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coat with silvery streaks. It’s lush to touch and gorgeous to look at. By the time the team of Theodore Roosevelt and William Temple Hornaday came to the rescue of sea otters in 1911, a single pelt was worth about 2,000 pounds in London. In documentaries, Walt Disney portrayed the species as cuddly and doglike, but in truth sea otters aren’t to be messed with: they are on average four to six feet long, weigh ninety pounds or so, and have razor-sharp teeth that can rip into flesh. In Alaska, they have long been pursued for their fur by Native tribes, and in the early nineteenth century these otters could be seen floating on their backs eating shellfish, and frolicking in kelp beds and around offshore rocks. “A sea breaks, the gull lifts, and the otters slide beneath the surface,” Peter Matthiessen wrote in Wildlife in America, “to rise again like black shadows in the semitransparent water beyond the foam.”1

Banning the sale of sea otter fur helped the species survive in the Aleutian Islands. But during World War II, troops stationed in Alaska often shot at them recklessly, forcing them to the brink of extinction. At last, however, the species found a steadfast ally in an employee of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who was known in the Alaska circuit as Sea Otter Jones. He was the happiest in the spring, when floods of migratory birds returned to the Aleutians, following the primordial “river in the sky”—flyways that lured birds to Alaska from five continents.

Bob “Sea Otter” Jones, who worked for U.S. Fish and Wildlife from 1947 to 1980, was born on August 3, 1916, in Millbank, South Dakota, a farm town of 2,500 people along the South Fork of the Whetstone River. Jones was an animal lover from a very early age. By the time he was ten, he wanted to be a field biologist. A beneficiary of a conventional midwestern upbringing, Jones excelled in high school. His father, an attorney, encouraged him to learn how to operate a ham radio. Skilled in electronics, Jones graduated from South Dakota State College in Brookings.2 “After college all he wanted to do was go to Alaska,” his wife, Dorothy, recalled. “People think he was an outdoorsman wearing a flannel shirt, but he liked ruffled shirts and opera.”3

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 7, 1941, the twenty-five-year-old Jones enlisted in the U.S. Army’s Signal Corps. He became a licensed radio operator. Although the army initially assigned him to New Jersey, he had a persistent vision of himself working in Alaska. The colossal territory appealed to his intense interest in wildlife resource management and in long-distance radio. “I had conceived a desire to come to Alaska,” Jones recalled, “so I made that known. There were no assignments in Alaska at the time, so I was sent to Fort Lawton in Seattle, that was the nearest opening.”4

Ruggedly handsome, with sandy hair and aristocratic features, Jones—a welterweight—wasn’t tall. But his personality was so huge that he seemed as big as a linebacker. Fascinated by meteorology, Jones dreamed of someday living in the Aleutian chain, considered the stormiest area in North America. In August 1942 he got his wish. He was assigned to Adak Island (part of an island arc between Alaska and Asia), to radio-monitor Japanese air traffic and use high-powered telescopes to watch for Yokohama’s naval fleet. Even for a Dakota boy, used to blue winters, Adak took some getting used to. The winter months on the forlorn island were unbearable. Living in a tent, First Lieutenant Jones and his colleagues cobbled together a diesel-burning stove to stay warm. The wind came at them like needles; its baritone howl was deafening. South Dakota seemed like a tropical rain forest by comparison. Jones developed a new appreciation for Aleuts who had made clothing from bird skin to stay warm. “It isn’t an extremely wet climate but it’s damp all the time and a little moisture in a 40 to 50 knot wind is enough to go a long ways,” Jones recalled. “Some of the guys couldn’t hack it and they’d lose their marbles. Well, sometimes in the middle of the