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By Root 3128 0

Olaus and Mardy Murie spent more than two weeks in Alaskan cities in the fall of 1956, talking about the Arctic with the Territorial Land Commission and local news organizations. Olaus’s Elk of North America was a classic study of the Jackson Hole elk herd, and many Alaskan outdoorsmen hoped he’d now fight for the preservation of caribou. In Juneau the Muries met with U.S. Fish and Wildlife officers, garden clubs, and Alaskan politicians. Their lobbying culminated when Olaus Murie showed slides of Arctic Alaska to the Tanana Valley Sportsmen’s Association (TVSA) at a stag dinner in Fairbanks. Besides the great caribou herds and Dall sheep groupings, more than 300,000 snow geese (Chen caerulescens) fed on the Arctic tundra in autumn before migrating to their wintering grounds in California. The TVSA bird hunters wanted to be sure that this migration would continue for their children’s children to enjoy. “Afterward several came to me,” Murie wrote to George L. Collins, “and fervently promised their support, and greatly surprised me by giving me an honorary life membership in their organization.”4

Even though Olaus and Mardy Murie were ecologically-minded, they had no serious qualms about genuine hunters. Unlike some “faux hunters” who guzzled beer and then stomped into the autumn woods to kill deer for a trophy, many serious Alaskan hunters (both Native and Euro American) had an almost Paleolithic reverence for animals. These real hunters used their body and senses with a trained acuteness, actually getting into the thought processes of the stalked animals. Where would a grizzly be catching salmon today? What bog would a moose prefer in a cold drizzle? The poet Gary Snyder wrote about this kind of genuine hunter in Earth House Hold: “Hunting magic is designed to bring the game to you—the creature who has heard your song, witnessed your sincerity, and out of compassion comes within your range. Hunting magic is not only aimed at bringing beasts to their death, but to assist in their birth—to promote their fertility.”5

The Muries were convinced that there were members of TVSA who, like the Gwich’in, knew the magic of the animals they killed. Not that the sportsmen’s association didn’t also include “slob hunters” and “gun nuts” among its members. But the Muries were betting that a number of TVSA leaders—whom they knew as friends for decades—would join the Arctic preservation cause because they intuitively understood Rousseau’s theory of the noble savage: the ancient notion that humans still had a lot to learn from the primitive world. Congress had granted TVSA twenty acres of land along the Chena River (an unusual allocation for any sportsmen’s club) for two reasons: to teach Alaskan children how to safely use firearms, and to promote the “fair chase” ethics of Theodore Roosevelt’s wildlife conservation policies.

Almost like a theologian, Olaus Murie spoke to the TVSA about the spirituality of the Brooks Range and the coastal plain of the Beaufort Sea. The 120,000-head Porcupine caribou herd was his best selling point. Pregnant female caribou came to the coastal plain to give birth in May and June. Since the Pleistocene age, the Muries’ proposed Arctic range was also home to the northernmost population of Dall sheep, whose curled horns TVSA hunters coveted. And Murie had preservationist selling points for anglers. America’s largest and most northerly alpine lakes—Peters and Schrader—were also located in the proposed 8.9 million-acre Arctic Refuge. As Justice Douglas had found out, the braided rivers were rife with grayling in the summer. Most important, northeastern Alaska was the home of the Gwich’in people, who considered themselves one with the caribou herds. Murie made it clear that the proposed Arctic Refuge was, as Rick Bass put it in Caribou Rising, “as wild as when it was first created.”6

Convincing the antigovernment types in the TVSA that withdrawing 8.9 million acres of Arctic tundra for either U.S. Fish and Wildlife or the National Park Service wasn’t easy, even for Olaus Murie. The U.S. Geological Survey had barely