fierce predator The bald eagle can snatch a fourpound fish in its
walrus, seal oil, and whale meat. It’s still a sharing, trading society, and young men who hunt for a living can be seen carrying coolers full of seal oil and fat to inland settlements on floatplanes.
powerful talons.
What night is it? I can’t remember. But I know how cold it is: 15 degrees. We hover over the campfire. In the northern sky the aurora begins its pulse-dance of green and white lights. By one or two in the morning, it’s a green fist driving down toward the river, but on arrival there, its reflection softens and shivers. Morning, and we paddle out into a strong current. My dreams are all waterborne but darkened by thoughts of the road and the mines. With a tailwind, we don’t have to paddle, but only steer to keep the raft straight. Sometimes we make the raft spin and spin, taking in the 360-degree view amid laughter. Cottonwood leaves shush and clatter. “That’s the sound of autumn,” Joe says softly. But here, above the Arctic Circle, the air is already heavy with winter. To the north, the sawtooth-above-treeline wilderness of the Brooks Range has been blanketed with snow. We see a huge black ring around the sun called a sundog, indicating a change in weather. By morning everything is frozen solid—sponge to frying pan, tent stake to ground. The lids of the bear barrels are iced shut. Clouds called mare’s tails that foretell rain sweep across the sky like brushed hair. The river deepens and fills with schools of sheefish, a local whitefish that grows to be more than 30 inches long. They are ghostlike, swimming upstream. The songbirds have ceased singing. As the days go by, our brief summer reprieve vanishes. Motion is loss: we lose summer and enter autumn again. At the Pah River, where, before 1870, 15 “native” houses stood on these banks, the Kobuk slows and deepens. A Kobuk man far downriver stands on a sandbar, fishing. Is he a human or a bear?
Wind and the fading light pulse the river into hammered silver, then the water darkens into what looks like a lagoon. Beyond, tall mountains are black cutouts—an entry into another world. A floatplane drones by. A raven flies over. Which is the plane, which the bird, one wonders? Water is moving and bulbous clouds push down on it as if saying, “Don’t go.” Rain is on the way, or else snow. Only two miles remain of the 92 we will have paddled. Night. Raft unpacked, campfire started, soup cooking, tents set up, pads inflated, down bags rolled out, and a rind of moon falls behind the pulsing light of the aurora. Tonight it appears first as two spotlights that frame the Big Dipper. This is true north. Earlier we missed our camping spot and had to paddle upriver—a last arduous push before the end of river time. It’s not good to be careless. Herb Anungazuk, an anthropologist who grew up in Wales, on the Seward Peninsula, wrote: “The land and the sea will show you its wrath if you cannot read what it tells you.” Low, tight clouds close in above the trees and the mineral smell of snow erases the rain’s soft scent. We vacillate between wanting the floatplane to come soon and hoping we’ll be snowed into this remote valley all winter. At the last moment we get back in the raft and glide down Grolar bears? Read how climate to the other bank to make sure we are change is creating strange Arctic really in the correct place. hybrids at onearth.org/hybrids All week we’ve been moving in time, away from time, on top of time, all hopes and fears unspooling beneath us. But the road: will it come into being and corrupt this place? We dig in with our paddles and start back for camp. Joe whispers, “Forward a few paddles… Harder. That’s good.”
.org
Gretel Ehrlich’s most recent book, Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami (Pantheon), was longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award. winter 2013/2014
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