Acclaim for Barry Lopez's
ARCTIC DREAMS
"A master nature writer.... Mr. Lopez brought his talent for
close observation, empathy, freshness and wonder to a major
effort north of treeline. . . . The gift of sight (and second
sight) focused here upon the ocean, ice, skyscapes, land-
scapes and wildlife is extraordinary."
--The New York Times Book Review
"One of those landmark works of travel writing like, say,
Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta." --The New Yorker
"A splendid book, passionate and compassionate, by a man
who is both a first-rate writer and an uncompromising
defender of the wild country and its native inhabitants."
--Edward Abbey
"A marvelous evocation of the Arctic by a naturalist, who is
part poet.... A magical book to read slowly and savor."
--Irish Times
"Dazzling.... Treats the distant, snowy world of the Arctic as
a place that exists not only in the mathematics of geography
but also in the terra incognita of our imaginations."
--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"A monumental work, not only in its revelation of the
author's depth ofvision but, in a very real sense, it is a mon-
ument to the uniqueness, the mystery, and the drama of the
Arctic wilderness." --Living World
"A powerful storyteller.... Here is a book full of resonance."
--Margaret Atwood
"One of the finest books ever written about the far North."
--PublishersWeekly Barry Lopez
ARCTIC DREAMS
Barry Lopez is the author of six works of nonfiction and
eight works of fiction. His writing appears regularly in
Harpers, The Paris Review, DoubleTake, and The Georgia
Review. He is the recipient of a National Book Award, an
Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts
and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and other honors.
He lives in western Oregon.
B O O K S B y B A R K Y L O P E Z
N O N F I C T I O N
Arctic Dreams
OfWolves and Men
F I C T I O N
LightAction in the Caribbean
LessonsfromtheWolverine
FieldNotes
CrowandWeasel
Winter Count
River Notes
Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with His Daughter
DesertNotes
E S S A Y S
Apologia
About This Life
TheRediscoveryofNorthAmerica
CrossingOpenGround
Barry Lopez
ARCTIC
DUEAMS
Imagination and Desire
in a Northern Landscape
VINTAGE BOOKS
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York
For
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 2001 Sandra
Copyright  1986 by Barry Holstun Lopez.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States ofAmerica by Vintage
Books, a division ofRandom House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously
in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally
published in hardcover by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, in 1986.
Published by arrangement with Scribner, an imprint of
Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks ofRandom House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to quote from "The Field of the
Caribou," copyright  1966 byJohn Haines, reprinted from
WinterNewsbypermission ofWesleyanUniversityPress.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lopez, Barry Holstun, 1945-
Arctic dreams : imagination and desire in a northern landscape / [Barry Lopez].
p. cm.
Originally published: NewYork : Scribner, 1986.
Includes bibliographical references (p.).
ISBN 0-375-72748-5
1. Natural history--Arctic regions. 2. Arctic regions--Description and travel.
3. Arctic regions--Discovery and exploration. I. Title.
QH84.1 .L67 2001
508.98--dc21
2001026078
Maps by David Lindroth
Authorphotograph  Nancy Crampton
www.vintagebooks.com
Printed in the United States ofAmerica
10 9 8 7 6 5 4
The landscape conveys an impression of absolute permanence. It
is not hostile. It is simply there--untouched, silent and complete.
It is very lonely, yet the absence of all human traces gives you
the feeling you understand this land and can take your place in it.
EDMUND CARPENTER
Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the
remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular
landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as
he can, to wonder upon it, to dwell upon it.
He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at
every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it.
He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest
motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of the moon
and the colors of the dawn and dusk.
