The hardest thing about St. Matthew Island was never the island. It was getting on and off. The entry says that nobody could get there for six years after 1957, and for fifteen months after 1963, and that this is why the experiment’s result was read from bones. This piece is about the one time the getting off went wrong, as David Klein told it in his house in Fairbanks in April 2014, when he was eighty-six.

The three of them, Klein, the botanist Vernon Harms and the German post-doctoral researcher Detlef Eisfeld, had been landed in late June 1966 by a Coast Guard buoy tender that was working its way north along the coast to Point Lay, servicing navigation lights, and was to collect them on its way back, around August 20. Harms and Eisfeld had been seasick the whole way out and did not feel well until they had their feet on the island. The driftwood hut that the Rausches had built by Big Lake in 1954, which Klein had lived in twice, had long since been washed away, so they put a wall tent beside a lake further north, towards the middle of the island, with char in it and driftwood on the beach for the stove. Their radio was a lighter thing than the bookcase of 1957, a dry-cell set of the kind issued to the stream guards on the salmon rivers, and they used it sparingly, every other evening, to the refuge office at Bethel, which relayed to the ship.

They did their work. They found the reindeer, counted them, shot their ten, weighed them in pieces on a spring scale and carried the liver and heart twenty-two miles back to camp. Then the radio told them that an Air Force aircraft had tried to land at Point Lay and gone into the sea with everyone aboard, that the Coast Guard had been asked to drag for it, and that the ship would be late. A week, first. Then “probably a month.”

A month was a disaster for Harms, who had classes to teach in September and a family in Fairbanks. Klein and Eisfeld had families too. They were low on coffee and oatmeal, with rice, and the char came in when the wind allowed and not otherwise; five or six fish was a good day for three men. They had a permit for ten reindeer and had used it, and Klein would not have taken more in any case, because the thirty-two that were left had no male that could breed and were, he judged, going to die out whatever he did. The ship offered an airdrop of food so that they could sit out the month. Klein tried to put it off. He did not want the airdrop; he wanted a plane. The captain, through the radio operator, wanted a list of what they would like dropped. Klein did not want to give him a list, because a list meant staying.

So he asked, through Bethel, for the Fish and Wildlife Service’s new Grumman Goose in Anchorage, a twin-engined amphibian that had just been refitted for long flights, and whose aircraft division chief he had known for years. The answer came back after a day: they would not risk the new aircraft on 250 miles of open water. He asked whether the Coast Guard could send an Albatross, its big amphibian, from Kodiak. The answer was that it could, but that the Albatross carried only a small inflatable, which could not get through the surf to the beach, and so it could not pick them up. Two refusals. They sat in the tent.

The weather, for once, was turning fine: the clouds lifting, breaks of sun, no wind. And they heard an engine, a small one. Down through a hole in the overcast came a Super Cub on floats, which is a two-seat bush aeroplane that nobody flies 250 miles over the open Bering Sea. It circled the camp, wagged its wings, landed on the lake and taxied onto the gravel beach, and a young pilot with red hair stepped off the float and asked them to help him unload the petrol cans that filled his back seat, because he had to refuel. He had flown from Bethel to a bay on Nunivak Island, refuelled there, and come on with the rest in cans. From Nunivak the cloud had been down on the sea, so he had flown on top of it and found the island by its mountain tops sticking through. “What brought you out here?” Klein asked him. He had heard there were a lot of reindeer, he had lived in Bethel for years and never seen the place, and he had not been busy. He did not know where on the island the camp was. He had simply come down at the one lake that was good to land on.

He had advice as well as fuel: there was an outfit in Dillingham that flew Grumman Gooses to the Pribilofs and could surely come out; and as soon as he was airborne he could raise them on the radio and line up a charter, perhaps for the next day. He had room for one passenger. Klein told Harms privately that he himself would not go, and Harms said that he had to, for the classes, and went. The Cub took off about noon.

They were to hear from Bethel at six or half past. At six there had been no call from the pilot and they began to worry; then the office’s telephone rang while they were on the air, and it was him: the two of them had been so hungry when they landed that they had stopped for a hamburger before calling. The charter was arranged. The Goose would fly to Bethel in the morning, refuel, and come on, if the island would give it a weather report at seven. Klein put down the microphone to think about how to call off the airdrop, and heard a large aircraft.

It was a four-engined Air Force transport with a loading ramp at the back. It came down out of the cloud over the camp, dipped its wings, went back up into the cloud, and while Eisfeld asked where it had gone Klein explained that it was making the wide circle a big aeroplane needs. It came out again lower, and from the open ramp a parachute carried down a four-by-eight sheet of plywood stacked with cases, which landed, under a cargo net, on the beach, far enough from the tent to miss it. The net was stencilled with the information that it must be returned to Eielson Air Force Base. The cases held sea rations by the sack, military tins of ham marked “Keep refrigerated,” a little oatmeal and rice, and none of the cheese Klein had asked for when the operator had pressed him for a list. He went back to the radio and got the ship direct, for once with a clear connection, and told the operator the first thing was to call off the airdrop. The operator went to the captain and came back. “I think it’s too late.” Klein agreed that it was. Eisfeld wanted to cook a ham at once, and Klein said they could not eat a whole one, and then let him, and he ate a great deal of it.

The next morning was the finest weather they had had. They gave their report at seven and were told the Goose might be there by one. One came, and two, and three; every gull on the horizon was looked at through the binoculars. Then a Grumman Goose appeared far out, flying the length of the island, and went straight past without turning, and Eisfeld said they had missed. They had not. Their position had been given as so many miles from the north end, and the pilot was flying to the north end to count back. He landed on the lake, put his wheels down and taxied up the beach, and unloaded fifty-gallon drums of fuel which they pumped into him by hand. Then they loaded the camp, the gear and the whole of the airdrop, net included, and took off about half past five in the evening.

Klein asked for one thing on the way out: a pass over the valley by Big Lake where they had last seen the reindeer. The pilot obliged. The thirty-two were there, in the same general area, moved a little; and from the air, in that weather, there was no sign of a reindeer anywhere else on the island, which is the confirmation of the count that stands in the 1968 paper. The weather was so good that the pilot flew direct to Dillingham instead of back through Bethel, and they landed as the airport lights came on. The next day Klein flew to Anchorage and on to Fairbanks, and in due course drove the cargo net out to Eielson Air Force Base and handed it to an officer who had no idea what it was, and thanked him. The sea rations and the hams went to the wildlife unit’s store for students in the field.

The young pilot’s name, Klein said, was written down somewhere. He remembered the red hair. The story, he said, was the Coast Guard in an awkward bind, doing its best, and the Air Force taking a good day while it lasted; if the cloud had been down, there would have been no airdrop either. He had been on the island three weeks and nobody had died, which, on St. Matthew, is not a thing to take for granted.

Sources

• David Klein, oral history interview with Karen Brewster, April 3, 2014, Project Jukebox, University of Alaska Fairbanks. The whole of this piece, in his words. oralhistory.library.uaf.edu
• David R. Klein, “The Introduction, Increase, and Crash of Reindeer on St. Matthew Island,” Journal of Wildlife Management 32 (2), 1968, for the three weeks in late June and July 1966, the forty-two, the ten shot, and the confirmation of thirty-two from the air on the day they left. over-reeen.nl