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would travel more than 800 miles down the Yukon River—which flows almost 2,000 miles from northern Canada to the Bering Sea—to the riverside hamlet of Anvik, where she would rendezvous with Olaus. They were to be married in a log chapel at three o’clock in the morning, under the midnight sun, on August 19. She had marked the all-important date with a star on her calendar. Mardy’s trousseau was winter wear: fur parkas, wool mittens, and snowshoes. The couple’s most essential equipment on the three-month trek into the Upper Koyukuk River terrain included a weatherproof tent and a portable Yukon stove. Accompanied by her mother and bridesmaids, Mardy left Fairbanks on the stern-wheeler General J.W. Jacobs. Their complicated rendezvous was successful, and Mardy and Olaus were married.

The Muries then began their honeymoon, dogsledding 550 miles into the central Brooks Range, far away from prying eyes. They went north up the Koyukuk River to the area from Allakaket to Bettles and beyond. Rain was frequent: a thin, chilly spitting that came with squalls of wind. Canada geese graced the sky. Clouds of mosquitoes orchestrated a faint hum, which marred the romanticism. Mardy created comfort in their outback camps. Up the A-frame canvas tent would go; at night it was closed tight except for a peephole for air. Morning was always the most magical time; just being alive was lusty. They breakfasted like cowboys on coffee and oatmeal. During the day Mardy chopped wood, smoked salmon, concocted caribou stew, and made a large sleeping bag bed for her and her new husband to share. Fish—pike, grayling, or lake trout—was often their favorite course at dinner. When the sled dogs got dirty, she brushed them. She had mastered the primitive arts of survival. Dutifully she kept a diary recording times, places, and temperatures. “I remember once saying to Olaus on our dogsled honeymoon, ‘Whatever made you think I could do all this?’ ” Mardy recalled. “And he looked at me and said, ‘Oh, I knew you could.’ ”18

Olaus was honeymooning, but he was also intensely studying the habits of North Slope wildlife from red-throated loons to moose browsing on buggy patches of tundra. For all his scientific expertise Murie had an old-school, almost primitive way of looking at wild things. Field naturalists of that time were encouraged to submit ink drawings with their official reports. Besides shouldering a rifle, Olaus carried with him an art kit that had a porcelain slide to mix the watercolor paint. A fine taxidermist, unhurried and precise, he also set small traps to catch and analyze subspecies of mice. While grizzlies eluded them, he carefully monitored Arctic birds such as tundra swans or ravens. Most important, he observed the great barrenland caribou (Rangifer tarandus granti) herds amid the mountains. All the way to the Beaufort Sea, the herds of caribou browsed on the tundra. Caribou in Alaska were distributed into about thirty herds; the Muries hoped to document a fair number of them.

Before the Muries, nobody had done proper reconnaissance on caribou for the Biological Survey in Arctic Alaska. By 1922 the domesticated reindeer industry in Alaska was booming, producing a bigger net profit annually than copper, gold, and silver mining combined. The hope in Alaska was that reindeer meat would become competitive with beef as a source of protein. The Biological Survey published articles such as “Reindeer in Alaska” (1922) and “Progress of Reindeer Grazing Investigation in Alaska” (1926). The Muries thought that this kind of analysis of reindeer farming was the job of the Bureau of Animal Industry; after all, reindeer were domesticated animals. The Muries saw reindeer as a threat to the indigenous caribou herd. Interbreeding caribou with reindeer was, to their minds, biologically unsound.19 All of the Native Americans had their own reverent names for caribou; reindeer had been lumped together by early French voyageurs under the term la foule. Each Athabascan group had a loving name: udzih (Ahtha), bidziyh (Koyukon), vadzaith (Gwich’in), and tutu (Eskimos).20