Arctic Dreams, page 6
Lying there in the tent, I knew, as does everyone I think who spends some time hunting with Eskimos, that they are not idyllic people, errorless in the eyes of God. But they are a people, some of them, still close to the earth, maintaining the rudiments of an ancient philosophy of accommodation with it that we have abandoned. Our first wisdom as a species, that unique metaphorical knowledge that distinguishes us, grew out of such an intimacy with the earth; and, however far we may have come since that time, it did not seem impossible to me that night to go back and find it. I wanted to enquire among these people, for what we now decide to do in the North has a certain frightening irrevocability about it.
I wanted to enquire, as well, among thoughtful visitors, people who were taken with the land. Each culture, it seemed to me, is a repository of some good thought about the universe; we are valuable to each other for that. Lying there, I thought of my own culture, of the assembly of books in the library at Alexandria; of the deliberations of Darwin and Mendel in their respective gardens; of the architectural conception of the cathedral at Chartres; of Bach’s cello suites, the philosophy of Schweitzer, the insights of Planck and Dirac. Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation?
I had no idea as I lay on those caribou skins that evening precisely where wisdom might lie. I knew enough of quantum mechanics to understand that the world is ever so slightly but uncorrectably out of focus, that there are no absolutely precise answers. Whatever wisdom I would find, I knew, would grow out of the land. I trusted that, and that it would reveal itself in the presence of well-chosen companions.
I looked out of the tent. It was after one in the morning. A south wind blew, but so slightly. The kind of wind nineteenth-century sailors called “inclinable to calm.” Nakitavak lay stretched out on caribou skins and a cotton sleeping bag on his big sled, his qamutiik, watching the still black water between two massive ice floes, the open lead into which narwhals would come, sooner or later. His brother David, both hands wrapped around a mug of tea, was looking to the west, the direction from which he thought they would come. His lips stretched to the steaming, hot surface of the tea, and in the chill air I heard the susurrations of his sipping.
These Tununiarusirmiut men, relatives of the Tununirmiut to the east who had met the whalers 160 years ago, knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, beyond any hesitation, what made them happy, what gave them a sense of satisfaction, of wealth. An abundance of animals.
And so, we waited.
1 There is no generally accepted definition for a southern limit to the Arctic. The Arctic Circle, for example, would enclose a part of Scandinavia so warmed by a remnant of the Gulf Stream that it harbors a lizard, Lacerta vivipera, an adder, Vivipera berus, and a frog, Rana temporaria. It would also exclude the James Bay region of Canada, prime polar bear habitat. The southern extent of permafrost, the northern tree line, the geographical distribution of certain animals, the southern extent of the 50°F isotherm in July—all have been proposed and argued away by scientists.
2 The Soviet icebreaker Arktika, of 23,400 tons displacement and 75,000 shaft horsepower, reached the Geographic North Pole in August 1977.
3 Northern peoples everywhere—Eskimos in Canada, Yakuts in Russia, Samis (Lapps) in Scandinavia—have rearranged their lives in recent years to synchronize themselves with the day/night rhythm of the southern countries, a source of schedules and of patterns of information organization on which they are increasingly dependent.
4 This uneven pattern of illumination in the Arctic is caused by the earth’s rotation on its tilted axis and its annual revolution around the sun. See note 3.
5 Civilian twilight lasts from the moment after sunset until the sun is 6° below the horizon. The period when it is between 6° and 12° below the horizon is called nautical twilight. When the sun is between 12° and 18° below the horizon, the period of astronomical twilight, it is getting dark enough, finally, for astronomers to begin their work, which begins with true night, with the sun more than 18° below the horizon.
6 A few arctic animals, possibly auks and other nonpasserine birds, for example, might be “free-running.” The rest maintain a twenty-four-hour rhythm, which they synchronize without the benefit of a sunrise or a sunset. Some, apparently, regularly mark the position of the sun over a certain landmark, or respond to fluctuations in the spectral composition (color temperature) of sunlight, which in the Arctic is different at midnight from what it is at noon.