N. SCOTT MOMADAY
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Xlll
AUTHOR'S NOTE xvii
PREFACE xix
Prologue: Pond's Bay, Baffin Island i
1. Arktikos 15
2. Banks Island: Ovibos moschatus 42
3. Tornarssuk: Ursus maritimus 76
4. Lancaster Sound: Monodon monoceros 119
5. Migration: The Corridors of Breath 152
6. Ice and Light 204
7. The Country of the Mind 252
8. The Intent of Monks 302
9. A Northern Passage 355
Epilogue: Saint Lawrence Island, Bering Sea 407
NOTES 417
MAPS 421
APPENDICES 427
BIBLIOGRAPHY 445
INDEX 449
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MY DEBTS are great. And my sense of gratitude, especially to those
with whom I traveled in the Arctic, is very deep. First to Lloyd
Lowry, Bob Nelson, and Kathy Frost, knowledgeable and sterling
companions, whom I accompanied on coastal surveys in the Beau-
fort, Chukchi, and Bering seas. To Bob Stephenson, with whom I
traveled extensively in Alaska: in the Brooks Range, in Nelchina
Basin, on the upper Yukon, and to Saint Lawrence Island. To
Kerry Finley, for his companionship and assistance in northern
Baffin Island. To Don Ljungblad, who introduced me to the spring
ice in Bering Sea and to bowhead whales. To Ray Schweinsburg,
who introduced me to polar bears in the Canadian Archipelago. To
Rick Will, Becky Cole, Shirleen Smith, and Bill Abercrombie, my
companions on Banks Island; and Bruce Dinneford, my companion
at Pingok Island.
I am indebted as well to the officers and men of the MV
Soodoc, especially Master Pitt Schroter, Ice Master Niels Jorgen-
sen, third mate Jean-Luc Bedard, and second engineer Andre Gill,
for their accommodation and patience with my questions. I also
wish to thank the officers and crew of the NOAA ship Oceanog-
rapher and the men working on the Panarctic Oils drill rigs "Cape
Mamen" and "Whitefish," and at the Panarctic base camp at Rae
Point, Melville Island, for their assistance and cordiality.
Several institutions provided extensive logistical support during
periods of field research--the Alaska Department of Fish and
xiu
XIV Acknowledgments
Game in the United States and, in Canada, Polar Continental
Shelf Project, Department of Energy, Mines and Resources Canada;
Wildlife Management Division, Department of Renewable Re-
sources, Government of the Northwest Territories; and Atmos-
pheric Environment Service, Department of Environment Canada.
I would also like to thank the public relations staffs at Panarctic
Oils, Sohio Alaska Petroleum Company, and Cominco for their
help.
Without the support of Colin Crosbie of Crosbie Shipping I
would not have been able to retrace the sea route of John Davis
and William Parry. Without the assistance of George Hobson,
Director of Polar Continental Shelf, and the willingness of pilot
Duncan Grant to seemingly always make room, I could not have
traveled as extensively as I was able to in the Canadian Archipelago.
I thank each of them sincerely.
Many scientists gave unstintingly of their time in lengthy in-
terviews. I would especially like to thank, in addition to those
already mentioned, Anne Gunn, Kent Jingfors, Thor Larsen,
Dennis Andriashek, John Burns, Mitch Taylor, Martha Robus,
Cliff Hickey, Peter Schledermann, and Bob Janes. Christian Vibe,
Frank Miller, Murray Newman, Rick Davis, James Helmer, Diane
Lyons, Harriet Critchley, Poul Henrichsen, Greg Galik, Sam
Luciani, and Guy Palmer also provided critical interviews.
I feel inadequate in trying to convey my sense of appreciation
to the people of various native villages, for their deference and
understanding in the face of my intrusion. Among those who were
generous with their time I especially wish to pay my respects to
George Noongwook, Vernon Slwooko, Alex Akeya, Bob Ahgook,
Oolaiuk Nakitavak, and David Kalluk for invaluable interviews and
experiences. Qujannamiik.
Often during my travels I was in need of a meal and a place
to sleep. I would like to offer private words of gratitude to all who
opened their homes to me.
