Fresh tracks and a winter den left behind by a polar bear and her cub in the refuge’s 1002 region, March 2002

UPDATE: Senate Votes Against ANWR Drilling Provision ()

ON AN EARLY MORNING flight to Arctic Village in northeastern Alaska last July, our airplane crossed the forested White Mountains to Fort Yukon, at the confluence of the Chandalar and Yukon rivers, north of the Arctic Circle. From there we flew across the roadless barrens of the Gwich’in reservation, ascending the East Fork of the Chandalar and the caribou-tracked southern foothills of the Brooks Range, on the first leg of an expedition into the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Arctic Village is an assembly of 40-odd spruce-log cabins that overlook the serpentine bends, oxbows, and channels of the East Fork. More than a hundred miles from the nearest road, it was settled by the formerly nomadic Gwich’in because its forest and river provided timber for fuel and shelter, furred animals, and abundant fish. More important, it is winter range for varying populations of the vast Porcupine caribou herd, an estimated 123,000 strong. Drifting across the mountains from their summer breeding grounds in the Arctic Refuge on the coast of the Beaufort Sea, the caribou move south and east into the Porcupine River drainage and Canada’s Yukon Territory, where most of the animals overwinter. The 15 Gwich’in villages in northeastern Alaska and northwestern Canada, which include about 7,000 people, are scattered along the caribou migration route, and each family needs eight to twelve animals to provide sufficient dried meat and hides to feed and clothe it through the long, hard winters. In 1971, Arctic Village and Venetie, a Gwich’in village 70 miles to the south, chose not to participate in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. The act was offering nearly $1 billion and 40 million acres to settle indigenous land claims for those tribes that accepted oil development and the construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline, which carries crude oil 800 miles south from the Arctic coast by way of Fairbanks to the huge tankers at Port Valdez. Refusing the money, the two villages held out for the original tribal land claim of 1.8 million acres established under the Indian Reorganization Act, which was amended to include Alaska in 1936. Their brave commitment to the integrity of their ancestral lands has limited these Gwich’in to a life of bare subsistence, yet seen from the air, the solid cabins built among the conifers show a strength of spirit that is evident in the calm presence of Evon Peter, the young village chief, who came to greet our plane on the gravel airstrip.

Peter, a slight, handsome man of 26 who recently earned a B.A. in Alaska native studies from the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, gazed around his mountain country as if inviting me to appreciate it with him in the few hours I had to spend walking the village. “We’re certainly one of the poorest tribes,” Peter said, “yet we’re also rich, for we have our unspoiled original land, and we have our language and our traditional way. We want to remain independent as far as possible; we want sustainable energy, solar power.”

We crossed the village and climbed a hill to visit Sarah James, the Gwich’in spokeswoman for the Arctic Refuge. She greeted us from the doorway of her house. “Yes! We got plenty of good food here! Better come help eat it!” said Mrs. James, 57, a friendly, bespectacled person rounded out by a full life. “King salmon from the Yukon—that’s the best there is!” She waved us through her door ahead of the mosquitoes, bustling back to her small stove to put the last touches on a fine, big feed of salmon and caribou stew.

For many years, Sarah James has spoken out against development in the refuge. “I only repeated what Indian people have always said about land and life, but this time we got heard because of the big fight over our caribou and their breeding ground,” she said. The caribou have sustained the Gwich’in culture for many thousands of years, and the annual coming of the big deer is so critical to Gwich’in economy and cultural well-being that the distant region of the coastal plain where the caribou are born is revered as Vadzaih Googii Vi Dehk’it Gwanlii—roughly, the Sacred Place Where Life Begins—a near-mythic area that few Gwich’in have ever seen. In Mrs. James’s girlhood, the Gwich’in still had hunting camps on the braids of the Chandalar River to harvest the caribou moving through. “How to hunt and fish—that’s the only life we know,” she said. “That’s the only food we have, so we don’t want to lose it.”

ARCTIC VILLAGE WAS the starting point for an expedition into the Arctic Refuge on which I had been invited by Subhankar Banerjee, an enterprising 35-year-old conservationist and photographer from Calcutta, India. Subhankar has spent the last two years engaged in a documentary project to help rally support against oil exploration and drilling in the refuge. Departing Arctic Village on July 13, 2002, we would make a ten-day camping trip down the Kongakut River through the refuge’s remote northeastern region, from the north slope of the Brooks Range and across the tundra to the Arctic coast. As a lifelong environmentalist deeply alarmed by the aggressive anti-environmental attitudes of the Bush administration, I signed up at once.

This return to the Alaskan Arctic was my first visit since May of 1957, when I accompanied a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service pilot on a polar bear survey along the icebound coast east and west of Point Barrow while researching a book called Wildlife in America. Three years later I traveled to Nunivak Island, in the Bering Sea, on an expedition to capture musk ox calves for an experimental herd that might strengthen the economy of the Inupiat—the Alaskan Inuit, or “Eskimo,” of the northern coast. In Anchorage that year, the saloons were jammed with Indians and oil prospectors. Eight years later, the largest oil field in North America, with an estimated reserve of 9.6 billion barrels, was discovered just west of the Arctic Refuge at Prudhoe Bay. The discovery threatened the Inupiat as well as the Gwich’in, since both peoples, in different seasons, were hunters of the caribou which calved on the coast plain; the potential disruption of the fragile tundra ecosystem would precipitate them into the struggle to protect it. By June 20, 1977, however, the first Prudhoe oil was flowing south to Port Valdez, and oil leases, public royalties, and revenues became a serious political consideration.

The Carter administration’s monumental Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980, a farsighted triumph for conservation, virtually doubled the refuge area to nearly 20 million acres, setting aside an inviolable wilderness of 8.9 million acres. Unfortunately, most of the designated wilderness lay in the barren mountains, leaving the coastal region containing the Porcupine calving ground entirely vulnerable. The relevant fine print in the Lands Act was Section 1002 (known as the “Ten-Oh-Two”), which directed that this critical 1.5-million-acre coastal area be placed in an “undecided” category while being assessed for its fossil fuel potential and biological significance.

Oil drilling in the 1002 seemed inevitable until the night of March 23, 1989, when the oil tanker Exxon Valdez went aground on an offshore reef in Prince William Sound, leaking 11 million gallons of oil and destroying the ecology of well over a thousand miles of Alaska’s coast. Though the oil industry lay low during the ensuing investigations, the first President Bush would make drilling in the Arctic Refuge a plank of his energy policy. However, his 1991 attempt to forward drilling stalled in Congress, and his successor, President Clinton, vetoed a draft of the national budget that contained a drilling provision. Undaunted, the second Bush administration has been promoting an “energy initiative” that includes an estimated $27 billion in subsidies for fossil-fuelers, with a special provision that would permit drilling in the refuge—what the oilmen refer to as “the AN-war.”

Though the Bush energy bill was approved by the House in August 2001, the inclusion of the drilling provision was rejected by the Senate in March 2002. However, the 22-year battle is far from over. With the Republican takeover of Congress this past November came the stated intention to resurrect the Bush energy agenda, including drilling for natural gas in certain national parks, and oil development in the Arctic Refuge. The future of North America’s last great stronghold of wildlife will depend once more on a few key votes.

Subhankar Banerjee’s invitation presented a wonderful opportunity to behold the lower Kongakut—a mere 15 miles from the border of the 1002 and part of the same coastal tundra ecosystem—while it is still pristine and intact.

OUR TRIP WAS SPONSORED BY Tom Campion, a 54-year-old clothing and sporting equipment dealer from Everett, Washington, who has dedicated a substantial percentage of his income to helping save the Arctic wilderness from despoliation. “I put my money where my mouth is, and I have a big mouth,” said Tom. From Arctic Village, two chartered planes shuttled the expedition across the Brooks Range to its north-slope foothills on the Kongakut River, taking three collapsible river rafts, two whitewater kayaks, food, and gear. Besides Tom and me, our group included Jim Campbell and Carol Kasza, proprietors of Arctic Treks, a Fairbanks-based wilderness outfitting company; Mike Matz, a founder of the Alaska Wilderness League; Mark Skatrud, an Okanogan, WashingtonÐbased environmentalist; Tom’s wife, Sonya; my 38-year-old son, Alex, who works as the Hudson Riverkeeper and is executive director of the environmental group of the same name; and a few Campion friends. Farther on, we would meet Subhankar and his friend and guide, a 56-year-old Inupiat named Robert Thompson. The Brooks Range is the northwest extension of the Rocky Mountains, rising to 9,000 feet and extending east to west for 600 miles, from the Yukon border to the Bering Sea. The mountains are about 80 miles across, and the traverse was a long one in a light aircraft, heavily loaded, that seemed to skim the tumult of black snow-patched peaks, deep, dark ravines, and steep inclines of gravel shale, interspersed with barren tundra valleys lost amid stark ridges and rock towers. “Might take two weeks just to walk into one of these wild drainages,” Tom said. “The first time I saw how many there were, it brought tears to my eyes. I swore to myself I would not permit those greedy bastards in Big Oil and their errand boys in Washington to trash this wilderness for all other Americans, not on my dime.”

On a broad bend where a gravel bench was wide enough to handle its small tires, the aircraft dropped us near the river. Though the clouds thicken, night never falls under the midnight sun, and the bush pilots, Dirk Nickisch and Kirk Sweetsir (the “Irk brothers,” as somebody called them), had the expedition on the ground in time for a late supper. Mosquitoes rose in swirls around our heads as we pitched tents in a grassy meadow among willows, where hoary redpolls as white as willow catkins flew through the thicket.

In the early evening, the rain came from the mountains, falling steadily and more or less heavily until after midnight. The next morning there was snow on the dark peaks to the south. The clear current had turned to a thick-silted gray, ending my plan to go fly-fishing. I climbed the green moss and tussock to a rock outcrop on the ridge, where, leaning back in the sun against soft lichens, I breathed in a vast Arctic prospect of mountain, river, and distant sea—utterly silent, ancient, and indifferent, entirely unscarred by the smallest mark of man.

About 6 p.m., a cream-colored grizzly appeared in the sunlit grassy saddle between ridges and worked its way downhill toward the tents, quartering the slope as it cropped greens, shaggy belly dark with tundra mud. At about 150 yards away, it stopped and lifted its head, catching our scent. Then it moved forward, tending past camp as it followed the descending ridge down a steep cutbank by the water.

