Free Rat Island by William Stolzenburg Page A

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.”
    T HE R USSIAN I NVASION
    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