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'In 1992 a young American walked into the Alaskan wilderness with ten pounds of rice and a plant guide to live off the land, and the thing that killed him was the thing he had failed to keep.

Christopher McCandless was twenty-four, bright, from a comfortable family, and done with all of it. He gave his savings to charity, burned his cash, and walked north until he found an abandoned bus on a trail west of Healy and made it his home. He had a rifle and a book on edible plants. He shot squirrels, porcupines and birds and wrote the tally on the wall. He ate the plants the book told him to.

In June he shot a moose. It was the largest thing he had ever killed and the only thing on the trail that could have carried him through to autumn. He tried to preserve it the way the book said, smoking it over a fire in a shallow pit, and in the warm weather the flies got into it faster than the smoke could work. Within days the carcass was maggots. He wrote in his journal that it was one of the greatest tragedies of his life.

From then on it was small game, berries, and the roots and seeds of the wild potato. He grew thinner by the week. In July he wrote that he was in trouble and tried to walk out, found the river he had crossed in spring now in flood, and went back to the bus. The journal entries shrink to a word or two. In August he wrote a note asking anyone who found him for help, climbed into his sleeping bag, and died. Hunters found him in September. He weighed sixty-seven pounds.

The seeds he had been eating are now thought to have contained a compound that blocked his body from using what little food he had.

A boy went into the wild with a bag of rice and a book of plants, was handed a moose by the country, and could not keep it. The plants did the rest.'