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By Root 212 0

satellite phone for emergencies. There wouldn’t even be a way to send a letter once the vet flew out in a day or so. Still, evidence of the rest of the world was scattered everywhere. I found spent shotgun shells on the tundra, a plastic drink bottle from China, and a beautiful blue glass globe the size of an orange—a float from a Japanese fishing net. And this seemingly limitless landscape was not without limitations. Federal regulators restricted hunting on the Delta because of declining bird populations, limiting even subsistence harvests. Home, pantry, woodshed to a subsistence lifestyle, the Delta—much of it protected as the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge—was otherwise useless to the cash economy: not yet determined to be particularly valuable for mining, oil and gas development, or extended residential settlement. The Delta’s soggy landscape was similar to the Arctic refuge’s flat, bird-flecked tundra; but its uselessness was as yet its savior, and the Delta went largely unnoticed.

A LITTLE OVER an hour after Joel had set the trap on the loon’s nest, he rushed in the weatherport door with the bird in a plastic pet carrier. Joel and the vet then went quickly to work. Joel took the loon out of the carrier and held the bird on the kitchen table, pinning its wings down under his hands. The loon looked terrified: its red eyes flared and its black bill darted at the vet like a dagger. Joel took it under one hand and used the other to still its head. The loon pushed its webbed feet madly against the flowered plastic tablecloth until the vet injected anesthesia into its leg and within a few seconds, the bird’s feet stilled and its head began to wobble. Then the loon went completely limp and its bill lay on its breast. The vet laid the animal—which at that point looked like a carcass—on a clean cloth on the kitchen table and inserted a tube into its mouth. The tube connected to a soft bulb that Joel pumped to deliver air into the loon’s lungs.

Crowding the weatherport, we were all silent except for the few words exchanged between Joel and the vet. I was transfixed by how dead the bird looked, and how the vet seemed to keep this bird just above death. Lifeless, it had dulled. The pale gray of its head, which normally shimmered, lost its luster, and the darker gray of its neck, which was made up of fine, pinstriped feathers, looked messy. From a distance, through binoculars, these birds always looked perfect; they shone. Now it lay ringed by the tools and trash of our work: bottles, tubes, needles, blades, iodine-soaked cloths, and a beeping heart monitor.

Then the vet began the work of inserting the matchbox-sized transmitter into the bird’s lower back. He parted the feathers to make an incision. I looked away then, feeling my head starting to swirl and sweat breaking out across my body. The bird suddenly flapped, surprising all of us, and the vet quickly delivered more anesthesia through the syringe attached to its leg. He inserted the transmitter into a sterile gauze pouch and then worked it into the animal’s body through the incision. I felt ill, easily sickened by the gore, but also lightheaded at the control we had over this bird, how easily we could take its life in our hands and splay it out on our kitchen table. I knew I was weak, but I had to dash out of the weatherport and sit outside with my head between my knees until the nausea subsided.

The whole business seemed so cruel, but Joel had assured us that only a few birds needed to be outfitted with the transmitters in order to get useful data about the species. Gathering basic information about these birds was a necessary first step. But then what? Would a culprit ever be found? Could a cause of their decline be proven? Would action be taken? What if—as Joel wondered—these birds weren’t getting enough food to thrive and feed their young because the Bering Sea was changing? Then what? What changes could be made fast enough to make a difference?

WHEN THE PROCEDURE was completed, the vet put the limp bird—which now had a six-inch-long, black rubberized