Five
MIGRATION
The Corridors of Breath
IT WAS STILL DARK, and I thought it might be raining lightly.
I pushed back the tent flap. A storm-driven sky moving
swiftly across the face of a gibbous moon. Perhaps it would
clear by dawn. The ticking sound was not rain, only the wind. A
storm, bound for somewhere else.
Haif awake, I was again aware of the voices. A high-pitched
cacophonous barking, like terriers, or the complaint of shoats. The
single outcries became a rising cheer, as if in a far-off stadium, that
rose and fell away.
Snow geese, their night voices. I saw them flying down the
north coast of Alaska once in September, at the end of a working
152
Migration 15 3
day. The steady intent of their westward passage, that unwavering
line, was uplifting. The following year I saw them over Banks
Island, migrating north in small flocks of twenty and thirty. And
that fall I went to northern California to spend a few days with
them on their early wintering ground at Tule Lake in Klamath
Basin.
Tule Lake is not widely known in America, but the ducks
and geese gather in huge aggregations on this refuge every fall,
creating an impression of land in a statě of health, of boundless
life. On any given day a visitor might look upon a million birds
here--pintail, lesser scaup, Barrow's goldeneye, cinnamon teal,
mallard, northern shoveler, redhead, and canvasback ducks; Great
Basin and cackling varieties of Canada geese, white-fronted geese,
Ross's geese, lesser snow geese; and tundra swans. In open fields
between the lakes and marshes where these waterfowl feed and
rest are red-winged blackbirds and Savannah sparrows, Breweťs
sparrows, tree swallows, and meadowlarks. And lone avian hunters
--marsh hawks, red-tailed hawks, bald eagles, the diminutive
kestrel.
The Klamath Basin, containing four other national wildlife
refuges in addition to Tule Lake, is one of the richest habitats
for migratory waterfowl in North America. To the west of Tule
Lake is another large, shallow lake called Lower Klamath Lake.
To the east, out past the tule marshes, is a low escarpment where
barn owls nést and the counting marks of a long-gone aboriginal
people are still visible, incised in the rock. To the southwest, the
incongruous remains of a Japanese internment camp from World
War II. In agricultural fields to the north, east, and south, farmers
grow malt barley and winter potatoes in dark volcanic soils.
The night I thought I heard rain and fell asleep again to the
cries of snow geese, I also heard the sound of their night flying, a
great hammering of the air overhead, a wild creaking of wings.
These primitive sounds made the Klamath Basin seem oddly un-
tenanted, the ancestral ground of animals, reclaimed by them each
year. In a few days at the periphery of the flocks of geese, however,
154 ARCTIC DREAMS
I did not feel like an interloper. I felt a calmness birds can bring
to people; and, quieted, I sensed here the outlines of the oldest
mysteries: the nature and extent of space, the fall of light from the
heavens, the pooling of time in the present, as if it were water.
There were 250,000 lesser snow geese at Tule Lake. At dawn
I would find them floating on the water, close together in a raft
three-quarters of a mile long and perhaps 500 yards wide. When
a flock begins to rise from the surface of the water, the sound is
like a storm squall arriving, a great racket of shaken sheets of
corrugated tin. (If you try to separate the individual sounds in
your head, they are like dry cotton towels snapping on a wind-
blown clothesline.) Once airbotne, they are dazzling on the wing.
Flying against broken sunlight, the opaque whiteness of their
bodies, a whiteness of water-polished shells, contrasts with grayer
whites in their translucent wings and tail feathers. Up close they
show the dense, impeccable whites of arctic fox. Against the bluish
grays of a storm-laden sky, their whiteness has a surreal glow, a
brilliance without shadow.
When they are feeding in the grain fields around Tule Lake,
the geese come and go in flocks of five or ten thousand. Sometimes
there are fořty or fifty thousand in the air at once. They rise from
the fields like smoke in great, swirling currents, rising higher and
spreading wider in the sky than one's field of vision can encompass.
One fluid, recurved sweep of ten thousand of them passes through
the spaces within another, counterflying flock; while beyond them
lattice after lattice passes, like sliding Japanese walls, until in the
whole sky you lose your depth of field and feel as though you are
looking up from the floor of the oceán through shoals of fish.
What absorbs me in these birds, beyond their beautiful white-
ness, their astounding numbers, the great vigor of their lives, is
how adroitly each bird joins the larger flock or departs from it.
And how each bird while it is a part of the flock seems part of
something larger than itself. Another animal. Nevěr did I see a
single goose move to accommodate one that was landing, nor geese
on the water ever disturbed by another taking off, no matter how
Migration 155
dosely bunched they seemed to be. I nevěr saw two birds so much
as brush wingtips in the air, though surely they must. They roli
up into a headwind together in a seamless movement that brings
thousands of them gently to the ground like falling leaves in but
a few seconds. Their movements are endlessly attractive to the
eye because of a tension they create between the extended para-
bolic lineš of their flight and their abrupt but adroit movements, all
of it in three dimensions.
And there is something else that draws you in. They come
from the ends of the earth and find this small lake every year with
unfailing accuracy. They arrive from breeding grounds on the
northern edge of the continent in Canada, and from the river
valleys of Wrangel Island in the Russian Arctic. Their ancient
corridors of migration, across Bering Strait and down the Pacific
coast, down the east flank of the Rockies, are older than the nations
they fly from. The lives of many animals are constrained by the
schemes of men, but the determination in these lives, their tradi-
tional pattern of movement, are a calming reminder of a more
fundamental order. The company of these birds in the field is
guileless. It is easy to feel transcendent when camped among them.
Birds tug at the mind and heart with a strange intensity. Their
ability to flock elegantly as the snow goose does, where individual
birds turn into something larger, and their ability to navigate over
great stretches of what is for us featureless space, are mysterious,
sophisticated skills. Their flight, even a burst of sparrows across a
city plaza, pleases us. In the Arctic, one can see birds in enormous
numbers, and these feelings of awe and elation are enhanced. In
spring in the Gulf of Anadyr, off the Russian coast, the surface of
the water flashes silver with schools of Pacific herring, and flocks
of puffins fly straight into the water after them, like a hail of gravel.
They return with the herring to steep cliffs, where the broken
shells of their offspring fall on gusts of wind into the sea by the
thousands, like snow. On August 6, 1973, the ornithologist David
Nettleship rounded Skruis Point on the north coast of Devon
Island and came face to face with a "lost" breeding colony of
Migration l
57
Fai/ migration of lesser snow geese front nesting areas on Wrangel
Island and in northern Canada to Tule Lake, California.
black guillemots. It stretched southeast before him for 14 miles.
On the Great Plain of the Koukdjuak on Baffin Island today, a
traveler, crossing the rivers and wading through the ponds and
braided streams that exhaust and finally defeat the predatory fox,
will come on great windrows of feathers from molting geese,
feathers that can be taken in handfuls and thrown up in the air to
drift downward like chaff. From the cliffs of Digges Island and
adjacent Cape Wolstenholme in Hudson Strait, 2 million thick-
billed murres will swim away across the water, headed for their
winter grounds on the Grand Banks.
Such enormous concentrations of life in the Arctic are, as I
háve suggested, temporary and misleading. Between these arctic
oases stretch hundreds of miles of coastal cliffs, marshes, and
riverine valleys where no waterfowl, no seabird, nests. And the
flocks of migratory geese and ducks come and go quickly, laying
their eggs, molting, and getting their young into the air in five
or six weeks. What one witnesses in the great breeding colonies is
a kind of paradox. For a time the snow and ice disappear, allowing
life to flourish and birds both to find food and retrieve it. Protected
from terrestrial predators on their island refuges and on nesting
grounds deep within flooded coastal plains, birds can molt all their
flight feathers at once, without fearing the fact that this form of
escape will be lost to them for a few weeks. And, for a while,
food is plentiful enough to more than serve their daily needs; it
provides the additional energy needed for the molt, and for a
buildup of fat reserves for the southward journey.
For the birds, these fleeting weeks of advantage are crucial.
If the weather is fair and their timing has been good, ťhey arrive
on their winter grounds with a strange, primal air of achievement.
When the snow geese land at Tule Lake in October, it is not
necessary in order to appreciate them to picture precisely the line
and shading of those few faraway places where every one of them
was born--Egg River on Banks Island, the mouth of the Anderson
River in the Northwest Territories, the Tundovaya River Valley
on Wrangel Island. Merely knowing that each one began its life,
took first breath, on those intemperate arctic edges and that it
alights here now for the first or nfth or tenth time is enough. Their
success urges one to wonder at such a life, stretched out over so
many thousands of miles, and moving on every four or five weeks,
always moving on. Food and light running out behind in the fall,
looming ahead in the spring.
I would watch the geese lift off the lake in the morning, spirál
up white into the blue California sky and head for fields of two-
i 5
8 ARCTIC DREAMS
row barley to feed, able only to wonder what this kind of nomadic
life meant, how their lives fit in the flow of time and made clearer
the extent of space between ground and sky, between here and
the Far North. They flew beautifully each morning in the direc-
tions they intended, movements of desire, arabesques in the long
sweep south from Tundovaya Valley and Egg River. At that hour
of the day their lives seemed flush with yearning.
ONE is not long in the field before sensing that the scale of time
and distance for most animals is different from one's own. Their
overall size, their methods of locomotion, the nature of the obsta-
cles they face, the media they move through, and the length of a
full life are all different. Formerly, because of the ready analogy
with human migration and a tendency to think only on a human
scale, biologists treated migratory behavior as a speciál event in the
lives of animals. They stressed the great distances involved or re-
markable feats of navigation. The practice today is not to differ-
entiate so sharply between migration and other forms of animal
(and plant) movement. The maple seed spiraling down toward
the forest floor, the butterfly zigzagging across a summer meadow,
and the arctic tem outward bound on its 12,000-mile fall journey
are all after the samé thing: an environment more conducive to
their continued growth and survival. Further, scientists now under-
stand animal movements in terms of navigational senses we are still
unfamiliar with, such as an ability to detect an electromagnetic
field or to use sound echos or differences in air pressure as guides.
In discussing large-scale migration like that of snow geese,
biologists posit a "familiar area" for each animal and then speak
of its "home range" within that area, which includes its winter and
summer ranges, its breeding range, and any migratory corridors.
The familiar area takés in the whole of the landscape an animal
has any notion of, an understanding it gains largely through ex-
ploration of territory adjacent to its home range during adolescence.
Intense adolescent exploration, as far as we know, is common to
all animals. Science's speculation is that such exploring ensures the
Migration 159
survival of a group of animals by familiarizing them with alterna-
tives to their home ranges, which they can turn to in an emergency.
A question that arises about the utilization of a home range is:
how do animals find their way to portions of the home range they
háve nevěr seen? And how do they know when going there would
be beneficial? The answers to these questions still elude us, but the
response to them is what we call migration, and we háve some idea
about how animals manage those journeys. Many animals, even
primitive creatures like anemones, possess a spatial memory of some
sort and use it to find their way in the world. Part of this memory
is apparently genetically based, and part of it is learned during
travel with parents and in exploring alone. We know animals use
a considerable range of senses to navigate from one pláce to an-
other, to locate themselves in space, and actually to learn an en-
vironment, but which senses in which combinations are ušed, and
precisely what information is stored--so far we can only speculate.
