The next day Steller and a small crew rowed a longboat from the wreck of the St. Peter to the beach to begin exploring what the wishful among them were praying was the Kamchatka Peninsula of Siberia. What Steller soon saw told him it was not. The crew was greeted by a company of curious sea otters, mindless of any danger. Steller’s suspicions grew with the appearance of a huge dark creature wallowing in the shallows, a mysterious animal the shape “of an overturned boat,” its snout occasionally surfacing to draw breath “with a noise like a horse’s snort.” The sea cow, as Steller came to call it, treated the boatloads of armed men as mere logs of driftwood.
Once ashore the men were besieged by arctic foxes , snapping and barking. The crewmen kicked them, to no avail. They hacked and stabbed the little creatures with axes and knives. The fearless foxes kept coming.
As the survivors of the Bering voyage settled into their new task of surviving on what would one day be named Bering Island, the foxes became the most intimate and incessant reminder that this strange and hostile land was someplace other than home. The foxes feared nothing in the men who now attacked them. Steller and a shipmate killed sixty in a day. And still they swarmed, bold with hunger and mindless of consequence. “When we first arrived they bit off the noses, fingers and toes of the dead while their graves were being dug,” wrote Steller. “While skinning animals it often happened we stabbed two or three foxes with our knives because they wanted to tear the meat from our hands.” Men learned to sleep with club in hand. Steller continued: “One night a sailor on his knees wanted to urinate out of the door of the hut, a fox snapped at the exposed part and, in spite of his cries, did not soon want to let go. No one could relieve himself without a stick in his hand, and they immediately ate up the excrement as eagerly as pigs.”
Mad with vengeance, the castaways resorted to torture, gouging the foxes’ eyes, hacking off limbs and tails, and hanging pairs of foxes by their feet to watch them “bite each other to death.” For their efforts the men were thereafter haunted at their huts by tail-less foxes and foxes hobbling on three or two legs, advancing with a zombie’s resolve.
As the plague of scurvy abated and strengths recovered under Steller’s doctorly care, the castaways turned the natives’ fearlessness to their favor. Sea otters and fur seals, lounging and napping so trustingly upon the rocks and sands, allowed the men to tiptoe down and club them. The otters became such predictable fare that the men began throwing away the half-palatable meat and collecting hides as poker chips. “The sickness had scarcely subsided when … worse epidemic appeared,” recorded Steller. “I mean the wretched gambling with cards, when through whole days and nights nothing but card-playing was to be seen in the dwellings, at first for money, now held in low esteem, and when this was gambled away, for the fine sea-otters, which had to offer up their costly skins.”
Faced with the relentless slaughter, the otters and innumerable rookeries of seals that Steller had noted at the onset steadily evaporated. Hunters found themselves journeying farther for their meat, trudging miles over rocky tundra to new shores in pursuit of the retreating herds. On the way, they hunted by the hundreds the ptarmigan, the snow grouse of the Arctic, until the ptarmigan too grew hard to find. They chased down the island’s strange species of cormorant, a fish-eating bird big enough to feed three and, to its ultimate demise, flightless.
Eventually the men of the St. Peter turned their attention to the most tempting mass of meat on the island, which came in the form of a sea beast thirty feet long and some four tons heavy. The sea cow, a gigantic cousin to the manatee, lolled in familial pods along the shallow shores. Steller, ever the naturalist, had been observing them daily from his hut. He would come to know these animals as no other human ever would.
“They come in so close to shore that not only did I on many occasions prod them with a pole or a spear, but sometimes even stroked their back with my hand,” Steller wrote. “If badly hurt they did nothing more than move farther away from shore, but after a little while they forgot their injury and came back.”
