Last Friday at his farm on the south side of Bodenburg Butte near Palmer, Tom Williams encouraged a visitor to hold half a banana between his teeth so a bull moose named Denali could use its leathery moose lips to pluck the fruit from the guest’s mouth. Williams calls Denali “my buddy” and pats the beast the way a dog owner pats his pet.

“You sure you don’t want to kiss a moose?” Williams says, hardly containing his own excitement. “Come on! Kiss a moose!” he says, as Denali uses his nose to explore the hands and faces of the people who just entered the corral.

Denali stands about 6 feet, 6 inches at the shoulder and would be an intimidating presence anywhere. He was head-butting another young bull named Kenai just minutes before. The two moose were nurtured in captivity, but even occasional treats of exotic fruit haven’t broken their primal urge to snort, dig their hooves in the snow and pit their thousand-pound bodies against each other. (Kenai had one antler left—moose lose their antlers in January—and drew blood from the patch on Denali’s brow where an antler used to be.) Ordinarily, a moose head-butting display would send most Alaskans to the safety of their car, or at least walking briskly toward the nearest stand of trees. So it was hard to believe when Williams opened the corral and invited his guests in. But it’s also hard to be afraid while standing with Williams. Denali met him at the gate. Maybe the moose was looking for a tasty treat, but it also may have just wanted attention from a man who had bottle-fed it.

Williams will bring about a dozen reindeer to the city Sunday, February 28, during the first week of Fur Rendezvous. The animals will be star attractions in an event that has kicked some life into a 70-year-old winter festival many people find too sedate. Last year 1,700 people participated in Anchorage’s “Running of the Reindeer” and a couple thousand more lined the sidewalks of Fourth Avenue to watch. In 2008, the event’s inaugural year, the crowd of onlookers was thick enough to make Fourth Avenue feel like Mardi Gras.

Williams approached the Press in December angling for a story about island-bound reindeer and caribou in Alaska, stocked there by people. He says some of the animals are destined to starve, and could be rescued. A story timed to take advantage of the mythology of Santa Claus’ flying reindeer, he thought, might get those animals the attention they deserve.

Naturally, there’s something in it for Williams. He wants to go to the Aleutian Islands—specifically Adak, where the caribou are among the largest in the world, or Atka, a neighboring island on the chain—and capture young caribou live. It’s something he’s done in Canada. It’s something people have done for thousands of years. Some anthropologists believe caribou were domesticated before horses or cattle. “They’re smaller, and easier to catch,” Williams says.

There are at least nine islands with reindeer or caribou in Alaska. (No one in the federal or state government we contacted knew definitively just how many.) A few islands have reindeer herds managed by Alaska Native herders. Others have feral reindeer or wild caribou, depending on who is describing the animals. Williams is in the camp who say caribou and reindeer are the same, even though biologists have identified as many as nine different caribou subspecies around the globe; some domestic, others wild.

“The state’s definition of a reindeer is a tamed caribou and the state definition of a caribou is feral reindeer—so you tell me what the difference is,” Williams says.

Williams’ words often come tinted with not-so-subtle patina of anti-government—or at least anti-bureaucrat—frustration. It’s not an adopted affectation. Williams earned it over the long haul, by dealing with a government that once approved of his reindeer farm, then switched opinions and disapproved, then dropped a case against him entirely when Williams seemed set to win.

That’s not to say Williams is crabby. His tone most often suggests befuddlement, rather than anger. “A reindeer is a domesticated animal and a caribou is a wild reindeer,” he says. “Do you have to be told over and over again? I do.”

Over the years at least two Alaska islands—Hagemeister Island on the north side of Bristol Bay and St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea—have experienced population explosions and catastrophic over-grazing. St. Matthew is a well-documented site of a reindeer stocking gone bad. The U.S. Coast Guard put 29 animals on the island in 1944, calling the herd an “emergency” food supply. The U.S. military left the island uninhabited after World War Two. In the summer of 1963, scientists found the population had exploded to 6,000 reindeer on an island of barely 115 square miles with no predators. The winter of 1964 killed most of them, and biologist counted just 42 a few years later. The herd never recovered and eventually died off.