The vision most of us háve of migration is of movements on
a large scale, of birds arriving on their wintering grounds, of spawn-
ing salmon moving upstream, or of wildebeest, zebra, and gazelle
trekking over the plains of East Africa. The movements of these
latter animals coincide with a pattern of rainfall in the Serengeti-
Mara ecosystem; and their annual, roughly circular migration in the
wake of the rains reveals a marvelous and intricate network of
benefits to all the organisms involved--grazers, grasses, and pred-
ators. The timing of these events--the heading of grasses in seed,
the dropping of manure, the arrival of the rains, the birth of the
young--seems perfectly fortuitous, a melding of needs and satis-
factions that caused those who first examined the events to speak
of a divine pian.
The dependable arrival of swallows at the mission of San Juan
Capistrano, the appearance of gray whales off the Oregon coast in
March, and the movement of animals like elk from higher to lower
ranges in Wyoming in the fall are other examples of migration
familiar in North America. I first went into the Arctic with no
other ideas than these, somewhat outsize events to guide me. They
ióo ARCTIC DREAMS
opened my mind sufficiently, however, to a prodigious and diverse
movement of life through the Arctic; they also prompted a realiza-
tion of how intricate these seemingly simple natural events are.
And as I watched the movement of whales and birds and caribou,
I thought I discerned the ground from which some people háve
derived so much of their metaphorical understanding of symmetry,
cadence, and harmony in the universe.
Several different kinds of migration are going on in the Arctic
at the samé time, not all of them keyed to the earth's annual cycle.
Animals are still adjusting to the retreat of the Pleistocene glaciers,
which began about 20,000 years ago. Some temperate-zone species
are moving gradually but steadily northward, altering their be-
havior or, like the collared lemming and the arctic fox, growing
heavier coats of fur as required.
Climatic fluctuations measured over a much shorter period of
time--on the order of several hundred years--are responsible for
cyclic shifts of some animal populations north and south during
these periods. Over the last flfty years, for example, cod and several
species of bird háve been moving farther north up the west coast
of Greenland, while populations of red fox háve been establishing
themselves farther north on the North American tundra.* As ani-
mals long resident in the Arctic respond to certain kinds of short-
term ecological disaster, as was the čase with muskoxen in the
winter of 1973-74,
or t0
violent fluctuations in their population,
as with lemmings, they reinhabit, over time, former landscapes and
abandon others.
To cope with annual cycles--the drop in temperature, the
loss of light, the presence of snow cover, and a reduction in the
amount of food available--arctic animals háve evolved several
* American robins háve moved as far north as Baffin Island in recent
years. The Eskimos around Pond Inlet and Arctic Bay, who recognized
the bird from stories white travelers told them about it, first saw them
around 1942. Eskimos say the robin came that far north then because
there was "a lot of fighting in the south" at that time.
Migration 161
strategies. Lemmings move under the snow; bumblebees hibernate;
and arctic foxes move out onto the sea ice. Many other animals,
including caribou, walrus, whales, and birds, migrate over quite
significant distances. Arctic terns, for example, fly to the Antarctic
Oceán at the end of the arctic summer, an annual circuit on which
they see fewer hours of darkness than probably any animal on
earth. Other migratory birds that head out to sea change their
ecological niche. The long-tailed jaeger, a rodent hunter on the
summer tundra, becomes a pelagic scavenger on the high seas in
winter.
On a scale smaller yet than these annual cycles are the migra-
tions of animals during a season, like the movement of muskoxen;
and the regular patterns of localized movement keyed to an ani-
mal's diurnal rhythms, like the hábit among some wolf packs of
leaving a den each evening to hunt. (Arctic animals, as mentioned
earlier, maintain a diurnal pattern in špite of the presence of
continuous daylight in summer.)
When one considers all these comings and goings, and that an
animal like the muskox might be involved simultaneously in several
of these cycles, or that when the lemming population crashes,
snowy owls must fly off in the direction of an alternativě food
supply, and when one adds to it the movement of animals to the
floe edges in spring, or the insects that rise in such stupendous
numbers on the summer tundra, a vast and complex pattern of
animal movement in the Arctic begins to emerge. Also to be con-
sidered are the release of fish and primitive arthropods with the
melting of lake and ground ice. And the peregrinations of bears.
And a finál, wondrous image--the great oceán of aerial plankton,
that almost separate universe of ballooning spiders and delicate
larval creatures that drifts over the land in the summer.
The extent of all this movement is difficult to hold in the
mind. Deepening the complications for anyone who would try to
fix this order in time is that within the rough outlines of their
traditional behaviors, animals are always testing the landscape.
IÓ2 ARCTIC DREAMS
They are always setting off in response to hints and admonitions
not evident to us.
The movement of animals in the Arctic is especially compel-
ling because the events are compressed into but a few short months.
iMigratory animals like the bowhead whale and the snow goose
often arrive on the last breath of winter. They feed and rest, bear
their young, and prepare for their southward journey in that
window of light before freeze-up and the first fall snowstorms.
They come north in staggering numbers, travel hundreds or even
thousands of miles to be here during those few weeks when life
swirls in the water and on the tundra and in the bahny air. Standing
there on the ground, you can feel the land filling up, feel some-
thing physical rising in it under the influence of the light, an em-
brace or exaltation. Watching the animals come and go, and feeling
the land swell up to meet them and then feeling it grow still at
their departure, I came to think of the migrations as breath, as the
land breathing. In spring a great inhalation of light and animals.
The long-bated breath of summer. And an exhalation that pro-
pelled them all south in the fall.
ANIMALS define much of the space one encounters in the Arctic
because the land, like the sea, is expansive and there are so few
people about. Nowhere is this more apparent than in northern
Bering Sea in the spring. Certain regions of the world, sea straits
in particular, funnel the movements of migrating animals. This is
true at the Bosporus and at Gibraltar, for example, where land
birds move north and south and sea creatures east and west, as if
through the throat of an hourglass. Bering Strait, however, is
unique in the way it concentrates life. The arrangement of the
earth's land masses is such that they come close to meeting only in
the North; at Bering Strait the Chukchi Peninsula of the Eastern
Hemisphere, with its birds and animals, nearly touches the Seward
Peninsula of the Western Hemisphere, with its birds and animals.
Moreover, the North Pacific coasts converge here, bringing to-
Migration 163
gether the offshore migrations of whales and pelagic seabirds, the
near-shore migrations of seals and walrus, and the coastal migra-
tions of birds like eiders.*
1 he Bering Sea itself concentrates life as well because it is an
extremely rich feeding ground for marine mammals. Alany of the
birds, fish, and sea mammals moving within its borders during the
height of migratory activity in the spring and fall are local popu-
lations. The nearness of the two continents, the convcrgence of the
coasts, and the size and diversity of local bird populations, in fact,
háve made the Bering Strait region the very image of a remote
paradise for European and American bird-watchers.
In the spring, summer, and fall of different years, 1 háve either
been on the water in northern Bering Sea or flying transects over
it with marine scientists. In the course of that time I háve wondered
why the concentration of life here in the spring is so little known
to North Americans, for the concentrations are astounding. To the
southeast, to begin with, some 24 million migratory waterfowl
and shorebirds nést and feed on the delta of the Yukon and
Kuskokwim rivers (the Y-K Delta) between May and September.
These include black brant, sandhill cranes, several species of eider
and loon, surface-feeding ducks such as the green-winged teal and
greater scaup, plovers, phalaropes, and turnstones and the entire
North American populations of emperor geese and spectacled
eider.t
* Sea mammals migrating up the North American coast negotiate the
Aleutian barrier at Unimak Pass, providing an observer at Cape Sarichef
on Unimak Island with a spectacular view. In the eastern Arctic, the
convergence of Greenland and Baffin Island at Davis Strait and the
presence of an extensive floe edge in Lancaster Sound concentrate
the migrations of sea mammals and birds, similarly, for an observer at
Cape I lay on Bylot Island.
t Alany of these particular birds--pintail ducks, white-fronted geese,
and tundra swans, for example--will fly to Klamath Basin in the fall,
together with snow geese that stop briefly to feed on the Y-K Delta
en routě from Siberia.
164 ARCTIC DREAMS
In the Bering Sea itself, stocks of herring, pollock, halibut,
and yellowfin sole, and what are probably the largest clam beds in
the world, put this sea in a class almost by itself. From here, begin-
ning in latě May, hundreds of thousands of chinook (king) salmon
will start up the rivers of western Alaska, followed quickly by
even larger numbers of chum (dog) salmon, which will be fol-
lowed a week or so later by numbers as large of pink (humpback)
salmon. Finally, in July, will come runs of coho (silver) and
stupendous runs of sockeye (red) salmon.
Ornithologists believe that, in addition to the 24 million migra-
tory birds nesting on the Y-K Delta in the spring, there are an
additional 5 million seabirds living in northern Bering Sea, mostly
auklets, murres, and kittiwakes, and smaller numbers of horned
and tufted puffins, pelagic cormorants, and pigeon guillemots. And
some 500,000 oldsquaw ducks that winter south of Saint Lawrence
Island. Around the margins of Bering Sea, in saltwater marshes
and lagoons, are yet more birds, flocks of migratory Steller's eider,
long-billed dowitchers, dunlins, and whimbrels, all searching the
shallows for food; plovers, turnstones, and sandpipers; and many
of the species of bay and sea duck already mentioned. An observer
in the coastal lagoons might také in 10,000 or even 20,000 birds at
a glance, many of them in stunningly colorful nuptial plumages.
When numbers fail, as they always do, one thinks of mesmerizing
incidents, like the day in May 1982 when sandhill cranes passed
in flocks over the village of Nome almost continuously for two
hours, on their way to Russia. Or the afternoon 75,000 king eiders
flew past Dali Point on the Y-K Delta in two hours.
That is only the birds, and to suggest the uncountable fish. In
March, more than three-quarters of a million marine mammals are
concentrated at the southern edge of the Bering Sea ice, in an area
scientists call the ice front: 300,000 bearded seals, 75,000 ribbon
seals, 225,000 spotted seals, 250,000 Pacific walrus, 4400 bowhead
whales, and 15,000 belukhas. Living in the fast ice along the Bering
Sea coast, deep within the ice pack, are more than one million
ringed seals, the most ice-adapted of the seals.
Migration 165
In the spring, all of this animal life is poised to move north,
awaiting only the fracturing and melting of the ice. Until then,
they are confined to open water to the south. The ranges of the
bearded, spotted, and more solitary ribbon seals overlap toward
the edge of the ice front (a region 10 to 40 miles wide, depending
on prevailing winds and storm conditions in the north Pacific).
The walrus winters deeper inside the ice front, where there are
intact floes large enough to bear its great weight. (Walrus can
surface through as much as eight inches of sea ice, using their
massive heads as rams, and if they are trapped out on the ice by a
sudden freeze, they can walk to areas where they can break through
to feed, which arctic seals can't do.) The whales move throughout
the ice front during the winter months. As early as latě April,
when the ice north of Saint Lawrence Island is still solid, the bow-
heads may start pressing north, on the Russian side of Bering Sea.
If the ice is not heavy, they will be followed or accompanied by
herds of belukhas. As the ice begins to open up in latě April and
May, walrus will head north, followed a few weeks later by the
chree species of ice seal. Almost as soon as cracks and leads begin
to appear, they will be ušed for feeding by flocks of migrating
king and common eiders and oldsquaw ducks.
