The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [171]
Throughout the 1940s Leopold had been putting together A Sand County Almanac, a book about conservation that is equaled only by Walden Pond as a meditation on the need for the wild in our commerce-driven lives. Because of his strong scholarly bent and his “micro-knowledge” of silviculture, it is somewhat surprising that Leopold could write so philosophically and with such poetic grace. Leopold worked for thirteen years on the book and had written hundreds of articles in preparation for undertaking the task. Every line and every comma seems exactly right in this reflective memoir, which is also a work of natural history. Prefiguring the “deep ecology” movement of the 1960s, Leopold reasoned that land wasn’t a commodity to be possessed. Instead humans should be caretakers of the Earth, and wild places should be saved. Famously, Leopold wrote the essay “Thinking Like a Mountain” in 1944 for inclusion in A Sand County Almanac. Filled with an anguished regret, Leopold told of a sad afternoon when, in Arizona’s Apache National Forest, he killed a mother wolf and her pups. “In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf,” Leopold wrote. “In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy: how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks.”33
What happened next became one of the most profound moments in the annals of the wildlife protection movement. Leopold had an epiphany in the Apache, a pang of conscience. All those bloody hunt stories, the machismo, and the random slaughter of species that came to signify the winning of the West seemed perverse as Leopold watched the pup drag its bleeding body toward cover, away from its mother lying dead in the dust. It was a scene of carnage. “We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes,” Leopold wrote. “I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the great fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”34
Thanks to Murie and Leopold, national park superintendents started considering wolves an asset. Poisoning animals was now frowned on in public lands. After spending the summers of 1940 and 1941 studying Alaskan wolves in their dens, Murie refuted the popular perception of wolves as savage and morose.35 Although far more elusive than bears or raccoons, wolves began to attract tourists, who would brave the cold, damp winds around Mount McKinley and train their binoculars on the horizon hoping to spot a pack. Murie had succeeded in changing the reputation of gray wolves from sheep-killers to wild dogs that maintained long familial ties with their pups. But he encountered negative reactions as well as accolades. When Murie returned to Mount McKinley in 1945 to continue writing articles about protecting wolves, the Alaska territorial legislature derided him. Outdoors groups such as the Tanana Valley Sportsmen’s Association had preferred the conservationists of Charles Sheldon’s era who saved Dall sheep; these sportsmen disliked the Minnesotan ecologist—Murie—who was bent on protecting wild wolves and who seemed to be trying to turn gray wolves into teddy bears. A grassroots countermovement, in favor of killing wolves, developed across Alaska; and Alaskans turned against the U.S. Department of the Interior as never before.
Murie was a nice Midwesterner, disdainful of overwrought conflict; he had no overweening desire