Arctic Dreams

by Barry Lopez

(He also rolls in snow, an excellent blotter, to daub off moisture—as do people who accidently fall through the ice.)

For the bear to go off preoccupied with such a subject means it will not be paying attention to where it is going, that it may fall through bad ice or miss signs that will lead it to an aglu and sustenance.

One of them had once come upon a female nursing her cubs. Unaware of his presence, she had settled back against a bank of snow with them and was staring calmly out across the empty sea ice. “I saw that, and I said to myself, why in God’s name am I bothering these animals?

At a deeper level, however, imagination represents the desire to find what is unknown, unique, or farfetched—a snowy owl sitting motionless on the hips of a muskox, a flower of a favorite color never before reported, tundra swans swimming in a winter polynya.

In The Worlde’s Hydrographical Description (1595), reflecting on the light that fell on the northern regions in the summer, he wrote that because of this suffusion of light the land beneath the Pole Star is “the place of greatest dignitie” on earth.

“Ajako bends down,” writes Rasmussen, “filling his hollow hands with fiord water, which he raises to his face to feel and inhale its salt freshness. In these drops he smells the meat of the walrus, narwhals and seals—flesh of all the blubbery animals which shall now make our days good. Beautiful ocean! I recognize you, now I am home!

From that dignified relationship with the land, it is possible to imagine an extension of dignified relationships throughout one’s life. Each relationship is formed of the same integrity, which initially makes the mind say: the things in the land fit together perfectly, even though they are always changing. I wish the order of my life to be arranged in the same way I find the light, the slight movement of the wind, the voice of a bird, the heading of a seed pod I see before me. This impeccable and indisputable integrity I want in myself.