Back in the boat, Chester and his friends headed a few miles downstream to his grandmother Nanny Woods's place, a rough plywood shack sitting on the crumbling riverbank. The door was banging open in the wind. The flotsam and jetsam of a typical Inupiat hunting camp lay strewn about: dead batteries, old cookstoves, rusting oil drums, and associated junk. This is their spot, the cousins say, their home away from home. Here they escape the growing pressures of Inupiat life, the constant buzz of four-wheelers, the incessant drone of TV, the boredom of the village, and just hunt, fish, and be free.

"The caribou herd used to come here," Chester said. "Hardly does anymore now that this pipeline is here. Oil is a good thing for the jobs, but it changes things."

"Man, I love it when the herd runs," Joe Frank said. "You can feel it in the ground just like Dances With Wolves."

There are other sounds now. They can hear the rig from here, the generators, the planes, the helicopters, and a garbage-truck-size vacuum cleaner—a "super-sucker"—for cleaning up spills. "OK," I said, "pretend I'm ConocoPhillips. I'm offering each of you ten million dollars for this cabin and the land around it. Any takers?" To a man, each said no.

"How far will ten million take you?" Andrew asked. "You can go to Vegas and blow ten million dollars in a year. But can you still come out here? This place is priceless."

"We get more from this place than money," added Joe Frank. "The land feeds you. We're rich as long as we've got the land."

As they left the shack, one of the men pointed to a lone wooden marker jutting from the tundra. "See? Our grandpa George Woods. He's buried over here." One has to wonder if that old Inupiat knew when he picked that spot that one day he'd be listening to super-suckers for eternity, or at least until the oil runs out.

Today it's the hunting lands of Nuiqsut. The next stop on the oil industry's wish list—based on where it is putting its money—isn't the coastal plain of ANWR, known by its government label as the 1002 Area. It's Teshekpuk Lake. The largest freshwater body on the slope sits in the most controversial chunk of NPRA to go on the auction block, some 4.6 million acres (1.8 million hectares) known officially as the Northeast Planning Area. The lake and its swampy borders, laced with creeks and potholes, have long been considered one of the most important molting areas for geese and other birds in the Arctic. A third of the world's black brant, for example, lose their flight feathers near the lake, along with tens of thousands of Canada geese, white-fronted geese, snow geese, and tundra swans. It's also the calving grounds for some 45,000 caribou known as the Teshekpuk herd, which serves as a veritable meat locker for four villages. Up to a tenth of the herd ends up on Inupiat tables every year.