Arctic Dreams

by Barry Lopez

On a summer walk, the wind-washed air proves depthlessly clear.

bioacoustical lipids—special fats that allow the narwhal to use sound waves to communicate with other whales and to locate itself and other objects in its three-dimensional world.

quinuituq.

The mind we know in dreaming, a nonrational, nonlinear comprehension of events in which slips in time and space are normal, is, I believe, the conscious working mind of an aboriginal hunter.

In My Life with the Eskimo Stefansson recalls spending an hour stalking a tundra grizzly that turned out to be a marmot.

A man in Anaktuvuk Pass, in response to a question about what he did when he visited a new place, said to me, “I listen.” That’s all. I listen, he meant, to what the land is saying. I walk around in it and strain my senses in appreciation of it for a long time before I, myself, ever speak a word.

The reluctant traveler, brooding about events at home, is oblivious to the landscape. And no one is quite as alert as an indigenous hunter who is hungry.

I will have hot tea and lie in my bunk, and try to recall what I saw that did not, in those moments, come to mind.

I thought about the great desire among friends and colleagues and travelers who meet on the road, to share what they know, what they have seen and imagined. Not to have a shared understanding, but to share what one has come to understand. In such an atmosphere of mutual regard, in which each can roll out his or her maps with no fear of contradiction, of suspicion, or theft, it is possible to imagine the long, graceful strides of human history.

Gerrit de Veer’s narrative of this adventure, The True and Perfect Description of Three Voyages, so strange and woonderfull, that the like has never been heard of before …, chronicles the awful conditions they endured and conveys a certain nightmarish aspect, particularly because of their fear of the animals.

Book reference

Richard Hakluyt wrote The Principal Navigations,