Survival

Nine tribespeople who survived the Dec. 26 tsunami spent 38 days wandering through flattened villages on a remote Indian island, eating boar and coconuts, before police found them Wednesday. Five men, two women and two girls were discovered in a forest on Campbell Bay by police searching for people still missing after the disaster, which killed more than 150,000 people around the Indian Ocean.

Nine days after giant waves struck Little Andaman island, a child was born in a soccer stadium and the Onge tribe of hunters and gatherers took a step away from extinction. The rain forest that surrounds the tribe, along with traditional Onge wisdom, saved it in a catastrophe that killed more than 150,000 people across southern Asia. Now some experts fear that the tsunami's aftermath will prove more dangerous than the waves.

The first thing John Phipps wants you to know is that he doesn't know what all the fuss is about. He was a passenger on a commuter train, that's all. One moment he was asleep, rolling to his aerospace job in Burbank; the next moment morning mist was falling on his face from the open sky, and a pile of wreckage was pinning him to the floor. What made him so sought-after is what he did next. He scrawled a note on an overturned seat with his own blood: "I {heart}my kids. I {heart}Leslie."

Ants living in the tops of trees in the Peruvian rain forest have developed a unique technique to control their fall if dislodged. Even though the insects do not have wings, ants that fall are able to glide back to a tree trunk and grab onto bark, a team headed by ecologist Stephen P. Yanoviak of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston reported this week in the journal Nature.

FOR Patric Hedlund, it was a beautiful fall afternoon for a day hike on Pine Mountain near Frazier Park. Clear, bright skies. Hawaiian-shirt weather. A familiar trail. Her friend Amy tagging along with her Rottweiler-Dane pup. There was no sign of impending doom. "We were walking along some banks and missed the cutoff to the main trail," recalls Patric Hedlund, a Frazier Park-based editor who had done this hike at least eight times.

IT IS A LOVELY SUNDAY for a ski tour. A bright midwinter sun counters a chilly north wind as the five of us -- old friends, new friends, one pretty girl -- round the southwest shoulder of Red Mountain No. 3 and prepare to ski the face below. Jerry Roberts drops in first, but I can see him for only a couple of turns before he disappears -- skis, then hips, then head -- behind the convex shape. Dammit Jerry, I think: He hasn't waited for us. We wanted to get in position to watch him ski down.

IT'S 10:30 ON A MOONLESS FRIDAY NIGHT IN THE EASTERN SIERRA. IT'S darker than the inside of a cow and colder than a well digger's caboose. I'm stomping a flat spot in snow that must be 85 miles deep, getting ready to pitch a tent the size of a straitjacket. Which somehow seems appropriate, given my companions once were ordinary people with regular jobs. Then something in their lives snapped: They signed up for a wilderness training course. They wanted to touch the void.

The lasting mark my father, a Holocaust survivor, has made on me is not from the tiny bits he has shared about his past, but from what he hasn't said. My dad has always told me that he had to draw an imaginary line between his past and his present to be able to emotionally survive and live his life. Since I understand his coping mechanism, I've never really delved into deep conversations about his personal history.

The clues are covered by snow now, 158 winters removed from events that haunt these hills and the history books. Back before railroads and interstates and ski towns, the families of George and Jacob Donner hunkered down here during the terrible winter of 1846-47, snowbound in a pine-ringed meadow a couple miles north of the old pioneer trail now flanked by vacation homes. We all know the Donner Party story -- or at least think we do. A wagon train of 81 emigrants is trapped in the Sierra.

A cross-country skier who survived eight days in the backcountry with a broken leg and little food or water was rescued Monday when searchers heard him blowing on his emergency whistle. Charles Horton, 55, was hospitalized in fair condition with frostbite, mild hypothermia and dehydration in addition to his broken leg, authorities said. "Mentally, he's doing awesome. Thoroughly amazing," said friend Mary O'Brien.