Peter Schledermann generously provided library privileges
and working space at the Arctic Institute of North America in
Acknowledgments xv
Calgary; Colleen Cabot provided a place to work at the Teton
Science School, Kelly, Wyoming, during a critical period. Martin
Antonetti and Kerry Finley helped with Latin and Inuktitut
translation, respectively. Many individuals graciously answered
requests for documents. I would especially like to acknowledge
Arthur Credland of Kingston Upon Hull's Town Docks Museum
for records of the whaling ship Cumbrian-, Steve Amstrup, Malcolm
Ramsay, and Gordon Stenhouse for material on polar bears; David
Gray for material on muskoxen; Jim Levison for information about
loons; Bud Fay for material on walrus; Anthony Higgins for data
on Oodaaq Island; and Marty Grossman for information on Edward
Israel.
I would like to express my personal and professional gratitude
to Lewis Lapham at Harper's, Robley Wilson at North American
Review, John Rasmus at Outside, and Paul Perry at Running for
their support while I was at work on the manuscript.
Several people with whom I spoke only briefly were never-
theless instrumental in helping me clarify my ideas and intentions.
I would like to express my appreciation for that reason to Ted
Muraro, Maurice Haycock, J0rn Thomassen, Martin Luce, and
Keith Quinlan.
Some of the ideas in this book grew out of conversations with
friends little concerned, directly, with the Arctic. It is difficult to
be precise about such debts, but they are no less real than those to
a traveling companion. I would like to thank in this capacity Dick
Showalter, Tony Beasley, and China Galland.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to Isabel Stirling, who
helped me greatly as a research assistant and typist.
Finally, I wish to thank my editor, Laurie Schieffelin, and my
agent, Peter Schults, for their faith during a long period of work
and for their discerning reading of the manuscript at various stages.
And my wife, Sandra, whose mind and character and support,
as always, were like shelter.
My deep and humble gratitude.
Author'sNote
The scientific names of northern animals and plants, and geographic
coordinates for named places in the North, are listed in the ap-
pendices. Bibliographic information is in the text itself, in footnotes,
in the Notes section beginning on page 417, and in a selected
bibliography on page 445, depending on where its appearance is
most appropriate. Maps in the Maps section are cartographically
accurate. Maps in the text are mostly simplified sketches and not
drawn to scale. Eskimo terms, unless otherwise noted, are from the
Inuktitut dialects of the eastern Canadian Arctic. Eskimo words in
common English usage, such as "iglu" (house), "kayak," and
"qamutiik" (sledge) are not italicized.
PREFACE
BEYOND A REGARD for the landscape itself, this book finds its origin
in two moments.
One summer evening I was camped in the western Brooks
Range of Alaska with a friend. From the ridge where we had
pitched our tent we looked out over tens of square miles of rolling
tundra along the southern edge of the calving grounds of the
Western Arctic caribou herd. During those days we observed not
only caribou and wolves, which we'd come to study, but wolverine
and red fox, ground squirrels, delicate-legged whimbrels and ag-
gressive jaegers, all in the unfoldings of their obscure lives. One
night we watched in awe as a young grizzly bear tried repeatedly to
force its way past a yearling wolf standing guard alone before a den
of young pups. The bear eventually gave up and went on its way.
We watched snowy owls and rough-legged hawks hunt and caribou
drift like smoke through the valley.
On the evening I am thinking about--it was breezy there on
Ilingnorak Ridge, and cold; but the late-night sun, small as a kite in
the northern sky, poured forth an energy that burned against my
cheekbones--it was on that evening that I went on a walk for the
first time among the tundra birds. They all build their nests on the
ground, so their vulnerability is extreme. I gazed down at a single
horned lark no bigger than my fist. She stared back resolute as iron.
As I approached, golden plovers abandoned their nests in hysterical
xix
XX Preface
ploys, artfully feigning a broken wing to distract me from the
woven grass cups that couched their pale, darkly speckled eggs.
Their eggs glowed with a soft, pure light, like the window light in
a Vermeer painting. I marveled at this intense and concentrated
beauty on the vast table of the plain. I walked on to find Lapland
longspurs as still on their nests as stones, their dark eyes gleaming. At
the nest of two snowy owls I stopped. These are more formidable
animals than plovers. I stood motionless. The wild glare in their
eyes receded. One owl settled back slowly over its three eggs, with
an aura of primitive alertness. The other watched me, and im-
mediately sought a bond with my eyes if I started to move.