On Hagemeister Island, wildlife managers began killing a reindeer herd, which eventually created a public relations nightmare for the federal government in 1992. News reports said 300 to 400 animals were wasted. Some were saved, eventually winding up on mainland game farms such as Williams’s, or living out their lives in zoos.

Adak—like Hagemeister and St. Matthew—is within the boundaries of the Alaska National Maritime Wildlife Refuge. The state of Alaska planted caribou on Adak in the 1950s, using stock captured from the Nelchina caribou herd. Williams believes the island was also stocked previously, in the 1920s, making the Adak herd a hybrid population. He notes that a world-record 700-pound caribou was shot there, and attributes that to hybrid vigor, the biological phenomena that gives us tomato-sized strawberries in supermarkets.

There are about 100 head of reindeer on Williams’ farm. (There are also about two dozen elk, six horses, one black-tail deer and three moose.) Some are harness trained and have walked in parades or attended Christmas parties to be fawned over and petted. They’re available to rent for film, TV and photo shoots. If you watch TV in Alaska you’ve probably seen video of Bruce the moose, a 14-year-old bull who grows a large rack of antlers each year and has appeared in several commercials.

But the farm almost died once, when a group of Alaska Native reindeer herders took Williams to court in the early 1990s. The Kawerak Reindeer Herder Association, based in Nome, wanted the government to enforce the Reindeer Industry Act, a federal law passed in 1937, when Alaska was still a territory without any votes in Congress. The law restricted reindeer herding in the territory to Alaska Natives. It also funded a government buyout of animals owned by non-Natives at the time.

The first time Tom Williams ever heard of the Reindeer Industry Act, he was teenager attending Palmer High School where his agriculture teacher was lecturing about the reindeer industry in Europe and Asia. “I remember raising my hand and saying you know, my father’s a dairy farmer and I’m tired of milking dairy cows and why can’t I rope reindeer?’” Williams says. “And [the teacher] said, ‘shut up kid; you’re a white boy.’—So I went to law school.”

The dairy cows were gone by 1960, after Tom Williams stopped milking and pursued the education that eventually took him to law school in California. He sometimes tells people that if a person wants to farm in Alaska, they should become a lawyer first. But that’s a touch of Williams’ humor—a mix of sarcasm, hyperbole and occasional self-effacing descriptions such as “white boy” or “idiot” or “ambulance chaser.”

He didn’t want the law degree just for the reindeer case. That was years away.

“I went to law school because there are a lot of problems,” Williams says, as we enter a corral of mostly female reindeer. He talks about suing insurance companies and corporations and being pitted against “the biggest firms in Anchorage.”

“Insurance companies don’t like me,” he says, adding his clients are “widows, orphans and injured people—and cripples who are out of work” while his rivals represent “massive insurance companies” defending policies and a corporate bottom line. “What’s so silly to me is someone who says that us plaintiff’s lawyers are so effective that we’ve beaten that system,” Williams says of legislative tort reforms. “It’s a very popular thing to try and destroy the citizen on behalf of the large insurance companies and their big bonuses,” he says.

Williams says that after becoming a lawyer, he reread the Reindeer Industry Act with fresh eyes. He always considered the law “racist” and still calls it that today. After becoming a lawyer, he also decided it was unconstitutional to boot. And he noticed that the law left a door open for non-Natives to import reindeer. It only restricted “reindeer in Alaska” as if the 1947 herds were Congress’s only concern. (It doesn’t apply anywhere Outside.)

Williams wrote to government official for permission and began importing animals from Canada in the 1980s, and began raising them as market animals on the farm. The Kawerak Reindeer Herders Association, based in Nome and composed of about 14 members on the Seward Peninsula, cried foul. They took a case against Williams to an administrative court run by the U.S. Department of Interior called the Board of Indian Appeals. That court ruled against Williams.

