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FOREWORD

by Victor B. Scheffer

This is the true story of a man who believed that humankind would be saved by learning to love and preserve the wild places of earth, large and small. He was a missionary, though he would have screwed up his face at hearing the word. His religion was wilderness.

In his title for the chapter “Flowers on Ice,” Olaus Murie used his own idiom to describe the dualism he sensed in the living world. The flowers above the Arctic permafrost are the beauty and wonder of life, filled with color, fragrance and purity. Simple and undemanding, secret in their parts, they are ephemeral but everlasting. Beneath them, the cold, unresponsive ice represents the limiting factor of life, the physical world that every organism is pressed against in the continuing act of survival. The beauty which only the human animal can grasp and the struggle to survive which all wild animals share—both were the source of Murie’s vitality.

I have elected to write about the man rather than the book because you are about to read the book for yourself. Murie’s language is deceptively simple. He was not a man to waste words or motion. He saw in his mind what was to be done, and he did it. His clear sense of direction was at times an amazement to his friends and at times an exasperation. On one collecting trip that I shared with Olaus he suggested that we discard the meat of all the birds whose skins we saved for the museum. He did not want anyone to think that in killing a duck or a goose, we were prompted more by our appetites than by our scientific zeal. This, I thought, was integrity carried a bit too far!

One day in Alaska, he writes, he made a bargain with a wolverine. He had shot two mountain sheep for the museum, but the afternoon was fading, and he realized that he would not have time to carry both into camp. He saw tracks of a wolverine—a notorious robber of meat. What to do? “I wanted the skin and skull for a specimen; the wolverine would want some meat to eat. So I partially skinned the animal, pulled the skin over the head, laying bare much of the carcass of pure meat. Then I filled my packsack with the other specimen and went back to camp.” At daybreak, he found that his plan had worked. “The wolverine had his feed, the museum had the specimen, and the dogs and I still had a supply of camp food.”

I first met Olaus Murie in the summer of 1937, when we lived on the motorship Brown Bear and made a wildlife inventory of the Aleutian Islands. I saw him last in the summer of 1958, when we joined Justice William O. Douglas on a three-day hike along the Olympic seacoast of Washington in an effort to save the wild character of a few miles of that beach. He wrote to me on October 16, 1958. “I am sorry to see that so many in high places [of government] look upon the ocean as a place in which to dump things. It is about time we began to look upon the world as a whole unit, an ecological unit for man.” He saw, of course, what all naturalists in the great tradition have seen so clearly, that a man cannot separate himself from nature and remain a whole man.

As a man grows in knowledge of nature—or wilderness, if you wish— he also grows in humility. Long ago the word humility was related to humus, the soil. The truly educated man understands and respects his binding relationship to the soil—to the earth.

Let me quote a few flashes from Murie’s book and from memory, to illustrate his lifelong engagement with nature, a relationship in which he was wholly accepting, loving, and confident.

On a snowy trail in Alaska he wrote, “I have seen my lead dog, Snook, sail into a mass of fighting dogs with what appeared to be a smile on his face. . . . I suppose we can say that we [humans] simply share with the dogs the joyous impulse to ‘do’.”

Again, “This was a hungry country. I learned to eat hawks, owls, sea birds—anything that had meat on it. The Indians up here lived a most rugged life; yet they somehow had a kind view of nature, like the hunters who begged the bear’s pardon before shooting it.” Later: “Annie boiled some bear feet, wristlets of fur still on them—we didn’t mind appearances, and they tasted good.” And, “I am convinced that in the evolution of the human spirit something much worse than hunger can happen to a race of people.”

On the trail to Rainy Pass, he suffered two sleepless nights with toothache. Using a ptarmigan-feather brush, he painted both sides of the gum with tincture of iodine. “Immediately the pain of this remedy was much greater than the toothache it was to cure. . . . Next morning all pain was gone, and I had no more trouble until I reached Fairbanks and a dentist in the spring.”

Indeed, as Olaus once remarked, adversity is good for the soul, and every father should take it upon himself to introduce struggle in the life of his son.

For thirty-one years, from 1914 to 1945, Murie earned a living as a field biologist, mainly in northern Canada and Alaska, first for the Carnegie Museum and last for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. Earlier, he spent two years as a game warden in Oregon, a job which I doubt that he could have cared for. Offers of higher pay and administrative power left him cold. He wanted only to travel, collect, and see—to tease out the relationships between living things and their environment. He became increasingly interested in origins. How did the alpine saxifrage reach the New World? How could a little band of caribou persist in this or that isolated pass? What are the implications—or carryovers—of wildlife behavior in the behavior of human beings?

So intensively did he feel the colors, shapes, and mysteries of the outdoor world that he had to share them with others. On his first trip to the Canadian Arctic in 1914, when every ounce of weight was a burden, he carried a bulky Graflex camera and sketching materials. He knew the value of a diary, which is to say that he had a sense of history. The beautiful paintings that he left to us are not “art for art’s sake,” but rather expressions of a sensitive teacher who wanted others to stand on the mountain top and see what his eyes had seen.

“We found something to admire in one another,” he wrote of his Indian guides. To the best of my knowledge, he liked everyone. He was puzzled at meanness because, I think, he had a feeling that meanness was a waste of time. His way of approaching strangers (such as the Attu Islanders) resembled his way of approaching animals—slowly and warily, but with childlike trust. I used to think him shy; but later I saw that he was simply waiting for “something to admire.”

When I last talked to Olaus, he spoke in distress of the Computer Age, artificiality, and of man’s abuse of the wild places of earth. I said, smiling, that he was now an ecologist and ought to be happy with his new title. He wrinkled his nose and said “Gee!” In his heart he had not changed. The truths he recognized early and spent a lifetime shaping into words and pictures were still the same old truths. He knew it, and I knew it.