After a string of frustrated bunglings and escapes of wounded sea cows, the hunters eventually honed a crude but lethal technique. It amounted to live butchery, which Steller seamlessly recorded with compassion and chilling candor. “These … gluttonous animals keep head under water with but slight concern for their life and security, so that one may pass in the very midst of them in a boat even unarmed and safely single out from the herd the one he wishes to hook … Their capture was effected by a large iron hook the point of which somewhat resembled the fluke of an anchor, the other end being fastened by means of an iron ring to a very long and stout rope, held by thirty men on shore. A strong sailor took this hook and with four or five other men stepped into the boat, and one of them taking the rudder, the other three or four rowing, they quietly hurried towards the herd. The harpooner stood in the bow of the boat with the hook in his hand and struck as soon as he was near enough to do so, whereupon the men on shore, grasping the other end of the rope, pulled the desperately resisting animal laboriously towards them. Those in the boat, however, made the animal fast by means of another rope and wore it out with continual blows until tired and completely motionless, it was attacked with bayonets, knives and other weapons and pulled up on land. Immense slices were cut from the still living animal, but all it did was shake its tail furiously and make such resistance with its forelimbs that big strips of the cuticle were torn off. In addition it breathed heavily, as if sighing. From the wounds in its back the blood spurted upward like a fountain.”
Finding their stricken mates and family members under assault, the sea cows would surge heroically to their rescue. “To this end some of them tried to upset the boat with their backs, while others pressed down the rope and endeavored to break it, or strove to remove the hook from the wound in the back by blows of their tail, in which they actually succeeded several times. It is a most remarkable proof of their conjugal affection that the male, after having tried with all his might, although in vain, to free the female caught by the hook, and in spite of the beating we gave him, nevertheless followed her to the shore, and that several times, even after she was dead, he shot unexpectedly up to her like a speeding arrow. Early next morning, when we came to cut up the meat and bring it to the dugout, we found the male again standing by the female, and the same I observed once more on the third day when I went there by myself for the sole purpose of examining the intestines.”
THE RUSSIAN INVASION
By January 1742, having recently lost their commander, Bering, to intestinal gangrene, the survivors had come to realize that they would either rescue themselves from their island prison or die a miserable death there. They began to disassemble the wreck of their ship, to build a new boat from its remains. Come August, nine months after their stranding, with their energies freshly bolstered by the meat of the sea cow, the forty-five remaining seamen of the Bering expedition crammed themselves into a forty-foot boat resurrected from the bones of the St. Peter and sailed westward for home. Fourteen days and sixty miles later, furiously bailing to keep their jury-rigged lifeboat from sinking, the survivors of the Bering expedition at last reached the familiar shores of Kamchatka.
It had been a titanic feat of oceanic exploration and human endurance. But with the crew’s escape came doom for the natives they had left behind. With news from Steller and his shipmates of the Bering Island menagerie—some of them wearing coats of fur worth more than the average Cossack’s yearly wage—fleets of Russian fur hunters were soon racing eastward for their fortunes in the Aleutians.
The sea otter—owner of the most luxurious insulation in the animal kingdom, a fur destined to adorn Chinese aristocracy with garments of soft gold—was shot on the water, clubbed on land, and netted in the kelp beds. The second-finest fur in the North Pacific came off of the back of the northern fur seal. Conveniently gathered onshore in great rookeries, the seals were slaughtered en masse. In 1791 the fur hunters killed 127,000 fur seals; over
the next thirty years they killed another two and a half million.
As each new shore went empty, the hunters moved on, sweeping east across the Aleutians. Adding muscle to the industrial slaughter, the Russians enslaved the islands’ Aleut people, looting villages and maiming resisters. The assault on the sea otters was soon to be joined by an international force of Americans, Brits, Spaniards, and Japanese. They chased the otters across the Aleutians to the mainland of Alaska, and on down the North American coast to the end of their range, in California. By the turn of the twentieth century, upward of nine hundred thousand otters had been mined from the North Pacific; by 1925 an extensive survey of sea otters tallied zero.
Steller’s sea cow, its fat rendered for butter, its oil for lamps, its skin used for boats, was likewise assailed to a predictable end. Twenty-seven years after the naturalist’s first glimpse, Steller’s sea cow was extinct. The spectacled cormorant, helplessly flightless but far less appetizing than the sea cow, lasted almost a century longer, before it too was relegated to a handful of museum skeletons and skins.
When in 1867, Russia sold Alaska and the Aleutians to the United States, the Americans took up whatever slack the Russians had surrendered, clubbing fur seals at the rate of a quarter million a year. An international treaty in 1911 would finally slow the slaughter, while sparing the last few renegade sea otters that had somehow hidden out the siege. But a more lasting assault on the Aleutian wildlife had by then been set in motion.
