The Aleutian Islands are truly a world apart, a chain of volcanic peaks rearing out of the icy Bering Sea a thousand miles from the coast of Alaska's mainland. Surrounded by some of the coldest, stormiest ocean on Earth, lashed by williwaws or shrouded in a blanket of fog, they are remote, forbidding, challenging -- and breathtakingly beautiful on the rare occasions when the sun burns through the gray sky to reveal them in all their solitary splendor. To veteran paddlers like Jon Bowermaster and his companions, the Aleutians hold a special allure, for these jagged shores and unforgiving riptides are the home waters of the kayak. Their destination is the mythical cradle of the Aleut people, a group known as the Islands of four Mountains at the heart of this all-but-unknown archipelago. Trusting only their skill, their strength, and the seaworthiness of their fragile two-man craft, the four adventurers spent a month on these windswept, mysterious outposts of North America, risking their lives every time they launched their boats. Even a minor mishap could be deadly: a man in the water could hope to survive half an hour at most, and