut one morning a century ago, destined to become the inadvertent first human host of HIV, a disease that would spread to every inhabited region of the world, claiming the lives of more than 25 million people.

The hunter must have counted himself lucky to bring down a chimpanzee, which would provide a feast for a small village. But maybe the wounded chimp bit the hunter as it struggled. Or maybe its infected blood dripped into an open wound on the hunter as the carcass was hauled home. Maybe the hunter’s wife cut her hand while butchering, or one of his children put organ-bloodied fingers into their mouths, as I watched Bidja’s children do. One way or another, blood infected with simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) came into contact with human blood.

Viruses consist of genetic material — DNA or RNA — that is up to 100 times smaller than bacteria, far too tiny to be seen through anything but an electron microscope. Despite their small size, they carry an incredible amount of genetic machinery. They can respond to stimuli in real time, and they mutate extraordinarily fast. This last trait has made them the most diverse — and by many measures the most successful — class of organisms on the planet.

Unlike other organisms, though, a virus can’t live on its own. A virus needs to get inside a living cell, then commandeer that cell’s resources to reproduce and infect other cells. If two viruses happen to infect the same cell at the same time, they can swap genetic material in a process known as recombination.

In the case of pandemic HIV, scientists now know that the virus appeared in humans many years after it had recombined in chimps who had eaten two smaller species of monkeys. It subsequently spread from one person to another, reproducing so aggressively that within a month of infection a single teaspoon of a host’s blood plasma can have 500 million copies of the virus.

Once it had infected a critical mass of humans, the virus took advantage of a series of opportunities — emigration patterns, urbanization, a boom in intercontinental travel — to transform itself from a local mysterious disease to a worldwide killer that still claims more than 2 million lives each year, and that continues to confound efforts to develop vaccines and other preventive measures.

—-

Wolfe’s Cameroon virus-hunting operation was initially a spare one. For the first couple of years, says Matthew LeBreton, an Australian who is now GVFI’s ecology and rural site coordinator, the team relied on a single vehicle — a run-down Toyota Land Cruiser — to collect samples from 17 villages. When the truck broke down or roads washed out, they traveled by foot, bicycle, or rattletrap public bus, racing to get blood to the lab before its 48-hour spoiling point.

According to LeBreton, Wolfe thrived on the obstacles. “Give him the most difficult, complicated, logistically challenging environment, and Nathan will figure out a way to make it work.”

Says Wolfe, “I’d tell my team that if nothing was going wrong, we weren’t asking hard enough questions.”

Every few months Wolfe would tail his blood samples back to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention laboratory in Atlanta, where he would analyze them himself. In 2004, while looking at a blot of a hunter’s blood work, Wolfe did a double take. The readout showed clear exposure to a simian foamy virus (SFV), so-called because the cells look like soap suds under a microscope.

Like HIV, foamy viruses are retroviruses. Because they inject their own genetic material into the cells they infect, retroviruses are tough foes. Once one gets in, it’s impossible to eradicate.

Wolfe’s discovery of simian foamy viruses in humans cemented his reputation as a viral-epidemiologist wunderkind. The National Institutes of Health awarded him its prestigious Director’s Pioneer Award in 2005. His findings also turned traditional thinking in epidemiology — which had held that transmission of retroviruses from animals to humans is rare — on its head. “The fact that we found SFVs with such a small sample was the shocking thing,” says Wolfe, “because it confirmed that viruses were passing from nonhuman primates to humans on a fairly regular basis.”

Could human SFVs — or the two other new AIDS-related viruses Wolfe found in his Cameroon hunters — become the next HIV? It’s still too early to say. So far none of the SFV-positive hunters have any glaring symptoms, though Wolfe’s team will continue to monitor the hunters’ health because of the possibility that they may become sick after a long incubation period. The team also takes regular blood samples of the hunters’ families and sexual partners, looking for signs that the virus is spreading.

—-

For Wolfe, who no longer bothers to keep an apartment or a permanent academic affiliation, Cameroon is the third touchdown in his latest series of round-the-world flights. “I spend most of my time in cars and planes with my head bobbing, drooling on my chest,” says Wolfe, who cultivates an air of omniscient nonchalance. Arriving late for our morning departure, wearing a T-shirt and flip-flops, he looks none the worse for his grueling agenda. “I finally figured out that coffee is a shitty drug-delivery system,” he tells me. “It’s not efficient, and the dosage isn’t standardized.” Now he toggles between the sleep aid Ambien and the antisleep drug Provigil. “Jet lag,” he says, “is no longer a problem.”

Then again, Wolfe could well have been high on the news that Google.org had just awarded GVFI a $5.5 million grant — Google’s largest grant ever. The grant would be matched by another $5.5 million from the Skoll Foundation, which backs the work of social entrepreneurs.

Though Google.org program director Frank Rijsberman has described Wolfe as a field-virologist “rock star,” there would be no helicopters or jelly beans on this tour. With a 10-hour drive ahead of us, our caravan of three vehicles motors out of Yaoundé, past the jagged skeletons of unfinished high-rises, some still standing apocalyptically years after construction ceased.

At one village, we top off with diesel sold in two-liter soda bottles, noticing fresh-killed porcupine on the menu du jour. It is tempting, but Wolfe is champing to get to Ngoila, about 30 miles north of the Congolese border in southeast Cameroon, before nightfall. “We can either stop here for lunch, or we can burn,” he said, pausing for a mock-democratic microsecond. “I say let’s burn.”

We cross the Dja River on a rickety cable ferry and burrow deeper into the jungle. Army ants stream across the roads, forming living tunnels that look just like speed bumps.

The radio rhythms have shifted from frenetic Cameroonian bikutsi to the flowing beats of Congolese ndombolo by the time two of our caravan’s trucks roll into Ngoila. The third truck sputters and dies a few miles outside the village. As the drivers locate a mechanic, Wolfe and I trudge off to pay respects to the village chief, the gendarme, and the subdivisional officer.

We stop to clown around with some local kids, then walk back toward the GVFI field office, arriving just in time to see the broken-down truck being towed in.

As the sun sets we repair to the porch of a small house that serves as GVFI’s headquarters in Ngoila to drink warm beer and feast on rice, chicken, fried plantains, and ndolé (greens with nuts and salty fish or goat and palm oil) slathered with piri-piri, Cameroon’s fiery salsa.

For Wolfe, it is a chance to bullshit with his staff — LeBreton, deputy director Ubald Tamoufe, chief operating officer Karen Saylors, and director of laboratory science Brian Pike — about the new, expensive toys that promise to ease logistics and narrow the time between specimen collection and results.

Now, Wolfe’s Cameroon team — 27 public health specialists, wildlife ecologists, laboratory technicians, nurses, and community liaisons — are clearing space in their labs and field sites for new high-tech equipment. Cameroon will be getting nitrogen generators to cool blood at field sites, GPS-trackable motorcycles, and possibly a state-of-the-art phylogenetic sequencer, which would give GVFI the first world-class viral discovery lab in Central Africa.

—-

Early the next afternoon, an elderly woman winces as a syringe pierces her vein, opening a flow of blood from her arm to a collection vial held steadily in a nurse’s meaty hand. Standing in line behind her are several dozen local villagers. Apart from the needle’s prick, no one seems the least bothered by the bloodletting or the waiting. “The success of this approach depends on having a long-term engagement [with the locals],” says study leader Tamoufe. “We’re sharing knowledge, we’re explaining the goals of what we’re doing, we’re being honest.”

After the blood draw, study participants step inside a thatch-roofed pavilion for medical checkups. Then they’re sent away with packets of milk, cans of sardines, condoms, and any prescription medicines they need.

GVFI’s method flies in the face of the “parachute science” approach that has long typified data collection in the Third World. Wolfe thinks he’s got the system down, and he believes that, with the right collaborators, his model can be scaled up and repeated anywhere in the world.

Maybe. But the unpredictable places Wolfe is targeting — Congo, Madagascar, China, Malaysia, Laos — have a way of making a mockery of the noblest goals and the most elegant logistics. Even here, where the team has an eight-year track record of trust and collaboration, nothing can be taken for granted. Today, for instance, Wolfe’s team will attempt something unprecedented, with a high potential for misunderstanding. “This will be tricky,” Tamoufe says. “There are certain cultural sensitivities surrounding masturbation.”

