Arctic Wild

In the early 1950s, armed with the rudest of survival gear, a husband-and-wife documentary team touched down in arguably the most remote wilderness in North America, Alaska's Brooks Range. Their mission: to film caribou. The annual migration of vast herds to and from their natal grounds north of the Arctic Circle was considered one of the world's preeminent--if little-known--wildlife spectacles. But on this great animal stage another species of charismatic megafauna unexpectedly one-upped the ungulates. Lois Crisler's 1956 memoir, Arctic Wild, vividly recalls the couple's 18 months in-country and the wolves that would help her work earn a place among the classics of natural history.