I took to bowing on these evening walks. I would bow slightly
with my hands in my pockets, toward the birds and the evidence
of life in their nests--because of their fecundity, unexpected in
this remote region, and because of the serene arctic light that came
down over the land like breath, like breathing.
I remember the wild, dedicated lives of the birds that night
and also the abandon with which a small herd of caribou crossed
the Kokolik River to the northwest, the incident of only a few
moments. They pranced through like wild mares, kicking up sheets
of water across the evening sun and shaking it off on the far side like
huge dogs, a bloom of spray that glittered in the air around them
like grains of mica.
I remember the press of light against my face. The explosive
skitter of calves among grazing caribou. And the warm intensity
of the eggs beneath these resolute birds. Until then, perhaps be-
cause the sun was shining in the very middle of the night, so out of
tune with my own customary perception, I had never known how
benign sunlight could be. How forgiving. How run through with
compassion in a land that bore so eloquently the evidence of cen-
turies of winter.
During those summer days on Ilingnorak Ridge there was no
dark night. Darkness never came. The birds were born. They
flourished, and then flew south in the wake of the caribou.
The second incident is more fleeting. It occurred one night
Preface xxi
when I was being driven past a graveyard in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Among the gravestones was one marking the burial place of Edward
Israel, a shy young man who sailed north in 1881 with Lieutenant
Adolphus Greely. Greely and his men established a base camp on
Eilesmere Island, 450 miles from the North Pole, and explored the
surrounding territory in the spring of 1882. A planned relief ex-
pedition failed to reach them that summer, and also failed again
the next year. Desperate, Greely's party of twenty-five retreated
south, hopeful of being met by a rescue party in 1884. They
wintered at Cape Sabine, Eilesmere Island, where sixteen of them
died of starvation and scurvy, another committed suicide, and one
man was executed for stealing food. Israel, the expedition's astron-
omer, died on May 27, 1884, three weeks before the others were
rescued. The survivors remembered him as the most congenial
person among them.
I remember looking out the back window of the car that
evening and seeing Israel's grave in the falling light. What had this
man hoped to find? What sort of place did he think lay out there
before him on that bright June morning in 1881 when the Proteus
slipped its moorings at Saint John's, Newfoundland?
No one is able to say, of course. He was drawn on by the
fixations of his own imagination, as were John Davis and William
Baffin before him and as Robert Peary and Vilhjalmur Stefansson
would be after him. Perhaps he intended to make his mark as a
scientist, to set his teeth in that high arctic landscape and come
home like Darwin to a sedate and contemplative life, in the farm-
lands of southern Michigan. Perhaps he merely hungered after the
unusual. We can only imagine that he desired something, the ful-
fillment of some personal and private dream, to which he pinned
his life.
Israel was buried with great public feeling and patriotic
rhetoric. His gravestone reads
IN LIFE A TRUE CHILD OF GOD
IN DEATH A HERO
Preface xxin
These two incidents came back to me often in the four or five
years that I traveled in the Arctic. The one, timeless and full of
light, reminded me of sublime innocence, of the innate beauty of
undisturbed relationships. The other, a dream gone awry, re-
minded me of the long human struggle, mental and physical, to
come to terms with the Far North. As I traveled, I came to believe
that people's desires and aspirations were as much a part of the
land as the wind, solitary animals, and the bright fields of stone
and tundra. And, too, that the land itself existed quite apart from
these.
The physical landscape is baffling in its ability to transcend
whatever we would make of it. It is as subtle in its expression as
turns of the mind, and larger than our grasp; and yet it is still
knowable. The mind, full of curiosity and analysis, disassembles a
landscape and then reassembles the pieces--the nod of a flower,
the color of the night sky, the murmur of an animal--trying to
fathom its geography. At the same time the mind is trying to find
its place within the land, to discover a way to dispel its own sense
of estrangement.
