Travis picked me up in Boise. I'd expected his skin to be lined and dusty, like all Western horsemen, but so far the marks of his trade had furrowed only as high as his boots. Round-cheeked and stocky, Travis was also far from true-grit terse. "Your mom must be real worried about you, huh?" he asked as we began our four-hour drive northwest to Challis, Idaho, a dusty gateway to the 2.4-million acre Frank Church Wilderness. I'd be camping there with one of Travis' guides for a week's summer vacation, miles from the middle of nowhere.

"Yeah, Mom's beside herself," I said. "She won't sleep until I've left the wilderness, and washed my hands."

"Oh, no," Travis laughed. "I mean, isn't she worried about you living in New York City?"

Well, no. My mother grew up in New York City. When she married my father, a you-can't-raise-a-child-in-the-city southerner, she'd had to get over her fear of the suburbs. And when I'm home in Brooklyn she, in the most preternatural sense, knows where her child is.

Travis Bullock is a fifth-generation Idahoan. He is 33, and he has two children, a home he built himself, and a successful business. (I am 34, and I have roommates.) He and his wife Brenda run Mile High Outfitters, guiding hunters and unarmed visitors through the spectacular Northern Rockies.

As a horse person and a wolf person, I swooned when I heard about Mile High's riding and camping trips through this prime wolf country. Our family's beloved dog, you see, was half-wolf. (The suburbs had at least turned my mom into an animal person.) We'd given many impromptu speeches, my folks and I, about how "Wolves are by nature very shy," and "History, metaphor, and the Brothers Grimm have it all wrong," and "There's no documented report of a wolf attack on a human in the United States." Grateful animal, environmental, and gun control groups kept our closets full of logoed tote bags and umbrellas.

Through a freak scheduling accident, it turned out that I was the only person on Mile High's August 2002 trip. Just me, two horses, four mules, and Justin: a 20-year-old with a baby face, Wrangler jeans, and a skill set very different from mine. He can hunt, fish, shoot, track, build, farm, break a horse, castrate a calf, dissect an elk, raise a prize-winning steer. (I can read French.) Yes, just Justin and me in the largest wilderness in the lower 48, accessible only on foot, horseback, or by private plane. It was like Blind Date meets Survivor meets Who Wants to Marry A Horse Whisperer? When we rode into what would be camp the first night, Justin set about gathering wood, saying, "Me make fire for Lynn." We were going to get along fine.

We rode for up to nine hours a day, camp to camp, through forest, over meadows, alongside creeks, over fire-scarred mountaintops spiked with sooty skeletons of pine. I learned to tell deer tracks from elk, moose poop from bear. I learned to keep an eye on the ridges above us for mountain lions. And I learned that wolves could kill me.

"I don't know why folks think wolves are so different from bears and lions," Justin said. "If they're hungry, you're food. And you are in their house." He told stories of wolves chasing elk for sport, wolves circling camp at night. I thought Willa Cather made all that up. I didn't want to hear it.

"Well, what if they come to camp?" I asked.

"I shoot in the air. They run off," he shrugged.

Shoot. A gun. Right. A gun. Of course he's carrying one. We're alone in the wilderness. Right.

"My gun's right in my duffel -- wanna see it?" asked Justin, also skilled in reading thoughts. He rummaged around and pulled out his .357 Magnum. It looked like a prop.

"You never even seen one, have you?" he asked, having seen me take an inadvertent step back.

"I don't know anyone who owns one."

"I don't know anyone who doesn't," he said.

I really know no one? I asked myself again. Nope. No hunters, no collectors, no post-September-11 rewriters of the rules of self-defense. Not even my Georgia granddaddy, though he'd been outlaw enough to make moonshine on the back stoop of a dry home. No one.

"I'll let you shoot it if you want," Justin offered. Oh, I wanted. To impress Justin. In truth, I was petrified.

He showed me the safety, the chamber, the feather-light action of the trigger.

"Why am I so scared?" I asked.

"You should be scared," he said.

Justin fired first, to prepare me for how loud it would be.

Beyond loud. The sound bored into my chest, through my gut, out my toes and back into the trees. Justin made me paper-towel earplugs and handed me the pistol. It felt heavy and out of place in my hands. He showed me how to aim at the tobacco tin he'd leaned against a tree. I half-listened, focusing mainly on his instructions not to touch the trigger until I was about to fire. I also imagined the scenario: my finger slipping, the gun flipping, how a bullet would feel in my neck, how Justin would feel having to call my mother.

Justin waited. I eventually chose a moment from nowhere and moved my finger. There was another noise and I was done. The tin was untouched.

"Good for you!" Justin grinned. "Travis will be proud."

"Thanks."

I handed the gun back. I felt no surge of power, no urge to shoot again, no thrill from firing a deadly machine, no guilt about holding it with the same hand that carried those tote bags. What I felt was kinship, or at least that I'd earned a temporary visa. That I was now a legitimate guest of what's evidently a shrinking fraternity - and, if the lobby has its way, a growing sorority - of Gun People. I knew I stood in a place where guns had their place. Not a city, not a cockpit, but a place where guns were part of life rather than its antithesis.

That night the horses spooked. We were sitting by the fire devouring chicken-fried steak when we heard what sounded like rocks tumbling out of a dump truck. Justin said, "What the hell was that?!" -- not something you want to hear from your wilderness guide. A short walk down to the meadow below, where the animals were grazing, revealed that we'd heard hooves striking earth. "They ran clear across," he said. "Must have seen a bear or a lion, or wolves."

Wolves. Love and fear fused in my now-wild imagination to make two decisions: one, it was definitely wolves, and two, I was going to sleep outside my tent. Part of me still hoped they'd show up, but I wasn't about to be lying inside my tent, like the soft creamy center of a giant nylon Twinkie, when they did. I unrolled my sleeping bag on some horse blankets, under the stars, next to Justin, who was next to his gun. And I slept.