The GVFI team wants to get semen samples and vaginal swabs from at-risk hunters, as well as their primary sexual partners. Here’s why: Every virus needs to use its host cell’s resources to make copies of itself, which then go out to infect other cells. But a virus that infects a cell in a liver or lung — or, indeed, almost any other cell in an animal’s body — can’t carry on to the next generation of its host. In other words, if you were to contract influenza, or SARS, or Ebola, and then have a baby, you wouldn’t normally pass the virus on to your offspring. But some infectious diseases can be transmitted sexually.

Tamoufe’s team approaches 17 hunters and their sexual partners, asking them to participate in today’s “special study.” The chief adds his own encouragement. “We are hunters here,” he says, “and this is how we help. We know that there are some bad things inside some of the animals we kill. If we can help our friends discover how to protect people, that’s good.”

Both Tamoufe and ecologist LeBreton confide that they have doubts about this working. “But whether or not we get these extra fluids,” LeBreton says, “we’ll get plenty of blood.”

—-

Late that afternoon the team meets back at GVFI’s headquarters in Ngoila, where night drops quickly. Within a matter of minutes the kerosene lamps are lit and the abundant butterflies are replaced by fireflies — one of which finds its way inside the screened-in porch, zigzagging among the team members. “We Cameroonians say that it’s a lucky thing to have fireflies in your house,” says Tamoufe.

Indeed, it has been a good day. Of the people approached, three men and four women provided semen samples and vaginal swabs — a pretty good start, all agree. That’s in addition to the 100 blood samples collected.

Working like this, one village at a time, Wolfe has quickly accumulated one of the most comprehensive blood collections on Earth, some 25,000 human and 16,000 animal samples that are available to researchers around the globe. “I can guarantee that these repositories of samples will be treasure troves of information for the future,” says Michael Worobey, of the University of Arizona.

Even though Wolfe is fundamentally a collector — of blood and exotic microbes and, to a lesser extent, West African art — he’s a minimalist in his personal life.

“Almost everything I own is in a storage locker in Los Angeles,” he says. When Wolfe was on the faculty at UCLA, he had an apartment in Venice Beach. “I would swim and do yoga and ride around on my Vespa. I was also into rare orchids, but I wasn’t there enough, so they died.’’

He tells me he lives for moments like these, drinking warm beer with his team, listening to the sounds of the jungle as they build into a riotous chorus of grunts and caws and chuckles. But Wolfe, who is single, says that as he nears the age of 40 the urge to drop anchor is getting stronger. “I’m actually thinking that things will begin to calm down in a few months,” he says. “Of course, I’ve been saying this for the last 10 years.”

Pike suggests we go outside to toast the almost-full moon. As we do, someone fires up a generator and a radio, sending the warm, liquid guitar lines of Congolese soukous skipping across the courtyard.

“We vertebrates are a pimple on the ass of life on this planet,” Wolfe says, to no one in particular. “But we exist at a moment in history when we have the tools to understand things in a deep way, things that we didn’t know existed a few years ago.

“What’s still out there?” Wolfe asks, looking up at the moon. “We just don’t know. And that’s what’s fun.”

—-

Every weekday morning at 9 am Central European time, the Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response team meets in the Strategic Health Operations Centre, known as the “SHOC room,” at the World Health Organization’s headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. After discussing incoming reports, members fan out to verify outbreaks through WHO country offices and local governments.

In the spring of 2003, WHO received a report of a flulike outbreak in southern China — a mutant, fast-spreading virus that would come to be named severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. But by that time, a man from Guangdong province — famous for its “wet markets” selling wild animals for food — had traveled to a hotel in Hong Kong.

That single-night stay in room 911 prompted a SARS “super spreader” event that led to at least 16 SARS cases among hotel visitors. But it didn’t stop there. Those travelers departed to Europe, North America, and elsewhere in Asia, spreading the virus to more than 8,000 people in 32 countries.

The SARS outbreak killed more than 700, but it could have been far worse. A massive international containment effort, led by the WHO, averted a doomsday scenario and quickly controlled the outbreak. What worries people like Dr. Michael Ryan, coordinator of the WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network, is that SARS may have been just a rehearsal for something worse. “We winged it with SARS,” says Ryan, “and we got away with it, because the core countries had the capacity to deal with it. But if SARS had happened in rural Africa we’d still be dealing with it. And I think it’s inevitable that we’ll be hit with something new that will be harder to put back in its box.”

Despite the high stakes, the world’s outbreak-response agencies are perennially underfunded and underequipped. For instance, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s pandemic preparations budget in 2008 was just $158 million — a fraction of the nearly $200 billion budgeted for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan last year.

“We don’t have any problem investing money in physical security issues,” Ryan says. “But epidemics of infectious disease have killed a lot more people than wars ever have.” (The “Spanish flu” — which may have actually originated in Kansas — claimed around 40 million lives in 1918–’19, nearly twice the number killed in World War I.)

For its part, WHO is hamstrung by budget shortfalls and international protocols that can slow its response. Until recently, for instance, countries were required to report only three infectious diseases (cholera, plague, and yellow fever), and the WHO couldn’t legally consider outbreak reports from nongovernmental sources. As a result of SARS (which was given a head start by the Chinese government’s ham-handed response), the agency can now use reports from informal sources. But in places where information doesn’t flow freely (think Myanmar, or North Korea), a localized outbreak could potentially smolder until it sparks an uncontainable pandemic.

“Once viruses get going,” says Dr. David L. Heymann, the WHO’s assistant director-general for health security and environment, “they don’t have much regard for borders or politics.” Wolfe’s viral surveillance project, he says, will help the WHO and other health agencies fine-tune computer models that can forecast where the next diseases will emerge and then contain them through proactive approaches such as blood-supply testing, education, economic development, and environmental protection.

But some public-health experts believe it ultimately makes more sense to give communities and healthcare providers the tools to bypass international agencies and governments, using information and technology to deal with local threats before they become global crises. To that end, last year Google.org unveiled its Predict and Prevent Initiative. The program aims to expand disease surveillance and build grassroots networks to push detection and response “two steps to the left” of the epidemic curve, according to Dr. Larry Brilliant, the iconoclastic doctor and internet entrepreneur whom Google’s founders brought in to run their philanthropy arm.

“We’ll always need the international agencies,” says Predict and Prevent director Mark Smolinski. “But I hope that within the next 10 years, a farmer in Vietnam will be able to report a sneezing chicken or a sick child without worrying about what system is responding on the other end of the line.”

Eric Rasmussen, who heads the disease- and disaster-prevention lab InSTEDD (which is partially funded by Google), says it doesn’t matter how many good policies and procedures are in place “if communications hurdles make it impossible to get information to the people with the skills to do something about it.”

InSTEDD and its technology partners are working on everything from inflatable satellite dishes that can be transported in backpacks to cell phone–based systems that could broadcast warnings of an imminent calamity, such as a tsunami.

Since most sick people don’t go to a doctor as a first step, the Predict and Prevent team is looking at unconventional data sources for disease outbreak detection. These include rumor surveillance by health workers and digital detection (sometimes called “scrubbing’’) for news articles or blogs suggesting a possible outbreak.

—-

On our final morning in the field, project leader Joseph Le Doux Diffo convenes a “healthy hunter” meeting in Zoulabot. Bush meat (“We prefer to say ‘wild game,’ ” Wolfe corrects me) is a thorny issue in Central Africa, due to the growing number of commercial hunters. If current hunting levels persist, many species — especially primates such as gorillas and chimpanzees — may go extinct in the wild within a few decades. Wary of occasional crackdowns, villagers are often suspicious of outsiders who talk about hunting.

“We are not telling you not to eat hunted meat, but bad diseases are out there now,” Diffo tells the crowd of about 100 people, speaking mostly in French. “So please do it carefully.”

“There are ethical subtleties here,” says LeBreton, watching the presentation. “On one hand, the levels of hunting are not sustainable, so they are contributing to a major ecological catastrophe that will eventually impact their own food security. On the other hand, every human on Earth will choose to feed their child over saving an endangered piece of meat.”

GVFI’s approach is a combination of safe-hunting instruction and conservation education. Diffo encourages the hunters to focus on abundant animals, such as rodents; he reminds them that certain species are illegal to hunt; then he demonstrates how to wrap carcasses in either plastic or large palm fronds before carting them home. And, since Ebola has been confirmed across the border in Congo, he advises the hunters to walk away from dead animals in the forest.

