Hunting Alaska

The ballot box has become a battleground for animal-rights groups seeking curbs on the killing of wildlife and hunting groups concerned that such limits will wreak havoc with game management and eventually lead to bans on hunting itself. In Alaska, the two sides are dueling this fall over companion ballot measures.

Thirty years ago, Richard Childress was campaigning a year-old Chevrolet in NASCAR. He and one mechanic and one helper worked on it in a tiny garage in Winston-Salem during the week, then Childress raced it on Sundays. Today, the man who masterminded Dale Earnhardt's career sits in a luxurious wood-paneled office in the heart of a racing complex of 12 buildings with nearly 400,000 square feet of shop space. They occupy about 35 acres.

There are seven months remaining before the Summer Olympics at Seoul, South Korea, so the story stands to get even more complicated and, possibly, sensational.

Fluffy and white as snow drifts, a pair of big, beautiful poodles bound into the glacier-sleek marble foyer, nuzzling the man with the unshaven shadow around his chin, the safari garb, the cowboy boots. He reaches to pat them--this new Indiana Jones of the environment, just back from Alaska--tenderly caressing these luxurious specimens of nature in another icily opulent environment. Lean and intense, Sam LaBudde, 33, has lived for a decade as a drifter.