The Arctic light in the long evenings was so limpid that we stayed up well past the midnight sun. In the pallid dawn, Tom, Mark Skatrud, and I were the early risers. We sat with our coffee, scanning the landscape for wild creatures. By midmorning our companions had emerged, and by noon we were on the river. Our cheerful outfitters, Jim and Carol, with river veteran Mike Matz, were at the helm in the three rafts, 12-foot inflatable craft of tough rubberized canvas with space for paddlers in the bow and stern. Mark and Alex took the lead in the kayaks, harried by pale glaucous gulls and the quick, forked-tailed arctic terns. Downriver, a cow moose and her big calf had come down to drink; wary of us, the enormous deer plunged like horses up the bank and disappeared over the rise.

That night camp was made on soft wet moss at the foot of the last escarpment before the Kongakut forges out onto the plain. Subhankar and Robert, who had camped a half-mile upriver, turned up in time for supper, bringing news of local musk ox and grizzlies, and of gyrfalcons and peregrines nesting on two rock towers on the escarpment. Tom had already located a large, dark grizzly in his spotting scope; it shambled across the plain east of the tents, as massive as an ambulating boulder. He soon located another to the north, then two more off to the west under the low hills across the river; they rolled along less than a hundred yards apart.

Setting off the next morning with Robert, Alex, and Subhankar, I climbed the steep tundra slope behind the camp, my eyes at the level of a sunshined bed of fresh blue lupines and translucent yellow poppies. From the plateau, Robert pointed at the low hills across the river where this coastal plain, including the 1002, has the highest density of land-denning female bears on the Arctic coast.

We went south along the escarpment, scanning the willow bottoms of the riverbed for grizzlies and musk ox. A golden eagle flapped downriver, far below, and a gyrfalcon passed rapidly overhead. Against the background of rock towers and the Brooks Range, the highland plateau was mysterious and beautiful, its wildflower meadows broken here and there by lonely monoliths like leaning headstones.

Where the caribou herds descend into the willow bottoms to ford the river, we followed their tracks to the foot of the escarpment, then continued southward. (At this time, the herds with their new young had already returned into the mountains; some will arrive in the Gwich’in country by late summer.) Up the valley, the rock towers seemed to brace the steep, grassy inclines. At the gyrfalcon aerie, under a rock ledge high above, two big gray chicks were still hunched on the nest, and a half-fledged sibling flapped and flopped on the rocks below. From a craggy outcrop overlooking the Kongakut Valley, the adult bird, a gray gyrfalcon, screeched a brief warning but otherwise sat motionless as stone, its yellow talons gleaming in the sun. On the next turret was the crude nest of the big rough-legged hawk that commanded the rock above, and from one of the towers came the scream of peregrines. One darted out high over the valley and cut back at once toward its hidden nest. To have observed the rough-leg, golden eagle, peregrine, and gyrfalcon within one hour on the same escarpment—astonishing!

Returning to camp, Alex and Subhankar walked the upland tussock to avoid mosquitoes, while Robert and I chose the easier going of the willow bottoms. In the maze of big-deer prints—moose and caribou—we looked for sign of musk ox and found wolf instead. Noting fresh bear scat along our way, I was content that my companion wore a holstered .45 Long Colt six-shooter on his belt that dragged his pants down as he rolled through the thickets.

LEAVING THE LAST FOOTHILLS behind, the Kongakut River descended into the flat coastal plain of the Barren Ground, where we hoped to cross Siku Lagoon to the barrier island known as Icy Reef. Having cleansed itself of the storm roil of a few days ago, the water was clear jade over the stones, fresh turquoise in the channels. In the brilliant air, the whites of the passing birds brightened the green-gray monotones of the tundra. Soon the current passed through overflow ice, up to six feet high on both banks of the channel, deepening the chill of a hard northeast wind that slowed the heavy round-bowed boats. The ice wall was broken here and there by eroded banks over ice-filled stony earth, presenting a grisly and primordial appearance, as if a mammoth tusk might protrude at any moment. On a high bank over a river bend sat a small statue of white ice, which from a distance looked like a melted snowman, but the snowman’s head revealed a yellow eye—a snowy owl, which in the next instant flopped down and away over the channel. Leaving the delta, the bottom changed to the gray, clay mud of the brackish lagoon. Warmed by the endless sunlight, the lagoon was full of nutrients, supporting great numbers of waterfowl and shorebirds, but on this tide it was too shallow to float the boats; finally we dragged them a half-mile across the lagoon to a likely campsite out on Icy Reef, a narrow gravel spit perhaps 60 yards across and four feet above sea level that separates the lagoon from the drift ice and the Arctic Ocean. Crowding the reef’s outer beach, the sculpted forms of stranded icebergs extended offshore a half-mile, reflecting like floating sculptures in the still, black water, which was broken now and then by the dark, skinny head of a ringed seal. We had four days to explore this region before the planes came to pick us up.

Taking a kayak on the second day, I set out across the glassy stillness. Long-tailed duck, eider, and loon pitched in nearby, making a soft, whispering rush as they subsided into the mirror. Where the sea had broken through the barrier island, a large, grayish seal—the bearded seal—parted the surface and slid beneath again, but another was so taken aback by our sudden confrontation that it whirled in a great thrash as it disappeared.

I drifted for a long time in the light of endless day. Off to the south, beyond the plain, rose the steep ramparts of the northernmost mountains of the New World. Off to the west, thin wisps of sunlit rain drifted over the 1002. Across the water, on a low cliff where the barren ground touches the sea, walked the misted silhouettes of caribou, and near the caribou a pair of sandhill cranes. On the beach crest, upright and heraldic on a silver limb, a magnificent peregrine, gray-blue above and lightly barred ivory on the breast and belly, watched the half-man in the gliding craft without the smallest twitch of wing.

That night was spent on the tundra across the lagoon, near an old hunting and fishing camp with an ancient log cabin, a small graveyard, and some grassy platforms where tents were erected and large hides pegged out to be scraped and dried. The Inupiat hunters come here less often now, according to Robert Thompson, who told me that his Inupiat people, accustomed to motor snowsleds and outboard boats, rarely need to camp so far from home. In the quarter-century since the first oil left the Arctic slope in the trans-Alaska pipeline, the dogsled and the dogs themselves have largely vanished.

AT 9 A.M. ON JULY 23, when Kirk Sweetsir landed his Cessna on the gravel crest of Icy Reef, the day was clear. I flew out with Robert and Subhankar over the 1002. The coastal tundra was dotted by a hundred pairs of tundra swans, and two cow moose with well-grown calves were perhaps a mile apart, throwing big black shadows in the morning light. Across the Aichilik delta, the olive monotones and grassy ponds were indistinguishable from the Kongakut tundra except that as the plane flew west, the coastal plain widened and the mountains receded into the mists. The caribou concentrate in the 1002 because the greater distance from the mountains cuts down predation on new calves by the grizzlies and wolves. Also, the hard winds across the barren spare the tight-pressed herds the worst of the mosquito hordes and biting flies. On the myriad trails that web the odd polygonal tundra surface, a lone caribou plodded inland, head low under its great antlers. As we flew over the Jago River, Kirk spotted musk ox tracks under a bank. The plane crossed the northern 1002, then a broad, open bay, before landing at Robert’s village of Kaktovik, on Barter Island (so called because Inupiat bands up and down the coast used to meet here to trade). A traditional fishing place—Kaktovik means “Seining Place”—with a large pond of good fresh water on the high ground, the site has been occupied for thousands of years, said Robert, but it wasn’t until a Distant Early Warning site (part of the array of missile-detection sites spread across the top of North America during the Cold War) was built on the high ground behind the village back in the 1950s that the outlying Inupiat were relocated to benefit from new jobs and a new clinic and school. The village is now made up of about 280 people.

Arriving at his small blue house, Robert seemed vaguely astonished by the gear that overflows his yard—heaped fishnets, a kayak, oil cans, boots, an abandoned dogsled, and some long black strips of baleen from the great jaws of a bowhead whale (Kaktovik is allowed a quota of three whales each year).

We were joined at breakfast by his wife, Jane Thompson, born Jane Akootchook and raised here in Kaktovik. “Our people never had no rights from the very start,” she said. “Who gave the Russians the right to own Alaska or sell it to the Americans? Sold my people to America right along with it. When the Air Force came here in 1947, all our coast people got moved to Kaktovik. We never had no say about it, even though this coast plain out here is our land, not theirs. And our people were put here to take care of it,” she continued, referring to the 92,000 acres of subsurface rights in the 1002 given to the people of Kaktovik as a result of the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. The Settlement Act led to the establishment of the North Slope Borough, a group of locally elected officials which governs Kaktovik and the seven other settlements on the North Slope. The borough taxes oil companies for land use and allocates the revenues for civic improvements, such as better schools and sewage systems. (The state government in Juneau receives royalties from oil companies, which are then dispersed to Alaskan citizens—last year, almost $2,000 per person.)

The Inupiat supported the Gwich’in against oil development as late as 1979, enjoining the federal government to award permanent protection to the calving area. But the improvements that swept in with oil money changed the mood in Kaktovik, and the majority of the Inupiat now support drilling in the 1002. Yet they still oppose any offshore drilling, since the sea and its creatures are sacred to their life in the way that the caribou are sacred to the Gwich’in. “Our people accepted development because they have always been so poor, and they are unhappy when people say they are just greedy,” Robert said. “This is their chance to improve their standard of living, maybe own some of the things they see on the TV—well, you can’t blame ’em.”

A LARGER PLANE FLEW THE EXPEDITION across the western section of the 1002 to the oil fields at Prudhoe Bay. By the time it left Kaktovik in late afternoon, the coast weather had turned colder, the sky was dark, with gusts and light rain, and a heavy sea fog swept like smoke across the Inupiat land. Some 60 miles west, near the Canning River, which separates the 1002 from the oil fields, we spotted perhaps 200 caribou wandering the plain, with another band of 30 or 40 not far away. These animals west of the 1002 belong to the so-called Central Arctic herd.

Soon the first drilling pad took shape in the blowing fog, its 12 ghostly wells lined up in two neat rows. Behind the well pumps were several huge rectangular reserve pits for the fluids used for cooling and lubrication. Thirty years of oil-field operations have produced millions of tons of “drilling muds,” which nobody had figured out how to get rid of.

Beyond the first wells, roads and land scars gouged by tracked vehicles began accumulating. More drilling pads loomed dimly through the fog, which mercifully shrouds the wastelands of one of the earth’s largest industrial sites; in the North Slope’s oil fields, there are almost 4,000 wells, 500 miles of gravel roads, and 12 enormous flow stations that separate the oil from gas and water. The infrastructure is made all the more intrusive by airstrip construction, production facilities, sewage plants, and housing for workers.

