When Ásta Stefánsdóttir failed to show up for work, her family called the police. This was in Reykjavík, Iceland, last year, on a Tuesday in the nightless month of June. A few days earlier, Ásta, a thirty-five-year-old environmental lawyer, had gone with her partner, Pino Becerra Bolaños, to spend a long weekend at her grandmother’s cabin in the countryside. Bolaños, a sports trainer from the Canary Islands, had missed an outdoor training class she was scheduled to teach that morning.

The police visited the cabin—they weren’t home. An officer found himself ranging downhill, drawn toward a cleft in the hillside, where a torrent came out of the highlands. The area—deceptively gentle farmland in the foothills of the Tindfjalla glacier, not much more than an hour east of the capital—was called Fljótshlíð. After about ten minutes, the policeman came to a deep ravine. He scrambled to a vantage point and looked down into the gorge, where he saw, more than a hundred feet below, a body floating in a pool. It would be impossible for him to reach it from above. As Guðbrandur Örn Arnarson, Iceland’s search-and-rescue project manager, told me recently, “It is a terrifying place.”

Immediately, a call went out to the local search-and-rescue teams, which are part of the country’s sprawling system of emergency-response volunteers, known collectively as Slysavarnafélagið Landsbjörg, or, in English, the Icelandic Association for Search and Rescue—ICE-SAR. Within hours, a dozen or so people from a number of teams had climbed up into the gorge from downstream, recovered the body, and lifted it out by helicopter. It was Bolaños. An autopsy determined, from her bruises and broken bones, that she’d died from injuries sustained in a fall of thirty or so metres. Above a waterfall of about that height, some hundred and fifty metres upstream, there was a swimming hole. The path down to the hole, descending a sheer cliff, was narrow and slippery. People had died there in the past. At the water’s edge, rescuers found two pairs of shoes.

What had been a relatively straightforward accident scene now became something more complicated: a search for a lost person. “We never just assumed that Ásta was in the ravine,” Arnarson said. They had to consider that she might have wandered off in grief or panic. “And we never assume it’s a crime scenario. We leave that to the police.” The Landsbjörg teams adhere to databased search techniques and internationally recognized theories of lost-person behavior. For example, they categorize by type. A hunter, a hiker, a child, a senior suffering from dementia: each tends to get lost, and to try to get found, in a particular way. The hiker usually follows trails, and so likely goes astray at decision points and then attempts to retrace. A hunter may follow the blood trail of a wounded animal over wild terrain and, in the fervor of the pursuit, lose his bearings and then improvise. What do people do when a lover has fallen or drowned? The possible scenarios were that one woman had fallen and the other had then fallen or drowned while trying to help, or else that the survivor had scrambled free and reached out for help or done something irrational.

The SAR leaders made circles on a map, each ring denoting a probability. The outer ring traced natural boundaries, such as rivers and mountains. The searchers then divided these areas into zones and methodically searched, eliminating one after another. A net was strung across the river at the end of the gorge, and divers and rope teams worked their way up and down the ravine, in extremely difficult terrain. By the weekend, they’d found nothing.

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Arnarson, the SAR project manager, convened a committee to do a review. “There was still a very remote possibility that she was alive,” he said recently. “But realistically we knew this was a recovery, and a difficult one.” They focussed again on the pool where they’d found the shoes—the so-called Initial Planning Point, or I.P.P. From the pool, a torrent swept through a rift in the rock and dropped thirty metres. “We suspected that Pino had gone through that. At the bottom, where the waterfall hit, there was another pool, which was completely unsearchable. Divers went in but couldn’t get close enough. Three or four metres from the waterfall, it was a total washing machine. So we’d searched everything well, except the I.P.P. If the I.P.P. is unsearchable, you have a problem. It is really hard to close a case where the I.P.P. hasn’t been searched. In fact, it’s unacceptable to me. So, we said, the waterfall has to go.”

Turn off the water: there was some disagreement over that, although, this being Iceland, it was muted and civil. They figured they needed a few minutes to search the lower pool. The waterfall, they calculated, carried about a thousand litres per second. They concluded that it would be too difficult and damaging to the land to divert this flow into another river, via a trench. “So instead we came up with the crazy idea to siphon off the water in the pool with a pipe,” Arnarson said. “It would be like stealing gasoline from a car.” Searching the Internet, he had come across a farmer in Texas who had irrigated a field this way. They brought in three twelve-metre lengths of PVC pipe, an array of pumps, and, in the absence of electricity, a small armada of generators. “We were concerned about the forces we were dealing with,” he said. After a couple of aborted attempts, they managed to reduce the flow by forty per cent. Swift-water rescue technicians got a quick look. “The men who went in, they said, ‘That funnel—it’s a beast.’ We were not going to send people in there.”

By then, after two weeks, four hundred and seventy-four people from fifty-nine rescue teams, using eighty-one vehicles, had been involved in the search. Most of them were volunteers, taking time away from their families and jobs. The papers followed their efforts closely. The decision to call off a search is always the hardest one to make. “We are good at identifying with the pain of people,” Arnarson said. “In a smaller community, you can’t hide in the masses.” Nonetheless, the next day, in coördination with the police, Landsbjörg abandoned the search.

Arnarson added, “Sometimes we have to evaluate risk versus return. Very rarely do we make decisions unsupported by data. Sometimes we determine that there is no chance that the person is still alive. It can sound callous. In the end, once we know it’s a recovery, we do it for the living, for the families left behind.” Another rescuer told me, “It’s harder to stop a search than to start one.”

A month later, during a routine twice-weekly hike down into the gorge, a member of the SAR team from the nearby town of Hella found Ásta’s body. She was well downstream of the waterfall but above the net. The autopsy determined that she’d died of hypothermia.

Iceland, with a population of little more than three hundred thousand, is the only NATO country with no standing Army. It has police, and a coast guard, but these, like the citizens they are paid to protect, are spread thin, so come accident or disaster, disappearance or storm, the citizens, for the most part, have always had to fend for themselves. Landsbjörg has evolved into a regimented volunteer system that serves as a peerless kind of national-emergency militia. It is not a government program, and so represents a tithing of manpower. There are close to ten thousand members in all, with four thousand of them on “callout” duty, on ninety-seven teams. Pretty much every town has a team. (Reykjavík and its surrounding municipalities, where more than two out of three Icelanders live, have eight.) They are well trained and well equipped, self-funded and self-organizing, and enjoy a near-mythical reputation among their countrymen, who, though often agnostic regarding the existence of elves and gnomes, are generally not inclined toward reverence or exaggeration. “People think of the rescue teams as the Guardians of the Galaxy,” a mountain guide told me. “They forget these are normal people.”

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Were Iceland, say, Rhode Island, a system like Landsbjörg would be nice enough—grownup Boy and Girl Scouts to help firemen get cats down from trees—but Iceland, besides being sparsely populated, is marooned far out on the polar edge of the North Atlantic, just below the Arctic Circle. It has harsh, unpredictable weather and a raw, inhospitable landscape. Since it was first settled, more than eleven hundred years ago, by Norse chieftains, its inhabitants have waged a perpetual war with the elements. There are volcanoes, crevasses, avalanches, earthquakes, tidal waves, ocean gales, sandstorms, and glacial-lake outburst floods, to say nothing of winters without daylight and varieties of precipitation and wind uncommon to the temperate zones. It is hard for a visitor to appreciate how quickly conditions can change, and how dismal they can get. One might sometimes hear an Icelander describe a blizzard in terms of snow driving up from the ground. Calamity is almost commonplace, and so rescue, its counterpart, is ingrained and sanctified.