Caribou

Last week, Ian Thomas posted a map on a U.S. government Web site of the caribou calving areas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an area the Bush administration wants to open up for oil exploration. This week, Thomas is looking for a new job. "I'm really flabbergasted," Thomas said Wednesday. "After putting out 20,000 maps with no problem and then putting out one where baby caribou like to hang out, I got fired." Thomas, a contract employee for the U.S.

This was a gift from the Creator, like the caribou or the snow: A plane from Fairbanks was bringing the Gwich'in tribe a strange black box with aluminum antlers--a thing, they'd heard, that never stopped talking. So the Indians stood in the snow and waited until the twin-propellered bird dropped out of the sky and met the earth. A white man hopped out, threw open a cargo door and pulled out the thing everybody was so curious to see. TV. More precisely, a 12-inch, black-and-white Zenith.

Sportsmen's Lodge is that hotel at Coldwater Canyon and Ventura boulevards, the one designed like a hunting lodge (stone pillars, Craftsman lamps that look as if they were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright) with charming landscaping--a waterfall, duck pond and foot bridges. Now that summer is almost upon us, nowhere in this part of the Valley provides as pleasant an alfresco dining experience as its restaurant, Caribou.

There was a time when 600-pound Ice Age relics known as musk oxen roamed with mastodons and hairy mammoths across the northern plains of the continent. But they were intensely hunted for their longhaired hides, and the musk ox became extinct in Alaska. Their primary defensive posture was to encircle the most vulnerable members of the herd. With their tails in and their heads out, the powerful bulls were able to defend their young and weak against wolves and other predators.

There is poignancy when mothers wheel in severely disabled children. And there is comic relief, with droll banter about hero worship, shopping and life in Washington. The questions cover virtually anything and everything--Internet censorship, caribou herds, gay rights, timber salvage, chiropractors, national parks, Louis Farrakhan and the Ku Klux Klan.

Maybe the curse on "Due South" has lifted. Canceled in June, the unpredictable, tragicomic adventures of a handsome, wholesome, crime-busting Mountie loosed on Chicago has returned to CBS (Fridays at 8 p.m.) in hopes of boosting the network's third-place lineup. "Due South" has been a struggle for its stars Paul Gross, as Constable Benton Fraser of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and David Marciano as Ray Vecchio, the cynical police detective who is Fraser's foil and best friend.

Never before, perhaps, have so many heroes championed so many causes all at once. As the House neared a showdown vote Thursday on a massive GOP budget measure, members of Congress seemed to lurk at every turn, indoors and out, self-righteously defending the interests of a dizzying array of claimed constituencies: senior citizens, college students, hard-working middle-class stiffs, the unemployed underclass, helpless infants--even the Alaska porcupine caribou.

I applaud Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt for taking on Big Oil by opposing its bid to trash the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska for a maximum of six months' oil supply at current national consumption levels (Commentary, Aug. 21). Big Oil doesn't want you to know this, but America's best energy resource by far is conservation. If the United States were as energy efficient as Western Europe, dependence on unstable foreign sources of oil would plummet, as would the amount of taxpayer money spent on murderous military forays initiated to enforce price stability.

Every summer a wind-raked, bug-ridden stretch of Arctic desolation briefly transforms itself into the Alaskan equivalent of a teeming East African savanna. It is that way again this year. An extravaganza of caribou, grizzly bears, wolves, foxes and musk ox has begun its promenade through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, as if the looming prospect of an oil field in the midst of wilderness was one more crystal mirage on the polar horizon.

Wildlife experts are trying to unscramble the kind of mystery that unfolds only in Alaska, where herds of great animals can wander through the wilderness for months without ever encountering civilization. The mystery surfaced this summer when biologists with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game discovered that around 3,000 caribou were missing and presumed dead from the herd that grazes on the flat coastal plains of Bristol Bay several hundred miles west of Anchorage.