7 The operation of the biological mechanisms responsible for the recovery of arctic species remains largely mysterious. Current research, however, indicates that, unlike their temperate-zone counterparts, arctic animals are apparently unable to tolerate both the inherent stress to which, in an evolutionary sense, they are accustomed and new stresses of man-made origin—oil blowouts, pollution from mine tailings, noise from arctic shipping, and the unnatural patterns of sea-ice disruption associated with icebreakers. They are therefore probably more vulnerable to man-made intrusions than the populations of any animals we have ever dealt with.
8 Grizzly bear, polar bear, short-tailed weasel (ermine), least weasel, mink, wolverine, coyote, wolf, red fox, arctic fox, hoary marmot, arctic ground squirrel, collared lemming, brown lemming, tundra red-back vole, tundra vole, Alaska vole, porcupine, arctic hare, tundra hare, moose, caribou, muskox.
9 They include about 175 species of parasitic wasp, 25 species of sawfly, 40 species of moth, 100 species of root maggot, and 150 species of midge, as well as smaller numbers of species of black and crane flies, blowflies, hover flies, bumblebees, mosquitoes, springtails, fleas, butterflies, and about 60 species of beetle.
Two
Banks Island
Ovibos moschatus
IT IS THE MIDDLE OF JUNE, so it is apparent, as it would never be on a dark and frozen day in December, that the Thomsen River is actually a river. It rises among unnamed creeks in east-central Banks Island and flows black and sparkling under the summer light, north to Castel Bay on M’Clure Strait. It is a highway of nutrients, and northwest Banks Island is an arctic oasis because of it, a kind of refuge for plants and animals.
The verdant, fertile valley of the Thomsen River is striking country in part because so much of the rest of the island is a desert of gravel, of bare soils and single, far-flung plants—a patch of yellow cinquefoil blooms, say, or a bright green cushion of moss campion. On the west bank of the Thomsen, where I am camped between Able and Baker creeks, the landscape is stark: gully erosion has cut deeply into a high-rising plateau to the west. But even here is a suggestion of the refugelike character of the Thomsen River Valley, for these desert-colored shores were never touched by Pleistocene glaciers. Like most of western and interior Alaska, much of Banks Island went unscathed during the glacial epoch. These, in fact, might have been the shores of an ice-free Arctic Ocean 20,000 years ago.
I have come here to watch muskoxen. The muskox, along with the American bison, is one of the few large animals to have survived the ice ages in North America. Most all of its companions—the mammoth, the dire wolf, the North American camel, the short-faced bear—are extinct. The muskox abides, conspicuously alone and entirely at ease on the tundra, completely adapted to a polar existence.
I am sitting at the edge of a precipitous bluff, several hundred feet above the Thomsen, with a pair of high-powered binoculars. At this point the river curves across a broad plain of seepage meadows and tundra in a sweeping oxbow to my left; on my right Baker Creek has cut a steep-banked gash into the badlands to the west. Far to the south, in front of me, are clusters of black dots; at a distance of more than two miles they arrest even the naked eye with a strange, faint reflection. The mind knows by that slow drift of dark points over a field of tan grasses on an open hillside that there is life out there. But an older, deeper mind is also alerted by the flash of light from those distant, long-haired flanks. The predatory eye is riveted.
The broad valley in which the muskoxen graze has the color and line of a valley in Tibet. I raise my field glasses to draw it nearer. Beyond the resolution of the ground glass the animals look darker, the tans of the hills more deeply pigmented, and the sky at the end of the distant valley is a denser blue. The light shimmers on them. I recall the observation of a Canadian muskox biologist: “They are so crisp in the landscape. They stand out like no other animal, against the whites of winter or the colors of the summer tundra.”
I put the glasses back in my lap. A timeless afternoon. Off to my left, in that vast bowl of stillness that contains the meandering river, tens of square miles of tundra browns and sedge meadow greens seem to snap before me, as immediate as the pages of my notebook, because of unscattered light in the dustless air. The land seems guileless. Creatures down there take a few steps, then pause and gaze about. Two sandhill cranes stand still by the river. Three Peary caribou, slightly built and the silver color of the moon, browse a cutbank in that restive way of deer. Tundra melt ponds, their bright dark blue waters oblique to the sun, stand out boldly in the plain. In the center of the large ponds, beneath the surface of the water, gleam cores of aquamarine ice, like the constricted heart of winter.