“If we want people to change their activities, then we will have to pony up the money and create alternatives,” says Wolfe. “And certainly we should. Because if we feel responsible enough to stop pandemics and save endangered species, then we also have the responsibility to deal with the inequalities that reinforce these things.” After all, he continues, “they’re doing something completely rational. Wild game hunting may be high-risk, but it’s not higher-risk than not eating.”

Late that afternoon we arrive at the GVFI house in Ngoila just as the caretaker is pouring kerosene over a line of termites heading across the courtyard and up the house’s wall, determined to make a meal out of the rafters. Wolfe sits in a plastic chair, his clothing stained earth-red, debating with his team whether viruses could be more important to the evolution of animals than mutation or genetic recombination, as some researchers have theorized.

“We live on a planet that is dominated by microbial life,” Wolfe says. “I don’t think anyone would debate that. But are viruses the primary driver of evolution? I’m not convinced.”

A case of beer arrives just as dark gray clouds begin to gather overhead, their bottom edges highlighted by the orange and pink rays of the recently departed sun. When the storm lets loose we retreat to the porch, watching the rain come down in crazy, curving sheets. “It’s mind-boggling,” Wolfe says. “A century ago we didn’t know viruses existed, and now we’re starting to understand that they’re the prevailing life form on Earth. We have to rethink just about everything we know about how this planet works.”

The post The Virus Hunter appeared first on .

John McAfee stands in the New Mexican playa in front of his trike ultralight, during a Sky Gypsies aerotrekking camping expedition. Click photo above for slide show.

Big ideas come easy to John McAfee. First he pioneered antivirus software, then instant messaging. Now the mercurial magnate thinks he’s on to something truly extraordinary: personal Icarus machines.

The post John McAfee’s Flying Circus Wants You! appeared first on .

Puffin hunting atop Drangey Island. Click photo for slide show.

“This boy Grettir—well, he was trouble from the very beginning.”

High atop Drangey Island, Jón Eiriksson stands at the nub of a jagged rectangle of stones, looking out at the fjord and the mainland beyond. Above him, sea birds wheel in the salt wind over Drangey, a green-capped spike of rock thrust down, like an axe head, into a tongue of the North Sea. Jón pulls off his cap and runs his fingers through a tussock of white hair, then he sits down on a half-buried stone.

“Grettir is our neighbor, you know,” Jón says. “He was born on a farm near Midfjord, a place called Bjarg. That means ‘stone’ in Icelandic. When he was young, he was a handsome boy, with red hair and a broad face. But very rough and mischievous. He made clever poems, but they were mostly scornful. His father and nearly everyone believed that he would amount to nothing.”

Jón talks in the familiar terms one might use to describe a ne’er-do-well kid who squeals his tires through the subdivision. But at the age of 72, Jón isn’t quite old enough to have known his juvenile-delinquent neighbor.

Grettir was born a thousand years ago.

I had arrived in Iceland three weeks earlier with photographer Michael Moore, determined to follow the path of Grettir Asmundarson—the warrior, poet, ghostbuster, and outdoorsman popularly known hereabouts as Grettir the Strong. This medieval Jesse James outwitted his pursuers for nearly 20 years, roaming and wreaking havoc across the harshest and most remote corners of 11th-century Iceland. As any Icelander will attest, and as Jón tells us, “Grettir was not only the strongest man who ever lived in Iceland, but also the greatest outlaw.”

Mike and I brought along maps, compass, and a translation of the anonymously written Saga of Grettir the Strong. Our plan: to follow Grettir’s outlaw Odyssey into Iceland’s stark and uninhabited interior. We would climb into the caves where Grettir slept, and backpack into the lost valleys where he rustled sheep and romanced trolls’ daughters. We would ply the icy waters where Grettir swam, soak in the hot springs where he soothed his bones, and dine on meals of puffin, fish, and lamb. By following Grettir’s off-the-beaten-path footsteps, we hoped to get intimate with Europe’s last great wilderness, and to grasp something of the character of the rugged Icelanders themselves.

###

The Saga of Grettir the Strong was on Mike’s lap when we touched down at Keflavik Airport on a July morning, groggy and looking forward to three weeks of adventuring in the most volcanic place on earth. Through the airplane’s windows we looked out over a vast lava field stretching from runway to horizon. In the distance, two plumes of white steam vented into the low gray sky. Keflavik is the departure point for whale-watching tours.

Grettir’s grandfather, Onund Tree-Foot, would have seen something similar when he arrived in the 10th century, after a harrowing voyage from Norway. Described as “the bravest and nimblest one-legged man ever to have lived in Iceland,” Onund came to farm away his sunset years in the fledgling Norse settlement, which was becoming something of a retirement colony for past-their-prime Vikings. He joined other weather-beaten warriors with names like Ulf the Squinter, Thord Bellower, and Thorkel Scratcher.

Onund and his rowdy contemporaries had escaped the clan wars that wracked their homeland, but they found themselves in a strange new world where violence seemed to spring from the landscape itself. Iceland was—and is—still under construction, and any given day might be interrupted by rattling earth, stampeding lava, or showering ash.

It was the perfect setting for great literature to evolve, according to Bernard Scudder, who had recently finished a new English translation of The Saga of Grettir the Strong. (Throughout the course of this story, short passages are quoted from this translation, as well as a 1914 translation by G. H. Hight, and a 1974 translation by Denton Fox and Herman Palsson.)

Bernard was easy to track down—Iceland’s single phone book is alphabetized by first name—and eager to provide information to fuel our quest. We sat down for a meal with him and Örnólfur Thorsson, a Reykjavik-based scholar and editor of a series of translations of the Icelandic sagas. As we laid out our maps and books on the table, I asked the two men why Grettir, among the many colorful saga characters, is still the favorite of the majority of Icelanders.

“Grettir was an underdog who refused to back down to the rich and powerful,” Örnólfur said. “He’s a complex hero—he’s a superman and a villain, he’s a Robin Hood and a hot-headed goon, he’s a womanizer and a family man. He has these tremendous advantages of strength and intellect, but he’s hobbled by hubris, and fate. He also has an Achilles heel—fear of the dark—which many Icelanders can relate to, even today.”

Grettir’s Saga is considered one of the most readable works of the entire Middle Ages, with its well-rendered battles, daring deeds, and bursts of sarcastic wit. There are no frilly-sleeved princes or beautiful virgins; the narrative is more like an American Western, propelled by feud and flight, and punctuated by bouts of ale-drinking. Grettir makes his solitary way across the land, battling both enemies and Iceland’s bizarre environment, which is manifested in evil spirits and fearsome trolls. These spirits represent the last vestiges of heathendom, as do the fearsome, nonfictional berzerks—“bear-shirted” warriors who whipped themselves into animal-like frenzies when doing battle.

Before we drove off in the elderly four-wheel-drive truck we had rented, Örnólfur offered some parting words. “Bernard and I talked about what you are planning on doing, and we don’t believe anyone has ever visited all the places Grettir visited—probably because they are so remote. If you succeed, we are quite certain that you would be the first.”

###

With a rough itinerary plotted and the truck packed with gear and food, we headed north, rolling through vivid green valleys backed by snow-capped peaks and crisp blue fjords. We arrived at Bjarg, the farm where Grettir was born, just ahead of a storm rolling in from the southwest. On a hill at the front of the property—still a family farm after ten centuries—a monument was raised in 1974, in memory of Grettir’s much-suffering mother, Ásdis.

By the age of 15, Grettir had grown lazy and insolent. When his father, Asmund, asked Grettir to look after the family’s geese, Grettir wrung their necks. When he asked Grettir to scratch his back, Grettir reached for a metal wool-comb and drew blood. When Asmund asked Grettir to take care of his prized mare, Kengála, Grettir dutifully went out to the barn, and flayed the animal alive.

But Ásdis detected greatness in her son. She encouraged Grettir with heroic tales of his ancestors’ triumphant battles. Behind her husband’s back, she gave Grettir an inlaid sword that belonged to her grandfather, telling him…

“Something tells me you will be needing one.”

“Might be the understatement of the millennium,” Mike said, turning away from the monument’s bronze bas-relief of the sword-giving scene, captioned with Ásdis’s portentous quote. With the rain coming down hard, we jumped back into the truck and rolled away from the green coastal valleys toward the desolate brown interior—following the route of Grettir’s first trip beyond the Midfjord region.

