build new ones. Once that was done, they could spend long winter Shallow water and narrow spruce shadows nights in the all-day twilight, fixing dog harnesses, boats, and nets, fibrillate as if trying to pump life back into the fading day. Cutbanks and gravel bars slide by, islands in the streams of a braided river bulging and telling stories. Those were the days before snowmobiles cut through magic songs with small islands and hemmed by vegetation: havens for the wildlife that were sung for protection. The sparsely populated river valley here. Isn’t this enough for us humans? Do we have to pimp the earth was home to dwarfs, giants, and animals that assumed the shapes of for monetary gain at the expense of place itself? Does “progress” trump humans, then eased back into their animal skins. One legend tells of a human health, the rights of the grizzly, moose, or robin? Who speaks specially blessed young man who paddled the Kobuk in a canoe made for them? Who speaks for this river? An anguished bird cry awakens us from our midafternoon river-daze. by beavers and birds. Along the way he married a woman who turned We can’t see what’s happening at first, but around a bend we spot a out to be a red fox, and later he lived with a kindly giant. Spirits in the bodies of iñugaqalligauraqad—“small strong men”— bald eagle attacking a loon. Its mate flies back and forth over our heads, lived here and still do. In Seth Kantner’s 2004 book Ordinary Wolves, a crying for help. The eagle dives down repeatedly, trying to pick the bird man named Enuk said that iñugaqalligauraqad had come to his camp: out of the water. She tries to fly but can’t lift up. As soon as we approach, “They rob my skins. Meat. Caribou tongues even.” By comparison, the eagle leaves and the airborne loon rejoins its mate on the river. For half an hour, we float slowly behind the two birds as the female our overpopulated world seems thin, unspirited, and bleak. Farther downriver, we hear songbirds for the first time. We thought stretches her wings, shakes her head, and gets ready to fly. No eagle they had departed for the winter, but some are still here: a robin sings in view now. Finally the pair flap hard and lift up, disappearing into the a morning song and four Bohemian waxwings flap between birch trees. safety of the trees. One life saved by a boatful of strangers. On the wide gravel bars, tracks reveal that we’ve moved from I try to push away the black line of the proposed road that would tear apart the beauty of this place, and the human-drawn boundaries that grizzly into black bear country. But at the end of August, anything can change: something in my bones tells me that winter might begin allow senseless wolf depredations, and for awhile I do. Under a clear sky we drift in silence. Here, movement means not as early as tomorrow. To be on moving water is to ride an unrolling scroll. Wind scratches loss, but beginning again: we seem to be gaining on green. At midday blue skies reign. We eat lunch on a gravelly island. A tiny inlet is still messages on the water’s surface ahead: that’s our only future. Midice-choked, but the sun feels good on our tired shoulders. Glaucous stream boulders punctuate the flow of memory. Watch out. Veer left. gulls cruise by, eyeing our salami and cheese. As we start off again, Stay right. Don’t forget. Forward a few. Paddle hard now. As we eat an immature bald eagle flies toward us, all black feathers with white lunch, a wild iris brushes my arm, and the river, like a Tang dynasty spots, like an Appaloosa horse, then lifts up suddenly over our heads scroll, unravels time. A season changes one way, then goes back to and alights on a spruce. A northern shrike whistles. Two red birds we the other. Death thoughts gust by. Ice-gouged spruce tip over and thrum water like drumsticks; the vastness of the physical world and can’t identify poke their heads out of holes in a sandy bank. All week we’ve been hoping to see migrating caribou. There should our small place in it loom large. A layered cutbank flies by like a piece of time with its 53,000 years be thousands of them streaming through the trees and crossing water on their way south from the Noatak drainage, but none appear. They of geological depositions. At another site, the ruins of a 1,000-year-old will stay on the north side of the Brooks Range until heavy snow is inhabitation are revealed. Not far downriver, the people of the Kuuvak imminent. Though it has been cold here, real winter weather has not are netting chum, seining whitefish, and collecting berries in birchbark baskets that fold on top like huge envelopes. Spruce ladles, carved from arrived above the Arctic Circle. Instead of caribou, there are more birds: around a bend 17 or 18 hollowed-out burls, are still used for serving a lunch of fish-head soup. ravens circle trees, cawing, gurgling, making their strange sounds. Kids are shooing ravens away from drying fish, and resident dogs scare away bears. A green willow wall with Toolmakers and jokesters, they possess a small fire in the center smokes the the most diverse set of sounds—around last of the salmon. 30 of them—and speak in local dialects. A hundred years ago, people travMaybe they can talk someone into saving eled by skin-covered canoe, and when this valley. the river froze, they made their way on Pairs of Pacific loons float by around the sun called a dogsleds. In the fall, a huge trading and bald eagles flap between trees. fair began at Shesilik, near the coast. Ospreys carry fish in their talons to hidsundog, indicating a change Every river filled with travelers. Nunaden nests. Dead chum line the shore. miut (inland people such as those from Grizzly, moose, and wolf tracks pave the in w e a ther . b y m orning Kobuk and Noatak) carried caribou sandy banks. Earlier, snow filled their tracks separated by huge strides. Now everything is frozen solid— meat and hides in canoes to the coast, where marine mammal hunters from sun shines in them before retreating. Though the days are getting shorter, we sponge to frying pan, tent Wales, Shismareff, Kivalina, and Point Hope, as well as traders from the seem to be going backward in time. The berry bushes have lost their autumnal stake to ground. the lids of the Diomede Islands, came each year. Caribou, moose, bear, and inland ducks colors: we’ve entered a nation of birds bear barrels are iced shut. and birds were traded for maktak, and returned to the season of summer.
we see a huge black ring
4 4 onearth
winter 2013/2014