John Ottway has found the job at the end of the world, working as a hunter for an oil-camp on the North Slope of Alaska. It’s brutal, cold, and isolated, and there’s little he needs to do but wait for the day when he has the courage to end his life, as he plans to, some day, “at a time to be determined.” But the plane that ferries him and the other camp workers between the Slope and civilization crashes in the tundra, leaving Ottway alone with a handful of terrified survivors to face a punishing landscape, wolves who see them as an invading pack, and, ultimately, the prospect of a death he didn’t choose in its most insistent, inexorable form. As he battles to save the lives of those with him, he looks into the darkness of an unforgiving nature and must weigh the abysses in himself and the wrongs he carries against what he leaves behind, and choose whether his own life is worth saving, or not.

Книга переделанная в сценарий к фильму "Схватка".