With Grettir proving worse than useless at home, Asmund sent his son off to represent the family’s interests at Iceland’s fledgling parliament (Europe’s first), at Thingvellir. Grettir traveled with a group of 60 men and boys from the district, south over the moor called Tvidaegra, or “two days’ journey.”

Driving through the misty, marathon dusk, we negotiated our way through a vast, lake-dotted bog. There were no houses or people, but the roadside was guarded by ancient stone cairns, built to guide ancient travelers through the treeless heath. These man-size piles of stone often startled us as they came into view, lurching out of the roadside fog like hulking night-giants.

As we entered the Hallmundarhraun lava field, the road deteriorated into a rocky obstacle course. I shifted into creeper-gear and negotiated over and around the huge slabs of tossed lava. Though the outside temperature was in the forties, the old truck began to overheat; we stabilized it by blocking the fan clutch and keeping the heat on.

With the storm building, we crossed a river and turned off the cairn trail, following vague tracks. When the sand turned to rock we navigated by compass, until the visibility got so low that we couldn’t get our bearings on the mountains. We got stuck and unstuck a couple of times, freeing the truck while pummeled by horizontal braids of wind-driven rain. At 11:30—still dusk—we set up camp, using the truck as a wind-block.

We cooked a dinner of pasta and dried codfish, at times catching glimpses of the Eiriksjokull glacier, glowing paternally through the mist and rain. The wind screamed all night, driving waves of rain against the tents, but in the morning a rainbow arched over the glacier. We pressed onward toward the Borgarfjord valley and reached Fljotstunga, a farm that rents bunks to spelunkers keen on exploring the extensive cave systems nearby. According to the saga, Grettir’s parliament-bound party stopped at Fljotstunga to sleep and rest the horses. When they woke in the morning, Grettir got into a heated argument with a neighbor boy named Skeggi, over a misplaced food bag.

Skeggi seized his axe and struck at Grettir, who grabbed the shaft of the axe with his left hand, and wrenched it free. Then Grettir struck Skeggi with the same axe, through to his brain. Later, when the party noticed that Skeggi was missing, all eyes immediately swept to Grettir, who answered in verse:

I imagine a cleft-dwelling ogress

Made a wild rush for Skeggi.

She stretched her harsh mouth over his head,

And split his forehead in two.

###

Kalman Stefánson remembers the day it happened.

“My uncle, Pall Einarson, was playing in a crater with some other children. He found the skull below the farmhouse at Fljotstunga. That was the year TK, when I was a young boy. The skull was very old, but it was quite clearly split in two at the forehead, as if from an axe.”

Kalman illustrated with a vertical karate-chop to the center of his forehead, which is covered in bushy white bangs. His uncle has since passed away, but  Kalman, 66, still works the Kalmanstunga farm, next to Fljotstunga.

As his wife plied us with biscuits and strong coffee, Kalman showed us a photograph taken by an English traveler in 1898. It shows his grandfather standing in front of a turf-roofed structure, holding a large can of sheep’s milk.

“The first Kalman came to Iceland eleven hundred years ago,” said Kalman. “He landed in Keflavik, where you landed. Then he moved around quite a bit. You see things named after him everywhere.”

As a younger man, Kalman spent a great deal of time exploring the caves on his substantial property. Acting on his advice, Mike and I spent two days in the area, climbing through Surtshellir cave, which was occupied in the 10th century by outlawed thieves called Hellismenn (“cave men”). In nearby Vídgelmir, the world’s largest lava tube, we crawled on our hands and knees through ice water to view some spectacular drip-formations. We also tried, unsuccessfully, to find the “storm-driven den” where Grettir stayed with his nebulous friend Hallmund, for whom the Hallmundarhraun lava field is named.

According to Kalman, Skeggi’s skull was brought to the church at Reykholt and buried in the cemetery there. But the minister at Reykholt said he has no idea which grave holds Skeggi’s skull. “And if anyone tells you they do,” he told us, “they’re lying.” The clergyman suggested that, if it’s skulls we’re after, we head up the valley to Husavell, to visit a local sculptor named Pall (Palli) Gudmundsson.

“Don’t be surprised if Palli is not at home,” the minister told us, “since he spends much of his time in the mountains alone, looking for stones. If he is there, though, don’t be surprised if you run into Björk—you know, the strange little thing? The two of them sometimes collaborate.”

We found Palli—alas, no Björk—in an old silo that he uses as his studio, in a meadow strewn with giant, sculpted feet. Thin and wired with childlike energy, he enthusiastically trotted us over to a turf-roofed shed housing his “stone harp,” which consists of dozens of flat stones arranged on long boards like the keys of a piano. Palli picked up a pair of mallets and plucked out the opening notes to Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmuzik.”

“It took me ten years to collect all the stones,” he said. “I go out to the mountains with a tuning fork to ask each stone if it has a tone. One night I was looking for the C-note, and I spent the entire night hiking around, listening to the stones. At dawn, I finally found my note.”

We followed Palli into a blueberry patch behind the house. After searching for a few minutes, he crouched over a chunk of red palgonite. “You will recognize this man,” he said, turning the stone over to reveal Grettir’s broad face exploding out of the rock—eyes bulging, forehead rippling, mouth contorting in a fearsome bellow. As an expression of pure rage, this is the most convincing sculpture I’ve ever seen.

“I found the stone near here,” Palli said, “where he walked. The stone would remember his foot steps. Yes, it’s true that the stones have memory. The stones remember everything.”

###

At the Althing [parliament], Grettir was found guilty of killing Skeggi and declared a “lesser outlaw,” banished from Iceland for three years. He was allowed to go back to Bjarg, to arrange his affairs before sailing off to his exile in Norway. On the way home, “Grettir lifted a stone lying in the grass, which is still known as Grettishaf. Many went afterwards to see this stone and were astounded that so young a man should have lifted such a mountain.”

“I was 18 years old when I first lifted it,” Palli says, regarding a large, heart-shaped rock lying in the hay field, illuminated by the glow of the Eiriksjokull glacier. “Three years older than Grettir. It weighs 180 kilos [398 lbs]. My brothers all lifted it, and my father and grandfather and other ancestors too.”

Iceland is known for strongmen—Magnus Ver Magnussen, the world’s strongest man, lives just south of Reykjavik—but Palli is an artist, and built like one. The stone is two and a half times his body weight.

“Hernia city,” Mike says, as Palli kneels down and rolls the boulder heavily onto its side. He squats back on his heels, and wraps his arms around the rock. Then he strains upward, face bulging. Mike hurriedly raises his camera as the rock comes off the ground an inch, then two…

“Hrrrrahhhhhhrrgh!”

Palli straightens his legs and in one motion hoists the huge stone to his torso, leaning back and holding it while Mike frantically works the shutter. “One more,” Mike says, as Palli, grinning, lets the rock thud to the ground.

###

When Grettir left for his exile many people wished him a safe journey–but few wished him a safe return. Upon landing in Norway, Grettir went to a house to fetch fire for his freezing shipmates, and accidentally burned the house down. Inside were the sons of a prominent Icelander named Thorir of Gard. Though the killings were accidental, Thorir exploited a legal technicality to have Grettir convicted in absentia. Grettir was declared a “full outlaw,” condemned to wander the wilderness with a price on his head. No one would be permitted to feed, ferry, or shelter him.

Grettir did not hear the news until he returned to Iceland. When he stepped off the boat he was told that he had been declared a full outlaw—and also that his father had died, and his brother Atli had been murdered. Grettir donned a black cowl and immediately stole a horse, then rode off in search of his brother’s killer, Thorbjorn Ox. Upon finding him in a raking hay in a marsh near Thoroddstaddir, Grettir struck Thorbjorn on the head “with such a blow that his brains spilled out.”

###

In the springtime, Grettir ascended the Geitlandsjokull glacier and turned his steps south-east. He took with him a kettle and fuel. He went on until he came to a long and narrow valley in the glacier, shut in on every side by ice. He found fair grass-grown banks and hot springs, and it seemed as if volcanic fires had kept the ice from closing in above the valley. A little stream flowed down the dale, and the number of sheep seemed to him countless. Grettir named the valley Thorisdal (Thorir’s Valley) after a giant named Thorir, a half-troll whom Grettir said ruled over the valley. Grettir said that Thorir had daughters with whom he had some play, and that they were very pleased, because few people came there.