The surface of the great expanse of ice covering Bering Sea
in April and May is infinitely varied. Cracked, rafted up over itself,
and refrozen where it has briefly opened, it shows a dozen shades
of gray and a dazzling pattern of fractures. Or for tens of square
miles it may stretch unbroken beneath a layer of snow, a nearly con-
tinuous tone of white, with only the slight irregularities called ice
hummocks or the disc rows of rubble where two floes háve ground
against each other to create shadows. Then a lead half a mile
long and 20 feet wide will suddenly appear, revealing water dark
as ink, with the facing edges of the ice being mirror images of
each other. Most of the longer, broader cracks, it soon becomes
apparent, tend to occur along a southwest-northeast axis. Occa-
sionally these expand into areas of open water the size of small
lakes. By the middle of May, bowhead whales are moving through
166 ARCTIC DREAMS
these annually recurring lead systems, northeast through Bering
Strait and northward to Point Barrow. They leave behind a recog-
nizable trail, where their backs háve rubbed the underside of the
ice oř where they háve broken through in refrozen leads oř at
enlarged seal holes to breathe. (These trails are evidence of the
bowheaďs remarkable ability to find its way from one systém of
open leads to the next in heavy ice.) Because of their white chins
and belly markings, it is sometimes possible to spot bowheads
cruising just below the translucent ice. More often, one notices
herds of white belukha accompanied by their gray calves.
If the ice ahead is still solid (somehow they know), bowheads
will milí about together in the larger leads, cavorting in small
groups, breaching, and even spy-hopping. Mating also occurs at
this time. Walrus, bearded seal, and ringed seal may be swimming
in these lead systems at the samé time. And new ice in the area
will show holes with characteristically different shapes where each
species of animal has broken through to breathe.
Because the prevailing lead systems encourage marine mam-
mals to swim in certain directions and because they concentrate
animals in certain places if the ice ahead is too heavy, memorable
sightings occasionally occur in the ice south of Bering Strait. In
April 1981, one scientist, flying along a channel three-quarters of
a mile wide and about 15 miles long, counted 332 bowhead whales,
nearly a tenth of the Pacific population, before he was obliged
to turn back at the international dáte line (the Russian border at
sea).
After the bowheads háve passed north, along with a large
portion of the belukha whale and walrus populations and large
numbers of bearded, spotted, and ringed seals, Bering Sea becomes
the summer ground of several other species of whale. Gray whales
arrive from the North American and Korean coasts, and minke
whales and orcas arrive from the Pacific. Sei, humpbacks, and an
occasional Pacific right whale may come as far as Saint Lawrence
Island. (The samé waters rendered idyllic in May by the gentle
Migration 167
mating of bowhead whales seem ominous in June, when orcas are
hunting walrus and gray whales with chilling precision. The walrus
they sometimes abandon uneaten; and they may také no more than
the tongue of a gray whale they háve drowned. The presence of
diverse animals in such abundance here each year, however, testi-
fies to a set of equitable relationships, however ruthless they may
seem to us on occasion.)
The breadth of our still incomplete understanding of the
Bering Sea ecosystem is exemplified by a current confusion over
the identity of some of its larger parts. An unnamed whale, smaller
than the bowhead and with a fiat rather than a bowed head, and
with denser rib and jaw bones and a lighter-colored baleen, swims
in Bering Sea. Eskimos, who refer to the bowhead as ingitivak, call
this other whale ingutuk. Its existence has been known to scientists
since at least the time of whaling captain and historian Charles
Scammon in the 1870S, but it has nevěr been fully described. An-
other cetacean, even less known, is a large, brown, bowhead-type
whale that might be a color phase of Balaena mysticetus.
A spring visitor to the village of Nome on Seward Peninsula
would stand at the edge of this great seasonal upwelling of life in
Bering Sea. From Cape Nome east of the village he could watch
whales spouting and see walrus and seals passing, alcid birds diving
for fish, and ducks flying up and down the coastline. Salmon would
be coming up the Nome River. Near Safety Sound, where swans,
ducks, and geese would be feeding, spotted seals might be hauled
out on the beaches. Up on the tundra north of the village one
might be lucky enough to encounter a remarkable open-country
bird called a northern wheatear, a small thrush with as great a
claim to making a prodigious migratory journey as the arctic tern.
The wheatear arrives from Russia each spring with bluethroats,
yellow wagtails, and arctic warblers; certain individuals may háve
come from as far away as Saudi Arabia, perhaps even the northern
edge of the Sahara. They fly as far east in North America as the
Mackenzie River.
168 ARCTIC DREAMS
The northern wheatear is a reminder that all migration is not
strictly north and south, and, because it is a newcomer to North
America, that animals are experimenters, pushing at the bounds of
their familiar areas in response to changes in their environment.
Nothing is ever quite fixed for them. One afternoon a man in
Nome remarked that the bowhead migration through Bering Strait
was "latě this year." It was not really "latě" of course, but only
part of an arrangement that diífers slightly from year to year.
They are not on our schedules. Their appointments are not solely
with us.
AFTER the passage of fish and marine mammals through the Bering
Sea region, and the arrival of birds at their accustomed deltas and
sea rookeries, there is a third great migratory spectacle to behold
in the Arctic: the movement of caribou.
North American caribou are divided into three groups. The
woodland caribou, the largest of the three, lives in the taiga forests
of the subarctic and migrates over only relatively short distances.
Peary caribou, the smallest of the three, occupy parts of the
Greenland coast and northern islands in the Canadian Archipelago
and also move over relatively short distances each year. Barren-
ground caribou are the distant travelers. As many as 2 million of
them trek hundreds of miles each year between their winter range
near the tree line and well-defined calving grounds on the tundra.*
Caribou biologists recognize more than thirty different arctic
herds, each occupying a different region. The ones that migrate
the farthest each year are the Western and Central Arctic herds
in northern Alaska; the Porcupine herd, which straddles the U.S.-
Canada border; and, from west to east in Canada, the Bluenose,
Bathurst, Beverly, and Kaminuriak herds.
* None of the three caribou is a reindeer. Reindeer, a separate sub-
species of Rangifer tarandus, are the deer native to northern Europe
and Asia. Of the many that háve been brought to Alaska as domestic
stock, a significant number háve joined herds of caribou.
Migration 169
Scientists are uncertain what starts caribou on their northward
journey--knowledge that they háve stored enough fat to carry
them through, perhaps. They endure spring blizzards on their
journeys and cross ice-choked rivers with great determination and
a sure sense of bearing, but they also choose paths of least resistance
over the land, often following in each other's tracks through deep
snow. Pregnant cows are normally in the lead; mature bulls may
be as much as a month behind the cows, or nevěr arrive at the
calving grounds at all. By the end of their arduous journey the
females are thin and tattered-looking. Behind them, in places where
they háve had to cross rivers in a stage of breakup, there may be
the carcasses of hundreds of drowned and fatally injured animals.
Their calving grounds, writes biologist George Calef, appear
"bleak and inhospitable. Meltwater lies in pools on the frozen
ground, the land is often shrouded in fog, and the wind whistles
unceasingly among the stunted plants and bare rocks." The advan-
tages of these dismal regions, however, are several. The number
of predators is low, wolves having dropped away from the herds
at more suitable locations for denning to the south. Food plants
are plentiful. And these grounds either offer better protection from
spring snowstorms or experience fewer storms overall than adja-
cent regions.
Most calves are born within a few days of each other, and
calving occurs at least a month before swarms of emergent mos-
quitoes, blackflies, warble flies, and botflies embark on a harassment
of the caribou that seems merciless to a human observer. If one
were to think of events that typify arctic life--the surge of energy
one feels with daily gains of ten or fifteen minutes of sunlight
in the spring, or waking up one morning to find the oceán frozen--
one would also include that feeling of reliéf that descends over a
caribou herd when a wind comes up and puts hordes of weak-
flying mosquitoes to the ground.
After calving, cows and their offspring join immature animals,
barren cows, and the bulls in "postcalving" aggregations of 75,000
or more animals, their numbers stretching from horizon to horizon.
Distribution of major caribou herds in the North American Arctic.
They trek slowly south, breaking up into smaller herds. The first
fall storms catch them in open country, and in the cold, snowy air
these "gray shepherds of the tundra," as the Alaskan poet John
Haines calls them, "pass like islands of smoke." They také shelter
in the short timber of the taiga for the winter.
After the herds háve gone, the calving grounds can seem like
the most deserted places on earth, even if you can sense strongly
that the caribou will be back next year. When they do return,
hardly anything will háve changed. A pile of caribou droppings
may také thirty years to remineralize on the calving grounds. The
carcass of a wolf-killed caribou may lie undisturbed for three or
four years. Time pools in the stillness here and then dissipates.
The country is emptied of movement.
The coming and going of the animals during the short summer
gives the Arctic a unique rhythmic shape, but it is to be felt only
in certain places. Mostly, summer and winter, the whole land is
still. The arctic explorer George De Long called it "a glorious
country to learn patience in." Time here, like light, is a passing
172 ARCTIC DREAMS
animal. Time hovers above the tundra like the rough-legged hawk,
oř collapses altogether like a bird keeled over with a heart attack,
leaving the stillness we call death. In the thin film of moisture that
coats a bit of moss on a tundra stone, you can find, with a strong
magnifying glass, a world of movement buried within the larger
suspended world: ageless pinpoints of life called water bears mi-
grate over the wet plains and canyons of jade-green vegetation.
But even here time is on the verge of collapse. The moisture freezes
in winter. Or a summer wind may carry the water bear off and
drop it among bare stones. Deprived of moisture, it shrivels slowly
into a desiccated granule. It can endure like this for thirty or fořty
years. It waits for its time to come again.
Long, unpunctuated hours pass for all creatures in the Arctic.
No wild frenzy of feeding distinguishes the short summer. But for
the sudden movements of charging wolves and bolting caribou, the
gambols of muskox calves, the scamper of an arctic fox, the swoop
of a jaeger, the Arctic is a long, unbroken bow of time. Twilight
lingers. There are no summer thunderstorms with bolts of light-
ning. The ice floes, the caribou, the muskoxen, all drift. To lie on
your back somewhere on the light-drowned tundra of an Ellesmere
Island valley is to feel that the ice ages might háve ended but a
few days ago. Without the holler of contemporary life, that con-
stant disturbance, it is possible to feel the slope of time, how very
far from Mesopotamia we háve come. We move at such a fast clip
now. We draw up geological charts at a snap, showing the possi-
bilities for oil in Tertiary rocks in the Sverdrup Basin beneath
Ellesmere's tundra. We delineate the life history of the ground
squirrel. We list the butterflies: the sulphurs, the arctics, a copper,
a blue, the lesser fritillaries. At a snap. We enumerate the plants.
We name everything. Then we fold the charts and the catalogs, as
if, except for a stray fact or two, we were doně with a competent
description. But the land is not a painting; the image cannot be
completed this way.
Lying fiat on your back on Ellesmere Island on rolling tundra
Migration 173
without animals, without human trace, you can feel the silence
stretching all the way to Asia. The winter face of a muskox, its
unperturbed eye glistening in a halo of snow-crusted hair, looks
at you over a cataract of time, an image that has endured through
all the pulsations of ice.