For a time, Prudhoe’s deposits of high-quality crude oil, readily “recovered” from permeable rock, were immensely profitable, delivering at their peak as many as two million barrels a day. But according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, the extraction of oil and the resulting industrial burden on the North Slope also produced an annual toxic load of 56,000 tons of nitrogen oxides, some 24,000 to 114,000 metric tons of methane, and up to 11 metric tons of carbon dioxide, the chief component in the greenhouse gases implicated in global warming. The oil fields and pipeline still average about one spill daily; there were 1,600 recorded spills from 1996 to 1999 alone.

In support of its claim that future drilling in the 1002 will affect only a small area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the oil industry promises more precise mapping of deposits, horizontal drilling from smaller pads up to four miles away, and other new technology that it claims will reduce the size of its “footprint” on the tundra. The oil companies claim the damage might also be offset by limiting exploration to the winter months and using ice roads instead of digging gravel. But even if all this should work, to drill a new oil field efficiently would still require an estimated 280 miles of new roads and hundreds of miles of new pipelines. Realistic predictions of economically recoverable oil in the 1002, based on U.S. Geological Survey studies in 1998, work out to about 3.2 billion barrels (assuming a price of $20 a barrel), or less than a six-month supply for America’s wasteful fossil fuel economy, which consumes 25 percent of the world’s oil production while possessing only 3 percent of its known reserves. Drilling in the 1002 is no quick fix, for even if drilling is approved, most energy companies estimate that no oil would be ready for consumption for at least a decade. The Environmental Protection Agency has determined that if manufacturers increased the fuel efficiency of cars and trucks by just three miles per gallon, we would save more than a million barrels of oil a day—five times what the refuge could possibly supply—thus reducing the dread dependence on foreign oil far faster than the proposed drilling in our last great expanse of pristine land.

In any case, the westbound caribou, put off by the scaring din and reek in their home territory, would probably stop short of the 1002 and calve farther to the east, producing fewer young and altering the migration patterns on which the Gwich’in villages and the whole ecosystem depend. And this disruption of a fragile wilderness would almost certainly lead to widespread ecological degradation.

LEAVING THE AIRSTRIP AT DEADHORSE, south of Prudhoe Bay, the pilot followed the silver tube of the trans-Alaska pipeline and the service route known as the Haul Road. To the west lay Service City, a defunct camp where the oil gave out in 1986. Service City and the Sacred Place Where Life Begins: The names tell us more than we might care to confront about our culture’s increasing alienation from what native peoples know as Land and Life.

Ten days earlier, in Arctic Village, I had listened happily to Trimble Gilbert, a tall elder with thick glasses and a big smile in a mouth with few front teeth, and a former village chief who serves as spiritual leader. In Gwich’in mythology and creation stories, Mr. Gilbert said, Caribou has a piece of Man’s heart in its heart, and a piece of Caribou’s heart rests in the heart of Man, so that each will always know what the other is doing. “Those elders who followed the traditional way knew a lot about animals,” he continued, “and they would know when our caribou were coming. They would dream that they would be here in a few days. Many caribou used to cross our river—not anymore. In the last 20, 30 years since the pipeline came along, things have changed. The birds don’t come. We don’t hear their singing. When I was growing up, I couldn’t wait till spring, to see them, hear them! Every spring! Not anymore. If we don’t stop this oil development, everything will go. It might take 20 or 30 more years, then everything will be gone.

“I don’t want to lose our animals. Those little birds [phalaropes] that go round and round on the water, every pond: I haven’t seen one in 20 years. And swallows! You’d see them all over, whirling up and down—it’s fun! Now, my wife, Mary, she says, ‘Where did the swallows go?'” He paused. “That is something taken from our lives that we can’t put back.

“We try to keep our community together. That is our Indian power. That is our way,” Mr. Gilbert said, smiling his great toothless smile. “I see my father’s fishing place, my grandfather’s camp, then I am at peace again. We respect our land, and the refuge is our land. This is our home.”

This article was adapted from an essay by PETER MATTHIESEN in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land (The Mountaineers Books), to be published in March.

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THE HEART OF THE WILD TIGER COUNTRY in India is the Central Highlands state of Madhya Pradesh, on the Kanha plateau. A remote region of forest and savanna in the Maikala Range, the plateau was set aside in 1955 as Kanha National Park, where, in March 2001, from atop an elephant, among the wistful cadences of forest birds, I observed a male tiger on a gaur kill. The tableau was stirring, since the dark wild ox known as the gaur is the largest of all bovine animals, and the Indian tiger, Panthera tigris tigris, is rivaled only by another subspecies, the Siberian or Amur tiger (P. t. amurensis) as the greatest terrestrial predator on earth.


Unwilling to abandon its unfinished meal to the looming mass of the intruder, the tiger stretched its jaws wide in uneasy yawning, and with those incisors so close, the elephant was restless, too. Checking our beast’s skittishness with heel kicks and harsh grunts, the barefoot mahout who piloted the elephant let it shift in place every few moments to distract the tiger from any impulse toward departure. Eventually the fire-colored cat, affecting vast feline indifference, eased away into the trees, losing itself in the leaf shadow and dappled light of the dry woodland.


In the warming sunlight, as the elephant returned to the road, I fairly glowed with exhilaration, feeling fortunate indeed to have seen a tiger at all. As the new millennium begins, this magnificent species, which once prospered all across Asia, from the Caspian Sea to the East Indies, in boreal forest and hot tropical jungle, from saline mangrove estuary on the Bay of Bengal to alpine tundra in the Bhutanese Himalayas—in every habitat, in fact, except dry desert and rock mountain—has been reduced to remnant populations scattered across the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and southeastern Siberia (where the single sparse population survives in the Sikhote-Alin Mountains).


Of the last tigers left in the wild—estimated numbers range from 4,600 to 7,700—it is commonly supposed that about half may inhabit India and several of its neighbors, including Nepal and Bhutan. The highest estimates are probably optimistic, and in India, where roughly 40,000 tigers could be found at the end of the 19th century, there are probably fewer than 3,000. Even in its last redoubts, unceasing habitat fragmentation and degradation, made worse by relentless poaching of both the tiger and its prey, are hastening the end of one of the most beautiful creatures ever known on earth.


The Indian cheetah is already extinct, and the Asian lion is confined to a single small reserve in the Gir Forest, near the coast of Gujarat. Because there is still hope for the tiger, and because tigers are critical to the earth’s biodiversity, I was eager to work with conservation biologists and others who were studying their habits and ecological requirements in order to help save them. Beginning in Siberia in 1992, I made four journeys into tiger country.


In the winter of 1992, I spent three days at the small, exquisite park at Ranthambhore, south of New Delhi, by common repute the most dependable place in India to observe tigers, which commonly arrange themselves in the romantic ruins of old vine-grown stone pavilions at the edges of the lily lakes, and might even oblige the visiting photographer by leaping into the water to do battle with a crocodile over a luckless deer. But that winter, the Ranthambhore tigers were scarce and very wary; the wildlife safari group I was co-leading was warned by the former warden Fateh Singh that even a glimpse was quite unlikely, and in fact, we never saw one. Six months later, it was discovered that well-organized and well-armed local poachers, in collusion with park guards, had killed at least 18 tigers in the previous three years, almost half of the Ranthambhore population. (The immensely profitable trade in tiger parts, feeding the medicine trade in China, was already extinguishing the last tigers in eastern Siberia, Southeast Asia, and Sumatra; it was now epidemic in India, as well. Between 1994 and mid-2002, the Wildlife Protection Society of India documented the death by poaching of 622 wild tigers, and the WPSI believes that this figure represents only a fraction of the total loss.)


In January of 1996, I would see my first wild tiger in the coast range of the Russian Far East—a fire-striped creature bounding across deep sunlit snow in bursts of powder—but a month later, on an eight-day visit to the tiger reserve at Kanha, in India, I saw not one. Not until 2001 did the Indian tigers show themselves, and that big male on the gaur kill was an exciting sight. Yet even before I dismounted from the elephant, I became aware of something missing, something lost—in effect, some elusive aspect of the very different visit I had made to these forests six years earlier. For it was on that earlier trip, when I saw no tigers at all, that I came closest to an affinity with this great striped beast.

IN FEBRUARY 1996, I flew inland from Bombay to the small city of Nagpur, in Maharashtra, from where a narrow, toilsome road led north-northwest toward Madhya Pradesh. In these leached and dusty landscapes, worn bare by swarming livestock and human beings, one could scarcely imagine that the Indian subcontinent, with 350 species of mammals and 1,200 species of birds, remained one of the richest faunal areas on earth outside Africa. The vast region of Madhya Pradesh, with its forests, savannas, ridges, and plateaus rising almost 3,000 feet above sea level, sustains the greater part of what is left of India’s tropical dry forest, and perhaps half of the nation’s surviving tigers.


In Madhya Pradesh, wooded hillsides appear, then small rivers and low mountains. At lower altitudes the forest is dominated by the sal tree, which, because its wood is hard and straight, was logged extensively in colonial days for railroad ties. As early as the 1860s, this region, where valuable teak and bija are also common, was set aside as a timber reserve, but since it was cut only infrequently, the forest remained sufficiently intact to support its abundant wildlife. In the early 20th century, it was used as a private hunting reserve for British viceroys, and in 1933 part of the region was set aside as the Banjar Valley Sanctuary. In 1962, seven years after the sanctuary was declared a national park, its area was expanded to encompass 172 square miles. By that time, according to American wildlife biologist George Schaller—who spent 18 months at Kanha in the mid-1960s doing research on predator-prey dynamics for his book The Deer and the Tiger—Kanha’s tiger population had shrunk to about a dozen animals. In 1973 the park was designated a tiger reserve and expanded to 363 square miles.


Depending on the driver’s willingness to blare his horn and bump through village crowds and milling animals, the journey overland from Nagpur to Kanha requires about five and a half hours. Toward the end of the trip, the ever-narrowing and deteriorating road crosses the Banjar River, a western boundary of the broad buffer zone around the park. Human activity is restricted within this zone, and one of the few settlements is a safari lodge called Kipling Camp, named for the British writer; the wonderful Jungle Book and Just-So Stories had their inspiration and location in this hill country. Read to me at bedtime as a child, Rudyard Kipling’s peculiar dreamlike tales, illuminated by the awe he brought to the imminent and unexplained, lay close to the source of my own lifelong fascination with the wild. Here in the heart of tiger country, the name of the camp filled my heart and mind with nostalgia and anticipation.


“But the wildest of all the wild animals was the Cat,” wrote Kipling in his story “The Cat That Walked by Himself.” “And all places were alike to him.”


What better description of the tiger, that solitary creature of tropical jungle and snow mountains and all habitats between, on its long age-old walkings over Asia.