To Mike and me, this was one of the saga’s most tantalizing passages. Was there an outlaw’s Shangri-La hidden somewhere in the wasteland between the two glaciers, Geitlandsjokull and Thorisjokull?

It was one of the most isolated places in Iceland. On the map, the high elevations and bunched-up contour lines suggested nothing but a cold, brown wasteland. But Iceland’s landscapes are so protean that maps are rarely the last word on any stretch of topography. The glaciers had advanced substantially since Grettir’s time, so it was possible that the valley, if it ever existed, might have been covered up. Then again, the glaciers were currently in retreat. Could it be that Thoris’s verdant valley was back there somewhere, newly uncovered?

“You won’t find it unless you’re meant to,” Örnólfur had told us in Reykjavik.

With four days’ provisions riding on our backs, Mike and I began hiking up Skjaldbreid, a broad, inactive volcano surrounded by an extensive lava field. According to the saga, Grettir left an enticing clue on Skjaldbreid, a marker that would enable him to find his way back to Thorisdal:

Grettir headed down south, reaching the [top] of Skjaldbreid from the North. There he erected a stone and bored a hole in it. He said that if a man put his eye to the hole he could see into the gully which flows out of Thorisdal.

Nearing the volcano’s summit, we stopped to look to the north. If we didn’t already know it, we’d never imagine that there was a valley between the two glaciers—they appeared as one massive, continuous ice cap. We continued up and across Skjaldbreid’s snow fields toward the wide caldera, encircled by a steep wall buttressed by braids of solidified lava resembling the trunks and roots of giant redwood trees. Fifty yards from the wall, Mike stopped in his tracks.

“Tom, you’re not going to believe this. It’s . . . a hole.”

Sure enough, a small circle of sky peeked through the rock rim. We scrambled up the wall to get a closer look.

On the rim of the caldera, we quickly realized how the hole-drilling story must have evolved. Strewn around the rim were hundreds of lava tubes, spyglass-like formations of lava created during an eruption as gas bubbles rose through the quickly cooling lava. Some of the pipes were several feet long—although none seemed to point toward the valley. We picked one up and laid it atop the wall. Using the map and our advantage of elevation, we lined it up with what looked like the most promising approach, between two mountains tailing off the ramparts of the Thorisjokull glacier. And we began walking.

The glaciers appeared to be a few miles away, but the lack of humidity in the Icelandic air often confounds the human sense of scale and distance—everything looks much closer than it really is. This problem is mitigated—or complicated, depending on how you look at it—by the fact that, during the Icelandic summer, a hiker pretty much never runs out of light. For the next three days, we would hike 12 to 16 hours a day.

We walked across a wind-whipped lava field and forded a river bounded by pyroplasmic ash falls and bubbled lava. The evening brought rain, but not darkness, as we descend into a notch below the Thorisjokull ice cap. Next to a milky stream, we stopped to eat some reykur lax—salmon smoked over sheep dung. It’s an Icelandic delicacy that is as indelicate as food gets; the smell of the smoke and its unsavory fuel overpower nearly all hints of fish. We flipped a 10-kroner coin to determine who got to stash the leftovers in his pack.

“Did you ever hear of a hlaup?” Mike asked, raising his eyes toward the towering ice caps. I hadn’t, and I wondered out loud if it was some kind of troll, or ogre, or a physical feature that we might see.

“Let’s hope we don’t see one,” Mike said, explaining that a hlaup isn’t a spirit or a thing; rather, it’s an event: a catastrophic release of meltwater trapped under a glacier. When an ice-damn breaks, a wide torrent of milky water thunders down, wiping out everything it its path.

For two days we walked in the shadow of the massive glacier, across dark brown wastelands and muddy lake beds. Dwarfed by the landscapes, we made our way through rivers and shallow lakes, into canyons lined with caves, and through fields of land-locked icebergs—the slow-melting remnants of old glacier tongues. We gained a pass and climbed into the gap between the glaciers. Unable to find sheltered flat spots, we camped in the open, and dined on smoked and dried fish, as Grettir would have. There were no sheep to slaughter, few birds or insects, and no plants whipping around in the wind. But at times, the very ground under our feet seemed alive, and I wondered whether my next gurgling footstep might sink me toward the center of the earth, or shoot me toward the moon.

As we climbed higher the lichen began to assert itself ever more colorfully, in flamboyant arrays of red, yellow, purple, and green. Once, we chanced upon two strips of flamboyant Martian-moss, more vivid than neon. Atop the moon-like brown rock, the parallel strips of glowing moss formed an avenue fit for Alice; we followed it up into the gully.

“That’s what’s great about this place,” said Mike, who had made five previous trips to Iceland. “It’s not just pretty sights; there’s incredibly weird stuff everywhere.”

Each day, we watched the sun travel three-quarters of the way around the horizon, not seeing a single cairn or walking on a single trail. By the third morning, with blistered feet, burnt ears, and scabby, mud-brown lips, we began to understand why the ancient travelers needed to believe in places like Thorisdal—a green paradise that must surely exist, just over the next rise.

But we were coming to accept that we weren’t going to find this one. We gained a vantage point and looked out over monstrous, end-of-the world vistas both in front and behind us. We could see most of the valley, but there were no grassy banks, no fat sheep, no frisky Amazons—nothing but an awesomely beautiful and overpoweringly harsh landscape, cradled by the two opposing glaciers.

Reluctantly, we turned on our blistery heels, and started heading toward the truck, taking a seemingly more direct route on the way back. Halfway across a broad, exposed ridge, the sky blackened, and a cold rain began in earnest. The wind came in hard, snaking over the mountains and accelerating through the valley. This was the worst weather we had seen, and with no windbreaks nearby, it was starting to look like we were in for a rough night. Then . . .

“Tom, you’re not going to believe this . . .”

Mike had spotted what looked like a hut, on a distant ridge. But it seemed unlikely. There was nothing on the map, and Iceland’s emergency shelters were usually located in popular hiking areas, not no-man’s-lands like this. Still, we were desperate enough to check it out anyway.

It looked close, but our sense of distance was off again, and by the time we reached what did indeed turn out to be a large hut, we were wet and chilled to the marrow. Unfortunately, the door was locked up tightly. We boosted ourselves up to the porch and peered through double-insulated window glass at a warm and dry fantasy world, outfitted with everything we lacked: padded bunk beds, a wind-free kitchen, even booze. Judging by the photos on the walls, it was some kind of winter clubhouse for a snowmobile club.

“What would Grettir do?” I asked Mike.

“He’d kill everyone inside and ride off with their gear.”

“Only one problem with that plan.”

“Yeah, I know—we don’t have horses.”

After considering the circumstances—the wind, the cold rain, the exhaustion—and after taking another look through the glass, we . . . well, we committed what North American police call a “B & E.” Using a combination of pocket-knife tools and tent poles, we managed to spring a window lock open, without damaging it. Then we climbed inside. We hung our clothes to dry, cooked a big meal, and slept the sleep of sheltered outlaws.

In the morning, we swept up and re-secured the window, and left our haven just as we found it. Almost. Just before we pulled the locked door shut, Mike and I tucked the equivalent of $30 in the guest book, and composed a short poem thanking the snowmobilers for their inadvertent hospitality. Then we signed it . . .

“Yours truly, Grettir & Thoris.”

 ###

As the summer passed Grettir began to long for the habitations of men, and to see his friends and kinsmen. Bjorn the Hitdale Warrior received Grettir well… and said “I have thought of something. In the mountain which stretches away from the Hitara river there is a good position for defense, and likewise a good hiding-place if skilfully managed. There is a hole through the mountain from which you can see down upon the high road that lies immediately beneath it, and a sandy slope down to the road so steep that few could get up it if it were defended above by one strong man.”

Grettir went to Fagraskogafjall, and took what he wanted from passers by. When Bjorn came to visit, the big men  challenged each other to various feats of strength. They swam the entire [20-mile] length of the Hitara River, and “brought stepping-stones into the river, which neither floods nor freezing nor ice drifts have since moved from their places”.

Mike and I rented a pair of Icelandic horses from a farmer, and set off toward Grettir’s horse-jacking lair at Fagraskogafjall. We rode along the Hitara river, which is flanked by fields of lava covered by gauzy white lichen.