The fur hunters had decided to hedge their bets. As they emptied the shores of seals and otters, they added to them arctic foxes. Alopex lagopus, the bane of the Bering castaways, was the dominant little canid of the far north, making do on the slimmest of pickings in the coldest extremes across the circumpolar world of sea ice and tundra. The foxes’ coats, capable of insulating little metabolic packages against temperatures dropping to minus 80 Fahrenheit, transformed from sleek summer brown to a plush winter white or bluish gray. Blue foxes, the trappers sometimes called them. The little fox of the Arctic could be found surviving the winter on deserts of pack ice hundreds of miles from land; single foxes had been tracked covering straight-line distances of a thousand miles; one fox was supposedly seen within two degrees’ latitude of the North Pole. Yet the widest wanderer on four legs had not yet conquered the high seas. To most of the Aleutians, which had rarely if ever been bridged by sea ice, the arctic fox remained a stranger. That, the fur hunters would soon correct, shipping pairs of blue foxes to distant islands on the chain.
The basic business plan had the foxes procreating on their private islands, the hunters periodically returning with traps, as farmers to harvest the crop. They assumed little cost for tending their foxes, counting on the islands’ native birds to serve as feed. For as long as they lasted.
One might have imagined, at first glance, the avian subsidy lasting forever. By the millions and tens of millions, seabirds gathered along the Aleutian arc, drawn by a feast of fish and a once-inviolable refuge. The islands arose on the southern rim of the Bering Sea shelf, where warmer shallow waters met the cold deep waters of the North Pacific trench. The mixing of waters stirred nutrients from above and below to feed a thick broth of plankton, the drifting micro-masses that in turn fed enormous schools of little fish, which fed the innumerable flocks of fishing birds. On the countless cliffs and headlands and boulder fields rising between these fishing grounds, the seabirds amassed. Their numbers swamped however many raptors—in the form of gull, falcon, or eagle—might come hunting. They congregated in protective bubbles barring terrestrial predators behind oceanic moats spreading tens and hundreds of miles wide through chilling seas and mountainous swells.
The inland reaches of these islands served too, as breeding sanctuaries for a special assortment of ground-nesting ducks and geese, ptarmigan, sandpipers, and songbirds. Through the ages of isolation, these islands had evolved unusually large variations of the mainland’s song sparrow and winter wren. They had produced a smaller, oddly honking offshoot of the Canada goose, the Aleutian cackling goose.
To these sanctuaries the Russians introduced the arctic fox. The same brazen fox that had sneered at the armed castaways of Bering Island now found itself loosed in a kingdom of sitting ducks. Through the endless days of the sub-Arctic nesting season, mad with birdlife, the foxes gorged. They ate eggs, nestlings, and incubating parents. Into the vulpine maw went the ducks and geese, the ptarmigan, the sandpipers, and the songbirds. Only the sheerest of cliffs and tightest of crevices harbored appreciable numbers of seabirds against the onslaught. During the bleak Aleutian winter, the foxes survived on their summer caches of eggs and carcasses. They combed the beaches and tide pools for odds and ends, hunting crab and urchin and clam, scavenging the occasional windfall of a dead seal or whale washed ashore. Come spring, with the arrival of the nesting multitudes, the bird slaughter would begin again.
By the 1800s, birds that had once blanketed the islands had begun to go missing. The native Aleut people, who had long fashioned the feathers and skins of birds into clothing, in the wake of the foxes found themselves wearing fish skins instead. The midcentury sale of Alaska to the United States brought anything but relief for the birds. Pelt prices soared; fox farms proliferated. In 1913 the United States set aside the Aleutian Islands as a national wildlife refuge, with the curiously conflicted purpose of protecting their world-class rookeries of seabirds while propagating fur-bearing animals, chief of which was the arctic fox. By 1925 the Alaskan islands housed upward of four hundred fox farms, that year shipping thirty-six thousand pelts worth six million dollars. Among Alaska’s major industries, only fishing and mining surpassed the fur trade.
