Forming the framework of his first collection of nonfiction, “Running After Antelope,” Carrier’s attempts to catch antelopes appear throughout the book, interspersed with other articles previously published in Harper’s and Esquire. Also included are several broadcast pieces from his 18-year stint as a contributor to National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” and Public Radio International’s “This American Life.”

But Carrier’s pursuit of antelopes provides the narrative thread of the book, and the essays that deal with it are the most captivating, honest and heartfelt. Early on, Carrier shares with us the origin of his obsession: Back in 1983, his vertebrate morphologist brother tells him that, during exercise, humans can breathe when they want to, unlike other mammals whose lungs are connected to their spines and are inflated automatically with each stride.

Carrier’s brother believes this biological feature gives humans an advantage over other mammals by providing greater strength and stamina; he finds historical accounts of tribes that run for days tracking deer, antelopes or kangaroos until the animals tire sufficiently to be caught and killed. The tribes include the Goshutes and the Papago of America’s West, Australian Aborigines, Mexico’s Tarahumara and, also from Mexico, the Seri tribe, which Carrier visits. Slowly, over the years, he becomes transfixed with the thought of running down an antelope.

“When I drive across the desert I look for pronghorn standing by the highway. One time, on I-80 in Wyoming, I saw three of them outrun a freight train,” he writes. Together, Carrier and his brother enlist anyone willing to put their theory to the test; patience, perseverance and a good pair of lungs are the only requirements.

Carrier has been writing for Esquire since the late 1990s, from various far-flung locations referred to simply as “really fucked-up places.” These and other pieces see him traveling to Cambodia before and after the fall of the Khmer Rouge; to war-torn Kashmir, shelled from either side daily by Pakistan and India; and from Salt Lake City to New York and back again, hitchhiking, in two days.

“Running After Antelope” is populated with lonely truckers, Muslim Kashmiri insurgents, schizophrenics and ex-Khmer Rouge lieutenants. Moody and evocative, Carrier’s word slinging reminds us that America’s Wild West is still very much alive, as are wilder places still.

Carrier recently spoke with Salon.

What do you think readers have connected to in “Running After Antelope”?

The idea of pursuit, the idea of a chase; it’s biological.

Have you managed to catch an antelope yet?

Not yet. I haven’t tried lately. It would take some serious effort of more than just two guys. I’d say if we had four, and spent a couple of months working at it, maybe not every day, but it’s been done. I believe in it. I think it’s possible. The main problem is not the running; the main problem is knowledge of the terrain and the animal itself.

Primitive hunters did it. I mean, we got a pretty good story with the Seri down there in Mexico, and so many other reports. They’re all so similar in the technique that it makes me think that it has been done. And I think also probably a certain amount of dancing has put the animal into some sort of trance. That’s usually part of it, from what I’ve read, and the Seri said that too, that they would mesmerize the animal with a dance. I don’t know how many groups actually were runners or ran things down and did stuff like that, because there’s only three or four good stories in the records.

You included some historical accounts of this hunting technique in “Running After Antelope.” How did you find them?

My brother found some of them when he was doing research and then I found a couple more just by looking through the ethnographies. There are some Indians in Canada who would go after deer in the snow, with snowshoes, but that’s different. In deep snow the animal can’t go anywhere.

Why are there so few surviving accounts of these hunting techniques?

You know, I think it’s something that anthropologists missed. When there were primitive cultures intact, they didn’t really ever go out hunting with the guys. They sat in camp and waited for them to come back.

The pieces collected in your book are all written in the first person. As a writer, how important to you is life experience?

I don’t know about other writers, but for me, I just write about the things that I personally see or experience. So that limits me. Other people don’t work that way and that’s fine, but I try to write what I see and what I experience and always from that position. I try to make it clear from the beginning that this is my point of view.

Who are your literary influences?

Charles Bowden is probably the biggest one, recently. Over the years I’ve had a bunch.

Like you, Bowden is an American nonfiction writer. Do you read nonfiction exclusively or are you influenced also by works of fiction?

I don’t read a lot of fiction because I like nonfiction better. I read some fiction — well, Kerouac was a big influence. Yeah, Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut as well, and Mark Twain. I kind of get into disagreements with other people in that I’m not really influenced by anything other than American writers.

When the book was published earlier this year, many reviewers commented on how American your writing is, and how your voice quintessentially reflects your nationality. Do you agree?

Yes, I think it’s there because I try to write from my perspective. If I’m doing it well then it should sound like I come from a suburb of Salt Lake City in the year 2000, or whatever. So if that’s working then I guess that’s good.

