Flight of the Reindeer

by Robert Sullivan

  Steger’s team was only the latest in a very long line that have followed the midnight sun toward True North.

  In 1875 British naval officer George Nares failed. In 1882 the U.S. Navy’s Lt. George Washington De Long also failed. In 1884 American Brig. Gen. Adolphus Washington Greely led an expedition up the length of Ellesmere Island, and his junior officer, Lt. Lockwood, established a new Farthest North point. But Greely, too, ultimately failed, and six of his twenty-four men died.

  Andree was 42 years old and an explorer with ten years’ polar experience when he announced his daring flight. No previous exploration generated the keen anticipation that his did.

  IN THE LAST DECADE of the last century, the zeal for getting to the Pole (and to insights about Santa Claus) became feverish. In 1897, a charismatic Scandinavian named Salomon

  Andree—scientist, athlete, airman—electrified the world and shocked the competition: He would try to reach the Pole in a balloon. The earth’s citizens held their breath as Andree and two comrades made their way to the northern coast of Spitzbergen and, on a windy July 11th, lifted off dramatically. “The balloon is now traveling straight to the north; it goes along swiftly,” wrote Alexis Machuron, a member of the base party who was present at the launch. “If it keeps up this initial speed and the same direction, it will reach the Pole in less than two days. The way to the Pole is clear, no more obstacles to encounter; the sea, the ice-field, and the Unknown!”

  It was Andree’s intention to fly to the Pole, land there, then travel back over the ice by sled; he had brought equipment and provisions in the basket of his balloon. It is sad to say, but must suffice: He was never seen alive again. Vilhjálmur Stefánsson, the renowned Arctic explorer and historian, author of The Northward Course of Empire, Unsolved Mysteries of the Arctic and many other books, theorized that Andree stayed aloft for three days before crash-landing on the ice at 83 degrees north latitude. Stefánsson recounted how Andree and his fellow adventurers made their way to White Island over the course of three arduous months. There, finally, they died during the brutally harsh winter of 1897 – 98. Stefánsson

  based his account on the diaries, logbooks and tentsite relics that were found years later on the island.

  And he based his tale on the messages of doves.

  Andree, an able technician, oversaw the design of his mammoth balloon, the patching of its surface in the hangar at Spitzbergen and, of course, its northward launch.

  ANDREE HAD CARRIED thirty-six homing pigeons aloft with him. Their job was to transport news back to Norway. We’ll never know with certainty how many birds he released during his twoday flight, but it seems that there were at least three. Some experts contend that only one was found. Others insist: All three were.

  The first to be located was picked up by a ship traveling north from the Barents Sea. Sure enough, there was a message in the canister attached to the bird’s leg, and it read: “July 13, 12:30 midday. . . good speed to east. . . all well on board. This is the third pigeon-post.”

  Stefánsson wrote of the two “lost” doves: “Reports came in that natives had killed a bird unknown to them (i.e., a pigeon) that they had eaten the bird and destroyed or lost a message which had been fastened to it. The excitement about the pigeons spread far and wide.”

  As well it might have, for stories began to circulate among the natives of Spitzbergen, Iceland and northern Norway and Sweden of an inexplicable discovery—a discovery nowhere mentioned in Stefánsson’s careful writing. In Scandinavian histories written by indigenous people, the Sami, there is evidence that the second message was not “destroyed or lost” but in fact found months later on a Swedish beach. The extraordinary memorandum in that canister read (in translation): “July 11, 12:01 midnight. fast to north. . . fantastic sight, large mammals in flight . . . deer?. . . a hundred or more. This is the first pigeon-post.”

  Stefánsson was one of the century’s most distinguished explorer-scientists, and ventured into the Arctic many times before his death in 1962.

  A full year after Andree’s balloon had taken off, another dead pigeon washed ashore at Victoria Island. It bore even more stunning information, as a tattered note now in the possession of the Artic Institute proves: “July 12, 11:00 midday. . . gust has blown us to 90 degrees north latitude. . . incredible vision, eyes are deceived! A crystal city below on the ice!. . . Shall investigate. This is the second pigeon post.”

  Although the messages were ignored at the time—not least because competitive English and American explorers didn’t want to admit that Andree might have been the first to fly over the Pole—the facts were recorded in scores of northern histories. These frank, unamazed narratives are not unlike the ones in the Inuit museum of Kuujjuaq.

  “Again,” says Oran Young, “we’re the ones who are always astonished by this news of elves and other Arctic phenomena. The natives up there live with them and know them as neighbors. To them, this was no big deal. Elves and the flying deer, it’s part of their daily culture. Want proof? Just look at old northern European paintings—not just the Inuit, Sami or other native stuff, either. You can see flying beasts in the distance just as surely as there are birds in American scenics. Why not? The deer were in training constantly, so of course they had become part of the landscape.”

  Just so. But as an historical item, the conclusions regarding Andree remain a very big deal to all of humankind. Think of it: Salomon Andree and his compatriots were the first men ever to view not only the North Pole but also Santa Claus’s kingdom. Had they been able to land their balloon in those whirling winds above True North, they might have been the first men to make contact. As it was, all Andree was able to leave us was that alluring description, “a crystal city below on the ice!”

  It’s all but certain that the American adventurer Robert E.

