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appearance. A proper wardrobe was the sign of a Yale man, even in the outback. He refused to look scruffy, like a muskrat trapper. Venturing down the Yukon River, he declared all the nature around him worthy of a thousand Thomas Cole paintings. The forest animals he encountered in the Denali wilderness—deer, wolves, and ground squirrels—had variations of color and size he had not anticipated. Sheldon dutifully recorded the precise numbers of the migrating caribou he encountered. Eskimos claimed that up in the Arctic great herds roamed the tundra above the timberline along the coastal plain of the Beaufort Sea. He hoped to visit the Arctic someday. To the Gwich’in people (known as the Caribou people), these great herds represented the primary source of cultural and economic sustenance. As herbivores, the caribou ate willow, dwarf birch, lichens, moss, and even dried sedges in winter. In turn the Gwich’in people ate the caribou.

Sheldon returned to the Alaska Range wilderness (which formed the southern border of the Yukon basin) on August 1, 1907, and stayed through June 11, 1908. His guide for this expedition was Harry Karstens, who wanted much of wild Alaska saved from commercial exploitation. Sheldon snowshoed through fresh powder in the Alaska Range with Karstens, forging new trails at high altitudes. The saw-toothed Alaska Range had a distinct crest line, with peaks from 8,000 to 10,000 feet high (unbroken for a breathtaking 200 miles). The range south of Fairbanks was imposing, wild, forlorn, and stern. Many peaks—Foraker, Russell, Hunter, Hayes, Silverthrone, and McKinley—were over 10,000 feet high. A trifle nervous about winter in the Alaska Range, Sheldon and Karstens stayed in the snug valleys, moving their base camp according to the weather. In the winter they holed up in a cabin on the upper Toklat River. They marveled at how, in springtime, everything came alive in Denali. The sky was filled with flocks of geese that sprawled over the long fields—Canada geese (Branta canadensis) and white-fronted geese (Anser albifrons). Surrounding Sheldon and Karstens in swirling columns were arctic terns (Sterna paradisaea) and sandhill cranes (Grus canadensis), sometimes in pairs, but often in cloudlike clusters. To Sheldon there was a sense of ancient history about these great bird flocks. He was annoyed that there were virtually no U.S. laws to permanently protect them.

To Sheldon’s surprise, the truly irreplaceable link in Alaska’s food chain was the willow ptarmigan (Lagopus lagopus). These birds mated in May and their eggs hatched in June. They were particularly thick in Roosevelt’s Yukon Delta.20 Once their white downy feathers were lost, the ptarmigan’s plumage turned as brown as the willow, dark birch, and spruce boughs. They were well camouflaged, clinging to the ground to feast on wild berries and willow buds. When flushed, the ptarmigan, which are plump, seem to struggle with flight, forced to keep a low trajectory only ten to fifteen feet above the ground. The naturalist Margaret E. Murie, in Two in the Far North, joked that the ptarmigan was a comical creature, seemingly saying, “Come here, come here, come here—go back, go back, go back.”21 Every predator in Alaska considered the willow ptarmigan fine dining. The red foxes and ground squirrels, in fact, seemingly identified the brown-speckled ptarmigan eggs as the finest delicacy on the tundra. Other birds—golden eagles (Aquila chrysaetos), gyrfalcons, short-eared owls, and goshawks among them—swooped down to lift away willow ptarmigan in their claws for dinner.22 For wolves and wolverines, the willow ptarmigan was a veritable Thanksgiving dinner in waiting. Once ptarmigan were devoured, the tree sparrows (Spizella arborea) and white-crowned sparrows (Zonotrichia leucophrys) collected the feathers to use as nest lining.23 “The ptarmigan,” Sheldon reported in his field journal, “flying from rock to rock above, kept sounding their croaking chatter.”24

The primordial bird populations in Alaska included 100 million seabirds, 70 million shorebirds, and 12 million