The particular section of the Arctic I became concerned with
extends from Bering Strait in the west to Davis Strait in the east.
It includes great, unrelieved stretches of snow and ice that in
summer become plains of open water and an ocean that is the
tundra, a tawny island beneath the sky. But there are, too, sur-
prising and riveting sights: Wilberforce Falls on the Hood River
suddenly tumbles 160 feet into a wild canyon in the midst of the
Canadian tundra, and its roar can be heard for miles. Humboldt
Glacier, a towering, 50-mile-long sea margin of the Greenland ice
sheet, calves icebergs into Kane Basin with gargantuan and im-
placable force. The badlands of east-central Melville Island, an
eroded country of desert oranges, of muted yellows and reds, re-
minds a traveler of canyons and arroyos in southern Utah. And
there are places more exotic, like the Ruggles River, which flows
out of Lake Hazen on Ellesmere Island in winter and runs 2000
feet through the Stygian darkness, wreathed in frost smoke, before
it disappears underneath its own ice. South of Cape Bathurst and
west of the Horton River in the Northwest Territories, bituminous
shale fires that have been burning underground for hundreds of
years make those coastal hills seem like a vast, smoldering heap of
industrial slag. South of the central Kobuk River, one hundred foot
dunes rise above hundreds of square miles of shifting sand. In East
Greenland lies an arctic oasis called Queen Louisa Land, a valley
of wild grasses and summer wildflowers surrounded by the walls
of the Greenland ice cap.
The Arctic, overall, has the classic lines of a desert landscape:
spare, balanced, extended, and quiet. In the Queen Elizabeth
Islands the well-drained tundra plains and low-lying bogs more
familiar in the south give way to expanses of weathered rock and
gravel, and the illusion of a desert is even more complete. On
Baffin and Ellesmere islands and in northern Alaska, sharply pitched
XXIV Preface
arctic mountain ranges, which retain their remoteness even as you
stand within them, complete a pervasive suggestion of austerity.
The apparent monotony of the land is relieved, however, by
weather systems moving through, and by the activities of animals,
particularly of birds and caribou. And because so much of the
country stands revealed, and because sunlight passing through the
dustless air renders its edges with such unusual sharpness, animals
linger before the eye. And their presence is vivid.
Like other landscapes that initially appear barren, arctic
tundra can open suddenly, like the corolla of a flower, when any
intimacy with it is sought. One begins to notice spots of brilliant
red, orange, and green, for example, among the monotonic browns
of a tundra tussock. A wolf spider lunges at a glistening beetle. A
shred of muskox wool lies inert in the lavender blooms of a saxi-
frage. When Alwin Pederson, a Danish naturalist, first arrived on
the northeast coast of Greenland, he wrote, "I must admit to strange
feelings at the sight of this godforsaken desert of stone." Before he
left, however, he was writing of muskoxen grazing in lush grass
that grew higher than the animals' heads in Jameson Land, and of
the stark beauty of nunataks, the ice-free spires of rock that pierce
the Pleistocene stillness of the Greenland ice cap. I, like Pederson,
when stooping to pick up the gracile rib bone of an arctic hare,
would catch sudden and unexpected sight of the silken cocoon of
an arctic caterpillar.
The wealth of biological detail on the tundra dispels any feel-
ing that the land is empty; and its likeness to a stage suggests im-
pending events. On a summer walk, the wind-washed air proves
depthlessly clear. Time and again you come upon the isolated and
succinct evidence of life--animal tracks, the undigested remains of
a ptarmigan in an owl's casting, a patch of barren-ground willow
nibbled nearly leafless by arctic hares. You are afforded the com-
panionship of birds, which follow after you. (They know you are
an animal; sooner or later you will turn up something to eat.) Sand-
pipers scatter before you, screaming tuituek, an Eskimo name for
them. Coming awkwardly down a scree slope of frost-riven lime-
Preface xxv
stone you make a glass-tinkling clatter--and at a distance a tundra
grizzly rises on its hind legs to study you; the dish-shaped paws
of its front legs deathly still, the stance so human it is unnerving.