You can sit for a long time with the history of man like a
stone in your hand. The stillness, the pure light, encourage it.
FOR years scientists háve been aware of difFerent rhythms of life
in the Arctic, though they are not particularly arctic rhythms.
Tundra soil cores examined by fossil-pollen experts háve shown
that changes in the composition of arctic plant communities háve
occurred periodically with a change in climate. Borings in the
Greenland ice cap háve revealed rhythmic fluctuations in average
temperature over the centuries. A careful examination of arctic
refuse middens by archaeologists, paleobotanists, and paleozoolo-
gists has revealed a succession of differently equipped early human
cultures, whose entries into the Arctic are also related to periods
of climatic change. The animal bones found in their camps confirm
parallel fluctuations in the populations of the animals they hunted.
A number of scientists feel all this information should mesh,
that in some way the rhythms of human migration, climatic change,
and animal population cycles should be interrelated. With a pre-
cise enough mathematics even the "nine-year lynx-snowshoe hare
cycle" and the "seventy-year caribou cycle" should fit neatly into
a basic pattern. Few háve sought to rigorously integrate this mate-
riál, and many don't believe the relationships even exist, except in
a generál way. Since the 1930S, however, the Danish scientist
Christian Vibe has taken the possibility very seriously, and no other
body of work has been so clearly linked with the attempt to find
a basic period of arctic cycling, a tantalizing bit of information of
enormous interest to biologists, historians, and arctic developers.
Climatic change--the advance and retreat of glacial ice in the
Northern Hemisphere--is the hallmark of the Pleistocene, the
174 ARCTIC DREAMS
epoch of man's emergence.* Vibe, keeping this in mind, and be-
lieving whatever he learned could be applied to understanding the
climatic future of Europe and America, posed certain questions for
himself. Why, he asked, were seals scarce at Ammassalik on the
east coast of Greenland at the turn of the century, while at the
samé time they were plentiful along Greenlanďs southwest coast?
Why did the caribou population of western Greenland crash sud-
denly at the end of both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?
And what accounted for the periodic northward movements of
Atlantic herring and cod in the North Atlantic?
Vibe scrutinized the records of the Royal Greenland Trading
Company, which took in sealskins and fox skins, narwhal ivory,
and other indicators, and by comparing these records with annual
records of sea-ice movement and annual rainfall and snowfall, Vibe
thought he could discern patterns. He checked his findings, to
corroborate them further, by going over 232 years of fur-trading
records from the Hudson's Bay Company in Canada, and by exam-
ining records kept by wool growers in southwest Greenland.
The first pattern to emerge for Vibe was a cycle of sea-ice
formation and movement that lasted about 150 years, which records
from arctic ships of exploration seemed to support. Vibe regarded
as a key insight in this early work the fact that fluctuations in the
arctic climate that were responsible for shifts of land and sea ani-
mals north and south over prolonged periods were tied to a lunar
cycle of 18.6 years (the time it takés the moon to intersect the
earths orbit around the sun again at the samé spot). Because the
length of this lunar cycle is not a whole number, the maximum
and minimum effect it has on the earth's tides (and therefore on
ice formation and weather) can oceur at different seasons of the
* Glacial periods are relatively rare in the earth's history. Scientists
háve discovered only four in the last 600 million years, the last of which
is still íjoing on. The Holocene, as far as we know, is only an inter-
glacial stage, a reprieve, between the retreat of the Wisconsin ice (or
Wiinn ice in Europe) and the next glacial advance.
Migration 175
year, in successive 18.6-year periods. This led Vibe to posit a pri-
máry period of 698 years for the Arctic's weather pattern, with
secondary periods of 116.3 years, and what Vibe calls a basic "true
ecological eyeling period" of 11.6 years.
Depending upon your point of view, either Vibe's insights
are ingenious and his mathematics elegant, or his systém is inipos-
sibly broad and complicated and of little help in understanding
arctic change. His inquiry might be considered an entirely esoteric
and rarefied pursuit, in fact, if it were not for two things. In the
Arctic one is constantly aware of sharp oscillarion. It is as familiar
a pattern of human thought and animal movement to the arctic
resident as the pattern of four seasons is to a dweller in the Tem-
perate Zone. In špite of the many manifestations of this rhythm,
and the effect of sharp oscillation not only on resident animals but,
probably, too, on the cultures that matured in these regions, Vibe's
remains the only serious attempt at a deseription. Second, insofar
as Vibe's theories explain oscillation in temperate-zone climate
patterns or indicate harbingers of another ice age, they háve a
significant bearing on our developing patterns of commerce and
economics, especially in the Arctic.
It is easy to say that the Arctic is characterized by sharp
oscillation, just as it is to say that the airs of a temperate-zone
spring are felicitous, but it is difHcult to say precisely why. The
basal annual rhythm of the North is winter/summer. The weeks
during breakup and freeze-up are short, frequently perilous times,
when strategies employed by both animals and human hunters to
secure food are momentarily disrupted. The long winter and short
summer constitute a temporal pattern around which life carefully
arranges itself. Preparations for winter show up clearly everywhere
in the land. The short-tailed weasel grows its white eoat and the
collared lemming its long snow claws. Tundra rodents shift from
their night-active summer pattern to a day-active winter pattern,
with but a few days of irregular rhythm in between. The arctic
fox lineš lemmings up in neat rows in its winter caches.
A second pattern complements this oscillation--long stillnesses
176 ARCTIC DREAMS
broken by sudden movement. The river you háve been traveling
over by dogsled every week for eight months, and háve come to
think of as a solid piece of the earth, you wake one day to find a
heaving jumble of ice. The spring silence is broken by pistol re-
ports of cracking on the river, and then the sound of breaking
branches and the whining pop of a falling tree as the careening
blocks of ice gouge the riverbanks. A related but far eerier phe-
nomenon occurs in the coastal ice. Suddenly in the middle of
winter and without warning a huge piece of sea ice surges hun-
dreds of feet inland, like something alive. The Eskimo call it ivu*
The silenr arrival of caribou in an otherwise empty landscape is
another example. The long wait at a seal hole for prey to surface.
Waiting for a lead to ciose. The Eskimo háve a word for this kind
of long waiting, prepared for a sudden event: quinuituq. Deep
patience.
As I moved through the Arctic I thought often about a rhythm
indigenous to this land, not one imposed on it. The imposed view,
however innocent, always obscures. The evidence that there is a
dilferent rhythm of life here seemed inescapably a part of the
expression of the animals I encountered, though I cannot say pre-
cisely why. A coherent sense of the pervasiveness of such a rhythm
is elusive.
The indigenous rhythm, or rhythms, of arctic life is important
to discern for more than merely academie reasons. To understand
why a region is different, to show an initial deference toward its
mysteries, is to guard against a kind of provincialism that vitiates
the imagination, that stifles the capacity to envision what is different.
Another reason to wonder which rhythms are innate, and
what they might be, is related as well to the survival of the capacity
to imagine beyond the familiar. We háve long regarded animals as
* Eskiino deseriptions of this phenomenon were not taken seriously
until 1982, when archaeologists working at Utqiagvik, a prehistorie
village site near Barrow, Alaska, discovered a familv of five people that
had been crushed to death in such an incident.
Migration 177
a kind of machinery, and the landscapes they move through as
backdrops, as paintings. In recent years this antiquated view has
begun to change. Animals are understood as mysterious, within the
context of sophisticated Western learning that takés into account
such things as biochemistry and genetics. They are changeable, not
fixed, entities, predictable in their behavior only to a certain extent.
The world of variables they are alert to is astonishingly complex,
and their responses are sometimes highly sophisticated. The closer
biologists look, the more the individual animal, like the individual
human being, seems a reflection of that organization of energy
that quantum mechanics predicts for the particles that compose an
atom.
The animal's environment, the background against which we
see it, can be rendered as something like the animal itself--pardy
unchartable. And to try to understand the animal apart from its
background, except as an imaginative exercise, is to risk the col-
lapse of both. To be what they are they require each other.
Spatial perception and the nature of movement, the shape and
direction something takés in time, are topics that háve been cogently
addressed by people like Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schródinger,
Paul Dirac, and David Bohm, all writing about subatomic phe-
nomena. I believe that similar thoughts, potentially as beautiful in
their complexity, arise with a consideration of how animals move
in their landscapes--the path of a raven directly up a valley, the
meander of grazing caribou, the winter movements of a single
bear over the sea ice. We hardly know what these movements are
in response to; we choose the dimensions of space and the dura-
tions of time we think appropriate to deseribe them, but we háve
no assurance that these are relevant. To watch a gyrfalcon and
a snowy owl pass each other in the samé sky is to wonder how the
life of the one affects the other. To sit on a hillside and watch
the slow intermingling of two herds of muskoxen feeding in a
sedge meadow and to try to discern the logic of it is to grapple
with uncertainty. To watch a flock of snow geese roli ofT a head-
wind together is to wonder where one animal begins and another
i 7
8 ARCTIC DREAMS
ends. Animals confound us not because they are deceptively simple
but because they are finally inseparable from the complexities of
life. It is precisely these subtleties of fact and conception that com-
prise particle physics, which passes for the natural philosophy of
our age. Animals move more slowly than beta particles, and through
a space bewildering larger than that encompassed by a cloud of
electrons, but they urge us, if we allow them, toward a considera-
tion of the samé questions about the fundamental nature of life,
about the relationships that bind forms of energy into recognizable
patterns.
IN trying to discover the routě and the time of man's arrival in the
New World, science has had little to work with but bits of char-
coal and an occasional broken tool or weapon retrieved from
ancient fires and hunting sites. There is little disagreement about
how man came to North America--people migrated across a broad,
dry plain called Beringia from Asia during several different periods
in the latě Pleistocene. But evidence that would confirm man's
arrival at some time earlier than 35,000 years ago, or even 20,000
years ago, is in dispute. The certain evidence is that people háve
been living in North America for at least 14,000 years.
Assuming that man arrived in North America on foot instead
of by boat, and gradually at that, he crossed from Asia either
sometime before 35,000 years ago, when the Bering land bridge
was open, or not until much later, about 25,000 to 23,000 years
ago. (The Bering land bridge was present from about 25,000 years
ago until about 11,000 years ago, but it was only during the period
from 25,000 to 23,000 years ago that man could háve both crossed
from Asia and traveled south to the centrál plains of North
America. After that the Wisconsin Ice Age climaxed; the eastern
and western North American ice sheets met, closing off the way
south and separating the American prairie from the Arctic. Western
Alaska remained free of ice during this period, and no doubt peo-
ple continued to live farther east in Beringia until Bering Sea rose
Migration 179
with meltwater from the ice sheets, flooding the land bridge and
separating Asia and North America.)
Many archaeologists believe man came to North America in
two waves. The first (the one that might háve crossed 25,000 to
23,000 years ago, or earlier) brought with it flaked stone and bone
tools comparable to Neanderthal man's Mousterian tools.* The
second wave came about 13,000 years later and brought with it a
more advanced tool tradition, comparable to the Aurignacian tools
of Cro-Magnon man.t Both immigrant groups were big-game
hunting cultures, subsisting on animals like large-horned bison,
ground sloth, and woolly mammoth.
