• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3182 0

valley. “There were woods, birds, mammals,” he recalled of his happy youth in Minnesota. “It was living close to the earth—you know what that does for you. Gee, it was wonderful.”14 Flushing out grouse from the prairie grasses was a favorite outing of his; he knew how to put meat on the dinner table. Olaus had attended Fargo College in North Dakota, but wanting to get out of the flatlands, he transferred to Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. After graduating in 1912, he stayed in Oregon for two more years. He was employed as a field naturalist for William L. Finley (a state game warden and perhaps the best photographer in America affiliated with the Audubon Society).

Much like Gifford Pinchot, Aldo Leopold, and Bob Marshall, Olaus Murie took trees seriously and considered deforestation a curse. Determined to make his mark as a scientist in the Arctic, he headed to Labrador and Hudson’s Bay on a paid assignment for the Carnegie Museum in 1914. Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the Canadian explorer and anthropologist, was starting to present Arctic habitats in a series of papers (in 1921 he would write The Friendly Arctic, a distillation of everything he had learned in below-zero temperatures, hoping to entice settlers to the north pole); but Murie was really the first serious biologist after Peary to adopt the Arctic as a laboratory. The Arctic, Murie believed, was very important to the new field of ecology. “Will we have the patience to understand what the northern part of the Earth has to offer?” Mardy Murie asked after traveling in the uncorrupted Arctic with Olaus. “Wherever we went in this country, there was something to see and wonder about. There were so many little things.”15

During World War I, Murie served with the Army Air Corps balloon troops based in Fort Omaha, Nebraska; he was therefore something of an expert regarding the impact of wind on high-altitude vegetation. Murie believed that scientists needed empirical data about the varied wildlife in the Arctic biosphere. He was displeased that no teams of biological experts had been dispatched to either pole. Looking around the saloons of Fairbanks he saw sea otters and polar bears stuffed and mounted. For a moment, a hatred seemed to clog his blood. It was one thing, he believed, to kill a moose for a steak or stew. It was quite another to use the antlers as a hat rack in a tavern or bar. His feelings ran particularly strong when he considered the free-roaming caribou—called the Fortymile Caribou Herd—that lived southeast of Fairbanks.16

In 1920 Olaus got his big break. Hired by the U.S. Biological Survey, he was tasked with studying the migration routes of Alaskan caribou. Olaus’s official title was assistant biologist and federal fur warden. He purchased a hooded oilskin poncho, thick wool socks, and the best snowshoes available from the mail-order catalogs. And romance was in the air. Before meeting Olaus Murie, Mardy Thomas had only a superficial appreciation of Alaska’s great caribou herds. She knew that the Gwich’in (“people of the caribou”) in the Brooks Range had prayed to the roving herds for 20,000 years. On dates with Olaus, Mardy now learned how caribou served this northernmost people’s utilitarian needs. The reverence that the Gwich’in (or Kutchin) felt toward the caribou was like the Plains Indians’ veneration of bison. Mardy had eaten caribou steak. She had worn caribou-skin boots. She had watched a hungry herd browsing on lichen in the tundra. She had heard caribou huff and hiss while being chased. When shot, caribou uttered a cry so anguished, so pleading, so terrified and mournful that Mardy winced with sympathy. In northern Alaska, caribou were as common as red squirrels. Mardy knew about caribou. But now she learned about their biological traits as if she were taking a college course. What Mardy liked most about caribou was that their fatness meant that at long last summer had arrived in frigid Alaska.

Olaus Murie soon taught Mardy more about the behavior of Alaskan-Yukon caribou. The U.S. Department of Agriculture had experimental stations