You’ve been to some pretty dangerous locations. You traveled to Cambodia, which was controlled by the Khmer Rouge, and Kashmir, which has been the subject of protracted, and sometimes violent, ownership battles since the 1950s. Were you ever in any real danger?

I was in areas where people were being killed, or had been killed recently, or there was some threat of military action. But I was never worried for myself because most of the time, in situations like that, even really dangerous situations, they don’t kill foreign correspondents. They kill the local correspondents who help them. Foreign correspondents go in and seek help from local people and the local people are the ones who get hurt, or imprisoned, or screwed up, because it’s too big a deal to mess with the [foreign] correspondents and really they don’t care one way or another most of the time.

How do you successfully introduce the reader to a country so removed from his or her own?

Those assignments are for short periods of time, like two weeks, and they’re limited in length, so you’ve got to present the historical background, for educational purposes and to set the scene. Then I tried to basically say what it was like to be there and what I saw. That was the hardest part, because in two weeks, you know, to present a historical context and then to have something happen for a story form, it’s rather chancy. And you don’t know if anything’s going to happen or not.

I just tried to do the best job I could, and I try not to write in a sort of macho blood-and-guts style like some of the other magazines. It was something that several men’s magazines were doing, and still do, to publish reports from really screwed-up places. It bothered me that, like I say in the book, or like the character in the Chiapas story says, “they’re putting blood and guts between ads for $3,000 suits and cologne.” That bothered me, but at the same time I thought, Well, people can learn something from this about really screwed-up places that we don’t know anything about.

How much input did you have in the locations you covered?

They said, “Do you want to go here?” and I said, “OK.”

In bringing to our attention the plight of citizens in areas like Cambodia, Kashmir and Chiapas, do you think your reports have the power to effect any positive social change that will be felt by the subjects you interviewed while you were there?

Well, I don’t know. I think that those Cambodia stories actually did have, sort of, an effect on the media awareness of Cambodia because I went there right before the Khmer Rouge dissolved, or fell apart. And then I went back again right after and that was a time when the Cambodians were trying to promote tourism and there was news going on besides. It was becoming a popular place for tourists and there were things happening that were pretty big changes in the country. It was something that Americans hadn’t really known about; you know, we’d forgotten about Cambodia in that interim time. So I think that one did make a difference because a lot of people heard the radio story. I tried to write it in a way that it wasn’t just a blatant, bloody thing. I was trying to affect the reader on a deeper level. I don’t think the Kashmir one made any difference. Nothing’s going to make a difference in Kashmir. The Chiapas one never got published, so it didn’t make any difference at all.

Twenty miles northeast of Detroit, the institute sits atop a small patch of grass, backed by a screen of trees, squat and unremarkable. Few would guess from its drab exterior that it houses the bodies of 38 customers frozen and suspended in liquid nitrogen. Even fewer would guess that seven dogs and nine cats, equally frozen, are keeping them company. But since opening the institute almost 25 years ago, Ettinger has seen membership grow steadily, and his team is performing more suspensions now than at any other time.

“In recent years we’ve been getting maybe three or four a year, I guess,” he says. Ettinger, like his patients and their pets, is waiting for the day they can all be revived.

In much the same way as drowning patients can be resuscitated after long periods without breathing, Ettinger believes researchers will find a way to reverse the tissue damage that accompanies long-term freezing, allowing his customers to be resuscitated too. Until then, their bodies will remain submerged, or “suspended,” in liquid nitrogen, in vast containers called cryostats, the largest of which is capable of storing up to 16 bodies at once.

With an eye toward the future, the folks at the institute are aware that the bodies they freeze must be in the best shape possible. In other words, they must be fresh and, to minimize tissue breakdown, the initial phases of suspension must be performed in the minutes immediately after a patient is declared dead. “We can have people on the spot if we know ahead of time,” Ettinger says. The sooner after death the process is begun, the more likely it is to be successful, he says. When his wife died last year, technicians were standing by to begin her suspension immediately.

“There were only seconds lost,” he says.

Immediately after death, a flurry of activity begins as technicians rush to prepare the patient’s body for cooling and suspension. The body is stripped of any clothing and an anticoagulant solution is injected via either the femoral or the carotid artery. Pumped around the patient’s circulatory system, this solution prevents the blood from clotting and causing ischemic tissue damage. Technicians cool the body with cold packs while transporting it to the institute’s fully equipped laboratories. Blood pressure and acidity are measured constantly, while a device for heart/lung resuscitation maintains vascular flow, pushing anticoagulant around the body, looping through arteries, veins and capillaries to permeate the brain.