On the far side of the Thomsen other herds of muskoxen graze below a range of hills in clusters of three or four. In groups of ten and twelve. I sketch the arrangements in my notebook. Most remarkable to me, and clear even at a distance of two or three miles because of the contrast between their spirited, bucking gambols and the placid ambling of the others, is the number of calves. Among forty-nine animals, I count twelve calves. The mind doesn’t easily register the sustenance of the sedge meadows, not against the broad testimony of the barren hills and eroded plateaus. It balks at the evidence of fecundity, and romping calves. The muskoxen on the far side of the river graze, nevertheless, on sweet coltsfoot, on mountain sorrel, lousewort, and pendant grass, on water sedge. The sun gleams on them. On the melt ponds. The indifferent sky towers. There is something of the original creation here.
I bring my glasses up to study again the muskoxen in the far valley to the south. Among fifty or sixty animals are ten or fifteen calves. I regard them for a while, until I hear the clattering alarm call of a sandhill crane. To the southwest an arctic hare rises up immediately, smartly alert. To the southeast a snowy owl sitting on a tussock, as conspicuous in its whiteness as the hare, pivots its head far around, right then left. The hare, as intent as if someone had whistled, has found me and fixed me with his stare. In that moment I feel the earth bent like a bow and sense the volume of space between us, as though the hare, the owl, and I stood on a dry lakebed. The moment lasts until the hare drops, becomes absorbed again in the leaves of a willow. The owl returns its gaze to the river valley below.
The indictment of the sandhill cranes continues; I shift my perch so they cannot see me, and their calls cease.
Behind me to the north my four companions, dressed in patterns of color unmistakably human, are at work on a hillside: archaeologists, meticulously mapping the placement of debris at a nineteenth-century Copper Eskimo campsite called PjRa-18, or, informally, the Kuptana site. Like others in the region, this campsite sits near the top of a windswept hill and looks down on well-developed sedge meadows, exceptional muskox pasturage. Scattered over 20,000 square yards at the campsite are more than 27,000 pieces of bone, representing the skeletal debris of about 250 muskoxen. The archaeologists call it a “death assemblage.” There are also rings of river stones there, which once anchored caribou-skin tents against wind and rain; and the remnants of meat caches built of shale and ironstone slabs, and of charcoal fires of willow twigs and arctic white heather. The lower jaw of an arctic char, eaten a hundred years ago, still glistens with fish oil. A sense of timelessness is encouraged by this primordial evidence of human hunger.
The muskoxen grazing so placidly in the hills to the south and in the sedge meadows to the east, so resplendent with life, are perhaps descendants of these, whose white, dark-horned skulls now lie awry on the land.
The story of this camp begins in the previous century.
In September 1851, Captain Robert M’Clure was guiding HMS Investigator along the north coast of Banks Island, desperate for relief from the press of heavy ice in the strait later named for him. Toward the island’s eastern cape M’Clure found a shallow, protected embayment, which he called the Bay of God’s Mercy. He and his men overwintered there. The following summer the ice did not go out of the bay, and they were forced to overwinter again in the same spot. In the spring of 1853 a rescue party reached them from HMS Resolute, a sister ship in winter quarters at Melville Island. (Both ships were part of a British search force looking for the lost Franklin Expedition.) M’Clure, reluctantly accepting the fact that Investigator was inextricably trapped, abandoned the 450-ton, copper-sheathed vessel and followed the rescue party back to Melville Island.
Copper Eskimos living more than 200 miles away on Victoria Island somehow learned of the abandoned ship. (These Kanghiryuakmiut and Kanghiryuachiakmiut people, from around Minto Inlet and Prince Albert Sound, had never seen white people. They would not be contacted by whites until American whalers visited them in 1906. Shortly thereafter they would be named Copper Eskimos, identifying them with the tools they made from local copper deposits.) When the Victoria Island people first crossed over the spring ice of Prince of Wales Strait to Banks Island is not known, but they left a clear trail up the Thomsen River Valley to Mercy Bay.
