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holed up in a rustic plywood cabin called the “Crackerbox” along a forlorn rivulet in the Brooks Range, sometimes in driving snow, encircled by a curtain of mountains, befriending one of Alaska’s thirty-two caribou herds. Lois wrote a memoir about the experience among the Central Arctic caribou herd on the North Slope along the Killik River (a tributary of the Colville River that is the eastern boundary of the National Petroleum Reserve). The memoir, Arctic Wild, was published in 1956 and was dedicated to the “Wolves of the Arctic Tundra and to Those People Who Will Act to Preserve Life and Habitat for Them.” Justice William O. Douglas deemed Arctic Wild “one of the most exciting wilderness books in the English language.”25 Ansel Adams, Mardy Murie, Margaret Mead, and many other prominent conservationists considered Arctic Wild a historic breakthrough in the wildlife protection movement. The Crislers had formed a bond with a wolf family. Every morning wolf pups would jump on the Crislers, lick their faces, and howl for an hour.26 Lois’s chiseled, elongated face and her braided hair tied in a bun were shown in photos throughout the autobiography, and the book made her a celebrity. “What do I want?” she asked herself. The answer: “To be where the people that walk on four legs are.”

Crisler’s Arctic Wild certainly wasn’t the first serious book about Alaska’s wolves—it had been preceded by Adolph Murie’s The Wolves of Mount McKinley and Stanley P. Young and Edward A. Goldman’s The Wolves of North America (both published in 1944). But Crisler, by using the first-person narrative style, brought the family life of wolves to a general readership in a touching, loving, and respectful way. Eight years later, the Canadian biologist Farley Mowat would publish Never Cry Wolf, to great acclaim; it clearly superseded Arctic Wild as literature. But during those crucial years of 1956 to 1960, when the fight to save the Arctic was particularly intense, it was Lois Crisler who most troubled the anticonservationists in Alaska.

Nothing, in fact, infuriated her opponents more than the fact that Lois Crisler was teaching wolves to cuddle, nurse, and howl. To the average Alaskan, wolves were useful only for their pelts. “Lois’s accounts of the wolves’ howling and using their incisors to finely lift her eyelids while she slept truly portrays the remarkable abilities of wolves,” the wolf ecologist David Mech later recalled. “No doubt such descriptions helped recruit a large number of people into the ranks of wolf admirers.”27

The biologist Rachel Carson of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was elated with Crisler’s Arctic Wild. A warmhearted correspondence ensued between the two women throughout the late 1950s. Carson’s articles of the 1930s and 1940s about marine ecosystems—which had appeared in the Baltimore Sun, the New Yorker, Field and Stream, and Yale Review—encouraged Crisler to write about wolves. When Carson’s The Sea Around Us was published by Oxford University Press in 1951, Crisler sat mesmerized, reading it over and over again. Whenever Lois felt lonely or depressed in the Olympics, Alaska, or Colorado between 1955 and 1963, she wrote to Carson. “We live in a [Silver Spring, Maryland] house that is too large for us, especially since my mother’s death, and it would be a joy to entertain you,” Carson wrote to Crisler. “We can promise you the song of mockingbirds and cardinals, and by mid-March we might even manage the beginnings of our frog chorus.”28

Although wolves were the stars of Arctic Wild, the 50,000-head Central Arctic caribou herd (so named in the 1970s) came in a close second. In Alaska every caribou herd on the North Slope claimed its own calving area, which was a fair distance from other calving areas. Because the caribou had large concave hooves, which made wide imprints in the tundra soil, they were relatively easy for a Disney camera crew to track. Newborn calves weighed only thirteen pounds. With their pretty suede-soft gray coats, these caribou were as appealing as Bambi. The crush-crush of Arctic caribou on frozen