Rat Island by William Stolzenburg

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