It was ironic that such wealth should fall into the hands of the Victoria Island people. Until that moment they had found themselves at the far end of not one but two arctic trade routes. The first came from the west, from Siberia across the north coast of Alaska; the other came from the south, up the Mackenzie River from the interior of Canada. Now they could reverse the flow of trade goods.1 Rarely had they seen the likes of the materials they found at Mercy Bay, and never in such abundance: The shore cache and the ship itself were as marvelous to them as the discovery of a well-provisioned vehicle from space.
The Eskimos likely traveled lightly on their annual excursions to Mercy Bay, saving space on their small sleds and inside dog panniers for salvaged materials. Most prized were strips of iron and sheets of canvas, and softwood boards, which were easier to carve than caribou antler. Also copper sheathing, woven cloth, hemp lines, wool yarn, and leather boots (for the leather alone—they were completely unsuitable as arctic footwear, a point the British were slow to learn).
On their journeys north, except for small amounts of seal meat and blubber carried with them from Victoria Island, the Eskimos ate what they killed en route—an occasional caribou, molting geese (which, flightless, could not escape), fish, and a great many muskoxen. They drove the muskoxen out of the sedge meadows along the river and up onto hilltops where, predictably, they turned to make a stand and Eskimo dogs held them at bay. The hunters shot them with copper- and iron-tipped arrows, the shafts carefully assembled from willow twigs bound together with bits of sinew. (Today, shoulder blade after shoulder blade bears the small, round arrow hole, at an angle that would have carried the arrow straight to the heart. Their knowledge of the animal’s anatomy was precise.)
The muskoxen were butchered where they fell, and a camp was set up. From such camps, presumably, small parties traveled back and forth to the Investigator and its cache all summer. In early fall, when the first snows provided a traveling surface for the sleds, the people returned south to country where seal hunting would hold them in good stead through the coming winter. The same camps were used year after year, apparently, and the skeletons of hundreds of muskoxen piled up at some of them, like PjRa-18. By 1981, scientists had found 150 such campsites, large and small, along the Thomsen River, along with the dismembered skeletons of about 3000 muskoxen.
The muskox population, some think, collapsed under this heavy hunting pressure before the ship and its cache were fully exploited. (Remnants of the cache remain. The ship either sank in the bay or floated away—it has never been found.) After about 1890, no people from Victoria Island traveled the route anymore.
Between 1914 and 1918 the explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson crossed Banks Island several times, but he never once saw muskoxen. None, in fact, was seen thereafter anywhere on the island until the summer of 1952, when a Canadian biologist spotted a lone bull in the Thomsen River drainage. The bull could have been part of a small, remnant population, previously undetected, or from a group that crossed over from Victoria Island and followed the same route the Eskimo had taken to the north. During the 1950s and 1960s muskoxen were seen sporadically on northern Banks Island, and surveys conducted in the early 1970s confirmed the presence of between 1200 and 1800 animals. A 1975 survey indicated further increases, and surveys in the early 1980s revealed the population had reached an astonishing size—16,000 to 18,000 animals.
The phenomenal recovery of muskoxen on Banks Island is something biologists cannot adequately explain. They do not have enough information about muskox reproductive biology and nutrition or about the play of other factors, such as prolonged periods of favorable weather or the absence of caribou competing for some of the same food. Informally, however, there is agreement that the lush sedge meadows and grasslands of the Thomsen River Valley have played a critical role in the recovery at the northern end of the island, and in the extension of the animals’ range toward the south.
A modern visitor to the Thomsen River district feels the resilience of the country right away, in the rich and diverse bird life, the numbers of arctic fox, the many lemming burrows, and in the aggregations of arctic hare and caribou grazing on the hillsides. And in seeing how many calves there are in the muskoxen herds. The valley is robust and serene with its life.