The “ambulance chaser” appealed to the federal court in Anchorage, where a judge upheld the BIA ruling, but refused to decide whether the Reindeer Industry Act was constitutional. Williams won the next appeal, at the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. By then government attorneys were defending the BIA ruling and lined up alongside Kawerak against Williams. The government appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court but eventually dropped its case, filing a motion that asked the court not to hear the case at all.

So the Reindeer Industry Act remains the law of the land in Alaska. It just has a huge hole in it, punched through by a dairy farmer’s son from Alaska who was told he couldn’t own reindeer in his home state because he was white.

The Alaska Maritime Wildlife Refuge managers call the Adak caribou herd an “invasive species” and have studied options to remove them. There’s an endangered plant species there, the Aleutian shield fern, and biologists want to get the herd in check before its gone forever. Cow caribou can be harvested on Adak any month of the year and there’s no bag limit. Hunters may take Adak bulls from August to December with a limit of two per year, according to the maritime refuge’s web site.

Refuge managers compiled an environmental impact assessment on plans for removal and called for comments in the early 1990s, before the slaughter on Hagemeister and its resulting media blow-up. Williams wrote to refuge managers in 1994, offering a plan for removing live caribou that he says was ignored.

The state government, which manages hunts on Adak, won’t likely sanction live capture of Adak caribou either, an Alaska Fish and Game biologist says. That’s partly because they’re not reindeer; they’re caribou. State permitting biologist Tom Schumacher says he can’t let the farmer apply for a permit that doesn’t exist. “We don’t have the authority to do that,” Schumacher says. “From the state’s perspective you can own reindeer as a pet and you can own reindeer as livestock, but you can’t own a caribou.”

Williams figures state and federal wildlife managers just haven’t learned much from past experience. If the Adak and Atka herds are not wanted on the islands, why not allow a reindeer farmer to take them? Why set the animals up for a mass starvation, or set the government up for a botched attempt at extermination?

“Some of these are descendents of the Hagemeister fiasco,” Williams says, indicating a fenced yard full of waist-high reindeer meandering around a feed trough. “…and I suppose in ten years I will be able to say these are the descendents of the Adak Fiasco, and of the Atka fiasco,” he says.

Schumacher says a live capture plan won’t gain traction unless the Alaska Legislature passes a new law. “And philosophically, the state would have some problems. I mean why would you approve this and not approve someone who says, ‘I want to have a moose ranch’ or ‘I want to have a polar bear ranch,’” he says.

Even with a new state law, it’s not clear whether the Bureau of Indian Affairs would consider feral reindeer, or wild caribou, to be “reindeer in Alaska” under the federal law that got Williams in a courtroom bind last time around.

Williams says he’ll file another proposal in writing to state and federal officials. He hasn’t threatened to sue, but he does propose that state game managers might be guilty of cruelty to animals if they allow a wild herd to starve off. He figures the state isn’t an Alaska Native organization, so it should be able to let him capture animals without butting heads with the BIA. In his 1994 proposal, under a subject heading for “disadvantages” Williams wrote just one sentence: “The federal and state government would have to cooperate with the private sector.”

When he finished securing the gate on the moose corral last Friday, Williams spoke about what makes animals wild or tame, and alluded to definitions of those terms that even he admits he doesn’t quite understand. “Fish and Game say you cannot tame a wild animal, because they’re wild animals, and wild animals have to be owned by [the state],” he said.

A horse named Annie approached Williams from behind and put her head over his left shoulder. He spoke a little quieter. Wild animals, he says, “cannot be helped and nurtured by citizens because citizens are idiots. They don’t know how to work with wild animals. And I don’t. I have to admit I don’t know how to work with animals. But animals seem to know how to work with me.”

scott@anchoragepress.com