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By Root 3105 0

from pale tan, sandy, gold, silver, and cinnamon to all shades of dark brown and black. Because of their color variations, Ursus arctos demanded a lot of careful biological scrutiny. Owing to Sheldon’s research, for example, the Biological Survey learned that the bears from coastal Alaska were much darker and more uniformly colored than those found in the interior (which had pale-tipped guard hairs). Furthermore, Sheldon inventoried everything these brown bears ate, including grasses, tender shoots, wildflowers, tree roots, tubers, mosses, willows, and especially berries. While these solitary (except during breeding season) bears occasionally grubbed for insects, larvae, and eggs, they were unable to digest coarse forage very well.35 By cutting out the molar of a shot grizzly, then counting the annual rings of cementum, Sheldon could tell the age of a bear. Whenever he ran into a successful bear hunter, he asked for a molar.

Both Sheldon and Merriam were determined to oversee the most comprehensive inventory of Alaska’s brown bear population ever undertaken. They were convinced that zoologists hadn’t properly identified subspecies of brown bears like Kodiaks. Sheldon was Merriam’s “bear man” in northern Canada and Alaska, trying to understand the range of brown bears, in particular. On Montague and Admiralty islands, he slept in an open canvas shelter with his wife, staying warm under reindeer skin robes. “I note that you give Ursus horribilis as mainly Rocky Mountains,” Sheldon wrote to Merriam. “These scarcely touch Yukon Territory, except north of the Pelly River and they extend well up the Mackenzie. Ursus horribilis is confined to the territory East of the Lewis and South of Steward. But west of the Lewis toward the Alsek River and the White River, close to the coastal ranges I have always thought that the grizzly there resembled those of the Alaska range (alascensis). There is one skin from that district in your collection and two female skulls. Therefore I had Yukon Territory divided up into three regions possibly. Urses phaeonix, ogilves region north of latitude 64—horribilis in district southeast of Yukon Rivers and alascensis inside St. Elias and other coast ranges north.”36

For all his skills as a naturalist, Sheldon was unusual because he enjoyed lonely reveries amid the spruce, often not seeing anyone else for weeks (that is, when his wife wasn’t along). Sheldon shot, with his .22 rifle, a wide range of coneys, marmots, shrews, and ground squirrels for the Biological Survey to analyze. On one Alaska-Yukon trip, Sheldon coincidentally bumped into the world-famous British hunter Frederick Selous, who was collecting for the British Museum. For six weeks, the pair trekked through the far north together, discussing South African game and Alaskan bears. Selous was sixteen years older than Sheldon but, like everybody else, was charmed by Sheldon’s show. They became lifetime friends. When Selous died in 1917, Sheldon wrote to Roosevelt about creating an impromptu memorial to the great British conservationist. “Will you bring the matter up,” Roosevelt wrote to Sheldon, “before the Boone and Crockett Club?”37

But the outdoors life that Sheldon led had drawbacks. In Alaska, for example, the plague was mosquitoes. There are more than 3,000 species of these insects, and at times it seemed that all of them had decided to hold a revival meeting or a roundup in Alaska. When Sheldon studied paleontology as a boy, he learned that mosquitoes had been around to buzz and bite the dinosaurs. Scientists would in coming years find mosquitoes trapped in amber (petrified sap) in a tree fossil more than 38 million years old. During the summer months, swarms of mosquitoes attacked Arctic Alaska’s four caribou herds, forcing the Porcupine herd to migrate 700 miles to escape them. If an Eskimo hunter killed a caribou in summer with a spear or arrow, the carcass would be blanketed by mosquitoes within seconds. There were other true flies in Alaska—crane flies, midges, and gnats—but it was the mosquito, wings beating between 250 and 600