CLOUDS AND RAIN threatened as I stepped from the single-prop onto the tarmac at the Alaskan village of Galena, home to a few hundred residents along the north bank of the Yukon River, 270 air miles west of my home in Fairbanks.
Waiting for me in the parking lot, leaning against his vintage Toyota pickup, was Wyatt Snodgrass, fisheries biologist for the Innoko, Koyukuk, and Nowitna National Wildlife Refuges (combined acreage: 9,450,488—the size of six Delawares). I was visiting in my capacity as a fisheries ecologist for the NYC-based Wildlife Conservation Society, here to help Wyatt with a pike research-and-monitoring project in the Innoko River, Alaska’s fifth-longest at 500 miles.
Our plan was to document the population’s diet, age, genetic information, and levels of contaminants. I felt fortunate to be fishing the Innoko, one of the world’s top big-pike destinations.
I took in the landscape around me: old military buildings (Galena served as an airfield during World War II); wide, flat topography; and muddy roads, surrounded by a green hardwood forest. The rain began peppering the windshield as Wyatt took me on a driving tour of the sleepy, dispersed hamlet scattered along the enormous river.
The following morning, Wyatt and