How the Arctic itself, the land east and north of the land
bridge, became inhabited is unknown. The early hunting cultures
in Alaska were succeeded about 5000 years ago by what some
archaeologists regard as a less robust and impressive cultural tradi-
tion, one distinguished only by its very finely worked small tools.
These microblade cultures were very likely the first human cultures
to move into the North American Arctic.
Archaeologists know of two periods in the recent past when
the climate warmed enough in the Arctic to allow human beings
in skin boats easy summer passage through the islands of the Cana-
dian Archipelago. These two "climatic optimums" occurred be-
tween about 3500 and 4500 years ago and again about 1100 to 900
years ago, and people migrated into the high Arctic on both
occasions.
Louis Giddings, an archaeologist with a gift for locating im-
portant prehistorie sites, discovered cultural sequences at Onion
* The Mousterian tradition, named for tools discovered near Le
Moustier in the Dordogne in France, marks the high point of Neander-
thal culture in the Middle Paleolithic, 40,000 to 100,000 years ago. See
chart, Appendix III.
t The Aurignacian was one of several traditions that emerged in the
upper Paleolithic in western Europe between ten and fořty thousand
years ago, when Cro-Magnon people displaced the Neanderthal culture.
i8o ARCTIC DREAMS
Portage on the Kobuk River in Alaska and at Cape Krusenstern,
Alaska, that provided basic chronologies for Arctic cultural phases.
With Giddings's findings and those of archaeologists working in
northern Canada and in Greenland, it has become possible in recent
years to organize a relatively coherent picture of early human
occupation of the North American Arctic.
Before setting this forth, I should make two points. First,
human beings migrating into this region were making a very bold
move. Survival here required skills and technologies unknown to
these hunters, not the least of which were qualities of a psycho-
logical nátuře. Second, the arctic migrations represent movements
of very smáli numbers of people. It is not out of the question to
consider that all the microblade sites archaeologists háve discov-
ered so far from western Canada to northern Greenland were
created by fewer than 500 people. The Arctic offered man scant
resources, which were widely scattered and sometimes difficult to
retrieve. Even at the height of their success during the Thule cul-
tural phase, about A.D. I 000, the number of arctic residents from
Point Barrow to Peary Land may háve been no more than 5000.
The first people to cross into North America were probably
paleo-Indians, people who settled in the interior of Alaska and
spread south. The geographical point of origin of paleo-Eskimos,
people who remained in the Arctic, is unknown, but archaeologists
generally favor the Bering Sea region and eastern Siberia. These
arctic mongoloids may or may not háve been the ancestors of
modern Eskimos; in any čase, paleo-Eskimos were in arctic Alaska
by about 5000 years ago, having perhaps crossed the open water
of Bering Strait in skin boats. It was their culture that was typified
by minutely flaked chert and obsidian cutting tools about one inch
long and one-quarter inch wide. This culture and its variations are
referred to as the Arctic Small Tool tradition (ASTt).
ASTt campsites háve been found as far east as Peary Land in
northern Greenland (where the culture is called Independence I,
after a site on Independence Fiord) and more or less continuously
across the American and Canadian Arctic. Many of these sites
Migration 181
appear to háve been inhabited for only a single night or, at most,
for a couple of weeks before the people moved on. These people
hunted muskoxen, polar bear, arctic fox, arctic hare, and sea ducks,
and the tools they left behind suggest theirs was a harsh and
meager life. A Canadian archaeologist named Robert McGhee has
written that ASTt peoples migrated into "the coldest, darkest and
most barren regions ever inhabited by man." He speculates that
during the winters when they were hard-pressed for food, these
people "may háve almost hibernated in their unlit and unheated
dwellings." One looks today upon the remains of their dwellings--
a fox-bone awl, a quartz arrowhead, the ring of stones that held
down their skin tents--with profound respect.
With a gradual cooling, the Arctic Oceán- ice front came
farther south, and ASTt peoples apparently retreated. The next
culture to make its presence known was another ASTt culture
called Pre-Dorset, which appeared about 3500 years ago. This was
a more communal, more technologically advanced people. They
carved soapstone bowls in which they burned oil rendered from
marine mammal blubber for heat and light, and they fashioned
small wood sleds on which to pull their belongings. (Many Pre-
Dorset campsites háve been found at caribou river crossings and
at fish-trapping locations that háve been ušed by subsequent cul-
tures well into modern times.)
Pre-Dorset peoples seem to háve been concentrated in a core
area around Foxe Basin, a region of land and sea mammal abun-
dance. During periods when the climate ameliorated, they may
háve migrated out to other regions as well. The remnants of many
different technologies háve been uncovered at Pre-Dorset sites. (A
technology is an assemblage of tools, utensils, weapons, and other
implements designed for a specific task, such as the preparation of
skins for clothing or caribou hunting.) The materials for construc-
tion and manufacture háve included stone, bone, skin, ivory, antler,
and, very rarely, wood. Some of the tools are highly specialized,
designed, for example, for use in hunting a certain animal only in
a specific season or under specific circumstances--to také a seal in
182 ARCTIC DREAMS
open water or, alternately, at its winter aglu. About 2800 years
ago, the Pre-Dorset sites gave way to evidence of a new culture
called Dorset.
Many archaeologists speculate that the Dorset culture grew
out of various elements of Pre-Dorset culture. Perhaps, too, there
was an infusion of ideas and technologies from a contemporaneous
culture in Greenland called Independence II; or from Alaskan cul-
tures; or from archaic Indián cultures living to the south. However
they arose, Dorset people seem to háve appeared first in the Foxe
Basin region of northern Canada. They had skin boats, small sleds,
and better sea-hunting equipment than their forebears, and they
built houses of snow.
Dorset carving is by far the most developed art in Eskimo
prehistory. (The artwork of Okvik and Ipiutak culture in the
Bering Sea area, contemporaneous with Dorset artwork, is com-
parable.) And most archaeologists agree that there is something
unique about it. In contrast to other cultures, Dorset people deco-
rated very few utilitarian objects, and single pieces of artwork, all
carvings, are rather rare. The generál feeling is that the carvings
were connected with shamanistic magie, and many think there is
something decidedly dark about them. These caribou antler, bone,
and walrus ivory carvings are of single animals, most often polar
bears; of human figures and human/ animal figures; and of human
faces in chaotic tableaux. The representations are both realistic and
stylized, and most of the carvings are of inconspicuous size.
The eye for detail is so sharp and the execution so deft that
you can readily telí a carving of a common loon from one of a
red-throated loon. The style, writes Canadian artist and eritic
George Swinton, "exudes intensity and power . . . despite its re-
markable subtlety and delicacy." The human faces in some of the
carvings that seem tortured and psychotic to some viewers, Swinton
compares stylistically with German Expressionism, saying that
their form "emphasizes content, vigour, and involvement (as op-
posed to style, elegance, and detachment)." The primitive quality
in them, in other words, is more brutal than fetching.
Migration 183
Perhaps too much has been made of this Dorset "darkness";
but the observation that Dorset art is unsettling, while the art that
preceded it and followed it is not, is common among archaeolo-
gists dealing with this period. Giddings deseribes the Dorset-like
art of the Ipiutak to the west, in Alaska, as "grotesque and bizarre"
and the Old Bering Sea culture art that followed as "balanced
and pleasing, as though the artists led a secure--even serene--
existence." The circumstances under which these carvings are
found sometimes augment feelings of apprehension. Froelich
Rainey, excavating an Ipiutak burial site at Point Hope, Alaska,
found a small carved caribou hoof protruding on a shaft from the
pelvic region of a human skeleton. He cleared more dirt away to
find that this long ivory shaft penetrated the entire vertebral
column and emerged in the skuli, where it curved forward into the
space where the mouth would háve been. It terminated in a minia-
tuře human hand, opened in supplication.
In Jury 1979, a young archaeologist working at a Dorset site
in the high Arctic uncovered a caribou scapula that left him shaken.
Both surfaces of this fiat bone were incised with scores of small
human faces with gaping mouths. He remembers sitting with the
scapula in his hands on a cool and overcast morning and dumbly
contemplating the agonized expressions. "I was frightened out of
my wits by it," he told me. Then he handed me his notes for that
day and said, "Which is why the entry is so mundane." He got up
twice in the night to unpack the piece and look at it, he was so
disturbed.
When I háve held these objects in my hand, I háve marveled
most at the skill of the carvers, and found them more provocative
than dark.
T H E Dorset came into their ascendancy during a period of cooling
in the Arctic. During the warming trend that followed, the climatic
optimum of A.D. 900-1100, they were displaced by a quite different
culture called Thule (pron. too' lě). Archaeologists don't know
whether the Dorset were absorbed by the Thule or forcibly driven
i 8 4 ARCTIC DREAMS
east and south out of the Foxe Basin area. (Remnant bands of
Dorset survived in the fastness of northern Quebec and Labrador
until about A.D. 1400.)
The Thule, a vigorous, highly skilled, whale-hunting culture
originating in the region of Bering Strait, grew out of Old Bering
Sea culture. Robert McGhee has written that Old Bering Sea people
had a hunting technology "that gave them an abundant and secure
economy [and] they developed a way of life that was probably as
rich as any other in the nonagricultural and nonindustrial world."
Old Bering Sea culture was succeeded by a richer culture
around Saint Lawrence Island, called Punuk. Punuk people may
háve moved north about A.D. 900, to hunt whales and other sea
mammals along the northwest coast of Alaska during the warming
trend. There they either mingled with, or passed right over, a
culture called Birnirk. A Punuk or Birnirk-like group then con-
tinued east across the Beaufort Sea in large skin boats, or umiaks,
and established themselves in northern Canada as the Thule.
The Thule, directly ancestral to modern Eskimos, moved east
very quickly. They may háve traveled the 2600 miles from Point
Barrow to Peary Land, in fact, in only two or three generations.
With the climate warming up, bowhead whale populations from
the western and eastern Arctic likely met in Parry Channel
(M'Clure Strait, Viscount Melville Sound, Barrow Strait, and
Lancaster Sound); and herds of narwhals and belukhas and walrus
must háve penetrated far north into the Canadian Archipelago as
well. In the west, spotted and ribbon seals would háve wintered
and summered farther to the north, the samé being true for gray,
harp, and hooded seals in the eastern Arctic. The whole ecosystem
shifted north. The sea ice and the scarcity of animals in certain
seasons that had once discouraged east-west travel were no longer
impediments. (The increase in average annual temperature during
the climatic optimum was not much more than 3T, but the effects
were dramatic. The tree line in North America, for example,
shifted north about 60 miles.)
The Thule were superb hunters. They possessed an elaboráte
Migration 185
marine-mammal hunting technology, which they ušed from the
umiak in pursuit of whales and walrus, on the sea ice, and from
the kayak.* They developed the dog-drawn sled and made so-
phisticated refinements in the harpoon technology of the Dorset.
Their winter homes were warm, semisubterranean shelters with
lower walls and floors of stone and upper walls and roofs of turf
over a skin covering, which was supported by whale ribs and
jawbones.
