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On afternoons in the far north, while Olaus was out collecting, Mardy would wander around the banks of the Porcupine River, staring into the crystalline, sparkling water, amazed at the varied colors of smooth rocks. She’d comb through gravel bars, looking for animal skeletons to bring back to camp, daydreaming about writing an as-yet-untitled book about Alaskan Native tribes. Peregrine falcons (Falco peregrinus), a rather rare raptor, sometimes circled overhead. The river water was about sixty-two degrees Fahrenheit, too cold for a swim. Also, if she stripped naked, the mosquitoes would torment her. So Mardy contented herself with just hiking and pondering, thinking about ancient cave dwellers, caribou herds, and what bird might be magically flushed out of the low-lying bush, startled by her meandering. “Gravel bars are havens in the North Country,” Murie wrote in Two in the Far North, “providing some refuge from the scourge of Alaska.”21

Roughing it in the utterly wild Arctic had tribulations and frustrations. But both Olaus and Mardy considered the honeymoon a success, especially when they stared at the night stars together. North of the Arctic Circle you could dip your cup in a stream and drink the cleanest water on the planet. Bears, foxes, grouse, and other animals were fattening on the blueberries of summer. Because neither of the Muries had been overly concerned about physical comfort, everything that happened to them in the Koyukuk was fun and scientifically useful. There was enough wild land in the Arctic so that they never felt claustrophobic or hemmed in. The Muries had, they believed, been in harmony with the will of God. Now, returning to Fairbanks, they agreed that preserving the biological integrity of Arctic Alaska would be the duty of their lives. Spending time in the deep Arctic made them see every experience from birth to death with new eyes. When they built a log home in Moose, Wyoming, they carved over the upright piano the “Mardy and Olaus Murie Life Philosophy,” developed during their honeymoon: “The wonder of the world, the beauty and the power, the shapes of things, their colors, lights and shades; these I saw. Look ye also while life lasts.”22

The Muries were in high spirits after their Arctic honeymoon. As the temperature plummeted and the winter days turned short, they talked about the awesome Brooks Range to anybody who would listen. Back in Fairbanks, exhausted, they indulged in a week of well-earned sleep. They then headed to Washington, D.C., for the rest of the winter. Olaus wrote up the official report of the honeymoon expedition to be submitted to Dr. E. W. Nelson of the Biological Survey. The Department of Agriculture liked typed reports and Olaus, a dedicated bureaucrat as well as an intrepid biologist, handed in a batch of them. Mardy had gotten pregnant on the Arctic trek and was happy at the prospect of becoming a mother. That spring Olaus was dispatched to the Alaska Peninsula to conduct field research on brown bears. Unable to come with him because of the pregnancy, Mardy stayed with her mother in Twisp, Washington, where the Gillettes had relocated along the Methow River, unable to endure another bleak winter in Fairbanks. That summer the Muries brought a boy, Martin, into the world.

With Martin, the Muries returned to Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1925. Olaus had become celebrated as perhaps America’s leading Alaska wildlife biologist—an honor that had previously gone to William Healey Dall, who died in 1927. Murie met regularly with fellow biologists at the Cosmos Club to compare notes about bears—and discuss the prospects for preservation in Alaska. Geologists were concluding that because of the shallowness of the Beaufort Sea, combined with ice-clogged harbors, drilling for oil in Alaska’s North Slope wasn’t economically feasible yet. Transporting petroleum from the Chukchi and Beaufort seas was deemed dangerous, unrealistic, and even foolhardy. Also, demand wasn’t high. There was still plenty of oil left in the fields of Texas and Oklahoma.

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