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By Root 3189 0

and watching its eyes as it died, Leopold was repentant by the 1920s. Over his objection, roads had been constructed in the Gila National Forest to allow hunters easier access to deer. By killing off wolves to make the Gila “safe” for sportsmen looking for a few days of kicks in the controlled wild, Leopold had inadvertently robbed the Gila of its primeval wildness. Leopold, along with his wife, Estella Bergere, started hunting with a bow instead of using a rifle, as part of the concept of a “fair chase.” And he worked overtime to save North American species from extinction.37 Whether it was a refuge for the condor in California, antelope in Nebraska, grouse in Missouri, or spruce partridge in Minnesota, Leopold was for it. Dispelling the misperception of bears as predators to be eradicated, he promoted their abundance everywhere. “That there are grizzlies in Alaska,” he wrote, “is no excuse for letting the species disappear from New Mexico.”38

An ardent supporter of Leopoldian conservation in Alaska was Frank Dufresne. Nobody knew the Alaskan wilderness quite as intimately as Dufresne. Brrrr . . . was a regular condition in his life. The hyperactive, wiry Dufresne traveled 17,000 miles by dogsled to inspect herds of moose, caribou, seals, otters, deer, and walrus.39 He lived for months at a time in solitude. He could predict the weather. And as early as April, before the bushes bloomed, he could tell whether it was going to be a good year for wild mountain cranberry, salmonberry, or rose hips. Dufresne first came to Alaska from New Hampshire to both hunt and protect big game. More naturalist than game warden, he ended up writing three influential books about his outdoors life: Alaska’s Animals and Fishes (1946), My Way Was North: An Alaskan Autobiography (1966), and No Room for Bears (1965).40

What made Dufresne unique among agents of the U.S. Biological Survey were his elegant dispatches from the Arctic, coupled with his soldier’s sense of duty. Influenced by Roosevelt and Sheldon, Dufresne wrote government reports with panache, as if he were submitting them to The New Yorker. They conveyed a sense of life cycles; of death from old age and disease; of January’s hardships; of desolation. When he saw a raven or a magpie hovering overhead, he knew there was a fresh kill. “There comes a particular uncanny, deathly stillness in the air at seventy below zero,” he wrote in his report of January 1924, to E. W. Nelson at the Biological Survey. “No wild thing seems to stir. . . . The heavy breathing of our dogs, the squealing of the sled runners and the crackling of our own breaths in the air sound loud and harsh and seem to be violating this brooding silence of the north woods. It seems we are the only things that dare move—But no! There in the riffling shallows of an open waterhole a tiny, grey bird dashed and flits about with all the grace of a flycatcher. . . . Our map tells us we are forty miles north of the Arctic Circle; our thermometer tells us it is seventy below zero, yet there is a frail little bird seemingly unsuited to cold weather having the very time of its life. It is, of course, the Water Ouzel, or Dipper. . . . It requires considerable steeling of one’s conscience to blast that little life into eternity for the cause of science.”41

Dufresne was collecting specimens for the Biological Survey by killing and tagging them. Because Dufresne was respected as a hunter—and everybody knew he was the Alaskan outdoorsman, amazingly adept with a gun or a coil of rope—many sourdough Alaskans listened to his pleas to squeal on poachers in the backwoods and to make citizen’s arrests of game hogs. Regularly he reached out to fellow Alaskans about protecting both bears and salmon. Dufresne refused to travel with ultra-conservationists like those in the Sierra Club. Nevertheless, he recognized the essential role that such preservationist groups played in protecting wild Alaska. “In a way I believe we owe something to the ultra-conservationists,” he wrote, “who, by the very unreasonableness of their demands, have rationalized