Free Rat Island by William Stolzenburg Page B

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