The Thule stand out as a highly successful people. They
compare well in spirit, though not in fact, with the Magdalenian
caribou-hunting culture of Europe during the finál phase of the
Upper Paleolithic. The Magdalenian period is characterized by an
apotheosis in cave painting (at Altamira and Lascaux, for example)
and a lavish and skillful decoration of hunting weapons and other,
utilitarian objects, including beautifully carved, fine-eyed bone
needles. Magdalenian hunters lived almost 10,000 years before the
Thule; but they, too, flourished during a climatic optimum. This
advantage, together with a knowledge of their own capacity to
succeed as a culture, seems to háve infused them with vigorous
confidence. Their caribou-hunting way of life, with its refined
artistic overtones, was perfectly suited to the landscape they found
themselves in.
The samé sophisticated kind of hunting culture continued to
make ecological sense in the Far North long after farming and
pastorál cultures supplanted hunting cultures in Europe during the
Neolithic. The Paleolithic-Mesolithic-Neolithic sequence of Eu-
rope, thought to be a natural and even necessary progression for
mankind, is a model that applies poorly in a land of permafrost and
* The umiak, a Thule invention, is an open, walrus- or bearded seal-skin
boat, about 30 feet long, sometimes fitted with a square sail and a single,
stepped mast. On long journeys it was commonly rowed by women,
while the men followed in shorter, lower, decked-over, single-seat, and
more seaworthy kayaks, free to hunt. For this reason the boat is also
called "a women's boat."
184 ARCTIC DREAMS
east and south out of the Foxe Basin area. (Remnant bands of
Dorset survived in the fastness of northern Quebec and Labrador
until about A.D. 1400.)
The Thule, a vigorous, highly skilled, whale-hunting culture
originating in the region of Bering Strait, grew out of Old Bering
Sea culture. Robert McGhee has wntten that Old Bering Sea people
had a hunting technology "that gave them an abundant and secure
economy [and] they developed a way of life that was probably as
rich as any other in the nonagricultural and nonindustrial world."
Old Bering Sea culture was succeeded by a richer culture
around Saint Lawrence Island, called Punuk. Punuk people may
háve moved north about A.D. 900, to hunt whales and other sea
mammals along the northwest coast of Alaska during the warming
trend. There they either mingled with, or passed right over, a
culture called Birnirk. A Punuk or Birnirk-like group then con-
tinued east across the Beaufort Sea in large skin boats, or umiaks,
and established themselves in northern Canada as the Thule.
The Thule, directly ancestral to modern Eskimos, moved east
very quickly. They may háve traveled the 2600 miles from Point
Barrow to Peary Land, in fact, in only two or three generations.
With the climate warming up, bowhead whale populations from
the western and eastern Arctic likely met in Parry Channel
(JVTClure Strait, Viscount Melville Sound, Barrow Strait, and
Lancaster Sound); and herds of narwhals and belukhas and walrus
must háve penetrated far north into the Canadian Archipelago as
well. In the west, spotted and ribbon seals would háve wintered
and summered farther to the north, the samé being true for gray,
harp, and hooded seals in the eastern Arctic. The whole ecosystem
shifted north. The sea ice and the scarcity of animals in certain
seasons that had once discouraged east-west travel were no longer
impediments. (The increase in average annual temperature during
the climatic optimum was not much more than 3 °F, but the effects
were dramatic. The tree line in North America, for example,
shifted north about 60 miles.)
The Thule were superb hunters. They possessed an elaboráte
Migration 185
marine-mammal hunting technology, which they ušed from the
umiak in pursuit of whales and walrus, on the sea ice, and from
the kayak.* They developed the dog-drawn sled and made so-
phisticated refinements in the harpoon technology of the Dorset.
Their winter homes were warm, semisubterranean shelters with
lower walls and floors of stone and upper walls and roofs of turf
over a skin covering, which was supported by whale ribs and
jawbones.
The Thule stand out as a highly successful people. They
compare well in spirit, though not in fact, with the Magdalenian
caribou-hunting culture of Europe during the finál phase of the
Upper Paleolithic. The Magdalenian period is characterized by an
apotheosis in cave painting (at Altamira and Lascaux, for example)
and a lavish and skillful decoration of hunting weapons and other,
utilitarian objects, including beautifully carved, fine-eyed bone
needles. Magdalenian hunters lived almost 10,000 years before the
Thule; but they, too, flourished during a climatic optimum. This
advantage, together with a knowledge of their own capacity to
succeed as a culture, seems to háve infused them with vigorous
confidence. Their caribou-hunting way of life, with its refined
artistic overtones, was perfectly suited to the landscape they found
themselves in.
The samé sophisticated kind of hunting culture continued to
make ecological sense in the Far North long after farming and
pastorál cultures supplanted hunting cultures in Europe during the
Neolithic. The Paleolithic-Mesolithic-Neolithic sequence of Eu-
rope, thought to be a natural and even necessary progression for
mankind, is a model that applies poorly in a land of permafrost and
* The umiak, a Thule invention, is an open, walrus- or bearded seal-skin
boat, about 30 feet long, sometimes fitted with a square sail and a single,
stepped mast. On long journeys it was commonly rowed by women,
while the men followed in shorter, lower, decked-over, single-seat, and
more seaworthy kayaks, free to hunt. For this reason the boat is also
called "a women's boat."
i86 ARCTIC DREAMS
long winters. Farmers and herdsmen did not move into the Arctic
for good reason. (The Samis, oř Lapps, of northern Scandinavia
and the Kola Peninsula are the only far northern people to háve
voluntarily turned to a life of seminomadic herding.)
The climatic optimum that brought the Thule so swiftly to
northern Greenland, and which brought the Norse to southern
Greenland at the samé time, ended about A.D. IIOO. The cooling
trend that followed drove the Thule out of the high Arctic (and
proved disastrous for the Norse, who were dependent in part on
agriculture to sustain themselves and could not adapt). The Thule
culture fragmented into several distinct traditions. These cultures
--Polar Eskimo living around Inglefield Fiord in Greenland, Cen-
tral Eskimo living on Baffin Island, Caribou Eskimo living on the
mainland to the west of Southampton Island--were the tribes that
met the second wave of European explorers (after the Norse) in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The cooling trend that culminated in the Little Ice Age of
1650-1850 changed both the type and the numbers of animals
living in the Arctic. As a consequence, the hunting tradition the
Eskimos inherited from the Thule, its tools and methods, had to
be altered or abandoned in order for the different, isolated groups
to survive. They met the first European explorers, therefore, dur-
ing a transitional period between a Thule phase and a more dis-
tinctly Eskimo phase in their culture.
The latter transition--archaeologists regard the Thule as di-
rectly ancestral to modem Eskimos--is an important one. The
tendency of almost all Europeans was to regard the Eskimos they
met as brutish people living unrefined lives. No sense of transition
between high and low phases in a culture, no sense of environ-
mental necessity, no sense, even, that the various Eskimo cultures
were different, informed these early observations. And these early
judgments fixed an image of the Eskimo people as a backward race
in the European imagination. Had the second, decisive wave of
European culture met Thule people as the Norse had, instead of
the historie Eskimo, they might háve taken a different view of their
Migration 187
culture. (Though, to judge from Cortés's response to the Aztecs,
it is unlikely.)
When archaeologists sketch the broad outline of Arctic pre-
history, they are inclined to make comparisons among the various
cultural phases, based in part on the wealth of the respective mate-
riál cultures, and to stress that the transitions between them oc-
curred at different times in different places. Thus, it might háve
been remnants of the earlier Dorset that the first Europeans met
on the coast of Labrador, in southern Greenland, and on the Ungava
Peninsula, not post-Thule Eskimos. And so, too, the ASTt cultures
are called "impoverished" compared with the later Thule, or with
the Siberian hunting cultures that preceded them into North
America. Western society on its own has long held in low esteem
human cultures that matured outside the Temperate Zone, a con-
fusion, in large part, about what the landscapes these people lived
in demanded of them.
There is a tendency among archaeologists and many modern
arctic observers to look back wistfully to the period of Thule cul-
ture, to regard it as not only more highly achieved than that of
the smaller groups of more nomadic historie Eskimo but also more
coherent. They were the last Arctic culture to close their doors
before Western man arrived. Because of this, and the obvious
comparison with high cultures of the European Paleolithic, there
is a certain allure about them. From their tools and homes comes
a substantive feeling of energy, of passion and enthusiasm. A stu-
dent working at a Thule site on Ellesmere Island told me about a
harpoon head she had found. "All they had to do with it was catch
walrus. But they made it beautiful," she said.
The admiration one feels kneeling over the pathetic remains
of an early ASTt campsite can be very deep. What tenacity. What
courage. Another sort of feeling comes over one at a Thule site.
One misses any sense of remoteness or separation and feels instead
profound respect. A powerful, dignified people, one imagines. The
delicate and robust tools, as the student said, are beautiful. Peter
Schledermann, who has excavated prehistorie sites across most of
Distribution of Eskimo tribes in North America and Greenland in
historie times.
the Canadian Arctic, said to me one evening over dinner in Calgary,
"Everything we are is in our spirit. In archaeology, you are exam-
ining the long line of what we are."
WE owe much of our understanding of the distinctions among the
groups of historie Eskimo to a handful of exceptional ethnogra-
phers who lived for various periods of time with them--Knud
Rasmussen, Kaj Birket-Smith, Diamond Jenness, Franz Boas, and
Hans Steensby. Beginning in the West, these groups include the
North Slope Eskimo, who perhaps retained more of their Thule
heritage than the others, and who include an inland-dwelling com-
ponent called the Nunamiut; the Mackenzie Eskimo, dwelling near
the delta of the Mackenzie River; the Copper Eskimo, who in-
habited Victoria Island and the Coronation Gulf area and traveled
to the Investigator cache at Mercy Bay, and were the last of the
historie groups to be discovered; the Central Eskimo of Baffin Is-
land and Melville and Boothia peninsulas; the Caribou Eskimo, who
dwelled on the tundra northwest of Hudson Bay; and the Polar
190 ARCTIC DREAMS
Eskimo, the most isolated of the groups, in northwest Greenland.
(This last small group served many Arctic expeditions, including
those of Robert Peary and Frederick Cook. In 1949 their centrál
settlement, Uummannaq, was moved 60 miles farther north by the
Danish government to permit construction of a strategie NATO
air base.)
Among the Central Eskimo were other, smaller, distinct tradi-
tions, including the Netsilik, known for their soapstone carvings;
the Igloolik, the people the British whalers met at Ponďs Bay; and
the Sadlermiut of Southampton Island, all of whom died in an
epidemie in 1900 after a visit by a Scottish whaler, the Active.
What shreds of information exist suggest that the Sadlermiut re-
tained, perhaps, a significant amount of Dorset culture within their
own tradition. Aivilik Eskimo, related to Caribou Eskimo people,
now live on Southampton Island.
In modern times, of course, tribes like the Sadlermiut still dis-
appear with regularity in different parts of the world, or they are
absorbed into Western culture in a way that obscures or even
obliterates their intellectual and materiál traditions. These losses
seem tragic and consequential, and they are frustrating because
they sometimes oceur for reasons of indifference or greed. They
are not like the loss of the Thule. The Thule, one can feel, are
extinct on natural grounds, an event arbitrated by the landscape.
