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Starting in 1937, Olaus Murie occupied a seat on The Wilderness Society’s board. Like Douglas, he became known for his articulate dissent against proposals to build huge federal dams in Glacier National Park and Dinosaur National Monument, and against Rampart Dam on Alaska’s Yukon River. Throughout the late 1930s the Muries also turned their attention to the Aleutian Islands, leading a reconnaissance mission (similar to the Harriman Expedition) to study sea otters and birds. “What a rich prize and privilege the assignment was,” Victor B. Scheffer, who accompanied the Muries to the Aleutians, recalled. “Our chief mission was to make a ‘wildlife inventory’ of those treeless, nearly unpopulated islands that reach for 1,100 miles westward from the Alaska Peninsula.”38

Chapter Thirteen - Will the Wolf Survive?

I

A damnable problem regarding Mount McKinley in the 1930s was that wolves were blamed for the decline of its Dall sheep population. Alaskans were at war with wolves, direct competitors for suppertime meat, and therefore hunted them relentlessly. Wolf dens were destroyed like rats’ nests—best to kill the whole goddamn litter. Some grown wolves weighed as much as a 175 pounds and could run twenty-five miles an hour when chasing prey. They could eat a huge amount of meat—around 20 percent of their gross body weight. A wolf pack could devour a full-grown moose every two or three days. The “big bad wolf”—the term used in Walt Disney’s 1933 animation The Three Little Pigs—was considered vermin, a wanton killer, best eradicated. Wolves were also villains in children’s tales such as “Little Red Riding Hood” and Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. “They’re all dirty killers,” was a popular remark.1 When a wolf appeared around a bend of the Yukon River or in the Gates of the Arctic, an Alaskan instinctually reached for a rifle.

In April 1939, the unassuming but revolutionary wildlife biologist Adolph Murie appeared on the scene in Alaska. He had recently published a landmark study, Ecology of the Coyote in Yellowstone, in which he argued that predator species such as coyotes and wolves were beneficial, not detrimental, helping to maintain healthy populations of other species. As one of the first biologists in the National Park Service, Murie moved to Mount McKinley to study the relationship between Dall sheep and gray wolves; in truth, he was working in the historic shadow of Charles Sheldon and was hoping to protect the threatened species.2 Living in a hidden meadow and sometimes spending time in Sheldon’s old lean-to cabin along the Toklat River, Murie wanted to change the “shoot at sight” mentality of most Alaskans with regard to wolves. Murie discovered that Alaska’s wolves, for the most part, subsisted on old, injured, and diseased animals. Seldom would a pack or a loner raid a ranch; for one thing, there wasn’t much livestock in Alaska.

When Adolph Murie was watching wolves in interior Alaska, sometimes in the biting cold, he must have been quite a sight: he often wore Indian snowshoes or knee-length leather boots, and he carried a week’s worth of provisions in his backpack. He didn’t have to hear a howl to intuit when a wolf was nearby. Like all good animal trackers and saddle tramps, he looked for obvious clues: paw prints, specks of blood, dung, broken branches, and decayed animal carcasses. He had developed a sixth sense for Canis lupus. Although Murie knew he was unlikely to be attacked by a wolf, he nevertheless carried a loaded automatic pistol in a holster as a precaution.

Murie also carefully analyzed many wolf-dog hybrids, of the kind Jack London described in The Call of the Wild. Alaskans had marvelous sled dogs that were a quarter-breed wolf; Murie could spot them easily because their muscular legs were longer than those of a typical sled dog. What worried Murie was that many wolves and mush dogs had body scabs—a sign of mange. He also worried about rabies and distemper; both viruses affect motor functioning. The decreasing number of wolves