by Richard Nelson
This blog is based on an excerpt from the book On Arctic Ground: Tracking Time through Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve, from an essay “Voices from the Land– Ancient Echoes on the Utukok,” by Alaskan writer, cultural anthropologist, and radio engineer Richard Nelson who spent much of his life in the Alaskan Arctic. The Utukok River Uplands, meaning “old” or “ancient” in Iñupiaq, is one of five designated Special Areas in America’s Western Arctic. It is home to large populations of moose, wolves, and wolverines but is most well known for its high grizzly bear concentrations and the Western Arctic Caribou Herd. The biodiversity of the Utukok River Uplands is greatly threatened by climate change.
Sometimes on caribou hunts, instead of sneaking like a wolf toward caribou, a man would approach openly, his arms raised in a wide V to mimic the bulls' huge antlers. Angling slowly toward the herd, pausing at intervals, he might add to the ruse by making low staccato grunts. I often did this myself… and I believe the reward is not just meat, but the sense of weaving our minds together with the minds of animals.
I often made solo journeys up the Kuk River (its straightforward Iñupiaq name-Kuuk-means simply "River," or preeminently "the River"). This waterway is many miles wide near the coast, with shores that rise so gradually they're hardly distinguishable from the ice itself. The frozen river and snow covered land have a hallucinatory vastness. Seeing the faint dark line of a beach blown clear of snow, I would sometimes think it was miles away, then find it was just a few hundred yards when the dogs trotted up to it minutes later.
Another time, my companions on a caribou hunt said we should rendezvous at a hill named Nasiqruagvik, which means "High Lookout Place." But the rise was so subtle that it was invisible to me. In the Arctic, the human eye must learn a completely different way of perceiving.
As Debbie and I follow the twisting course of the Utukok, I wonder. What are the Iñupiaq names for these long ridges, these river bends, these sheer bedrock bluffs? Where are the old camps, the fishing spots, the landforms that channel migrating caribou toward waiting hunters? I only remember Wainwright elders telling me that the true name for this river is Utuqqaq, which means "Something Old," or "the Old One."
To an outsider, the far northern tundra may seem a bleak and threatening place. But with patient guidance from my Iñupiaq companions, I came to recognize it as a sustaining homeland, made all the richer by the connections people felt with special places– Uyagaagruk, Anaqtuuq, Kangiich, Kingiktuq...As we passed each one, they would explain how it was used for fishing or hunting and who had camped there or lived in the fallen sod houses.
For me, the land became an intricate braidwork of people and animals, land and water, weather and sky, story and song.
One late January, I had taken my dog team upriver to look for caribou. The temperature had remained far below zero for weeks and the sun had vanished more than two months earlier...although each day it gave us a few hours of remote and heatless twilight. I was following caribou tracks that led north, but at one point I happened to glance behind me. And there it was_ the long-lost sun, a shimmering golden sliver, scarcely breaking the hard seam where land met sky. Never before or since have I been so elated to see a sunrise.
Over that year in Wainwright, I became completely enthralled with the great, immeasurable, perpetually rolling vastness of the tundra, by the enormous unbroken whiteness of snow, by the moving expanses of sea ice, by the endless sun-circling summer days, by the bearded seals and walruses, the bowhead whales and polar bears, the enormous flocks of waterfowl, the great restless herds of caribou.
Ever since, I have marveled at the blind luck to be there, a young guy from a Wisconsin suburb, totally absorbed in the genius of a culture that emerged from this exquisite and challenging environment. My sense of privilege was then-and still is now-completely beyond measure.
One day, Debbie and I hike up a long ridge near our camp beside the Utukok River. As always, I carry a parabolic microphone to record the nesting birds and whatever sounds might catch our attention.
A year earlier and farther south along the Arctic coast, I was surrounded by thousands of migrating caribou. I started to record the storm of clattering hooves and grunts and chuffing breaths, then began whispering into the back side of the parabolic dish, compelled to describe one of the most spectacular wild events I had ever seen.
This summer, Debbie and I encounter smaller groups of caribou everywhere, and I am able to capture the intimate sounds between mothers and calves at very close range. We had hoped to see the big migration, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, but most of the herd is passing just to the north of us. Yet something just as remarkable happens. First, to our complete surprise, we discover a series of mysterious large pits that had been dug along a windblown ridge top. At first we think they must be ancient caribou hunting blinds, but they turn out to be something equally intriguing: deep excavations made by grizzly bears backhoeing the dirt and heavy slabs of rock to catch Arctic ground squirrels in their burrows.
That's a warm-up for what we find next: a dense scatter of artifacts half-hidden among the ground-hugging shrubs and lichens. We crawl around on hands and knees, picking up shiny black blades and fluted chert cores, exclaiming and speculating, taking their pictures then putting them back. We have found a place where ancestral people sat making stone tools, perhaps as recently as a few centuries ago but possibly as long as 10,000 years or more in the past.
ABOUT RICHARD NELSON
Richard Nelson (Nels) was an Alaskan writer, cultural anthropologist, and radio producer. Based on his experiences during the many years he studied the relationships to the environment among Iñupiaq Eskimos and Athabaskan Indians in northern Alaska, Nelson wrote Hunters of the Northern Ice, Shadow of the Hunter, Hunters of the Northern Forest, The Athabaskans, and Make Prayers to the Raven (which became an award-winning PBS television series). His writings have appeared in many magazines and anthologies; he co-authored Patriotism and the American Land with Barry Lopez and Terry Tempest Williams. Nelson was a past recipient of the John Burroughs Medal, the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, and the Lannan Literary Award for creative nonfiction and was Writer Laureate of Alaska. He was the co-producer and host for Encounters, a public radio program about the natural world, with podcasts and multimedia explorations at www.encountersnorth.org.