The eclipse of the Sadlermiut, however, seems to diminish us, be-
cause we are their contemporaries, because we claim to be en-
lightened about the intrinsic worth of life, and because we esteem
compassion. The Sadlermiut were a way to understand Southamp-
ton Island. A reflection on that harsh landscape and the evidence
of their success there leads to the conclusion that we lost some
wisdom about life with their passing. We cannot anymore piek up
their things and ask, "Why did you make this?" or "What is this
for?," and hope to hear the answer that would come in any čase
only once in a thousand times, the answer that reveals what it
means. The answer that opens the timeless interior of the human
Migration 191
mind, that collapses centuries of distance and transcends the object
at hand.
Wherever I went I felt the loss of the Sadlermiut and so a
sharper sense of gratitude toward those who once wrote down the
observations of arctic peoples, deseribed their skills, and saw to the
preservation of the objects of their culture. Even if we cannot say
what an object meant, we can still marvel today at what it did and
at the people who made it. With a minimum of materials historie
Eskimos created a wealth of utilitarian implements, distinguished
by ingenuity in design, specificky of purpose, and appropriateness
of materiál to the task.*
I think first of the clothing. Winter clothing was almost al-
ways made from caribou skin. The fur of arctic fox and, in the
western Arctic, Dali sheep, was warmer, but those skins were too
delicate. Caribou hair is not hollow the way polar bear hair is--
it consists of large, multichambered cells--but the effect is the
samé: excellent lightweight insulation. The skins of adult cows,
taken early in the fall, before their winter coats got too thick,
provided the best combination of warmth and lightness. (Late-fall
cow skins, like those of bull caribou or of muskoxen, were too
heavy to be comfortable but made excellent bedding.) Caribou
calf skins were ušed for underclothing and boot liners. The skins
of the caribou's forelegs were ušed for boot uppers and in the
palms of mittens because they resisted abrasion. The ruff of the
parka was of wolverine or wolf, furs that easily shed the ice
crystals that form there from breathing. The tightly spaced stitch-
ing was overcast or blind, as the situation required, to keep out
* The materials they worked with, of course, came almost entirely from
the animals they hunted. Eskimos generally regarded these materials as
gifts given in accordance with ethical obligations they felt toward the
animals. The two parallel cultures, human and animal, were linked in
biological ways and, for the Eskimo, in spirituál ways that are all but
lost to our understanding today. It was the gift rather than the death
that was preeminent in the Eskimo view of hunting.
192 ARCTIC DREAMS
wind and snow or to forestall the wicking of moisture. Sealskins
were more often used in place of caribou in summer clothing be-
cause they were waterproof. They were sewn together with sinews
that swelled slightly when wet (making the stitching waterproof)
and were soled with a hide as tough as walrus but lighter, that of
the bearded seal.
Slippers inside the winter boots were sometimes made of whole
bird skins turned inside out. Waterproof rain gear was made from
seal intestine. For walking quietly on the snow, boots were some-
times soled with polar bear fur.
Eskimo clothing required daily attention--sewing, softening,
and drying--because it was somewhat fragile. It was lighter and
warmer, however, than any clothing Western explorers brought
with them to the Arctic, and after several fatal lessons, expedition
leaders began to insist on Eskimo clothing for everyone. In some
respects it remains superior for general use to modern Western
expeditionary clothing.
Eskimos utilized the caribou completely. They made clothing,
bedding, and bags from its skin and tools and weapons from its
bones and antlers. Noting that fats in the caribou's leg joints con-
gealed at lower temperatures the farther they were from the body
core, they took the fat from the foot to use as a lubricant for bow-
strings in freezing temperatures. (Western civilizations made the
same discovery with cattle, whence neat's-foot oil.) They used
the marrow of its bones for fuel; its blood in glues; its sinews for
lashings, bindings, and thread. What they did not eat they cached,
against the lean months of spring. (The anthropologist Richard
Nelson marveled during his modern fieldwork at the still thorough
anatomical knowledge of Eskimo women, at the way they could
quickly cut up a large animal "into smaller and smaller pieces
without a saw, without breaking a bone.")
What is so consistently striking about the way Eskimos used
parts of an animal is the breadth of their understanding about what
would work. Knowing that muskox horn is more flexible than
Migration I 0
3
caribou antler, they preferred it for making the side prongs of a
fish spear. For a waterproof bag in which to carry sinews for
clothing repair, they chose salmon skin. They selected the strong,
translucent intestine of a bearded seal to make a window for a snow
house--it would fold up for easy traveling and it would not frost
over in cold weather. To make small snares for sea ducks, they
needed a springy material that would not rot in salt water--baleen
fibers. The down feather of a common eider, tethered at the end
of a stick in the snow at an aglu, would reveal the exhalation of a
quietly surfacing seal. Polar bear bone was used anywhere a stout,
sharp point was required, because it is the hardest bone.
One notices many subtle, imitative correspondences in their
creations: the drag handle at the end of a thong used to pull a seal
home over the ice is carved in the shape of a polar bear. The beak
of a fish-hunter, the loon, forms the point of a fish spear. Appro-
priate or fine distinctions: a preference for belukha sinew over
caribou sinew to stitch sealskin. Snowy owl or cormorant feathers
chosen over others for arrow fletchings. And signs of resourceful-
ness: tightly wrapping fresh char, lapped head to tail in a wet
sealskin, and letting it freeze to form the runner for a sled.
The sled itself was a remarkable piece of equipment. The sled
runners were cross-braced with lengths of caribou antler, lashed
to the runners with sealskin thongs. The bottoms of the runners
were shod with a mixture of pulverized moss and water, built up
in layers. On top of the peat shoeing came an ice glaze, carefully
smoothed and shaved. The result was a flexible sled that could be
sent over the surface of the snow with a flick of the wrist, and
that moved over irregularities in the sea ice without tipping unduly.
Otto Geist, excavating a Punuk site on Saint Lawrence Island
in the 1920s, made a list of items these people made solely from
walrus ivory, each one designed to perform a specific task or serve
a specific purpose. A dog-harness buckle. A wound pin to keep a
seal from bleeding. Part of a fox trap. A tent-line tensioner. His
list ran to more than a hundred items.
194 ARCTIC DREAMS
In Eskimo Realities Edmund Carpenter remarks on a well-
known phenomenon, that Eskimos quickly grasp the essence of any
mechanical problem and solve it. Even when the object is some-
thing they've never seen before, they will select from "scrap" or
"waste" material something with the right tensile strength or capac-
ity for torsion or elasticity, something with the necessary resistance
to heat, repeated freezing or corrosion, and shape it with simple
tools into a serviceable if not permanent solution. Nineteenth-
century explorers remarked on this capacity often, as have modern
scientists with broken outboard engines and wristwatches.
Very sharp, someone once said, these broadly smiling men
with no pockets, no hats, and no wheels.
THERE is a small village in the central Brooks Range today called
Anaktuvuk Pass. The Eskimos there are called Nunamiut, a group
that until recently subsisted largely on caribou, Dall sheep, and
moose. Originally nomadic, they spent winters in the Brooks Range
and summers with relatives on the Beaufort Sea coast, trading
caribou skins for sealskins and blubber. Their initial experience
with modern trade goods was with such things as Russian tobacco
in the eighteenth century, which they obtained from Eskimos liv-
ing around the mouth of the Colville River, who had traded for it
with Bering Sea Eskimos. After 1850 American whalers brought
in large quantities of flour, tea, coffee, sugar, and tobacco, as well
as guns, ammunition, and alcohol to the northwest coast of Alaska.
The Nunamiut were less directly involved in this trade than their
coastal relations, but they were profoundly affected nevertheless.
The caribou herds they depended on were decimated to feed the
whaling crews, and the Nunamiut were forced to abandon their
life in the mountains. They shifted away from an economy based
on hunting toward one based on trade. A few found seasonal em-
ployment on the coast, and most began trapping for furs in earnest.
A change came over the Nunamiut in the 1930s when the
market for fur collapsed and the trading posts were closed, distant
Migration 195
effects of economic depression in the United States. In 1934 a
handful of families, knowing the caribou population had recovered
and was again migrating through the mountains, sought to return
to an earlier, more satisfying way of life. They set up a camp that
first year at the junction of the Anaktuvuk and Colville rivers. For
a few years they continued to travel regularly to the coast, where
they fished and hunted seals, but in 1939, after this short period
of readjustment, they returned to their homeland in the Brooks
Range.
Ten years later the promise of trade goods to be brought into
the mountains by airplane and the services of a temporary teacher
in the summer induced several bands of Nunamiut to gather at a
place called Tulugak Lake. In 1951 this group of sixty-five people
moved a few miles farther south and a United States post office
was established at Anaktuvuk Pass at the skin tent of a hunter
named Homer Mekiana. A permanent school was built in 1961,
by which time many of the Nunamiut were staying in or near the
village year-round. Today about 180 people live there. There is a
village store; satellites provide both telephone and television service;
and there is a new school with sauna baths and a swimming pool,
built with royalty money from Alaskan oil discoveries.
This story has been repeated many times in the same sequence
across the Arctic in the past fifty years. Nomadic hunters are con-
solidated in one place for purposes of trade; radical changes are
made in the native way of life in order to adapt to a trade-based
or cash-based economy; some make strenuous efforts to return to
a semblance of the older way of life; and, finally, large segments
of the native language are lost, and the deep erosion of social, reli-
gious, political, and dietary customs occurs under intense pressure
from missionaries, bureaucrats, and outside entrepreneurs. Hunting
expertise, the ability of a man and a woman to keep a family going,
the kind of knowledge of life that grew from patience and deter-
mination--such attributes were not as highly regarded by the
interlopers, who sought to instill other virtues: promptness, per-
196 ARCTIC DREAMS
sonal cleanliness, self-improvement, and a high degree of orderliness
and scheduling in daily life.*
Among those in the outside culture whom the Nunamiut have
counted as friends in modern times are several anthropologists and
biologists who recognized a repository of knowledge in the Nuna-
miut, particularly about the natural history of the local landscape,
and who honored them for it. Some of the Nunamiut men and
women who have led balanced and dignified lives through all the
changes they have had to face have become symbols of unpreten-
tious wisdom to visiting scientists. The situation, of course, is not
unique to Anaktuvuk Pass. Many scientists comment in their papers
and books and in private conversation about the character of their
Eskimo companions. They admire their humble intelligence, their
honesty, and their humor. They find it invigorating to be in the
presence of people who, when they do speak, make so few general-
ized or abstract statements, who focus instead on the practical, the
specific, the concrete, t
I visited Anaktuvuk Pass in 1978 with a friend, a wolf biologist
who had made a temporary home there and who was warmly
regarded for his tact, his penchant for listening, and his help during
an epidemic of flu in the village. We spent several days watching
wolves and caribou in nearby valleys and visiting at several homes.
* It is easy to impugn the worth of such nebulous virtues, and to find
among the interlopers venal and self-aggrandizing people. But it dis-
parages Eskimos to see them as helpless in this situation. Most Eskimos
are not opposed to changing their way of life, but they want the timing
and the direction of change to be of their own choosing. "There is no
insistence," a man once told me, "on living as hard a life as possible." In
passing, it should be noted that many people have offered genuine
assistance to Eskimos. One frequently hears praise in the Canadian
Arctic, for example, for Catholic missionaries, because of their long-
term commitment to a single village, their practice of learning to speak
the language and to hunt, and their emphasis on good schooling.
t For a list of publications that grew out of work with the Nunamiut,
see note 4.