The Icelandic horse is extremely pure-blooded—no horse has been imported into Iceland for more than 800 years—and bred for long-distance backcountry riding. Unique among the world’s horses, these low, sturdy beasts have a unique “fifth gait,” a smooth running-walk called the tölt. This easy-rider trot virtually eliminates the jarring that keeps many people—men, especially—off horses. Once we mastered the art of getting the horses to tölt—essentially, you give them a bit of a mixed message by simultaneously kicking and holding the reigns up and back—riding became pure pleasure.

Shaded by a range of eroded purple mountains, we rode past the meadow where Grettir humiliated an intended assassin who ran from him “farting like a cart-horse.” We looked for Grettir and Bjorn’s stepping stones (hard to tell), then tied up the horses and scrambled up the steep mountain to the outlaw’s campsite, tucked among the jumble of spiny rocks that stuck up like armored fins on a stegosaurus’s back. Hidden in the shadows, we looked down on the horses, the trail, the river, and the island-dotted fjord—Grettir’s domain, all of it.

###

Traveling in disguise, Grettir set off on a two-year quest to gain the support of all the influential men around the country. Although many gave him advice, none would risk taking him in, for fear of being outlawed themselves.

We followed Grettir’s path around the country, generally behaving ourselves as we traveled by foot and horseback, by truck and bicycle. Running short on time, we began pitching our tents later, rising earlier. We trekked through the Kerlingarfjöll mountains, hopping over steaming streams and soaking in hot springs. We hiked a trail cut by berzerks, and strained to lift a few of the many mapped rocks supposedly lifted by Grettir. Some seemed within the realm of possibility, while others—like the one in the back paddock at Bjarg—must weigh 10 tons or more.

We stopped by a New Age festival at the end of the Snaefellsness Peninsula, and listened while wide-eyed believers talked of the many races of Älfar (elves), and Huldufolk (hidden people) in the nearby rocks. Even the Visitors Key to Iceland, a sedate road guide, describes places where “petrified trolls or night giants work.”

Iceland has few old buildings, and no castles or palaces. History and myth are woven into the landscape itself. Every hill, every river or rock, seems to have a story behind it. At the top of this hill, Grettir’s head was briefly buried. At this hot spring, another outlaw stopped to boil a stolen sheep. At this turn in the road, a large cloven rock had to be moved when elves disrupted road work in 1995. (According to a road department spokesman, the work continued “uneventfully” after the department employed a medium to strike a deal with the elves.)

Few other modern societies so fully inhabit the landscape in which they live, or so fully embrace their communal history. Above the “innumerable” hills of Vatnsdal, I pantomimed a boxing match for a non-English-speaking farmer, who then showed us to the ruined farm where Grettir fought an epic battle with a ghost named Glam, who had terrorized the entire valley. Glam “was endowed with more evil force than most ghosts,” says the saga, and in his dying breath he issued the curse that hobbled Grettir with his debilitating fear of the dark.

According to the saga, the farm house at Thorhallstadir was torn apart as Grettir grappled with Glam. A thousand years later, we looked down on the jumble of building stones strewn around the ruined chimney; the stones appeared as if they might have been left where the fracas had thrown them that day. We set up camp that night above the site, and asked ourselves again the question that I had put to Bernard and Örnólfur, back in Reykjavik: How much of it is true?

“That is really the central question of the sagas,” Örnólfur had said. “What is certain is that Grettir was a real person. In the census books and other records, you can cross-reference events like Grettir’s outlawry and his death in 1050. But his story wasn’t written down until many years later, and by then, the legend had been exaggerated.

“As for the ghosts and trolls, all that was true—at the time. Back then, people didn’t differentiate between the natural and supernatural worlds. Ogres and trolls and hobgoblins were their way of explaining things they couldn’t understand. But the ghosts were very physical then; they couldn’t walk through walls like Hollywood ghosts. If you had a ghost come through your wall, the wall got torn down.”

###

Grettir went up to Arnarvatn Moor and built himself a hut there… There was a point of land running out into the lake with a large bay on the further side of it…Grettir settled in there and since he wanted to do anything but rob people, he took a net and boat and caught fish to live on. He found life there very dismal, because he was so afraid of the dark.

After two weeks of dried and smoked fish, Mike and I were ready to pull our fishing gear out of the truck, and try our luck. We followed an old cairn trail toward Arnarvatn (Eagle Lake) Moor. Another of Iceland’s “innumerables,” the district supposedly has more lakes than can be counted. On our map, the largest lake, Stora Arnarsvatn, appeared to have a peninsula that could easily be the “point of land” described in the saga.

After failing to kill Grettir by overwhelming force, Grettir’s arch-enemy Thorir of Gard recruited an assassin named Thorir Red-Beard. Grettir was suspicious of the man when he showed up at the lake, but because of his loneliness and fear of the dark, he took him in as a lodger. Thorir spent two years with Grettir before he made his move. After a fiercely stormy night, he woke early and smashed Grettir’s fishing boat to pieces. Then he went to wake his host, who slept with his short-sword at his side.

“We are in trouble, my friend,” Thorir said. “Our boat has been smashed, and the nets are lying far out in the lake.” Grettir then arose, took his arms, and walked with Thorir onto the peninsula.

Mike and I trodded across the spongy heath and onto the flat green tongue of land, which jutted into the lake like an enormous proscenium. Across the windy lake, Eiriksjokull glacier glowed softly, under a deep-purple, overcast sky. Behind us, a line of old cairns stared down from the ridge, like petrified ushers standing at attention.

“Think we’re in the right place?”

I tossed in a line, getting the attention of a dozen swans on summer vacation from England. Then I opened the book.

Grettir threw off his weapons and dived in after the nets. He gathered them up, swam back to the land and threw them up onto the bank. When he was about to go to shore, Thorir snatched up Grettir’s short-sword and drew it quickly. He darted toward Grettir as he stepped up onto the bank, and swung a blow at him.

Cloud formations were blowing over the lake at astounding speed. Across the water, a beam of light squeezed through a gap in the clouds and swept across the lake, transforming fleeting patches from gray to blue. We watched the sunbeam as it moved toward us across the lake, spotlighting the islands, the swans, and, finally, the two men at the tip of the peninsula.

Grettir threw himself backwards into the water and sank like a stone. He swam under water, underneath the bank out of Thorir’s sight, until he reached the cove behind him. The next thing Thorir knew was when Grettir lifted him up above his head and dashed him to the ground so hard that he lost his grip on the sword. Grettir managed to grab it, and without saying a word, lopped off his head.

Were we in the right place? Basking in the momentary circle of warm light, after 10 days of overcast skies and sodden winds, we took it as something more than a coincidence that the sunbeam had targeted us, at this place, at this time. For a few moments, at least, it was easy to believe that strings were being pulled somewhere, that the elements had conspired to tell us something.

We were in the right place.

###

Grettir went boldly on… over the Thorskafjord Heath to Langadal, where he let his hands sweep over the property of the smaller cultivators, taking what he wanted from every one. From some he got weapons, from others clothes…The crofters did not dare to complain or resist… He traveled on all the way to Vatnsfjord and spent many nights in a sheep shelter, and completely relaxed his guard.

We followed Grettir’s path through the Westfjords on bicycles. The sun came back, and it stayed with us for a remarkable (by Icelandic standards) two days as we rolled along the nearly deserted dirt roads that parallel some of the loneliest stretches of coastline in Iceland.

This isolated region of narrow sea-fingers and tabletop mountains was well-populated in Grettir’s day, but in the past century, hundreds of farms have failed and vast tracts of land have reverted to the wolves and birds. We stopped often to pick blueberries and kreikberries from meadows, and to climb around on abandoned Viking-style fishing boats. At the side of Mjóifjord, we chanced upon a hot spring and made instant soup in the surprisingly sulfur-free water. Then we jumped into the steaming pool and soaked our sore biking-muscles, breathing in a 70-degree breeze and looking out over the deep blue fjord.

###

A band of 30 small-holders, fed up with the “great brute” who had shattered their peace, crept up on Grettir while he slept. They threw themselves atop him, and, after a hard struggle, managed to get ropes around the bucking, kicking giant. Once he was subdued, they decided to hang him.

We stopped to ask a farmer to direct us to the spot where Grettir’s capture took place. Following his directions, I pedaled up the hill behind his house, resolving to arrive at Grettir’s capture-spot via mountain bike. Bad idea.