Once body temperature is stabilized at 16 degrees Celsius, the patient’s blood is thoroughly washed out with buffered physiological saline, which also contains mannitol to prevent fluid migration from the rapidly cooling cells. Finally, after the patient’s blood is removed and disposed of, the body is suffused with a glycerine-based cryoprotectant solution that protects the tissues from freezing damage, and then it is slowly cooled again using cold carbon dioxide vapors. After it reaches dry ice temperatures, the body is cooled further to minus 196 degrees Celsius, which arrests further degradation or decomposition.

According to the Cryonics Institute Web site: “With a patient of ordinary size, we have been taking about a week to cool down to dry ice temperature (minus 79 degrees Celsius or minus 110 degrees Fahrenheit) and another week to get down to liquid nitrogen temperature (minus 196 degrees Celsius or minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit).”

After placing patients in cryostats, staff at the institute will care for them indefinitely. “They’re simply maintained in liquid nitrogen,” Ettinger says. “All that means is topping off the liquid nitrogen from time to time. We check them every day.”

Cool a body too quickly and it will crack; cool it too slowly and digestive enzymes in the cells will have time to begin breaking down the surrounding tissue. If cells are allowed to rupture, or swelling is not prevented, fluid migrating from within the cells to the spaces between them will expand on freezing, causing further damage. Either way, the result is extensive damage and, until this can be reversed, the bodies will remain in cryostasis under Ettinger’s watchful eye.

Injury to cells is not as severe as critics make out, Ettinger says, and many tissues, including human embryos, sperm, skin and bone marrow have been frozen in liquid nitrogen and have recovered when thawed. “There can be cellular damage,” Ettinger concedes, “but the most important damage probably is in the connections between cells, particularly the neurons.”

In the future, according to cryonicists like Ettinger, scientists will create tiny machines capable of trundling through the body to repair damaged cells molecule by molecule, and atom by atom, until proper function is restored.

“We haven’t tried to revive anyone yet because we’re nowhere near that capability,” he says. Meanwhile, the number of patients in long-term cryostasis increases yearly at the institute. “There is an extremely slim chance the anti-aging breakthrough will come in time for me,” Ettinger says. But resuscitation of patients will come sooner rather than later, he says.

“I guess the most common conjectures are anywhere between 50 and 200 years,” he says.

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“I grew up in the ’20s,” Ettinger recalls. “I just grew up taking it for granted that we would learn how to cure old age.” He first became interested in cryonics as a way of achieving this in 1931, after reading a story called “The Jameson Satellite” in a pulp fiction magazine. In the story, Jameson, a professor, has his body placed in a satellite and sent into Earth’s orbit, where it remains for millions of years until it is discovered by aliens and resuscitated. Inspired by the story, Ettinger was determined to make cryonics a reality.

In the late 1940s, Ettinger learned of French scientist Jean Rostand’s success in freezing and thawing frog sperm in glycerol without affecting its ability to fertilize eggs. To Ettinger, who spent the next decade obtaining master’s degrees in mathematics and physics, Rostand’s work was a sign that the same might be possible in humans. By 1960, with his mother still enjoying good health, Ettinger decided it was time to introduce a larger audience to cryonics.

“I wasn’t trained in biology and I wasn’t a celebrity of any kind and there was no reason to think people would be interested in what I had to say,” he says. Instead he tried to drum up interest by selecting “a couple of hundred” celebrities from “Who’s Who in America” and writing to them, outlining his theories. The outcome was disappointing, Ettinger says matter-of-factly.

“It received a meager response and I realized it had to be a book-length exposition,” he says.

The result was Ettinger’s first book, “The Prospect of Immortality,” which he published on his own in 1962 and distributed to friends and scientists. Two years later, the book was picked up by a major publishing house and quickly became a seminal text, the book that launched the cryonics movement.

In 1967, as a result of Ettinger’s book, psychology professor James Bedford became the first patient to undergo cryonic suspension. Meanwhile, Ettinger was busy forming the Cryonic Society of Michigan, which became the Cryonics Association, which became the Immortalist Society, which formed the Cryonics Institute, which was incorporated in 1976. Ettinger performed his first cryosuspension a year later, on his mother. Ten years after his inaugural suspension, he placed his first wife in cryostasis, and just last year, his second wife joined them.

As a result of Ettinger’s proselytizing, the Cryonics Institute is not the only company now offering cryonic suspension services. The Alcor Life Extension Foundation, based in Scottsdale, Ariz., is another. When potential customers call Alcor’s toll-free phone number, they are greeted by the following message: “Yes, yes, yes operator, collect calls are accepted. This is the Alcor emergency line; please use this line only in the event that an Alcor member is dying or has died. Please stay on the line, this call is being recorded. Our regular business number is (480) 905-1906, to repeat (480) 905-1906; however, if this is an emergency, continue to hold. DO NOT HANG UP.”