AT KIPLING CAMP, I was welcomed by Rashid Ali, a naturalist in his mid-twenties, and his companion, Jan Malony, who together ran the camp with a local staff and some lively young English volunteers. The camp’s owner is a lady named Anne Wright, of an old colonial family, whose hospitable husband Bob turned up during my eight-day visit; the Wrights are residents of Calcutta and, more particularly, said Mr. Wright, the “Tolly”—the colonial-era Tollygunge Club. A large, florid, expansive man, Bob Wright retains something of the imperial aura of Kipling’s day, when Panthera tigris bengalensis (now P. t. tigris) was still known as the Royal Bengal tiger.


In 1972, when it was estimated that the tiger population in India had been reduced to less than 2,000, Anne Wright, one of the founders of World WildlifeÐIndia, helped convince Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to inaugurate an inspired program known as Project Tiger. Kanha was one of nine tiger reserves established the next year under that program (there are now 27). In the early 1980s at Kanha and Ranthambhore, the Wrights’ daughter, Belinda, and her then-husband, Stanley Breeden, filmed Land of the Tiger, arguably the best documentary on wild tigers ever made. In 1994 Belinda founded the Wildlife Protection Society of India, of which she is still executive director; it was she who arranged my stay at this simple, attractive, and unpretentious lodge, less than a mile from the park boundary.


After a late lunch in the terrace shade, I set off with Rashid Ali and two Kipling guests in a long-wheelbase Land Rover from which the top and sides had been removed for better viewing. At Kisli Gate we were assigned a forest guide who served as a spotter and also made sure that the vehicle never strayed off the track and that none of its occupants compounded its intrusion by disembarking or by hailing or otherwise accosting the other mammals in the park.


This rule has not required much enforcement since 1985, when British bird safari leader David Hunt, investigating an unknown birdcall, walked a short distance off the track at Corbett National Park, in Uttar Pradesh, and was fatally mauled by a tiger within earshot of his horrified clients. Such incidents, however, have become rare. Although India’s tigers in their heyday killed hundreds of human beings every year, one of the few man-eaters still vaguely remembered in the Kanha region was an elderly specimen that killed a young boy some 15 years earlier. These days, aging or wounded tigers and newly dispersed juvenile males, driven from established territories in the interior out toward the boundaries, where the hard-hunted game is scarce and wary, are those most likely to prey on livestock and come into conflict with human beings.


Rashid, a small, handsome man with a black beard and faintly melancholy eyes and smile, is a kinsman of Dr. Salim Ali, who was India’s foremost ornithologist and conservationist for many years and whose book on the birds of India, written in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution’s Dillon Ripley, was long the standard volume in the field. Rashid himself is a dedicated naturalist, and that afternoon he pointed out how the brown jungle babblers, squalling through the underbrush stirring up insects, were often attended, higher in the branches, by the racket-tailed drongo, with its extraordinary black “flags,” and higher still by the beautiful rufous tree pie, in what Rashid called “a vertical hunting party moving through the forest.” Farther along, he showed me a place where a tiger standing on hind legs and sharpening its claws had made deep slashes in pale tree bark 12 feet from the ground, a clue to its size that might give pause to any rival daring to trespass on its territory.


Kanha is one of five parks in India that may shelter as many as a hundred tigers. The official number was “exactly” 104, Rashid pronounced wryly. In his opinion, 70 tigers, plus or minus 20, seemed more likely (a guess more or less confirmed by tiger biologist Ullas Karanth’s 1995-1996 camera-trap survey in Kanha).


Crossing the western region of the park, the Land Rover purred quietly along hard sand-clay tracks of the sal forest and out across the Kanha valley maidans—old, overgrown cultivations of the Baiga and Gond aborigines or tribal peoples, grown up in warm, broad meadows. Through the open forest and over the maidans moved scattered herds of chital, a small red-brown deer named for the prominent chitti, or white spots, that camouflage its form in the sun-speckled wood edge. As the common deer of India, the chital is the main prey of the tiger, accounting for nearly 40 percent of its diet here at Kanha, and is also taken by the leopard and wild dog without noticeable depletion of a park population estimated at about 20,000.


Though no tiger was seen on that first afternoon, we had a fine sighting in good light of the small, dark barking deer, or muntjac, which sprang over the track and reentered the forest with its head carried low to the ground. The muntjac, with its peculiar tusklike canine teeth, is not so much uncommon as uncommonly encountered—perhaps once in every 14 or 15 trips into the park, Rashid supposes—and I was fortunate to see another a few days later.

AT SIX THE NEXT MORNING, in the highland cold, we returned into the park, as we would do each daybreak and midafternoon for the next six days. In the woodlands, a fresh set of tiger pugmarks brought the track to life, and the alarm yelp of the chital was accompanied by the deep wowk of excited langurs—slender, long-tailed gray monkeys that raged through the coarse leaves of the sal trees, bouncing the branches. When a tiger shows itself and the suspense is past, the chital stops yelping, after which it may follow its enemy some little distance, presumably to keep an eye on it and reassure the herd that the predator’s whereabouts are being monitored.


Not far away, a sambar deer stood motionless among the dark columns of the trees. Unlike the chital, whose explosive yelps compete with langur hoots and peacock squawks and the raillery of jungle fowl and the eerie sonorities of doves and the green barbet among the prevailing sounds of the Indian forests, the cryptic and dark-colored sambar remains silent, unwilling to betray its own location, half hidden by the leaves and dependent on the camouflage of branch and shadow. It cries out only when it sights a tiger, by which time it, too, has been sighted, and bolts away with a loud, weird pong, which Rashid calls “the most dependable sign of a nearby tiger in the forest.”


Like the tiger, the sambar, largest of all Asian deer, may attain a weight of up to 700 pounds, and the two are similarly well matched in their keen hearing. But the sambar has poor eyesight, while the tiger, listening and peering, misses nothing.


On a woodland ridge, attended by a group of juveniles and does, a chital buck, big antlers still in velvet, stared fixedly downhill into a wooded ravine, and his great tension fairly trembled the flanks of his herd. Though one young animal snatched fitfully at weeds, it scarcely chewed; all eyes followed the buck’s riveted stare. His antlers seemed to shiver as his pinkish ears switched this way and that, getting a range on the smallest sound that might pierce the racket of the langurs and fix the position of the tiger.


It was near midmorning. The big cats would lay up now until near dusk. Sensing this, the nervous chital lost concentration and resumed feeding. Rashid Ali and the forest guide were sure that a resting tiger lay just downhill from the track, in this ravine, but since the vehicle was not allowed to leave the track and barge into the bushes, there was no way to urge the animal into the open.

AT SUNRISE THE NEXT DAY, in fresh morning light, two chasing males of the tiny scarlet minivet sparkled back and forth and up and down among the spring leaves on the tall trees on the steep slopes of the grassland plateau called Bija Dadar. Passing beneath tall bija trees, the track leveled off on the ridge plateau. In the warm sunlight, little bee-eaters in dancing greens flared quick butterfly wings of turquoise and warm copper, and in the deep shade, two gaur bulls browsed the light, feathery shoots of new bamboo that whispered in the warm wind of the plateau. This great wild ox, which can weigh more than a ton, has thick backswept horns, a prominent head knob, and a massive boss, like a Cape buffalo. Slow to alarm, the huge beasts raised great ivory-snouted heads to contemplate the intruders with hard ocher eyes, switching hard manure-flecked rumps with their short tails.


Tiger pugmarks on the track were fresh, and so was what the forest guide, holding his nose, called “leopard scat”; despite the soft breeze, its reek filled a whole curve in the road. Rashid, murmuring to spare the young guide’s feelings, told me this was no leopard, but a wild dog, or dhole.


Hearing something, the driver stopped, and at once a loud yowling arose from the near undergrowth—a tiger cub, distressed by our idling motor. Earlier that winter, not far from the same place, one of these open vehicles from Kipling Camp had been false-charged by a mating tigress, roaring her outrage that a carload of voyeurs should be privy to her copulations, and the guide was concerned that the cub’s yowl might summon that same mother. Within moments, a tigress answered it from down the ridge, a loud sharp growl that might have been a warning to her restive cub. The Land Rover moved off a little ways to wait.


A golden-backed woodpecker in bounding flight crossed the fiery mountain light—a tiger light—which made the early springtime in these highlands seem like fall. The tigress did not roar again; possibly she had crept close to her cub and was watching from nearby. In the great stillness, a blue ground thrush picked and kicked through the bamboo. Were a tiger to take form in the roadside thicket or step onto the road, I thought, the taut landscape would crack like an old shard of gilt ceramic.


ONE MORNING, AS IF PROTESTING three long days without a tiger sighting, the Land Rover rather mysteriously quit on the forest track. Rashid, who served as driver-guide, set off on foot toward the main Kisli-Kanha road in search of aid; since he was not there to forbid it, I took advantage of a rare opportunity to stretch my legs.


On foot, one travels through a forest very different from the one patrolled so blithely in a vehicle. Hearing each fallen nut or twig, I was alert for the alarm cries of chital and langur; I saw wild dog sign and a snake’s curved track, paid close attention to tree shadows, and took note of a tiger scat so ancient that all was leached away except the coarse guard hairs of a deer, never digested.


A mile or more down the track was a stockade from which an elderly forest guard rushed forth, waving his stick: I was to go no farther, I must wait right there. Pretending not to understand, answering with something foolish about meeting Rashid Ali at the vehicle, I turned and headed back, so exhilarated by this brief safari that I trekked some ways beyond the car.


By the time Rashid showed up with another vehicle, noon had come and the woods had fallen quiet. On the return, a large black-tailed mongoose crossed the track (reminding me of Kipling’s cobra-killing mongoose, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, whose eyes turned red when he was angry). Two wild dogs accompanied the car some little distance, trotting just back of the first line of trees while keeping to the shadows of the forest.


Farther along, a kill had taken place just minutes earlier. Three chital bucks moved in a stiff, slow line, white tails upright. From the direction they were pointing, more chitals came running, gathering up small companies of their kind from open woods and meadow, until more than a hundred scampered past. A jackal trotted toward a brushy gully where the cat had dragged its prey, and jungle crows and white-backed vultures came gliding in to a dead tree, craning and peering. Since they did not descend, it was quite clear that the predator was right there on the kill.

KNOWING I’D SEEN A TIGER in Siberia, Rashid was anxious for me to see one in his country and especially at Kanha, where the ecosystem, including what field biologists call the “prey base,” was so evidently intact. But sightings were not so simple anymore, as Rashid warned me. The former custom of permitting the park’s tame elephants to pick up visitors along the tracks and trundle them to where the mahouts had located feeding or resting tigers had been suspended by the park director two years earlier.


