106 On the trail of vanishing birds 



where the surviving whoopers winter, and they laughed in amaze- 

 ment and disbelief when I described for them a land where it sel- 

 dom snowed and where we shivered with cold when the ther- 

 mometer stood at thirty degrees above zero. 



After we started flying out across the broad delta of the Macken- 

 zie and on over the wilderness of the tundra, these children 

 watched anxiously for our return from each day's flight. When we 

 had tied up our little amphibian to the riverbank and were walk- 

 ing toward our quarters, several of the boys would come running 

 up to ask if we had found the whooping cranes. The first few times 

 we replied in the negative they showed keen disappointment, but 

 interest and hope were still alive in their faces. Then it became an 

 old story, and we saw them looking at us a little differently. We 

 had let them down and we were no longer heroes. Soon they 

 stopped running out to greet us, and then they scarcely looked at 

 us if we passed them on the road. Our own disappointment at 

 not locating the whoopers that summer was bad enough, but 

 the silent treatment we received from those native children was 

 the bitterest pill we had to swallow. We would slink back from 

 the landing as if we had just been caught kicking a dog. Both of 

 us had moments at that time when we felt that we were com- 

 plete failures and might as well give up the whole thing. It was 

 a very humbling experience. 



We were soon so busy with our job of estimating waterfowl 

 populations that we were able, by degrees, to salvage a certain 

 amount of self-respect. It also helped to take it out on that 

 dangerous lord of the tundra, the Barren Ground grizzly, which 

 we were able to do with practically no risk to our own necks. The 

 first bears that we saw were a pair that must have come down to 

 the delta to fish after breakup. We found them far out on the 

 flat, almost treeless region that comprises Ellice Island, facing 

 Mackenzie Bay. They were in a bunch of willows and we saw 

 them as soon as they started running, for the silt that still clung 

 to the branches had dried to a powder, and as the great beasts 

 fled pell-mell through the slender trees the dust flew from their 

 flanks in clouds. It wasn't until we met other bears as we flew 

 low over the open tundra that the idea of swooping down and 