Mike, wisely, wanted nothing to do with this, so I spent most of the afternoon alone, sinking in the trail-less bog, cursing and throwing the bike from tussock to tussock. Eventually, I came to the hilltop lake where the Lilliputian scene supposedly took place. Here, the hulking Grettir, tied down, watched as the “small farmers” built a gallows for him. He was saved with the arrival of a local leader named Thorbjorg the Stout, “a woman of firm character and foresight.”

“Whatever drove you to want to come here and cause trouble to my people, Grettir?” Thorbjorg asked him.

“I had to be somewhere,” Grettir replied.

Thorbjorg the Stout spared Grettir’s life once he swore not to cause any more trouble in the district. Once freed, she brought him to her house—much to the disquiet of her husband, Vermund the Slender.

From the lake, I headed north toward Vatnsfjord to meet up with Mike, and encountered a briar patch as tall as I am. I battled the thicket for another two hours, tossing the bike over the brush and then throwing my body through the prickers. Finally, I got out of the thicket and into a boggy, steep downhill. I jumped on the bike and careened down the mountain, springing from one spongy tuft to the next. The ride, which lasted an incredibly fun 10 seconds, ended when I flew over the bars.

###

Thorir of Gard succeeded in raising the reward for Grettir’s capture to nine marks of silver, the highest price that had ever been put on an outlaw’s head. Some of the local chieftains objected, saying that it was unwise to go to such lengths to keep a man in outlawry who is capable of causing so much trouble.

Traveling in disguise, Grettir roamed far to the east, alternating between thuggery and good deeds. After tossing a fearsome troll-woman out of a widow’s farm in Bardardal, he moved in with the grateful widow. But his turn toward domesticity was cut short when Thorir of Gard sent a group of men after him. Realizing that he was quickly running out of places to hide, Grettir appealed to a chieftain named Gudmund the Powerful. Gudmund refused to take him in, but he offered Grettir some valuable advice:

There is an island in Skagafjord called Drangey. It is a good place to mount a defense, because it can only be ascended by ladder. Once you reach it there is no chance of anyone overcoming you there with arms or trickery, so long as you guard the ladder well.

###

To get back east to Skagafjord, Mike and I joined a group of horse enthusiasts who were moving a herd of 21 horses across Trollaskagi, a peninsula formed of gnarly, maze-like mountain ranges. The region is well off the tourist path, but with its relatively mild weather and majestic scenery, it’s superlative riding and trekking country. Our group included a biologist, a veterinarian, a school principal, and Gunnar Rögnvaldsson, a TK. As we saddled up at an abandoned farm at the end of a valley northeast of Akureyri, Gunnar previewed our route.

“We’ll climb over that pass,” he said, pointing up at a snow-draped saddle to the west, “then we’ll come across through Heljardalsheidi [Hell’s Heath], and down into Heljardalur [Hell’s Valley]. There are some wild horses there, and if they decide to mix it up with our horses, we could get some action.”

I rode a mare with a dark strip down her back. “We call this marking bleikálótt,” said Gunnar. “You may remember that it is the same color of Grettir’s father’s horse, Kengála—the one Grettir skinned alive. Hah! It was the last chore his father ever asked him to do!”

As we set off toward the pass, I asked Gunnar why the peninsula is called Trollaskagi (“troll’s peninsula [FC]”). “Well, look at it,” he said. “It’s big and rough; the scale itself is inhuman. Remember that in Iceland, our trolls are not tiny, as Americans think of trolls. They are more like ogres—huge, horrible things. The mountains and valleys here are not tidy—they look like they’ve been dug out by the hands of giant trolls!”

We moved steadily through the zigzagging, treeless green mountains, then up over the snow-packed pass. On the far side we stopped at a crippled stone corral and ate some smoked trout, washing it down with jolts of homemade brandy. As we continued westward toward Holar, the site of Iceland’s medieval bishopric, the riders sang a traditional song, “Riden Riden” (“Ride, Ride”), which has a rhythm that’s very similar to “Rawhide.”

Riden riden riden

Let’s ride and ride by the light of the day

And let’s get home by evening

Riden riden riden

The queen of elves is bridling her horse

And we don’t want to meet her

As we approached Heljardalur, a herd of about 30 wild horses gave chase, and we set our mounts into a gallop, thundering across the valley. We made it through the gate and got it closed as the wild horses stormed up behind us.

Just past midnight we drove away from Hólar, and looked north across Skagafjord. Hunkering just below the horizon, the sun had formed a deep, ghostly orange halo behind Drangey, which reared out of the fjord in a stark, sinister silhouette.

###

On his way to Drangey, Grettir stopped by his birthplace at Bjarg to pick up his 15-year-old brother Illugi and to borrow money from his mother. Ásdis burst into tears upon wishing her sons goodbye, and told them of a dream in which she foresaw their deaths by sorcery. “Go forth now, my sons twain,” she said as they left. “Let one fate befall you both.”

Grettir and Illugi met a boisterous vagrant along the road, and invited him to come along, nick-naming him Glaum—“Noise.” With their mother’s money, they negotiated the four-mile crossing with the farmer at Reykir.

###

Jón first rowed out to Drangey with his father in 1942, at the age of 12. Although Iceland now has one of the highest standards of living in the world, it was, until the end of World War II, a hard-luck, nearly roadless country where horses and boats were the only means of getting around. Each springtime, facing starvation, the farmers around Skagafjord venture to Drangey to collect bird eggs and hunt puffins.

Jón’s father taught him how to rappel down the 558-foot cliffs and fill his sack with eggs. The work was difficult and dangerous (several neighbors fell to their deaths), and as Iceland became more affluent, most of the farmers stopped coming to Drangey. But Jón and his sons built a series of ladders and cables to ease access to the island’s grassy summit, and Jón came to be known, informally, as the Earl of Drangey.

Mike and I made the trip to Drangey twice—once in Jón’s boat, the New Viking, and once in sea kayaks. We launched the kayaks from Reykir, on a beach littered with whale bones (the Icelandic word for jackpot, hvalreki, translates literally as “stranded whale”) and driftwood from Siberia. Past the surf, we paddled eye-to-eye with minke whales, puffins, and quite a few dolphins. As we closed on Drangey’s ramparts, we could see seals flopping around on the rocks.

A rock pinnacle, whitewashed with guano, guards Drangey’s south flank. “The rock is called Kerling [crone],” Jón had told us. “She is the oldest and tallest woman in Skagafjord—and the hardest to get on top of!”

Past Kerling, the sea birds’ laughter grew louder, reaching a hysterical, mocking pitch. The birds—puffins, fulmars, razorbills, skuas, guillemots, terns, gulls—swarm in unimaginable numbers, and the island itself rears out of the sea, towering over us with a chilling determination. Drangey is, quite simply, one of the creepiest, most dramatic places on earth.

No wonder that it is known, among Icelanders, as a bastion of evil—a reputation reinforced by a millennium of fatal disasters. Here are the rocks where Jón’s neighbor died while rappelling for eggs, and the rocks where Jón himself was pinned down by a storm that seemed to arise from nowhere, swamping his boat. Here, at the northern extremity, is the place where 15 fishing boats were crushed in 1963 when the cliff they were sheltering under collapsed during an earthquake. On the island’s western spur, contrasting colors of rock form the shape of a cross called Heidnaberg—“Heathen Rock.” Earlier, Jón had told us how the cross got its seemingly ironic name.

“Two hundred years after Grettir, the bishop was traveling around the country, blessing all the rocks in Iceland. He came to bless Drangey, but when the egg-collectors lowered him down to bless the cross shape, a red hand burst out of the rock. The rope was fraying. A voice told him, ‘You shall not bless more, Father Gudmunder! You have removed evil elsewhere, but the evil things need a place to stay too! Drangey shall be our place!’”

The egg-collectors frantically hauled the bishop up from the cross, and he quickly left the island, leaving Drangey’s northeastern section as the last unblessed rocks in Iceland. Eight hundred years later, in the summer of 2000, Jón brought the current bishop of Iceland out to Drangey in the New Viking. Once he had finished showing the entourage around the island, Jón asked the bishop if he would venture to bless Heathen Rock, and thus complete the Christianization of Iceland’s rocks.

“He said he had been thinking about this very thing,” Jón said, “because he knew someone would ask. But he said that perhaps it was best to leave things as they have been. He said, ‘If the evil things want this place, then . . .’” Jón’s voice falters.

“‘Then let them keep this place.’”