Seconds later, a phone rings and someone answers expectantly, finger hovering over a bank of buttons, ready to dispatch a team of trained technicians anywhere in the country to begin an ailing member’s suspension.

Essentially, Alcor offers services similar to those of the Cryonics Institute, but with a whole-body suspension costing around $120,000, its prices are significantly higher than Ettinger’s fee of $35,000. “There’s nothing wrong with Alcor,” Ettinger says. “They’re much more expensive and we think that some of the things they do are unnecessary.”

Alcor is not as forthcoming as Ettinger, either, charging journalists $2,000 for access to its facilities and asking that they sign a media agreement before granting interviews. Among other things, the agreement requires that corpses at the facility not be referred to as “corpses” but rather “patients” or “Alcor members.” Similar terms like “stiff” or “carcass” or “cadaver” are also unacceptable.

Unlike the Cryonics Institute, Alcor also offers members the option of neurosuspension, or preservation of the head only. After the cryoprotectant suffusion, the head is surgically removed and stored in liquid nitrogen and the rest of the body is buried or cremated. Long-term storage of a head costs $50,000. Although that’s significantly less than Alcor’s whole-body suspension, the customer is left with the task of trying to find a donor body if resuscitation ever becomes possible.

In a 1992 paper, Dr. Ralph Merkle, a member of Alcor’s board of directors, wrote: “In principle we need only repair the frozen brain, for the brain is the most critical and important structure in the body. Other parts of the body can simply be replaced; or, if we wished, the methods employed for the brain could be extended in the obvious way.” In other words, the technology used to repair the brain could be applied to the whole body, at a much higher cost.

The Cryonics Institute has never offered neurosuspensions. Companies that offer them are not helping the cryonics movement gain acceptance, Ettinger says. “The people that do that, they keep the head and sometimes only the brain,” he says. “We think it’s a public relations negative, and the primary advantage is cost cutting.” The cost of a whole-body suspension at the Cryonics Institute is already low, Ettinger says, sounding like a used-car salesman. And he’s right: With Alcor asking for $120,000 per whole-body suspension and Trans Time Inc. and the American Cryonics Society, both in California, charging $150,000 and $135,000 respectively, there is little competition in the area of affordability.

Only time will tell if Ettinger is right or wrong about cryonics. If he’s right, he will be heralded as a true scientific visionary; if he’s wrong, his customers will have lost nothing more than they were willing to pay for their peace of mind. Not content to rest on his laurels, Ettinger will continue to suspend patients and expects to attract criticism for doing so. He is unapologetic; he has a business to run and customers to care for. And he will do so until he dies, becoming just another patient as the race begins to cool his body in time and place it in a cryostat beside his mother and his two wives.

The number of forensic entomologists working with investigators is small because insects are involved in relatively few cases, Goff says. “You’ve got a limited period of time during the year when insects get involved,” he says. “Some years I’ll do about 10 or 11 cases, and other years it will be about 20 or 25.” Despite variations from one year to the next, the average number of cases has increased over time, Goff says, as medical examiners and police have slowly begun to accept his sampling methods.

Goff first learned of forensic entomology in 1983 while attending a seminar about insect evidence and murder investigations as a young mite specialist. Intrigued, Goff contacted the local medical examiner and offered assistance whenever he heard about a suspicious death involving a badly decomposed body.

When the slick, humid rain forest offers up another bloated murder victim, Goff pulls on his boots and heads out with specimen-collecting gear in hand, eager to find some meaning in the insects that have made a home of the body.

It has taken many years for conventional crime investigators to accept forensic entomology as a useful tool, Goff says. “You are very much like a circus sideshow,” he says. As “an academic coming into a typical crime scene, you don’t necessarily think the same way [as the police].”

Depending on the species collected at the scene and their stages of development, insects can be used to establish several things about a body after death. Most commonly, forensic entomology is used to determine the postmortem interval, or the time between the death and the discovery of the body, but it also can help establish whether the body was moved after death and if poisons, drugs or toxins were involved. Further, since the advent of sensitive DNA testing, blood collected from the intestinal tracts of insects at the crime scene has been used to identify rape and murder suspects.