In the old days, live bait was set out for tigers, first to accommodate famous hunters, then VIPs, then researchers. Growing accustomed to these easy feeds, the big cats could be counted on to remain there at the kill, all set for gun or camera in the morning. The practice of baiting, which acculturated and corrupted the dwindling tigers, was finally banned in the late 1970s.


In the years that followed, the mahouts and their elephants would go out early in the morning to locate a tiger on a kill. In this way, the elephant men remained familiar with the territories and routes and habits of the seven or eight tigers drawn to the vicinity of Kanha Village by the abundant prey animals in the maidans. When a tiger was found, word was sent to park headquarters, which dispatched more elephants to the nearest point along the tracks. There the assembled visitors, convened quickly, were laddered up onto a pachyderm and trundled to the tiger, which was often less than a hundred yards back in the bush.


In this manner, in what became known as the Tiger Show, most visitors “got” their tiger in short order. But in 1993, at Christmas, Kanha’s busiest season, the backing and filling at the road was witnessed at its most noisy and disorderly by important Indian conservationists, including Valmik Thapar, a noted tiger wallah and nature writer, and Bittu Sahgal, editor of Sanctuary Asia magazine. These members of Belinda’s Wildlife Prevention Society were outraged not only by the unseemly spectacle but by the possibility that the whole circus was a transgression of the tiger’s domain, demeaning to the animals and dangerous as well, making them more habituated to the presence of human beings and therefore more vulnerable to poachers. A few months later, after Thapar, Sahgal, and fellow tiger conservationists protested with angry letters to the Minister of Environment and Forests and with op-ed pieces in Indian newspapers, the Tiger Show came to an end.


Rashid Ali acknowledged that the confusion occasionally got out of hand, but he also believes that it could have been controlled without eliminating the tiger viewing entirely and that, in the long term, the educational benefits and potential enlistment of public support for wildlife far outweighed any harm done by the carnival atmosphere.


One afternoon I accompanied Rashid to the park headquarters at Mandla, 47 miles away on the banks of the Narmada River. There we met with the urbane young park director, Rajesh Gopal, author of a noted book on wildlife management, whose opinion it was that this forested eastern part of Madhya Pradesh—and Kanha in particular—is the best tiger habitat in India. Despite a scarcity of water in the dry season, he explained, the forest produces an astonishing biomass of ungulates such as deer and wild pigs, which in turn support one of the highest densities of tiger in the country. Hearing about my unsuccessful quest, Mr. Gopal rang the office of the Forest Service at Kanha with instructions to provide us a park elephant for morning reconnaissance during the remainder of my stay.

KANHA VILLAGE, the stockaded compound in the center of the park, overlooking the broad maidans, is a settlement mostly inhabited by forest rangers and mahouts; it adjoins the park’s last thatch settlement of traditional Baiga forest people, small, dark-skinned hunter-gatherers who also practice shifting cultivation. Even at dusk we would see lone Baiga and Gond men walking the forest roads armed with nothing more than the thin stick they carry behind the head, across the shoulders. As animists who worship all life in the forest, the Baiga and Gond perceive the tiger as a forest deity and do not seem to fear it.


Beneath two huge and ancient sal trees, Rashid and I mounted the stairs of what looked like a small reviewing stand. The platform facilitated embarkation upon an elephant dubbed Bund Devi, Goddess of the Forest, whose howdah, or riding platform, was fitted with low iron rails, placed on sacks of meal, and secured by a hemp girdle of four ropes bound around the Goddess’s rumbling belly.


(This modest arrangement was not to be compared with the royal howdah on display at Kipling Camp, acquired some years earlier from a maharajah of his acquaintance by Mr. Bob Wright of “the Tolly”—in effect, a high-sided and capacious wicker basket resembling a balloon’s gondola and designed to accommodate three tiger killers of ample dimensions in complete security and comfort. A much smaller rear platform, all but aslide off the elephant’s hindquarters, carried sporting firearms and ammunition, alcoholic spirits, water flagons, and the plentiful comestibles lugged along on august outings in the grand days of the Raj, and also two natives—since even aboard an elephant, it would not do for important persons to be caught out-of-doors without a servant. However, no area had been allowed for such inconsequential beings, and how they managed was their own concern: Presumably the pinched space between plump hampers of sturdy British food was deemed sufficient for two humble rumps so much smaller and less rosy in hue than those installed up front.)


Awaiting us without evident pleasure was Kuarlal the mahout, a sinewy man of saturnine demeanor who urged his elephant with quick brown feet: The toes were applied behind the ears while the heels drummed tirelessly upon the elephant’s nape. Harsh cries of Mal! Mal! (Go! Go!), enforced by hard cuts of his whistling stick upon her brow knobs and down between her eyes, advised the Goddess to get moving, which she did, but not before relieving herself of a large load of manure, which struck the hard ground like a Turkish ottoman.


As the Goddess swung across the maidans in the early morning mist, a leopard came running toward her in light, graceful bounds. Seeing the elephant and her towering cargo, the cat recoiled backward in a somersault and unrolled rapidly in the opposite direction. Apparently this animal, climbing a tree, had leapt the high fence that enclosed a large meadow to rest it from overgrazing. As we watched, the frantic leopard probed for an opening along the bottom of the fence on the far side, although it could have clambered up and over the unbarbed wire almost as easily as it entered in the first place. When, quite suddenly and mysteriously, it disappeared, we assumed it had found a gap beneath and wriggled out.


“What a wonderful start to the morning!” Rashid said, and I, too, was delighted, for this was the first leopard I had ever seen in Asia. In most regions, the tiger will drive out or kill the leopard, but in Kanha, where prey animals are so plentiful, these two species of the genus Panthera can exist together in fair numbers.


At last we had escaped the dusty track. Entering the cool forest, the Goddess passed between the dark trunks of the sal trees. Shifting comfortably along, she descended into shady streams and followed the stony beds awhile before heaving back up onto the bank and climbing a hillside through thick stands of bamboo. Kuarlal was still beating a tattoo on her sparsely haired gray hide, and occasionally she closed her nostrils, filled her trunk with air, and then, as if to clear away her understandable exasperation, expelled the compressed air in an odd, loud explosion, not unlike a blowout or backfire, but more like booting a bass drum. “It pleases her to do that,” grumped her mahout, who knows there is no accounting for the ways of elephants.


Kuarlal said a tigress with three well-grown young hunted this territory. He located a bed in the long grass where the four tigers had lain sprawled out together, and a nearby tree trunk where they had scratched deep to scrape off old chitin and sharpen their long claws. But none of these signs was very fresh, and the sun was climbing, and even if the tigers had not left this territory, they would now be resting somewhere until dusk.


Kanha elephants are worked only in the morning, composing themselves as they see fit in the afternoon. On the return toward the Kanha meadows, Kuarlal spotted the leopard again, still trapped in the far corner of the fenced meadow. But as the elephant drew near, it miraculously disappeared in the short, sparse grass, and the frustrated mahout, with wild kicks to the ear, turned the Goddess back along the fence, anxious to find it. Just at that moment his eye picked up a small, tawny tuft that differed minutely from the surrounding stubble. The mahout shouted and his elephant stopped as a long, spotted tail rose slowly from the grass, wavering like a cobra. Then, with a deep, growling roar—the leopard, despite its modest size, is one of the four “roaring cats” (which include the jaguar and lion)—it writhed swiftly away across the open ground, so flat to the grass that it looked legless, like gold molten lava. Within an instant it was 50 yards away at a shallow gully, where it poured over the rim and disappeared.

A TIGER HAD BEEN SEEN on the day before near a fork in the road above the Nakti Ghati, a stream or nala that descends from the springs and escarpments of the Bija Dadar, about nine miles southeast of Kipling Camp. That one might meet a tiger on the road in so much forest seemed astonishing, since cats must hear the drum of tires on the hard dirt track from a mile away. But as in eastern Siberia, where Amur tigers take advantage of the lumber roads in the deep-snow country, Indian tigers have adapted to the tracks, which are well suited to soft and silent travel. They are also useful in the hunt, since the hoofed prey graze and browse the open edges where sunlight pierces the forest canopy, encouraging new growth. Near the road today we saw all five of the main prey species—chital, sambar, gaur, wild pig, and barasingha.


The magnificent barasingha is the southern race of the swamp deer of the Nepal borderlands in the Terai, that thousand-mile strip of savanna, swamp, and jungle south of the Himalayan foothills. In Madhya Pradesh, the barasingha’s habitat has been progressively usurped by village livestock, and its numbers in the Kanha region had fallen to less than a hundred by the time the park’s current boundaries were established in the early 1970s. While it has substantially recovered, it is now confined to the area in and around Kanha National Park, having nowhere to wander in the agricultural landscape beyond the buffer zone.


On a slow return to Kipling Camp through darkening forest late that afternoon, the Land Rover surprised a herd of ten or more wild hogs. The big, scrofulous boar had a black shoulder mane on its bristly black-brown hide; snorting, it rushed its careening sows and shoats across the track and downhill through the understory.


Farther on, a chital doe slowly raised and lowered the warning flag of her white tail. She stamped and yelped that musical alarm as a nearby buck pointed his antlers this way and that with a frantic flicking of his ears. The spots fairly flew off his trembling flanks as if he might explode at any moment.


Once again there fell that imminence of the great tiger. For long minutes, we searched the woodland with binoculars, scanning beneath bushes and past leaf-hidden rocks as the chital shapes withdrew into the darkness.


THE NEXT MORNING we headed off again for our assignation with the Goddess, yet with so much fresh sign and evidence of tigers near the Nakti Ghati, we made a detour along that road on the way to the Kanha meadows. Instead of the yelping chital and hurtling wild boar of last evening’s encounter, we were met by calm langurs plucking coral blossoms from the tree called flame-of-the-forest, but beyond the Y-fork near the Nakti Ghati, on the steep winding road that leads eventually to Bisanpura, were two fresh sets of tiger pugmarks headed in opposite directions and crisscrossing each other for more than a mile. There was also a fresh tiger scat, still shining.


Though no one dared say so, we were certain that we were about to overtake the tiger, which had left these big bowl disks preceded by four round marks in a crescent made by its sheathed claws. Instead we met a car filled to the brim with a large Indian family—the windows were all eyes—which had shrouded our road of crisscrossed tracks in a fine, light film of dust.


Atop the Goddess, we headed up and over forest ridges, through deep underbrush and tall bamboo, then down the drying Sulkum Nala, with its clear pools and softly sculpted rocks. The Goddess forged across dense canebrakes much frequented by tigers, to judge from the antlers and white shards of bone in the copper-colored swales where the cats had lain. The elephant, upon command, plucked up an antler, and Kuarlal lodged it in a tree fork; he would later retrieve it for use in native medicines. “Rocks, bamboo, deer, and water,” Rashid sighed, leaning back in resignation, hands behind his head. “Fine tiger habitat!” In his gentle and ironic way, Rashid seemed more frustrated than I was.