Migration 197
The men talked a lot about hunting. The evenings were full of
stories. There were moments of silence when someone said some-
thing very true, peals of laughter when a man told a story expertly
at his own expense. One afternoon we left and traveled far to the
west to the headwaters of the Utukok River.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game had a small field
camp on the Utukok, at the edge of a gravel-bar landing strip.
Among the biologists there were men and women studying caribou,
moose, tundra grizzly, wolverine, and, now that my companion
had arrived, wolves. The country around the Utukok and the head-
waters of the Kokolik River is a wild and serene landscape in
summer. Parts of the Western Arctic caribou herd are drifting
over the hills, returning from the calving grounds. The sun is al-
ways shining, somewhere in the sky. For a week or more we had
very fine, clear weather. Golden eagles circled high over the tun-
dra, hunting. Snowy owls regarded us from a distance from their
tussock perches. Short-eared owls, a gyrfalcon. Familiar faces.
A few days after we arrived, my companion and I went south
six or seven miles and established a camp from which we could
watch a distant wolf den. In that open, rolling country without
trees, I had the feeling, sometimes, that nothing was hidden. It was
during those days that I went for walks along Ilingnorak Ridge
and started visiting ground-nesting birds, and developed the habit
of bowing to them out of regard for what was wonderful and
mysterious in their lives.
The individual animals we watched tested their surroundings,
tried things they had not done before, or that possibly no animal
like them had ever done before--revealing their capacity for the
new. The preservation of this capacity to adapt is one of the central
mysteries of evolution.
We watched wolves hunting caribou, and owls hunting lem-
mings. Arctic ground squirrel eating irok, the mountain sorrel. I
thought a great deal about hunting. In 1949, Robert Flaherty told
an amazing story, which Edmund Carpenter was later successful
in getting published. It was about a man named Comock. In 1902,
198 ARCTIC DREAMS
when he and his family were facing starvation, Comock decided
to travel over the sea ice to an island he knew about, where he
expected they would be able to find food (a small island off Cape
Wolstenholme, at the northern tip of Quebec's Ungava Peninsula).
On the journey across, they lost nearly all their belongings--all of
Comock's knives, spears, and harpoons, all their skins, their stone
lamps, and most of their dogs--when the sea ice suddenly opened
one night underneath their camp. They were without hunting
implements, without a stone lamp to melt water to drink, without
food or extra clothing. Comock had left only one sled, several
dogs, his snow knife, with which he could cut snow blocks to
build a snow house, and stones to make sparks for a fire.
They ate their dogs. The dogs they kept ate the other dogs,
which were killed for them. Comock got his family to the island.
He fashioned, from inappropriate materials, new hunting weapons.
He created shelter and warmth. He hunted successfully. He re-
constructed his entire material culture, almost from scratch, by
improvising and, where necessary, inventing. He survived. His
family survived. His dogs survived and multiplied.
Over the years they carefully collected rare bits of driftwood
and bone until Comock had enough to build the frame for an
umiak. They saved bearded-seal skins, from which Comock's wife
made a waterproof hull. And one summer day they sailed away,
back toward Ungava Peninsula. Robert Flaherty, exploring along
the coast, spotted Comock and his family and dogs approaching
across the water. When they came close, Flaherty, recognizing the
form of an umiak and the cut of Eskimo clothing but, seeing that
the materials were strange and improvised, asked the Eskimo who
he was. He said his name was Comock. "Where in the world have
you come from?" asked Flaherty. "From far away, from big island,
from far over there," answered Comock, pointing. Then he smiled
and made a joke about how poor the umiak must appear, and his
family burst into laughter.
I think of this story because at its heart is the industry and
competence, the determination and inventiveness of a human fam-
Migration 199
ily. And because it is about people who lived resolutely in the heart
of every moment they found themselves in, disastrous and sublime.
During those days I spent on Ilingnorak Ridge, I did not know
what I know now about hunting; but I had begun to sense the
outline of what I would learn in the years ahead with Eskimos and
from being introduced, by various people, to situations I could not
have easily found my way to alone. The insights I felt during those
days had to do with the nature of hunting, with the movement of
human beings over the land, and with fear. The thoughts grew out
of watching the animals.
The evidence is good that among all northern aboriginal hunt-
ing peoples, the hunter saw himself bound up in a sacred relation-
ship with the larger animals he hunted. The relationship was full
of responsibilities--to the animals, to himself, and to his family.
Among the great and, at this point, perhaps tragic lapses in the
study of aboriginal hunting peoples is a lack of comprehension
about the role women played in hunting. We can presume, I think,
that in the same way the hunter felt bound to the animals he
hunted, he felt the contract incomplete and somehow even inap-
propriate if his wife was not part of it. In no hunting society could
a man hunt successfully alone. He depended upon his wife for
obvious reasons--for the preparation of food and clothing, com-
panionship, humor, subtle encouragement--and for things we can
only speculate about, things of a religious nature, bearing on the
mutual obligations and courtesies with which he approached the
animals he hunted.
Hunting in my experience--and by hunting I simply mean
being out on the land--is a state of mind. All of one's faculties are
brought to bear in an effort to become fully incorporated into the
landscape. It is more than listening for animals or watching for
hoofprints or a shift in the weather. It is more than an analysis of
what one senses. To hunt means to have the land around you like
clothing. To engage in a wordless dialogue with it, one so absorb-
ing that you cease to talk with your human companions. It means
to release yourself from rational images of what something "means"
2OO ARCTIC DREAMS
and to be concerned only that it "is." And then to recognize that
things exist only insofar as they can be related to other things.
These relationships--fresh drops of moisture on top of rocks at a
river crossing and a raven's distant voice--become patterns. The
patterns are always in motion. Suddenly the pattern--which in-
cludes physical hunger, a memory of your family, and memories
of the valley you are walking through, these particular plants and
smells--takes in the caribou. There is a caribou standing in front
of you. The release of the arrow or bullet is like a word spoken
out loud. It occurs at the periphery of your concentration.
The mind we know in dreaming, a nonrational, nonlinear
comprehension of events in which slips in time and space are nor-
mal, is, I believe, the conscious working mind of an aboriginal
hunter. It is a frame of mind that redefines patience, endurance,
and expectation.
The focus of a hunter in a hunting society was not killing
animals but attending to the myriad relationships he understood
bound him into the world he occupied with them. He tended to
those duties carefully because he perceived in them everything he
understood about survival. This does not mean, certainly, that
every man did this, or that good men did not starve. Or that
shamans whose duty it was to intercede with the forces that em-
powered these relationships weren't occasionally thinking of per-
sonal gain or subterfuge. It only means that most men understood
how to behave.
A fundamental difference between our culture and Eskimo
culture, which can be felt even today in certain situations, is that
we have irrevocably separated ourselves from the world that ani-
mals occupy. We have turned all animals and elements of the
natural world into objects. We manipulate them to serve the com-
plicated ends of our destiny. Eskimos do not grasp this separation
easily, and have difficulty imagining themselves entirely removed
from the world of animals. For many of them, to make this sepa-
ration is analogous to cutting oneself off from light or water. It is
hard to imagine how to do it.
Migration 201
A second difference is that, because we have objectified ani-
mals, we are able to treat them impersonally. This means not only
the animals that live around us but animals that live in distant lands.
For Eskimos, most relationships with animals are local and personal.
The animals one encounters are part of one's community, and one
has obligations to them. A most confusing aspect of Western cul-
ture for Eskimos to grasp is our depersonalization of relationships
with the human and animal members of our communities. And it
is compounded, rather than simplified, by their attempting to learn
how to objectify animals.
Eskimos do not maintain this intimacy with nature without
paying a certain price. When I have thought about the ways in
which they differ from people in my own culture, I have realized
that they are more afraid than we are. On a day-to-day basis, they
have more fear. Not of being dumped into cold water from an
umiak, not a debilitating fear. They are afraid because they accept
fully what is violent and tragic in nature. It is a fear tied to their
knowledge that sudden, cataclysmic events are as much a part of
life, of really living, as are the moments when one pauses to look
at something beautiful. A Central Eskimo shaman named Aua,
queried by Knud Rasmussen about Eskimo beliefs, answered, "We
do not believe. We fear."
To extend these thoughts, it is wrong to think of hunting
cultures like the Eskimo's as living in perfect harmony or balance
with nature. Their regard for animals and their attentiveness to
nuance in the landscape were not rigorous or complete enough to
approach an idealized harmony. No one knew that much. No one
would say they knew that much. They faced nature with fear,
with ilira (nervous awe) and kappia (apprehension). And with
enthusiasm. They accepted hunting as a way of life--its violence,
too, though they did not seek that out. They were unsentimental,
so much so that most outsiders thought them cruel, especially in
their treatment of dogs. Nor were they innocent. There is murder
and warfare and tribal vendetta in their history; and today, in the
same villages I walked out of to hunt, are families shattered by
2O2 ARCTIC DREAMS
alcohol, drugs, and ambition. While one cannot dismiss culpability
in these things, any more than one can hold to romantic notions
about hunting, it is good to recall what a struggle it is to live with
dignity and understanding, with perspicacity or grace, in circum-
stances far better than these. And it is helpful to imagine how the
forces of life must be construed by people who live in a world where
swift and fatal violence, like ivu, the suddenly leaping shore ice, is
inherent in the land. The land, in a certain, very real way, compels
the minds of the people.
A good reason to travel with Eskimo hunters in modern times
is that, beyond nettlesome details--foods that are not to one's
liking, a loss of intellectual conversation, a consistent lack of for-
mal planning--in spite of these things, one feels the constant pres-
ence of people who know something about surviving. At their best
they are resilient, practical, and enthusiastic. They pay close atten-
tion in realms where they feel a capacity for understanding. They
have a quality of nuannaarpoq, of taking extravagant pleasure in
being alive; and they delight in finding it in other people. Facing
as we do our various Armageddons, they are a good people to
know.
In the time I was in the field with Eskimos I wondered at the
basis for my admiration. I admired an awareness in the men of
providing for others, and the soft tone of voice they used around
bloodshed. I never thought I could understand, from their point
of view, that moment of preternaturally heightened awareness, and
the peril inherent in taking a life; but I accepted it out of respect
for their seriousness toward it. In moments when I felt perplexed,
that I was dealing with an order outside my own, I discovered and
put to use a part of my own culture's wisdom, the formal divisions
of Western philosophy--metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthet-
ics, and logic--which pose, in order, the following questions. What
is real? What can we understand? How should we behave? What
is beautiful? What are the patterns we can rely upon?
As I traveled, I would say to myself, What do my companions
see where I see death? Is the sunlight beautiful to them, the way it
Migration 203
sparkles on the water? Which for the Eskimo hunter are the patterns
to be trusted? The patterns, I know, could be different from ones
I imagined were before us. There could be other, remarkably
different insights.
THOSE days on Ilingnorak Ridge, when I saw tundra grizzly tear-
ing up the earth looking for ground squirrels, and watched wolves
hunting, and horned lark sitting so resolutely on her nest, and
caribou crossing the river and shaking off the spray like diamonds
before the evening sun, I was satisfied only to watch. This was the
great drift and pause of life. These were the arrangements that
made the land ring with integrity. Somewhere downriver, I re-
membered, a scientist named Edward Sable had paused on a trek
in 1947 to stare at a Folsom spear point, a perfectly fluted object of
black chert resting on a sandstone ledge. People, moving over
the land.