In the Empire of Ice (11 page)

“Used to be our land went way out. Now, it washes away, the waves cut under our land real deep. No more shallow ports. Springtime, the earth of our island is falling down. The land where we live and all that we know is soon all gone.”

WE LEAVE SHISHMAREF in a light snow and fly back to Nome in a twin-engine Navajo. Once there we buy a nine-dollar bottle of Evian because our stomachs are bad from the contaminated Shishmaref water. Later, at the Polar Café we look for Roy Tobuk, but he’s not there. Then we hear that he died of a stroke while we were away. The café owner tells us, “He was alone in his house down the alley. We found him there when he didn’t come in for breakfast.”

We walk the streets a little dazed by the news. The death of friends, the death of language and lifeways, and the death of ice haunt us in the same way. Our ignorance of how our own bodies work, and when death might befall us, carries over to our comprehension of Gaia and the planet’s intertwined living systems. We busy ourselves with blinkered specialties and forget to look at the whole, or at the spirit force behind the mask. We fear the unknowable, and so edit what we can understand about complex feedback loops to the kind of consensual stories we can bear to hear.

The lies we tell about ourselves, about others and “otherness,” in this case about indigenous Arctic people, are the same ones we tell about the Earth. We have no idea what is really going on in this changing climate, but we insist on doing nothing until there is a crisis. As things worsen, I almost feel relief: We have finally been put in our place. The oceans will acidify and go a deadly bright blue, riverbeds will dry up, and there will be nothing green on the ground.

In 1924, when Knud Rasmussen was about to leave Nome at the end of his epic journey, he met an old man on Main Street named Najagneq, a shaman from Nunivak Island. Rasmussen described him as having “little piercing eyes that glared wildly around” and a bandage wrapped around his jaw. He had killed several people and had just been released from a year of solitary confinement in the Nome jail. He claimed that while there, he had been killed ten times but that his helping spirits, ten white horses, saved his life ten times.

The old shaman liked Rasmussen and described the visions he’d had. Rasmussen asked, “What does man consist of?” The shaman replied, “Of the body; that which you see; the name, which is inherited from one dead; and then of something more, a mysterious spirit which gives life, shape, and appearance to all that lives.”

Rasmussen: “What do you think of the way men live?”

Najagneq: “They live brokenly, mingling all things together; weakly, because they cannot do one thing at a time.”

T
HE
K
OMI OF
N
ORTHWESTERN
R
USSIA

ON A WINTRY APRIL DAY
just south of the Barents Sea in the eco-tone between the taiga forests and tundra of northwestern Russia, we came unexpectedly upon a camp of nomadic Komi people and their 2,500 reindeer. They were packed and ready to move with the herd as the female reindeer began calving. A two-month-long spring migration would take them northeast across melting tundra, roaring rivers, and cranberry bogs to a relatively mosquito-free mountain by the end of June. The month of September, when snow began to fall, would move them down again, their yearly travels describing a lopsided circle cut through by north-flowing rivers and the flat maze of tundra, hummocks, and waterways that is their constant horizon.

The cavernous helicopter that had carried the four of us—photographer Gordon Wiltse, Inuit filmmaker Andrew Okpeaha MacLean, Russian biologist and translator Andrei Volkov, and me—had flown northeast from the city of Arkhangel’sk over a wide, factory-lined river that bent back on itself, twisting almost in half like a mind that has been lost. Just to the south was the hardscrabble collective farm where the poet Joseph Brodsky was sent in 1964 by the Communist regime to do hard labor. In his desolation he wrote: “Life steps back on itself / And stares astonished at its own / hissing and roaring forms.” Behind us were the Solovetskiye Islands, ordained by Communist leader Vladimir Lenin as the Solovki Special Purpose Camp. Once an Orthodox monastery, it became one of the first corrective labor camps of the gulag system, made famous in Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s
Gulag Archipelago.

Russia’s long history of human misery—the brutal conquest of Siberia, the terror of Stalin, the two World Wars, and the Cold War, with its persistent sweeps of radioactivity from the nuclear test sites in the Ural Mountains and on the islands of Novaya Zemlya—was chilling to contemplate as our helicopter roared over endless forests and ponds. “Here I wander in a no man’s land,” Brodsky wrote, “And take lease on non-existence.”

The apron of tundra that stretches from northwestern Russia all the way to the Chukchi Sea in northeastern Siberia is sparsely populated. It is a vast mosaic of snow and rotting ice, snaking rivers, ice-carved lakes and ponds that from the air flash like eyes in intermittent sun.

The helicopter flight lasted four hours. We sat on hard benches facing each other, unable to converse because of the noise. A ceiling panel had come down, and electrical wires dangled over our heads. Our luggage was stacked loosely down the middle between the benches. There were no seat belts, no bathrooms. One man with a vodka hangover vomited quietly into a bag.

Green to the south, white to the north. I asked Andrei where we were. He shrugged, and said, “Somewhere east of the Kanin Peninsula and west of the Yamal.” Opening a topographical map across his knees, he ironed out the wrinkles with his hand, but could not pinpoint our exact location. Out the window I saw a large oval
ostrov,
a snow-covered island of pines, which seemed to float in white haze. Beyond, a tight tangle of narrow, still frozen waterways separated spongy hummocks—tundra mats made of mosses, lichens, fungi, and berries that spread laterally, necklacing the top of the world.