The 1930s brought the Great Depression and the end of the Aleutian fur bonanza. Prices plummeted, trappers abandoned the islands. Their foxes, meanwhile, were left to tend the henhouses. The managers of the Aleutian refuge, with their fur factory all but shuttered, their magnificent bird colonies in tatters, were faced with the question of what it was they were now to manage. The first order would be to figure out what they had. Or, more to the point, what they had left.
MURIE
In the summers of 1936 and 1937, the pedigreed American naturalist Olaus Murie was assigned to take inventory of Alaska’s archipelago wilderness. Murie and a team of assistants sailed and surveyed from the Alaska Peninsula to the western Aleutians, dodging hot-tempered volcanoes and trudging through knee-deep snows, on their way to taking stock of the islands’ birds and seals.
Murie immediately rediscovered at least one aspect of Aleutian life that had changed little since his predecessor Steller took note two centuries before: The impudent arctic fox as a habit still harbored a baldfaced contempt for anything human. Murie in his Aleutian monograph told of being charged by one of the foxes for the apparent crime of looking its way. “To my amazement it came all the way, ran up to me, poked me in the arm, apparently with bared teeth for it was a sharp sensation, then ran off a little distance.”
Nothing seemed beyond the fox’s audacity, nor its appetite. In its droppings Murie found crabs, mussels, urchins, moss, beach fleas, crowberries, cranberries, pebbles, birds, other foxes, and human skin (the skin coming from a burial cave of Aleut mummies, some of them torn “limb from limb”).
But the fox’s hunting prowess was most impressively displayed in its pursuit of the Aleutian birds. “According to the Aleuts, sometimes a fox will catch an emperor goose when it is asleep and has its head tucked under its wing,” wrote Murie. “On occasion, too, a fox will stand on a point of rock where ducks are diving and, when a duck is rising in the water nearby, the fox will jump in and seize it while it is still below the surface.”
There were few safe harbors in the peripatetic little foxes’ empire. “Blue foxes readily swim from one island to another when the distance is not great,” he continued. “Sometimes they will attempt this where there are strong tidal currents and are carried off to sea and lost. Foxes also can climb moderate cliffs with ease. Occasionally,
one will even leap across a chasm and down to the top of a pinnacle where ducks are nesting, then clamber down the pinnacle, and swim back to shore. Foxes have learned to take every possible advantage over birds, and the birds must nest on sheer cliffs or inaccessible offshore rocks to be entirely safe.”
Islands that had once housed great flocks came up empty in Murie’s survey. Various species of ptarmigans had disappeared from fox-infested islands across the chain. The Aleutian cackling goose, once abundant across the archipelago, was hardly to be found. Seabirds in particular, so typically crowded in their rookeries, many of them nesting in burrows dug into the turf, suffered spectacular losses. Colonies of thousands vanished. On some islands, Murie found foxes subsisting almost entirely on seabirds, at times heaped in caches tallying more than one hundred bodies. Blizzards of birds—of gulls, terns, storm petrels, and puffins—fizzled to scarce sightings in the foxes’ wake.
Murie returned from his Aleutian surveys having seen enough wilderness and wildlife for several lifetimes. Yet his final report rang with warnings of ruin. “Possibly, there are areas where bird colonies are so huge that the Arctic fox has made only an insignificant reduction in the number of birds … but, in many other instances, great changes have taken place. On some of the smaller islands the birds have been almost eliminated, and on many islands such birds as eider ducks have ceased to nest, except on a few offshore pinnacles where they can find protection. The cackling goose and lesser Canada goose have become so scarce that it is somewhat doubtful whether they can survive in the Aleutians. If the migration to these islands should cease, these species would disappear from the Aleutian fauna.”
Here in the Aleutian Islands National Wildlife Refuge, the wild spectacles on which the reserve had been founded were being extinguished by a foreign fox, with the administrators’ apparent blessings. Before anybody would seriously tend to that irony, World War II interrupted. The war would score yet another wing shot on the Aleutians’ wounded birds, introducing a predator more potentially devastating than the arctic fox. Yet it would also bring the birds their first champion, and the beginnings of the campaign to rescue them.
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