A lot of things in Romania suffered during the brutal reign of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu—human rights, liberty, economic development. But tucked away in the deep freeze lay a stunningly well-preserved wilderness high in the Carpathian mountains, where brown bears, wolves, and lynx still run free.

By David Quammen

Gordon Wiltsie

On the prowl: A captive Canis lupus surveys Romania's Carpathian range, outside of Zarnesti.

IT'S TWO HOURS AFTER SUNSET on this snow-clogged Romanian mountain, and in the headlight of a stalled snowmobile stand five worried people and two amused dogs. One of the dogs is a husky. Her name, Yukai, translates from a distant Indian language to mean "Northern Lights." Her pale gray eyes glow coldly, like tiny winter moons. One of the worried people is me. My name translates from Norwegian to mean "cow man" or, less literally, "a cattle jockey who should have stayed in his paddock"—neither of which lends me any aura of masterly attunement to present circumstances. The temperature is falling.

Unlike placid Yukai, we five humans are poorly prepared for a night's bivouac in the snow, having long since abandoned most of our gear in an ill-advised gambit to lighten our load and move faster. Three of us—myself, the American photographer Gordon Wiltsie, and a German visitor, Uli Geertz, from the conservation group Vier Pfoten ("Four Paws")—are on backcountry skis with skins, schlepping along steadily behind a biologist named Christoph Promberger and his biologist wife, Barbara Promberger-Fuerpass, who are driving the two snowmobiles.

Christoph is a lanky, 34-year-old German whose raucous black hair and almond-thin, lidded eyes make him appear faintly Mongolian—that is, like a young Mongolian basketball player with a wry smile. Though officially employed by the Munich Wildlife Society, he has worked here in the Carpathian Mountains since 1993, collaborating with a Romanian counterpart named Ovidiu Ionescu, of the Forestry Research and Management Institute, to create a new conservation program called the Carpathian Large Carnivore Project. Barbara, a fair-haired Austrian, joined the project more recently and is now beginning a study of lynx. Both of them are hardy souls with considerable field experience in remote parts of the Yukon (where Christoph did his masters work on the relationship between wolves and ravens, and where later they honeymooned), so they know a thing or three about winter survival, backcountry travel, problem avoidance, snowmobile repair. But tonight's conditions, reflecting an unusually severe series of January storms and an absence of other human traffic along this road, have caught them by surprise.

Gordon and I are surprised too: that Murphy's Law, though clearly in force, seems unheard-of in Romania.

At the outset Christoph was towing a cargo sled, but that had to be cast loose and left behind. Even without it, the Skidoos have been foundering in soft six-foot drifts, and much of our energy for the past few hours has gone into pushing these infernal machines, pulling them, kicking them, cursing them, nudging them ever higher toward a peak called Fata lui Ilie, ever deeper into trouble. The sensible decision, after we'd bogged at the first steep pitch and then bogged again and again, would have been to turn back at nightfall and retreat to the valley.

Instead we went on, convincing ourselves recklessly that the going would get easier farther up. Ha. Somewhere ahead, maybe three miles, maybe five, is a cabin. We have one balky headlamp, a bit of food, matches, two pairs of snowshoes as well as the skis, but no tent and, since ditching even our packs back at the last steep switchback, no sleeping bags. The good news is that the forest is full of wolves.

"I believe the term is goat-fucked," Gordon says suddenly. "A situation that's so absurdly bad, it becomes sublime." Gordon's own situation is more sublime than the rest of ours, since he's suffering from a gut-curdling intestinal flu as well as the generally shared ailments—cold hands, exhaustion, frustration, hunger, and embarrassment. "We could easily spend the night out here, without sleeping bags," he adds.

On that point I'm inclined to disagree: We could do it, yes, but it wouldn't be easy.