In the dry sand beds down the nala, leopard pugmarks crisscrossed those of tiger, but here, too, the prints were old. The Goddess twisted off mouthfuls of bamboo and other forage as she barged along. “All you care about is stuffing your mouth!” Kuarlal cried. To us he said, “I don’t know why people would pay to ride around an empty forest. Used to see ten tigers in a day—now they’ve all gone away into the mountains!”


In the Land Rover that afternoon, we returned almost obsessively to the road of the crisscrossed tiger tracks. From the trees on the slope above, an excited langur was venting its harsh, tearing cough, and for one heart-piercing instant, I saw the recumbent fire-colored shape of my first Indian tiger, curled at the base of a pale kudu tree up the brushy ravine. Our driver and the forest guide were too polite to disabuse me; but when I laughed, they laughed, too. To want to see something so badly that one conjures it up out of one’s own head—what could be said of such a fool?


By now, the jungle fowl had started up their vespers and the rose-ringed parakeets were screeching over the treetops on their way to roost, and the forest guide hinted with a gentle shrug that we must turn toward home.


On my last day at Kanha, we forsook the Nakti Ghati road in favor of the Goddess, heading out across the dreaming maidans and the stately sal groves of this vast, mythic deer park. Swaying along atop our redolent warm beast to the creak of the hemp ropes lashing down the howdah and the mahout’s grunts and loving oaths and patter of quick feet, heeding the outcry of alarmed animals and exotic birds, aswim in the fecund fragrance of a flora evolved on this fragment of primordial Gondwana that appeared long ago out of the southern oceans to collide with Asia and remain affixed as its subcontinent, forcing the Himalayas high into the sky—in this moment-by-moment moment spun free of space and time, one did not need to be a Hindu or a Buddhist to rest in the myriad sounds and smells of the morning forest, in the all-encompassing great silence of the One.

IN THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED, I completed Tigers in the Snow, in which the main subject was the Siberian tiger. But I hadn’t forgotten India, or those days in the forest on the Goddess, and in March 2001 I returned to Kanha as a field leader for a wildlife tour that traveled around northern India on the reconstituted royal train, visiting historic sites and tiger parks along the way.


At Kanha I learned that Rashid Ali was no longer at Kipling Camp (he is married now to Jan Malony, and living in Bombay), and that some of the Baiga people had been relocated. In Kanha, as in other parks, the controversial Tiger Show had been restored, and on the first morning the mahouts, armed with walkie-talkies, spread the news of a big male tiger on a gaur kill; phalanxes of elephants headed toward the scene, where we arrived not long thereafter in a Land Rover.


That male tiger on the gaur was the first tiger I’d ever seen at Kanha; I would see a second and a third that afternoon. Not far from the meadows, on a road I knew from the grand old days aboard the Goddess of the Forest, an elephant drew up beside our open Land Rover. Using the canopy frame, we managed to clamber up onto the howdah, after which the elephant proceeded to the lair of another adult male, not out in the open on a kill, but so uncannily hidden in thick, high tussock that even when the mahout pointed at it with his stick from ten yards away, one could scarcely make him out; the eye glint in the tawny grasses was the first I saw of him. Then the striped form jumped into focus, though the tiger in the shadows never stirred.


Not far away, on a grassy bank within growling distance of the male, a sleeping tigress sprawled, indelicate white belly to the sun: Seemingly as tame as a zoo animal, she paid her visitors no heed whatsoever. The mahout, who knew this slattern well, said she had three small cubs hidden nearby. Not liking the prospect of looming over terrified wild cubs, I was greatly relieved that we made no attempt to find them.


In one day we had seen three tigers at Kanha; we could just as easily have seen six. At two smaller parks in Madhya Pradesh, we saw six more, in addition to another three in Rajasthan, at Ranthambhore. That I saw so many tigers where in other years I had seen none was partly attributable to the hot, dry season between rains, when prey animals and their predators collect near the scarce water. (On the previous journeys I had come in winter.) Another reason, I would like to think, was that India’s poaching, though not yet under control, had at least been slowed by greater vigilance. But the chief reason, sad to say, was the restoration of the Tiger Show in three of the four reserves we chose to visit.


Having written that, I wonder why I’m so sad to say it, though I know when and where those doubts began. That morning at Kanha during this visit, returning toward the track after seeing the big tiger on the gaur, we met another elephant on its way in toward the kill with a fresh howdahful of craning, camera-clicking human beings. Against my will—or perhaps against my romantic sensibilities—I found myself confronted with the People Show, and it was me. This was what the last wild tigers are compelled to look at. And try as I would to maintain my exhilaration at the exotic spectacle I had just witnessed, I felt instead a kind of baffled yearning and regret that was not offset by comparing such “success” to those long days of failure in this forest six years earlier.


Without some semblance of the hunt, the joy is no longer in the finding, but in the acquiring: Did you get your tiger? As in picking a beautiful wildflower, one destroys the moment’s fragile evanescence, and with it the fleeting mystery of creation and the lost paradise that lies behind what we imagine that we seek. As tiger biologist Ullas Karanth has said, “When you see a tiger, it is always like a dream.” Alas, this can never be true of a preordained and highly organized observation.


HAVING HAD THE GOOD FORTUNE to observe and study wilderness and wildlife all around the world for more than a half-century, and to take delight in this lifelong avocation, I must also accept the sadness of recording the precipitous decline of land and life in that half-century brought about by the rampaging activities of my own species. The Siberian tigress I saw in 1996, and another we were snow-tracking that winter, would be slaughtered by poachers in 1998.


As George Schaller has written, “Future generations would be truly saddened that mankind has so little foresight, so little compassion, such lack of generosity of spirit for the future that it would eliminate one of the most dramatic and beautiful animals this world has ever seen.” In the end, whether or not I “got” my tiger or my leopard is of small importance; what’s important is to know that they are there.

The post Burning Bright appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

Editor's note: This essay comes in response to an article written by Scott Anderson about Leonard Peltier, the American Indian Movement activist, published in ���ϳԹ���'s July 1995 issue. Anderson's controversial feature investigated the events that led up to Peltier's imprisonment for the murder of two FBI agents in 1975—as well as those by which he has now become the symbol of a cause. No work has done more to bring Peltier to the world's attention than Peter Matthiessen's In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, a book that received sharp criticism in Anderson's piece. Matthiessen's rebuttal follows here.

The hope of justice for Leonard Peltier, now in his 19th year in prison, has been seriously harmed by ���ϳԹ���'s destructive piece about his case, “The Martyrdom of Leonard Peltier.” Leonard Peltier and his supporters have endured vicious attacks before, and the attacks are sure to grow more strident and irresponsible with the growing pressure for his freedom. This one came out just in time to influence the overdue and imminent decision by the Justice Department and the White House on a petition for executive clemency. Ordinarily this magazine would not have such impact in the capital, but the Washington Post took up the article in two separate pieces, doubtless because of its suggestion that a special press release in the summer of 1994 by FBI director Louis Freeh arguing against commutation of Peltier's sentence was a warning to a “possibly wavering White House.” In the process of undermining Peltier, the Anderson article does its best to discredit my book, which documents in great detail how Peltier was deprived of a fair trial, and the easiest way to do that, of course, is to defame the credibility and good reputation of the author. For these reasons, it cannot be ignored, as it deserves, but must be answered.

The article's bias is evident from the opening pages. The dark and sinister photograph of Leonard Peltier selected by ���ϳԹ��� to illustrate its story makes him look furtive and menacing at the same time, like some trapped night animal. “He is a powerfully built man, and there is something in his loping gait, in the opaque gaze of his dark eyes, that lends him a vaguely predatory air,” Anderson writes of Peltier on the first page. The dark photograph, the “loping gait,” the “predatory air” set the tone for the whole article, presenting such a distorted likeness of this open-faced and amiable man that any reader unfamiliar with his case is drawn at once toward the supposition of his guilt.

Early on, the writer presents a brief summation of his clever angle on the Peltier story—that Peltier's “martyrdom” has been brought about not by his prosecutors and other antagonists, but by his very own supporters, those “merchants of myth,” as he likes to call them, who “promulgate his martyrdom—and who may be prolonging his imprisonment as a result.”

With seeming objectivity, the skillful Anderson goes on to provide some more or less accurate background on the Pine Ridge Reservation, the American Indian Movement, and AIM's troubles with local authorities on Pine Ridge. But soon strange errors of fact and emphasis start cropping up. Anyone familiar with Peltier's 1977 trial for the murder of the two FBI agents at Oglala will perceive at once that Anderson is dragging forth the same old discredited allegations, all of them tending to create an atmosphere of crime and violence around Peltier.

Anderson begins with Peltier's “attempted murder” of a Milwaukee police officer, a trumped-up charge on which Peltier was speedily acquitted when the cop's own girlfriend testified that the whole episode had been a setup. Next comes the “sniper killing” at Oglala. Despite FBI efforts to implicate him in the death of Jeannette Bissonnette in the spring preceding the shoot-out, Peltier was never seriously implicated, much less charged. Even Duane Brewer, the GOON leader on Pine Ridge, acknowledged a few years ago that Bissonnette's death was probably a “freak accident.”

The Martyrdom of Leonard Peltier

Read the original article by Scott Anderson, published in ���ϳԹ���'s July 1995 issue.

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The third ingredient in this brew of alleged violence is what Anderson calls the “torture and robbery of two young ranch hands,” in which a young AIM supporter who swiped a pair of cowboy boots from a white drinking buddy was charged with robbery and assault with a deadly weapon—a penknife that he claimed never left his pocket. The assault charge was dropped, and he was acquitted on the robbery charge. No one claimed that any torture had been perpetrated or that Peltier was in any way involved.

Why, then, is this paltry episode inflamed by the word “torture”? Is this mere carelessness? Another barefaced error? Or can it be that like “predator” and “sniper killing” and “attempted murder,” the word “torture” is insinuated here to intensify the atmosphere of violence around Peltier? Here and elsewhere, consciously or not, Anderson's use of erroneous and prejudicial terms imitates the unscrupulous case constructed by the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's office during Peltier's trial to establish a presumption of guilt.

