The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [204]
At first, the Arctic seemed to the Crislers barren of wildlife—an almost empty land. There were no throngs of caribou or packs of wolves. The Dall sheep came down to the rivers only during the winter months. Although the Crislers were well-known wildlife photographers, regularly giving slide shows on college campuses and at corporate retreats, they had assumed that the Brooks Range was like the Rockies, only colder. But once the Crislers sat still, didn’t look so hard, and actually lessened their expectations, a kingdom of wildlife appeared before them. Little voles were burrowing in the sedges. Asian bluetooths fluttered along the rivulets. Ptarmigans flushed put-p-p-p from the willows, turning from white to brown as the seasons dictated. Grizzlies patrolled streams, waddling away only when they picked up the scent of man. Perky eider duck mothers were followed by a single-file parade of youngsters. “There was a miraculous fact about this deadly white wilderness: it was alive!” Lois Crisler wrote. “Animals lived here and found food.”29
Ostensibly, the Crislers were going to follow the caribou’s migratory trail north of the Arctic Circle throughout the deep summer of 1955, as Charles Sheldon had tracked Dall sheep; but Disney had another idea. Why not adopt wolf cubs and raise them? As entertainment, tracking caribou in the golden Arctic light—despite the cute newborns—was boring. Raising wolves, by contrast, had immediate box office appeal. So, with money from Walt Disney Productions, two cubs were purchased from an Eskimo—a male, Trigger; and a female, Lady. (The names conjured up both Roy Rogers’s horse and Disney’s cartoon feature film Lady and the Tramp.) By day, Lois would observe wolverines—capable of bringing down prey five times their size—wading along sinuous creeks and gorging on caribou meat. At night, with willow bushes crackling away in the cabin fireplace, Lois would cuddle with the adorable wolf cubs. In her journal, Lois described being a mother to the wolf pack. She claimed that wolves, an extremely sociable wild species, “smiled” and “talked” and “read my eyes!” The concept was anthropomorphic, the film was filled with embarrassing hyperbole, and the raising of wolves was morally questionable. Nevertheless, the Crislers succeeded in their quest to make wolves more beloved the world over. “Wolves are not a menace to the wilds but orgies of wolf hate are,” Crisler wrote in Arctic Wild. “Wolves themselves are a balance wheel of nature.”30
The historian Vera Norwood has written insightfully about Lois Crisler in Made from This Earth: American Women and Nature. While admiring the Crislers for their advocacy for wolves, Norwood nevertheless raised smart questions about the ethics of the Disney film. Was this proper holistic ecology? To Norwood these habituated wolves were no better off than those behind bars at a zoo. Scenes of the Crislers releasing the wolves back into the wild only to have them scratch at the cabin door, seeking hearth and home, seemed cruel. One follow-up episode was unambiguously wrong. When Herb Crisler realized that two pet wolves weren’t generating enough entertainment value, Disney’s cameramen raided a den and swiped five more pups for Lady and Trigger to raise. The Crislers justified this raid by saying that bounty hunters would soon have slaughtered the pups.31 For real biologists, the Crislers were hard to take. But Arctic Wild, the memoir by Lois Crisler of their experiences in the Brooks Range, did make people think about the north country and about wolves. William O. Douglas (grumpy about the Disney film), the New York Times, and Rachel Carson all praised it as an educational work ideal for young people—and their approval alone was worth a lifetime of accolades for Lois Crisler. Disney ended up marketing the documentary as the feature film White Wilderness and also produced educational shorts from the footage, such as