Along creek washouts, in the western Arctic especially, you
might stumble upon a mammoth tusk. Or in the eastern Arctic find
undisturbed the ring of stones used by a hunter 1500 years ago to
hold down the edge of his skin tent. These old Dorset camps,
located along the coasts where arctic people have been traveling for
four millennia, are poignant with their suggestion of the timeless
determination of mankind. On rare occasions a traveler might come
upon the more imposing stone foundations of a large house aban-
doned by Thule-culture people in the twelfth century. (The cold,
dry arctic air might have preserved, even down to its odor, the
remains of a ringed seal killed and eaten by them 800 years ago.)
More often, one comes upon the remains of a twentieth-century
camp, artifacts far less engaging than a scrap of worked caribou
bone, or carved wood, or skewered hide at a Dorset or Thule site.
But these artifacts disintegrate just as slowly--red tins of Prince
Albert brand crimp-cut tobacco, cans of Pet evaporated milk and
Log Cabin maple syrup. In the most recent camps one finds used
flashlight batteries in clusters like animal droppings, and a bewilder-
ing variety of spent rifle and shotgun ammunition.
You raise your eyes from these remains, from whatever cen-
tury, to look away. The land as far as you can see is rung with a
harmonious authority, the enduring force of its natural history, of
which these camps are so much a part. But the most recent evidence
is vaguely disturbing. It does not derive in any clear way from the
land. Its claim to being part of the natural history of the region
seems, somehow, false.
It is hard to travel in the Arctic today and not be struck by
the evidence of recent change. What is found at modern campsites
along the coast points to the sudden arrival of a foreign technology
--new tools and a new way of life for the local people. The initial
adjustments to this were fairly simple; the rate of change, however,
XXVI Preface
has continued to accelerate. Now the adjustments required are
bewildering. And the new tools bring with them ever more com-
plicated sets of beliefs. The native culture, from Saint Lawrence
Island to Greenland, is today in a state of rapid economic re-
organization and of internally disruptive social readjustment. In a
recent article about the residents of Nunivak Island, for example,
a scientist wrote that the dietary shift from wild to store-bought
foods (with the many nutritional and social complications involved)
is proceeding so quickly it is impossible to pin down. "By the time
this paper appears in print," he wrote, "much of the information
in it will be of historical value only."
Industrial changes have also come to the Arctic, following the
discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, in 1968: the 800-mile-
long trans-Alaska pipeline itself, with its recent Kuparuk extension;
base camps for oil exploration on Canada's Melville Island and
Tuktoyaktuk Peninsula; huge lead-zinc mining operations on north-
ern Baffin and Little Cornwallis islands; hundreds of miles of new
roads; and increased ship, air, and truck traffic. The region's
normally violent and unpredictable weather, its extreme cold and
long periods of darkness, the great distance to supply depots, and
the problem of stabilizing permanent structures over permafrost
(which melts and shifts in erratic ways) have made the cost of
these operations astronomical--indeed, in Canada they could not
even be contemplated without massive assistance from the federal
government.
Seen as widely separated dots and lines on a map, these recent,
radical changes do not appear to amount to very much. But their
rippling effect in the settlements and villages of the North--
their economic, psychological, and social impact--is acute. And
their success, though marginal and in some instances artificial,
encourages additional schemes for development.* Of special con-
cern to local residents is a growing concentration of power in the
* For a summary of specific arctic problems, see note 1.
Preface xxvn
hands of people with enormous economic resources but a poorly
developed geographic sense of the region. A man from Tuktoyak-
tuk, a village near the mouth of the Mackenzie River, told me a
pointed story. In the 1950s he traveled regularly up and down the
coast by dogsled. When a distant early warning (DEW) line radar
station went up along his accustomed route, he decided to stop to
see what it was. The military men welcomed him not as a resident
of the region but as a figure of arctic fable. They enthusiastically
fed his dogs a stack of raw steaks. Each time the man came, they
pounded him on the back and fed his dogs piles of steak. Their
largess seemed so odd and his rapport with them so unrealistic he
stopped coming. For months afterward, however, he had tre-
mendous difficulty controlling the dogs anytime they passed near
the place.