Nineteen percent of Russian land is tundra and taiga forests where wild reindeer roam. The annual migratory cycle of the indigenous people of this region has been linked to herds for hundreds of years. Where the reindeer go, whether wild or domesticated, so go the hunters and herders, the only boundary being the beautiful and polluted Barents Sea.

MIDDAY. The helicopter shudders, vibrating to a standstill, then lowers onto snow. There’s no village in sight, no reindeer herd, only a small group of villagers waiting with their ancient Russian snowmobiles. Michail, the head of a nearby community, greets us. He’s a young, cheerful, bearish Russian. We are taken into the village of Pesha (pronounced
PER
-sha), where horse-drawn sleighs are the villagers’ only transportation and the muddy roads are deeply rutted with slush and spilled hay.

The town is heated by coal and stinks of it. Black coal dust is mixed into the snow. Unpainted 18th-century wooden houses and barns with beautifully carved window and door frames stand side by side—elegant reminders of the Russian past and an Arctic outpost so physically remote that it seems to have been untouched since Tolstoy’s time.

After a lunch of cabbage salad and meat dumplings, we climb back onto the small sleds pulled by the snowmobiles and head out to look for the herds. Reindeer blankets are thrown over us and tucked around our legs. We sputter along slowly because the machines are old and the Russian fuel is bad, and look for a group of herders, though our drivers say they’re not sure where they are.

Gordon wakes me. We’d traveled for hours and I’d fallen asleep. “I think we’re here,” he says. Dogs bark and come running. Ahead, smoke curls up from the tops of three large tepees. Beside them harnessed reindeer patiently wait, and a group of men look up to see who is coming. As we approach, I’m shocked by what I see. These are not dark-haired, almond-eyed Nenets people, but auburn-haired, blue-eyed men and women who look Russian or Saami.

They are as surprised to see us as we are to see them. “Who are you?” I ask. They smile and ask who we are. When I say we are from National Geographic, they say they’ve never heard of it. Then it’s their turn to explain. I had thought we were coming to stay with Nenets people. “We are not Nenets, we are not Saami, we are not Ruski. We are Komi,” a man who identifies himself as the chief says. “But we are using Nenets land.” Long pause. “And sometimes we marry Nenets people.”

Andrei unfolds his topographic map, and the men crowd around to show us where we are. What I see is thousands of square miles of uninhabited land. “Who owns all this?” I ask. “I guess Vladimir Putin does,” Piotr, the chief’s older brother, says, laughing. He’s tall and gaunt with curious eyes. “Yes, it must be his. There are Nenets to the east near Indiga, and Nenets to the west on the Kanin Peninsula, but here, there is no one but us, and we are not many. We have no wives, no children, and the old ones are dying out. Our fathers are dead. We are here to help our mothers.” He pauses, looks around, then smiles: “In summer, the main population is mosquitoes.”

The top edge of Arctic Russia is all fingers and fists sticking into the frigid sea, and since anyone can remember, there have been wild
Rangifer tarandus,
woodland caribou, here. In the 16th century there were an estimated five million wild reindeer in northern Russia. By the 1980s, that number had dwindled to a little more than two million, with another million domesticated. Now the wild deer are overtaking the tamed, and the herders say they struggle continually with wild herds leading the domestic reindeer away.

A man called Stanislav, or Stas, wearing dark glasses and a reindeer-skin tunic, hands me a piece of hard candy by way of greeting. His wide leather belt is decorated with bear teeth and bone cutouts of pine trees. A small scabbard hangs from two gold chains, and as he walks, it swings with the weight of the long knife sheathed inside. “In our long memory we have never had foreign visitors,” Vasily, the chief, a shy man with doelike eyes, tells us. “We don’t know why you are interested in us,” he says. “But you can travel with us if it pleases you.”

They are four families comprising fourteen people: four women in their 70s and Kayta, the daughter of one; three men and their six sons; and 13 dogs. They have no permanent residence, and no memory of ever having had one. They travel year-round with their herd on a route that covers four seasonal pastures and goes from taiga to wet tundra, where north-flowing rivers and streams bleed into the Barents Sea.

The herders’ belongings are packed on 84 sleds. They don’t ride their reindeer as the Sayka people to the east do, but instead harness the animals to hand-carved wooden sleds. Moving with the seasons and the weather, they live in large skin
chums
(pronounced chooms). “We can’t remember a time when we didn’t live this way,” Vasily says, and invites us into his chum for tea.

We duck through the reindeer-hide flap. Inside, Marie, Vasily’s 72-year-old mother, is feeding split birch logs into the woodstove. She scoops snow into a pot to melt for tea. Another pot burbles with chunks of reindeer.
Chai-pi
is not just tea and cookies, but also stew with potatoes, wild berries, and bread.

We sit on skins laid over pine boughs at a low table. Marie thrusts plates of food at us. “You’ve come a long way through the sky. You must be hungry,” she says.