###

When they reached the island Grettir thought it looked quite pleasant; it was all overgrown with grass and had steep cliffs down to the sea so that no one could get on to it except where the ladders were. If the upper ladder was pulled up it was impossible for anyone to get on to the island. There was also a large crag full of sea birds in the summer, and there were eighty sheep in the island belonging to the farmers, mostly rams and ewes, which were meant for slaughter. There Grettir quietly settled down. He had been fifteen or sixteen years an outlaw, so Sturla the son of Thord has recorded.

###

With plenty of sheep, birds, and eggs, Grettir realized that he could now settle down and live comfortably with his brother, free of loneliness and fear. The brothers built a hut, and instructed Glaum to mind the ladders and keep the fire burning.

Once the farmers discovered their unwelcome visitor, they circled the island in boats, trying to negotiate. The farmers’ leader, Thorbjorn Hook, told Grettir that he would let him leave without paying for the sheep he’d slaughtered.

“That is a good offer,” Grettir yelled down to him, “but each of us shall have that which he has got. I’ll tell you straight out that I shall not leave here unless I am dragged away dead.”

One night, Glaum let the fire go out, and Grettir decided to swim the four miles to Reykir, to fetch fire from the nearest farmer.

Grettir then prepared for his swim. He wore a cloak of coarse material with breeches and had his fingers webbed. Illugi thought his journey was hopeless, but Grettir had the current with him and it was calm as he swam. He smote the water bravely and reached the beach after sunset.

Although Grettir’s swim has been dupicated five times in the 20^th century, Mike and I found enough challenge in our round trip-kayak crossing. We didn’t have Grettir’s luck with the wind, and by the time we finished pulling the boats out of the surf at Reykir, we were in need of a good warm-up.

Grettir went into the settlement at Reykir, bathed in the night in a warm spring, and then entered the hall, where it was very hot and a little smoky from the fire which had been burning there all day.

He was very tired and slept soundly. In the morning, the first to enter the room were two women, the maid and the farmer’s daughter. Grettir was asleep, and his clothes had slipped off him. The maid recognized him, and said:

“Upon my word, sister, Grettir Asmundarson is here, lying naked. He really is large about the upper part of his body, but I’m astonished to see how poorly endowed he is below. It is not at all in proportion to the rest of him.”

With the kayaks beached, we walked over to the pool—now called Grettislaug—and jumped in. Within a few minutes, we were joined by Jón’s nephew, Steinn, and a German couple camping nearby. The Germans brought over a round of Weissbier, and talk got around to . . . what else?

The German guy sprang to Grettir’s defense: “It was unfair for her to mock him. The water in that fjord is very cold. You cannot expect a lot from a man in this situation.”

“But listen,” Steinn said. “After he swam in the fjord, he bathed in the hot spring, this very hot spring we bathing in now. Wasn’t there plenty of time for all his parts to warm up?”

Grettir heard what the farm maid had said, and he spoke a verse:

The seamstress sitting at home,

Short-sworded she calls me!

The boastful hand-maiden may well be right,

But a small one can grow, and I’m still a young man.

So wait until I get into action, my lass!

###

This scene—which the saga goes on to describe in further spicy detail—took place in Reykir, less than five miles from Jón’s farmhouse. And although Grettir was said to have not had any offspring, one look at Jón’s son Viggo was enough to make us wonder if some of the strongman’s genes hadn’t been handed down that day.

We met Viggo, whose surname is Jonsson—“Jón’s son,” in the Icelandic tradition—atop Drangey. In his blue coveralls—“my puffin-hunting uniform”—he cut an imposing figure. He’s a monster of a man, a true Viking, but like the rest of Jón’s ten children, he has a quick smile and a gentle sense of humor.

With Jón’s joints stiffening with age, Viggo now handles most of the hunting, often sleeping atop the island in a turf-roofed hut the family built. Mike and I pitched our tents next to the hut and spent the night with Viggo and a few of his friends, eating roasted lamb and drinking schnapps in the cool mist. Viggo asked us if we’d like to accompany him on the next day’s puffin hunt, on Drangey’s western spur.

In the morning we follow Viggo from Drangey’s summit down along a series of tenuous hand-holds, up a swinging chain ladder, then down a precariously steep meadow pocked with puffin burrows. We climb past hundreds of juvenile fulmars, still fuzzy and flightless in mid-summer. In a curious defense mechanism, the birds try to scare us away by projectile-puking their partially digested food at us.

At the edge of the cliff, Viggo crouches in the grass with his net, mounted on a 12-foot pole. When a puffin flies within range, Viggo arcs the net up swiftly and snares the bright-beaked bird, which flaps helplessly in the webbing until Viggo removes it. With a quick turn of the wrist—krrriick—he snaps its neck.

“I think it is better than being a chicken, at least,” Viggo says, setting the bird in the grass. “Most chickens stay in jails the whole lifetime. This is a more noble way, yah?”

Within a few hours, Viggo has laid a couple of hundred birds out to cool on a shady ledge. In the four-week puffin-hunting season, the family catches about 13,000 of the birds, which they sell to individuals and restaurants for about a dollar apiece. Mike and I help Viggo bag the birds, then we head back to Drangey’s main summit. In the middle of the meadow, Jón sits at the nub of the jagged rectangle of half-buried stones. Mike and I lean in to hear the old man’s voice above the wind and sea birds.

###

“When Grettir had been an outlaw for 19 years, the law speaker said that his sentence could be lifted the next year, because no man should be an outlaw for more than 20 years. Most of the farmers on Skagafjord decided to forget about their sheep. But Thorbjorn Hook was upset by Grettir’s insults. He went to his foster mother, Thurid the Crone. Sorcery was banned in Iceland by this time, but she took a piece of driftwood and smeared it with blood. Then she carved runes into the root, and set the wood drifting toward Drangey. This was what sealed Grettir’s doom.

“Glaum brought the driftwood to Grettir, and when Grettir tried to chop it for the fire, his axe bounced off and sank into his thigh. It was a deep wound, and it soon became infected. Grettir felt his strength draining. He told Illugi that he thought he had been a victim of sorcery. Then he recited a long poem, telling of his life’s accomplishments.

“A few nights later, Glaum fell asleep with the ladders down, and Hook’s men climbed to the top of the island. Eighteen of them stormed the hut and tore the roof off it. Illugi fought them bravely, but Grettir was close to death and could barely rise from the bed. While the others pinned Illugi behind the rafters, Hook speared Grettir in the back. As he fell, he said his last words: “Bare is the back of a brotherless man.”

“With Grettir’s own sword, Hook cut off Grettir’s head. Hook offered to spare Illugi if he promised not to take vengeance, but Illugi said, ‘It is out of the question that I might save my life by becoming a coward like you. If I live, I can assure you that no one will be a greater enemy of yours than I.’ At daybreak, they took off Illugi’s head, over there on the east side of the island.

“And so, the strongest man who ever lived in Iceland, the greatest outlaw, was taken down not by force or fair means, but by sorcery. And only a year before he was to be—how do you say?—paroled.”

###

On Drangey’s summit, the wind has tapered off, and the sun, a deep orange ball, is sliding gently toward the northern horizon. Jón puts his hat back on his head and stands up stiffly, hands on knees.

“Well,” he says, “I won’t bore you with any more of my babble. I will go home now and see if there is any coffee on the table.”

Mike and I rise from the stones on which we’ve been sitting. Grettir, our unseen guide, was dead. Our trip was winding down. Had we succeeded in visiting all the places Grettir had visited? It was hard to say. Both land and story had shifted so much that recognition was no longer a matter of books or maps; it was in the realm of spirit, of collective memory. To be honest, I didn’t believe we had gone everywhere Grettir had gone. But I did believe—perhaps the way an Icelander believes—in a story’s power to resonate through the ages, to reveal certain truths through the land itself—one person, one moment at a time.

As Jón begins to walk toward the ladder, Mike has a final question for him: Grettir’s hut, where the final battle took place—where was it?

Jón turns around, and looks surprised. “I did not tell you? It was right here—these stones where we have been sitting all this time.”

I experience a frisson of realization: To think that these stones were here that day—that they were here all along, carried through the seasons and shaped by the forces that shaped Iceland, the same forces that shaped the fates and fortunes of the Icelanders themselves.

Our visit here is short, our memories are easily scattered to the wind. But the stones were here all along. And the stones remember everything.

The post Outlaw’s Guide to Iceland appeared first on .