Passing through the villages, even traveling across the unin-
habited land, one cannot miss the evidence of upheaval, nor avoid
being wrenched by it. The depression it engenders, because so
much of it seems a heedless imposition on the land and on the
people, a rude invasion, can lead one to despair. I brooded, like any
traveler, over these things; but the presence of the land, the sheer
weight of it before the senses, more often drew me away from the
contemporary issues. What, I wondered, had compelled me to bow
to a horned lark? How do people imagine the landscapes they find
themselves in? How does the land shape the imaginations of the
people who dwell in it? How does desire itself, the desire to com-
prehend, shape knowledge? These questions seemed to me to go
deeper than the topical issues, to underlie any consideration of
them.
In pursuit of answers I traveled with people of differing dis-
positions. With Eskimos hunting narwhals off northern Baffin
Island and walruses in Bering Sea. With marine ecologists on hun-
dreds of miles of coastal and near-shore surveys. With landscape
painters in the Canadian Archipelago. In the company of rough-
necks, drilling for oil on the winter ice in high winds at --3O°F;
and with the cosmopolitan crew of a freighter, sailing up the west
XXV111 Preface
coast of Greenland and into the Northwest Passage. They each
assessed the land differently--the apparent emptiness of the tundra,
which ran out like a shimmering mirage in the Northern Ocean;
the blue-black vault of the winter sky, a cold beauty alive with
scintillating stars; a herd of muskoxen, pivoting together on a
hilltop to make a defensive stand, their long guard hairs swirling
around them like a single, huge wave of dark water; a vein of
lead-zinc ore glinting like tiny mirrors in a damp, Mesozoic wall
beneath the surface of Little Cornwallis Island; the moaning and
wailing in the winter sea ice as the ocean's crust warped and
shattered in the crystalline air. All of it, all that the land is and
evokes, its actual meaning as well as its metaphorical reverbera-
tion, was and is understood differently.
These different views make a human future in that northern
landscape a matter of conjecture, and it is here that one encounters
dreams, projections of hope. The individual's dream, whether it be
so private a wish as that the joyful determination of nesting arctic
birds might infuse a distant friend weary of life, or a magnanimous
wish, that a piece of scientific information wrested from the land-
scape might serve one's community--in individual dreams is the
hope that one's own life will not have been lived for nothing. The
very much larger dream, that of a people, is a story we have been
carrying with us for millennia. It is a narrative of determination
and hope that follows a question: What will we do as the wisdom
of our past bears down on our future? It is a story of ageless con-
versation, not only conversation among ourselves about what we
mean and wish to do, but a conversation held with the land--our
contemplation and wonder at a prairie thunderstorm, or before the
jagged line of a young mountain, or at the sudden rise of ducks
from an isolated lake. We have been telling ourselves the story of
what ive represent in the land for 40,000 years. At the heart of this
story, I think, is a simple, abiding belief: it is possible to live wisely
on the land, and to live well. And in behaving respectfully toward
all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling igno-
rance falling away from us.
Preface XXIX
Crossing the tree line to the Far North, one leaves behind the
boreal owl clutching its frozen prey to its chest feathers to thaw
it. Ahead lies an open, wild landscape, pointed off on the maps with
arresting and anomalous names: Brother John Glacier and Cape
White Handkerchief. Navy Board Inlet, Teddy Bear Island, and
the Zebra Cliffs. Dexterity Fiord, Saint Patrick Canyon, Starvation
Cove. Eskimos hunt the ringed seal, still, in the broad bays of the
Sons of the Clergy and Royal Astronomical Society islands.
This is a land where airplanes track icebergs the size of
Cleveland and polar bears fly down out of the stars. It is a region,
like the desert, rich with metaphor, with adumbration. In a simple
bow from the waist before the nest of the horned lark, you are
able to stake your life, again, in what you dream.
ARCTIC DREAMS