The chum is spacious, 25 feet in diameter. Instead of the sacred pole that stands at the center of the Nenets tepee, the practical Komi set their sheet metal woodstove in the center of the chum and thrust the stovepipe up through the open hole. Marie and Vasily, who is her youngest son, sleep on one side; Piotr, the oldest son, sleeps alone on the other side. Piotr is 52; Vasily, 46.

Through the one window, snow-encrusted conifers sway, and dogs lie curled on the seats of the sleds. It’s early April and still cold, with three feet of hard snow on the ground. At 24 miles above the Arctic Circle, almost 67° N, it’s unusual to see trees. But birch and spruce are here, thanks to the warming influence of the Gulf Stream. At the same latitude in Greenland or Arctic Canada there would be only rock and ice.

A Komi year is one of frequent movement and harsh winter and summer temperatures, 30 below in the winter, 90 above in the summer, with ferocious bugs. The Komi have reindeer to eat and reindeer from which to make clothes and shelters, with enough animals to sell so they can buy whatever else they need from the village. Winter is spent in the taiga, in the mixed forests; spring and fall are spent on the open tundra near the coast of the sea. In the summer, the Komi move up to a low mountain to get away from the mosquitoes. “Up there the women collect enough berries and mushrooms to last through the year. Then we move south to our winter camp at Golayga. We have to wait until the rivers freeze in order to get across safely.” If they do freeze at all. Lately, that has not always been the case.

By the time we finish our tea and reindeer stew, it is dark. Piotr lights the kerosene lamp hanging from a carving he made of a man’s elongated face. I had noticed there were no children or young women in camp. “Are any of you married?” I ask. Vasily and Piotr shake their heads: “No women want to live this way, out on the tundra with reindeer anymore,” they say. There will be no new generation to carry on the Komi tradition of reindeer herding.

MORNING. Bands of pale light slide down the peeled spruce poles. There are reindeer under me, reindeer around me. I sleep soundly. Someone gets up and starts the fire. The stove wood crackles. Water boils. I sit up. Marie smiles: “Good morning,” she says in Komi. She is fixing a breakfast of stewed berries, boiled reindeer meat, and bread.

It’s moving day. Outside, thick fog creeps in. Rime ice hangs in trees, on sleds, lacing the net fence, a portable corral in which the reindeer will be herded. Piotr is splitting wood. He looks toward the horizon, a gray blank. “They’re hunting for the loose reindeer. They’re out there somewhere. But it’s hard to find them in this weather.”

We pack our things. Then the “village”—the three chums—is dismantled. Stick by stick, the hole in the sky is gone, the center stovepipe laid on the ground. The three boughs at the entrance are stacked on top of a loaded sled. Both men and women unwind the canvas and skin coverings and pull them from the poles.

The loads are diverse: Three sleds carry nothing but chum poles; another sled is laden with a stack of five-foot-long logs. Antlers and spruce boughs are stacked on top of winter clothing. Another sled holds the wood cookstove.

The fog that came in earlier has dropped down to the ground and it is almost impossible to see. Someone hears reindeer coming and yells
“Aleyne!”
(“Reindeer!”) The women hurriedly pull on their skin dresses over long underwear and stuff the footpads of their leggings with dried grass for insulation. They grab long poles and rush outside. With their sewn-in hoods tightly framing their faces and fur mittens on their hands, they look like medieval troubadours.

The wait is long. The reindeer were near, but now they are gone, the men tell us. The older women—Vasily’s mother and Katya’s, also named Marie—and Stas’s wife, Rima, lean on their
khorey,
long poles used to prod the reindeer. The fog is a cold room that holds us, now that the chums have been taken down. Hours go by. No one seems concerned that we will be making a late start. A fire is built, a pot of tea is placed over the open flame. A few chunks of reindeer meat are threaded on a stick, roasted, and passed around. The men joke about not having wives. “If we put TVs in the chums,” they say, apparently forgetting that they have no electricity, “then we could get women to live with us.” Vasily speaks up, “I will bring a television next time we are near a village.” Everyone laughs except Katya.

Bright eyed and beautiful, she’s 38 and on the tundra to help her mother for half the year. The other half she lives in a town and has seen the devastation caused by runaway capitalism without rule of law and by the epidemic of alcoholism. “We live better here than in the village,” she says. “It has always been that way and will always be.” When one of the men from her chum suggests building a casino in Pesha, Katya turns to him angrily: “If you play in the casino, I will kick you out of the chum.”

SOMEWHERE OUT ON THE TUNDRA, Rima’s bearded son, Nikolai, is looking for the reindeer. There are two herds: the gelded reindeer used for pulling sleds and the big herd of breeding males and pregnant females that are about to begin calving.

Reindeer hunting and husbandry have always been the traditional way of life for indigenous people of Arctic Russia because tundra can support no other crop or herding animal. Biologists have put the domesticated reindeer population at 1,357,700 animals; there are reportedly, 1,246,000 wild reindeer, whose wide feet are superbly suited for the frozen habitat of Russia’s far north.