Then there's the matter of the AR-15 rifle. Anderson states that two of the young Indians in Peltier's group “testified to having seen Peltier walking toward the wounded agents with the AR-15 just moments before the fatal shots were fired.” This would certainly be damning evidence if it were accurate and complete. It is neither. One young Navajo told the grand jury that he had seen Peltier, Bob Robideau, and Dino Butler near the agents' cars, that Peltier was carrying what looked like an AR-15, and that “a few minutes later”—quite a long time in a running shoot-out—he heard shooting. The point is that the two events were not tied closely by any “just moments,” which, like “torture,” is Anderson's own contribution. Nor does he trouble to tell his readers that these young Indians recanted all such testimony at Peltier's trial, testifying instead that their earlier statements had been extorted by FBI agents under threats of beatings and indictment for first-degree murder.

The Crumbling Conspiracy Theory

Read Scott Anderson's response to this article, published in ���ϳԹ���'s November 1995 issue.

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Peltier, who escaped to Canada after the shoot-out, lost his fight against extradition largely because of what Anderson refers to as one of the “troubling details” in the case—the notorious Myrtle Poor Bear affidavits, concocted for the occasion by the FBI. He also speaks blithely of the “smaller inconsistencies” in the government's investigative files, which included a “badly worded ballistics-test telex.” Yet these “smaller inconsistencies” were so critical that in 1984 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ordered a special hearing to investigate the possible need for a new trial.

What was revealed during that hearing was damning indeed, and not to Peltier. There was nothing “badly worded” in that FBI telex of October 2, 1975; it merely stated that the “Wichita AR-15” allegedly used by Peltier during the shoot-out—the weapon on which prosecutor Lynn Crooks had constructed his charge of first-degree murder—could not be linked to the .223 casing found near the bodies, the casing that Crooks had called “perhaps the most important piece of evidence in this case.” Furthermore, this telex—which utterly invalidated the critical testimony of the FBI ballistics expert presented at Peltier's trial in 1977—had been illegally withheld from the defense. Yet ���ϳԹ���'s reporter ignores all this, referring to the discredited rifle as the “AR-15 murder weapon.” Apparently Anderson does not know, or does not care, that his “AR-15 murder weapon” was eliminated as the murder weapon 20 years ago.

Furthermore, the .223 casing was not inspected by the ballistics lab until an incredible seven months after the shooting, just in the nick of time, as it turned out, for the preparation of the ballistics affidavit used in conjunction with the bogus Myrtle Poor Bear documents (and the fugitive warrant for the bogus “attempted murder” charge) to effect Peltier's extradition from Canada—an entire extradition case built on bogus evidence.

What sort of investigative reporter, as ���ϳԹ��� bills Anderson, would neglect almost entirely these very strong exculpatory elements in Peltier's favor—not as claimed by his lawyers or the merchants of his myth, but as demonstrated in the uneasiness repeatedly expressed by his own judges. Imagine not even mentioning, for example, that Judge Donald Ross, during Peltier's first appeal in 1977, declared that the manipulation of the Myrtle Poor Bear affidavits “gives some credence to the claim of the Indian people that the United States is willing to resort to any tactic in order to bring somebody back to the United States from Canada. And if they are willing to do that, they must be willing to fabricate other evidence.” Yes, indeed. And though the court felt constrained to deny the appeal, it clearly did so with mixed feelings, noting in its decision that “the use of affidavits of Myrtle Poor Bear in the extradition proceedings was, to say the least, a clear abuse of the investigative process by the FBI.”

Judge Gerald Heaney, who sat on the panel of three federal judges that denied Peltier's third appeal in 1986, expressed his doubts about the case three years later on CBS's West 57th: “The FBI withheld from the defense a good deal of ballistics information which might have been helpful” at the time of the trial. For this reason, and also because of the Myrtle Poor Bear episode, Judge Heaney said that his concurrence in the court's decision to deny Peltier's appeal “was the toughest decision I ever had to make in 22 years on the bench.” (The court recognized “a possibility that the jury would have acquitted Leonard Peltier” had the records and data improperly withheld from him been available, but the evidence for ordering a new trial did not meet the strict standards imposed on the appellate courts.) In a June 1990 article in the National Law Journal Judge Heaney went still further, calling the FBI “equally responsible” for the death of its own agents.

On April 18, 1991, Judge Heaney wrote to Senator Daniel Inouye, who leads the fight for justice for Peltier in the Senate, authorizing him to show his letter to President Bush. Judge Heaney spoke of the mitigating circumstances in the case, emphasizing his view that “the United States government must share the responsibility” for the fatal gunfight and that “the FBI used improper tactics in securing Peltier's extradition from Canada and in otherwise investigating and trying the Peltier case. Although our court decided these were not grounds for reversal, they are, in my view, factors that merit consideration in any petition for leniency….”

Repeatedly, Anderson professes to be “stunned” by his own disclosures. Why isn't he stunned by such developments as the above? Even those in the Justice Department who are sincerely persuaded of Peltier's guilt must be troubled by such massive indication of investigative and prosecutorial abuses, which can only discredit what Indian people know as the Injustice Department. To insist on fairness in this case need not be a declaration of Peltier's innocence but only a long belated recognition that this man was unfairly tried and has spent 19 years in prison as a result.

It is not a matter of Matthiessen's belief in “über-conspiracies” or whatever, as this writer would have one believe. The Justice Department used extraordinary means to convict Peltier, not because he and AIM were threats to “white corporate America”—this, too, is disingenuous—but because, with Butler and Robideau acquitted, the prosecution had no intention of letting its last suspect get away. And this is understandable up to a point, considering the violence done at close range to the two wounded agents.

Anderson speaks knowledgeably of FBI agents' “abiding contempt for the merchants of [Peltier's] myth” and also their fear that “freedom for Peltier means that the propagandists win, that history will judge them and their slain comrades as guilty of all the crimes of which they have been accused.” Why is he pumping up all this bad stuff? The dead agents were never accused of any “crimes” in In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, which on the contrary quoted two friends and colleagues of slain agent Ron Williams to the effect that Williams was an unusually nice guy. (His partner, Jack Coler, had been recently transferred from Colorado and was not known well by local agents.)

Unfortunately, Anderson's main sources against Peltier are U.S. Attorney Crooks and a retired FBI agent named Nicholas O'Hara, who are (in regard to Peltier at least) two of the Justice Department's most intemperate spokesmen. On the same CBS program on which Judge Heaney appeared back in 1989, Crooks actually defended the government's use of the Myrtle Poor Bear affidavits, saying, “Basically…I don't agree that we did anything wrong, but I can tell you, it don't bother my conscience one whit if we did.” His arrogant refusal to repudiate government use of fabricated evidence—and the withholding of exculpatory evidence with the disingenuous excuse that the defense lawyers didn't ask for it—brought sharp rebuke from Senator Inouye: “I was a U.S. Attorney once, and that man is a disgrace to the profession!”

In the Rochester, Minnesota, Post-Bulletin in December 1992, O'Hara referred to “the fact that Myrtle Poor Bear's affidavits were falsely made and were then used to help extradite Peltier from Canada.” Yet, astonishingly, in the very next paragraph he stated, “There never was any fraud in Canada” and “the extradition process remains totally legitimate from a legal and ethical standpoint.” In a subsequent letter to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, O'Hara denied any knowledge of the appeals court's comment on improper FBI conduct in the Peltier case, and a few lines later he concluded happily, “There was no improper conduct by the FBI.”

The next year, in the Star-Tribune, O'Hara called Peltier “a mad dog” who should never be released. Judge Heaney tells me that he protested to FBI Director William Sessions, questioning the propriety of an FBI regional director abusing a man already convicted and serving time in prison. After news of his letter to Senator Inouye became known, Judge Heaney was visited by O'Hara on another matter, and O'Hara upbraided him for his conduct in endorsing clemency.

“Leonard Peltier, the good Lord willing, will never see the light of day as a free man,” O'Hara has said. What a pity it is that more reasonable civil servants permit such intractable people to represent the Bureau. If the Lynn Crookses and Nick O'Haras and their reactionary allies succeed in bullying not only the FBI but the entire Justice Department, their narrow views must certainly prevail, as they do today. But they did not succeed in bullying Congressman Don Edwards (the former FBI agent who, as chairman of the House Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights, denounced the ballistics abuses in the Peltier case and spoke out for a new trial for years until his recent retirement), Senator Inouye, and Judge Heaney, and I like to believe there are other men and women in the Justice Department who may see it as their duty to stand up and be heard.

In the 12 years since In the Spirit of Crazy Horse appeared, this book and its author have been attacked hard and often by ideological foes, including a former governor of South Dakota and an FBI agent who sued me and my publisher for a total of $49 million. People familiar with the Peltier case are certainly entitled to dispute In the Spirit of Crazy Horse and to express honest skepticism about its argument, as well as about the politics and competence of its author. I have mostly ignored all such attacks, since being called a bleeding heart and/or boob goes with the territory. But Anderson goes well beyond the usual political tirade against my foolishness and leftward leanings. Not so subtly, he disparages my “veracity,” then the honesty of my research, and finally the sincerity of my intentions. And he does this so unrelentingly and with such mean spirit as to finally call my character and my integrity into question, and with them almost 50 years of what I'd like to think is respected work.

Anderson launches his attack with a swipe at the book's “casualness toward documentation that bordered on the cavalier.” A more objective journalist might have noted that this casual book is 645 pages long and prodigiously annotated, with nearly 50 pages of notes and index.

Anderson goes on to cite two accounts from the book that are contradicted by the “official” reports. The death of James Brings Yellow, widely believed by Oglala people to have died of a heart attack during an FBI helicopter raid upon his house, is so incidental to the story that I couldn't find James Brings Yellow in the index—his name appears just once, in passing, in this immense book. With so many thousands of facts to cover, there seemed small reason to check out Brings Yellow's death certificate (I was not surprised to learn from Anderson's article that it wrote him off as just another Indian dead of drink). As an investigative reporter, Anderson must surely be acquainted with the well-known urge of all officials to cover their own butts, and those of kindred officials, in their reports. And one has only to glance at the numerous coroner's reports described in In the Spirit of Crazy Horse to realize how cynically Indian people, even dead ones, are dealt with all too often by officials. Besides, “official” documents in these AIM cases, which Anderson so dutifully accepts, have turned out with depressing regularity to be politically motivated and unreliable, a sad truth that is demonstrated over and over, and in great detail, throughout the book, where it comprises the main evidence that Leonard Peltier was deprived of a fair trial.

As for John Trudell, he explained to me why he had good reason to believe that his wife and children were killed by arson, since their home in Nevada was destroyed 12 hours after he had burned AIM's upside-down flag on the steps of the FBI building in Washington, D.C., during a vigil for Peltier in 1979. The fire marshal's report of a defective chimney may be accurate enough—indeed, the book itself states that “there is no evidence that the two events were connected”—but I would not have dismissed Trudell's personal account by accepting that “official” report at face value.

