Rat Island (7 page)

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.

M
URIE

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.

T
HE
K
ISKA
B
LITZ

At four
A.M.
on June 3, 1942, two Japanese aircraft carriers steamed into position one hundred miles south of Dutch Harbor on the Aleutian island of Unalaska and launched an attack on American forces. A dozen fighter planes and twenty-two bombers shook the town awake, causing minor damages to a radio station and some oil tanks and otherwise triggering the Aleutian campaign of World War II.

Within the next four days, Japanese troops had captured the islands of Attu and Kiska, establishing an embarrassing beachhead on American soil. And over the following fifteen months the two countries would struggle for strategic control of the North Pacific theater, before the Allied forces would finally take back both Attu and Kiska, to close the curtain on the Aleutian campaign.

Between the opening and closing salvos, the Aleutian campaign came to be known as the war fought not against enemy bombers and battleships but against the weather. Pilots flew blind through endless fog into lurking volcanoes. Williwaws thundered from the peaks and slammed planes into the ground. Foot soldiers suffered far fewer casualties from enemy fire than from trench foot and frostbite, insanity and suicides. Those who served for too long developed the glazed gaze of a pithed frog, a signature malady immediately diagnosed as the Aleutian stare and routinely treated with sedation, straitjacket, and a trip stateside.

The Aleutian campaign most infamously came to be known for the battle of Kiska. The Japanese Imperial North Force, which had taken Kiska in the first week of the war, had for months been hunkered down in its tunnels, stubbornly holding out under a daily deluge of bombs and the starving squeeze of an Allied blockade. On August 15, 1943, American and Canadian troops gathered for the massive offensive to finally take Kiska back.

On Kiska's D-day, 34,426 Allied troops, 95 ships, and 168 aircraft descended on the forbidding island, prepared for battle. They stormed the shores to eerie quiet. The first soldiers to inspect the enemy's underground city found it deserted, the only hostility a few parting shots of insult hand-scrawled in bad English on the walls. Trigger-itching Canadians and Americans advancing through the foggy hills mistook each other for the enemy and opened fire. A destroyer hit a mine, killing seventy-one.

The Japanese had orchestrated the greatest of escapes. Two weeks earlier five submarines from the Imperial navy had tiptoed into Kiska Harbor under cover of darkness and, in less than an hour, crammed all 5,183 comrades aboard and slipped homeward undetected.

Dozens had died in the Kiska Blitz, every one of them belonging to the Allied forces, each falling to friendly fire or to the mines and booby traps of an enemy gone home. Kiska's weather itself accounted for the most casualties. More than one hundred soldiers, trudging wet and cold through the tundra, were to be treated for trench foot.