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to battle with Alaskans over wolf conservation. But reports that bush pilots were now shooting wolves from the air sickened him. Very discreetly, he returned to Mount McKinley to conduct more field research on wolves and to protect packs from being slaughtered. Murie was annoyed by the false dichotomy that forced a choice between Dall sheep and wolves. He thought it was childish that in the atomic age people still accepted the image of the wicked wolf presented in Aesop’s fables and the Grimms’ fairy tales. Determined to amass more scientific evidence, Murie would disappear into the trackless wild for weeks at a time, dutifully recording the real behavior of wolves, not the legends. Mount McKinley without wolves, Murie concluded, would be mere scenery.

Wonder Lake, near the base of Mount McKinley, became Murie’s favorite place to watch the wilderness. In the spring of 1948, in preparation for a visit by the famous photographer Ansel Adams, Murie went to clean up a five-room log bungalow maintained by the National Park Service near Wonder Lake. Upon opening the front door, Murie found that grizzly bears had torn the place apart. Flour bins and pantry cupboards had been ravaged. The bears had also gotten into the basement and had ripped into boxes of army surplus Hershey bars. The bears had opened up cans of brown paint, tracking it throughout the bungalow. The basement windows were smashed. “The building was repaired,” Murie wrote in A Naturalist in Alaska, “but the bear could not forget those chocolate bars.”36

It took Murie an arduous day to make the bungalow bear-proof. Using a mop, he wiped away all traces of chocolate. A few days later, however, after a long day hiking the tundra observing wolves, an exhausted Murie went straight to bed. It was around midnight and still light outside. Murie, peering out of his bedroom window before drifting off, saw a grizzly running across the tundra headed right for his cabin. The bear, curiously spectral in the moonlight, circled the cabin, unable to find a way inside. Murie felt triumphant and went to sleep. “In a few minutes big chunks of wallboard were torn loose, and soon a hole was big enough to allow him to pass into the dining room beside the fireplace. He did not come the few steps down the hall to my bedroom, but sat down in front of the kitchen door. With his powerful paw he wriggled the doorknob, and soon I started hearing the rattle in my sleep. I awoke and heard the fumbling at the doorknob.”37

Although 50 percent of a brown bear’s diet consists of vegetation, bears were also known to bring down caribou in the soft snow. Around Mount McKinley, locals claimed that if you wanted to attract a bear, you should put chocolate on your porch. Brown bears were diurnal, but if they smelled even a whiff of chocolate, they could suddenly became nocturnal.38 Now Murie, grabbing his rifle, prepared to shoot the intruder at Wonder Lake. But, perhaps sensing danger, the bear jumped out the dining room window and ran off.39

Murie and Leopold’s ethos had made inroads in the Department of the Interior after World War II. A turning point for the protection of wolves in Alaska occurred in December 1945. A bill, H.R. 5004, was introduced in Congress stipulating that wolves could be protected around their historic range in Mount McKinley National Park, but only if their population was very strictly controlled. Conservationists—including Aldo Leopold—saw this bill as the first major step in protecting a predator. Because wolves dispersed over huge distances and easily colonized new habitats, a lot of federal land would have to remain unmolested in order for packs to survive. “The wolf has been demonized, defeated, and defended by humans,” National Geographic declared. “It must now renegotiate its place in a changed habitat.”40

From 1947 to 1950, Adolph Murie served with the National Park Service at Mount McKinley as resident biologist.41 Ostensibly, his job was to control the wolf population and protect the Dall sheep, even in blizzards and crawling fog, but his real aim was to persuade