At any rate, it seems to be an unwitting tribute to the essential strength of In the Spirit of Crazy Horse that all Anderson can scrape up as evidence of inadequate documentation are two of the most peripheral events in the whole book. He is dead silent on the hundreds of pages of documentation on the crucial issues—AIM, the background of the case, the shoot-out and escape, the trials, and all of the related legal issues and government positions and so forth and so on in between. Or the ballistics farce, or what Anderson calls the “slightly contradictory field reports from various FBI agents” that were criticized repeatedly by the appellate court judges.

Not that the book does not have its mistakes. Every edition of any book about an ongoing investigation is bound to have corrections and emendations. An example might be the matter of uranium, which seemed far more significant in the nuclear-power heyday of the 1970s than it does today. Despite Anderson's dismissal of significant uranium deposits in the Pine Ridge region, his opinion was not shared by my own reference, the November 1979 issue of the Engineering and Mining Journal, which estimated $8 billion worth of uranium in South Dakota, mostly beneath the Black Hills, just west of the Pine Ridge Reservation. However, in hindsight, I would probably agree with lawyer James Leach, whose comments and criticisms I invited and Anderson exploited, that I gave too much emphasis to this factor in the U.S.-Lakota confrontations.

Anderson also hints something fishy in the fact that half of the author's income from In the Spirit of Crazy Horse has been and still is given to the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee. Is he implying that I somehow benefitted financially from giving away half of the money? That arrangement was offered spontaneously and of my own accord during the course of the first conference about a potential movie, because I did not wish to profit from Peltier's desperate situation. And of course I have not profited, to put it mildly. Peltier's lawyers, of course, wanted the offer nailed down in writing, but the spirit of the offer was very different from what Anderson struggles to imply.

And on and on—there seems to be no bottom to my duplicity! Anderson bolsters his attack by quoting some belittling remarks by Alan Dershowitz, whose review of my book in the New York Times Book Review, like Anderson's article, was most notable for its defense of the FBI. But Anderson neglects to mention that even Dershowitz, who at least drew the line at questioning my integrity and good intentions, was impressed by the book, which he said “admirably dramatizes the tragic plight of native Americans” and was “one of those rare books that permanently changes one's consciousness about important yet neglected facets of our history.”

While preparing his piece, Anderson had a great windfall in the form of another writer's interview with Peltier's former associate Dino Butler, which appeared in the April issue of News from Indian Country. It is from this interview that Anderson takes both of the main pegs of his story. The first of these is Butler's statement that the story of Mr. X, the masked Indian who appeared four years ago on 60 Minutes and claimed to be the man who killed the agents, is “a lie.” Anderson writes: “Even more stunning, Butler pinpoints the origin of Mr. X to a meeting of Peltier supporters in California that he and several veterans of the Jumping Bull shoot-out attended.”

���ϳԹ���'s writer goes on to say that someone present “passed the story along to a writer for Oliver Stone, who at that time was working with Matthiessen.” In a trickily worded paragraph from which winnowing the slur is like trying to nail an oyster to the floor, Anderson leaves the distinct impression that this fraud perpetrated on the public on 60 Minutes and in the film Incident at Oglala was cooked up with the knowledge, if not the participation, of Matthiessen and Stone for purposes of promoting our Peltier movie. At the very least, the reader must infer, we were a party to the scam when Stone filmed my second interview with X.

On the wings of the Butler interview, Anderson sneers at the X account as a “patent absurdity,” yet all he can offer (besides Butler's testimony) to demonstrate its absurdity are (a) that agent Williams was shot at point-blank range, not by “an approaching killer firing randomly,” and (b) that investigators could not find the dynamite that X claimed he brought into the compound. Well, X never claimed he was “approaching” when he fired, much less that he “fired randomly.” As in the skewed testimony attributed to the Navajo boys, as in the “torture” of the ranch hands, nobody said these things but Anderson. In fact, X himself acknowledges in my interviews that he fired “at point-blank range.” And the fact that the investigators never found the dynamite only means that they did not stumble on it, since they had no reason to be looking for it in the first place. (Anyway, the Indians had four hours to move it somewhere else before they left the Jumping Bull location.) The story of X may turn out to be a lie, but it is not patently absurd, not on Anderson's evidence. After meeting with X five years ago on two different dates and in two different places and questioning him for many hours, I could not fault his story; I certainly did not find it “absurd.”

Dino Butler complained in his interview that X's account somehow threatened his family, and he chastised me for not verifying it with him. But Butler had always been close friends with Bob Robideau, who arranged the interviews with X, and I had no more reason to believe that Robideau or X would compromise Butler by including him in a false story than I had to believe that Robideau would set me up with a big lie after so many years of friendship.

Unlike Anderson, Butler never implied that I was a party to “the lie.” On the contrary, he said, “Peter Matthiessen was victimized by that, too.” Though Anderson quotes every word of Butler's harsh rebuke, he leaves out this part, which might have weakened his exposé of my myth-merchandising nature.

The reality of X—or of this X, at any rate, for there had to be somebody, a Y or Z, who killed the agents—is still obscured in the bitter disputes and contradictions in the ongoing and ugly “paper wars” among Peltier's former associates, which are doing such damage to his hope of freedom. I have taken no sides in these factional disputes, though I seem to have been caught in the cross fire. But if the X story was indeed a lie, as it now appears, I regret that I believed it, because in the end any such dishonesty can only do harm to Leonard Peltier.

The X story is actually a minor part of Butler's long interview, which in the first installments, at least, is mostly concerned with that Indian “truth” that Butler feels Peltier should return to. In Butler's opinion, Peltier has fallen under the bad influence of those around him. And here, unwittingly, Butler provides Anderson with his main angle: the destructive role allegedly played by Peltier's foolish and/or devious supporters.

How we myth merchants who support Peltier have done him so much harm is never made clear enough to support such a reckless charge, and Leonard's legion of supporters, and his faithful defense committee and his fine lawyers, who have worked hard for his freedom for years and years and years, may have trouble accepting these facile dismissals of their efforts. These supporters include many thousands of Indian people, despite Anderson's suggestions to the contrary; the leaders of at least 25 tribes have called on the government to give Peltier a new trial, and the National Congress of American Indians, which represents many more, asked Senator Inouye in December 1993 to “seek an audience with President Clinton for the purpose of securing Leonard Peltier's immediate release.” The Indian people, who never admired the way the two agents were killed, would be very unlikely to come out in support of the brutal cop-killer that the prosecution and now Anderson try so hard to portray.

Are Butler and Anderson really saying that Leonard would be better off without those supporters who have made his case well known? Without that notoriety, Leonard might be dead or forever forgotten in a federal prison; Butler, at least, knows this. (In July, I spoke at length with Dino, who repudiates Anderson's article. “I don't know this guy, he never talked to me,” Butler protested, “and he makes insinuations right and left. He makes me look like Leonard's enemy!”)

As Peltier told me in late June, reflecting on the article, “If it weren't for your book, I'd be just another Indian thrown away someplace.” And that is the real truth that is ducked by those who seek to divide him from his supporters: Leonard Peltier cannot be helped if he is dead or no one knows about him.

Having revealed Peltier's supporters as his true enemies, Anderson concludes, “It's hard not to feel sympathy for him…. Even after seeing the death photos of Ron Williams and Jack Coler, even after poring over the thousands of pages of documents and incriminating court testimony, I cannot see Leonard Peltier as anything other than a tragic figure, a victim of the martyrdom that now shackles him.” This profession of sympathy for Peltier—after torturing the evidence to reconvict him just in time for the final decision on his clemency petition, after doing another human being whom he interviewed and seemed to like what may turn out to be serious harm—is one of the most repellent aspects of this clever article.

Because it so well illustrates the true spirit of the piece, I'd like to make a final comment on Anderson's paragraph about an update on the Peltier case I wrote for Esquire in January 1992, in which a passage on the Wounded Knee occupation and another passage on the shoot-out at Oglala are inexplicably intertwined; perhaps my scribbled editing during the galley stage was illegible, or perhaps a copy editor not acquainted with the underlying facts committed this error in the course of “correcting” the text—a frequent experience in the life of writers. Needless to say, this is pounced upon by Anderson.

As this investigator surely knows from his “study” of my book, the Wounded Knee chapter is 40 pages and the material on Oglala at least four times that many; since these two critical locations could scarcely be confused, he must also know that the botch in Esquire was an accident. But instead of ignoring it, he falls all over himself trying to make it worse, accusing this poor old promulgator of relocating the agents' bodies from Oglala to Wounded Knee “while merging the events of 1975 with those of 1973.” But what is truly inexcusable is his final comment: “Such a conflated rendering of events suggests a stunning [!] development. In just 20 years, the Peltier story has so entered the realm of myth that apparently its architects no longer feel the need to adhere to the most rudimentary of facts.”

The pomposity and just plain silliness of this remark might be overlooked, but not what amounts to overt defamation, for Anderson dispenses here with all his hints and insinuations, all his obfuscations and his covert malice. What he has been implying over and over is suddenly explicit: that Peter Matthiessen is, quite simply, a liar.

I am disgusted by the waste of time and energy lost in cleaning up after another man's ill will. Yet I feel that people must be reassured about the case for Leonard Peltier and also about the credibility of my book, knowing even as I write that responses to these hatchet jobs reach only a very small percentage of those people whose opinions were contaminated by the original, and that Anderson may have the last snide say at my expense in ���ϳԹ���'s Letters column.

And of course it is discouraging, after so many years of such hard work by so many dedicated people, to see that effort so shabbily discounted, even to the ludicrous claim that it is In the Spirit of Crazy Horse and other protests that have kept Peltier in prison. I can only invite every reader—and especially Justice Department personnel—to compare my book with Anderson's attack on it, applying any standard of accuracy and honesty they like.

There is no statement in In the Spirit of Crazy Horse that I did not believe was true at the time I wrote it, and if and when I am persuaded that any of these statements is untrue, there is not one that will not be removed or repudiated in the event of a new printing. Despite inevitable mistakes of fact and emphasis that no work of this size and scope has ever been without, none of its critics—not even the sincere ones—have made any real dent in the implacable documentation of its argument: that Leonard Peltier was railroaded into prison with the use of fabricated and manipulated and suppressed evidence that dishonors not only the Justice Department but our great nation and its Constitution.

Leonard told me on the phone the other day, “Even if they let me out tomorrow and handed me a million dollars, that could never repay me for the loss of my whole life.” How can those long years behind steel bars—the whole heart of his life—ever be repaid? Nevertheless, as Judge Heaney has said, a healing process must begin. And the only way it can reasonably begin is with justice for a man named Leonard Peltier.

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