Arctic Dreams

by Barry Lopez

The plane is a great temptation; but to learn anything of the land, to have any sense of the relevancy of the pertinent maps, you must walk away from the planes. You must get off into the country and sleep on the ground, or take an afternoon to take a tussock apart. Travel on the schedule of muskoxen. Camp on a seaward point and watch migrating sea ducks in their days of passage. You need to stand before the green, serpentine walls of the Jade Mountains north of the Kobuk River, or walk out over the sea ice to the flaw lead in winter to hear the pack ice grinding and scraping, a noise like “the whining of puppies and swarming of bees,” in the words of the American explorer Elisha Kent Kane. In the stomach of a walrus butchered on the spring ice you will find the sediment of the ocean floor. Slowly comes the realization that 250,000 walrus in the Bering and Chukchi seas are moving tons of sand and fine gravel around, every day. You will think of lemmings and voles turning over thousands of tons of soil on the tundra. And of the Thule, who carried large stones into their camps and set them up in a pattern for a jumping game, like hopscotch. Of the huge stone polar bear traps the Thule built with their sliding stone doors. Residents, moving stones about.