Goff usually finds numerous species of insects at a crime scene: blowflies, flesh flies and black soldier flies; moths, wasps, ants and mites; beetles, spiders and scorpions. Each species plays a unique and characteristic role in the decomposition of a body, he says. Flies are the first to arrive; attracted early by the smell of decomposition, they colonize soft parts of the corpse — like open wounds or the ears, mouth, nose and eyes. Next are the social insects such as predatory ants and wasps, which wait until after the maggots and flies on which they feed have settled in the body. Others, like the lumbering hide beetle, wait to feed on the cartilage and dried tissue that remain after most of the other species are gone.

This pattern, with different species invading the body in distinct waves, is called succession, a predictable enough phenomenon for Goff to use in establishing the postmortem interval.

Goff recalls a case from November 1996 in which the body of a young woman was found in a sugar cane field on the island of Kauai. “The body was very decomposed and not a lot of physical evidence remained,” he says. But using samples of insect evidence he collected, Goff estimated a postmortem interval of 34 to 36 days. “They didn’t have any suspects, but they did have one individual who said he had given the lady a ride 33 days ago,” he says. On the basis of Goff’s information, police obtained a search warrant and searched the individual’s home but found nothing suspicious. “Finally,” Goff says, “they went in and sprayed luminol,” a compound that glows when it binds to hemoglobin in the blood. After police sprayed the house, the outline of a body was clearly visible on the floor of the bedroom. There were traces of blood in other rooms too, left when the suspect dragged the body through the house to his car. “The trunk of his car just glowed,” Goff says.

During the trial, the jury heard the entomological evidence despite the defense attorney’s efforts to suppress Goff’s findings, query the validity of the search warrant and discount the luminol evidence. The suspect was found guilty of murder. As with many other cases, this one probably would have been solved in time. “But it’s a matter of when it would have been solved,” Goff says.

Once on the scene, Goff collects samples of every insect developmental stage present — eggs, maggots, pupae and adults — taking them back to his laboratory for identification, preservation and hatching. He incubates samples of maggots and pupae under suitable conditions, noting how long it takes for adult insects to emerge, and uses the results to date the time of death. Armed with photos from the scene, insect and weather data and pig decomposition studies as a reference, he calculates the time required for the body to reach the state of decomposition in which it was found, estimating the postmortem interval.

Without pig studies to provide clues to patterns of insect activity, very little of Goff’s work would be possible. With characteristic bluntness, he writes of an early investigation: “Since I was attempting to duplicate a homicide, in one of my first studies I wanted to shoot each pig through the head with a 38-caliber pistol.” Which he did.

To duplicate insect activity found in beached drowning victims, Goff threw dead pigs into the sea; he also strung up dead pigs in trees to imitate suicide by hanging, wrapped them in blankets to re-create concealed bodies and mimicked arson victims by dousing pigs in gasoline and setting them alight.

“It is disconcerting to be collecting maggots from one end of a pig and look up to find a mongoose eating at the other end,” Goff writes in his book, helpfully reminding readers to make sure the decomposing pig is sufficiently protected from noninsect predators. While carrying out a pig decomposition study, Goff visits the study site several times each night to monitor insect activity.

Although Goff’s research may sound like bad news for pigs, the decomposition studies provide him with invaluable archival data to compare with insect evidence found in criminal cases. With that data, he can extrapolate a postmortem interval to within a few hours, and he has frequently provided courtroom testimony discounting or supporting a suspect’s alibi.

Goff’s work takes him annually to the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., where he teaches part of a weeklong course on the detection and discovery of human remains. He also travels extensively, investigating cases on the mainland and teaching training sessions worldwide. But Goff always returns to Hawaii, eager to conduct further studies to better understand the role of insects in decomposition. “I think I’ve got a lot more questions now than when I started,” he says.

In Oahu’s tropical environment Goff has found the perfect place to answer some of them. As night gathers and the tangled knots of vegetation tighten in the faltering light, the air becomes alive with insects.

A fecund and secretive place, the forest is like a machine, and as with all machines, it requires fuel to thrive. The same is true of the orderly sugar cane fields, the lazy coastal towns, the inland cities and almost any other environment. Dead organic matter is the fuel that drives any ecosystem, and insects, toiling away unseen, are the tools with which it is broken down and returned to the soil. “The whole pattern, the whole puzzle, is so complex and so intriguing,” Goff says. “These are very complex systems, and we’re part of it, sometimes in ways we don’t want to be.”

In several of Goff’s decomposition studies, insects began to colonize corpses within 10 minutes; and in some of his more gruesome studies, they did not even wait for death to occur before beginning to feed. His vivid descriptions of murder victims as centers of frantic insect activity are a reminder that we are just animals, as available and irresistible as roadkill to a passing blowfly.