  Peary knew of Andree’s sighting when he became the first man to reach the North Pole in 1909. After all, he had many Sami and Eskimos as members of his expedition, and they surely told him of Andree’s two strange, suppressed messages. But just as surely, Peary himself saw nothing of Santa Claus. Peary was an ambitious man who sought fame as much as achievement itself. Had he discovered any sign of the elf nation, he unquestionably would have trumpeted the news. His silence remains the best evidence that he saw nothing.

  “But Santa saw him,” says Will Steger. “He told me so.”

  Northerners say the second dove bore a missive from the balloon that eventually was found. The “July 12, 11:00 midday” note at the Arctic Institute bears them out.

  Steger, as far as is known, was the first person to actually venture into the elves’ village, and remains the only person alive to have enjoyed this privilege. It is possible that an Inuit citizen or a Scandinavian adventurer also made his way into the sanctum, then kept the news largely to himself. There are legends of such things, particularly in the northern communities. But there is nothing written. And, most reliably, Steger reports that Santa Claus himself feels that his community has stayed a closed nation during its millennium on the Arctic ice. “Santa said I could talk about this when I returned to Minnesota,” Steger says reflectively. “He said there were certain things it would be good for people to know.

  “Where to start?” he continues. “Well, as I say, it was 1986 and eight of us were trying to get to the Pole by dogsled. We were attempting to be the first ones to do it by carrying our own supplies with us. On March eighth we went north onto the frozen polar sea from Drep Camp on the north coast of Ellesmere. Santa joked about that. He said he had taken the same route, a long, long time ago.”

  The same route pioneered by Peary (above) in 1909 was followed by Will Steger years later (opposite).

  Steger remembers, “The first weeks were awful. The blocks of blue ice rose fifty feet or more, aligned like a series of huge frozen waves, and we had to climb each of these ridges with our tremendous loads. By the time we were nearing the Pole, in April, the ice was getting really weak and shifty—dangerous. After fifty
days or so we were only a few miles from the top of the world, and things started getting strange. We heard odd noises, we hallucinated at times. This is to be expected in extreme conditions, but the things that we were thinking we saw. . .

  “Once, it seems, the sky was filled with birds. They were so far off in the distance, yet we could see them. One of my teammates said, ‘How could they be that big? We shouldn’t be able to see an eagle from here!’ He shot some photos, hoping the animals could be identified later.

  “Another time, I swore I saw man-made structures beyond an ice ridge. I shot some photos quickly, but by the time I had taken the camera down from my eye, whatever I had seen had vanished, like a mirage. ‘Probably the shifting of the ice,’ I said to myself.

  “As we neared the Pole there was so much of that—moving ice, sudden loud cracks in the ice—that it was getting hazardous to travel fast as a team. We started scouting the safest routes individually, then doubling back to get the others. That’s how the strangest, most wonderful day of my life began. It had warmed up to about minus-twenty, and there was a constant fog over the ice—very eerie and mysterious—and it was my turn to scout. I went out with Zap, my lead dog, and a team of eight, pulling a light sled—I wanted to travel nimbly over the ridges. We were making our way through this skim-milk haze, and every now and then a wind would blow an opening in the fog and I could see blue sky.

  “Suddenly, I saw something. It was crazy. I saw this ice ridge ahead and what looked like a pinnacle above it, like a steeple. And then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, the fog enveloped it again.

  “Now, in the Arctic, you can have visions all the time. I figured I had just had one. I said to myself, ‘Will, it’s the cold. It’s been fifty days on the ice. You’re seeing things.’ I shook my head to get the cobwebs out, and drove the dogs toward the ice ridge, which wasn’t a very high one. Maybe ten or fifteen feet tall.

  “Zap started barking, just going nuts. He was making a racket all the way up the ridge, and soon all the other dogs started yapping too. I couldn’t shut them up until Zap got to the top, and the minute he did he just stopped barking. Stopped cold. I had never seen that before—he always keeps barkin’ when he senses something. But not this time. Zap was just struck dumb, and all the other dogs stopped too. So I’m pushing the sled up behind them and I’m shouting ‘What’s wrong, boy? What’s up? What do you see?’ Then I got to the top, and just as I did the fog blew away.

  “There, below me, was heaven. It was Oz. It was the village itself.”

  STEGER STOPS TALKING and rises slowly. He goes down to the edge of the lake and looks out over the surface of the water. He walks back up the bank and slowly resumes his story, as he sits down again on a tree stump. As he talks, he continues to gaze out over the lake and struggles, briefly, to regain his composure.

  The pressure ridges, which sometimes climbed to fifty feet, made Steger’s progress slow and exhausting.

  “It was certainly the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. The loveliest. The strangest, of course, and. . . well, obviously it was the most unexpected.” He smiles at this, then picks up steam. “It was both huge and small, if you can imagine that. A whole kingdom, and yet compact. A city of carefully sculpted snow and white-wood buildings that were all packed in tight, one against another. It was a booming metropolis, but it was just a village. It was a nation, but just a community. It was maybe three square miles, yet it was home to thousands—I could see them, scurrying around in the streets. It was overwhelming.”

  Steger says the village was “white—all white, pure white. The snow castles are white, the wooden factory is white, the streets aren’t paved or shoveled because all travel is, of course, by reindeer. The reindeer are white! All the elves wear white. From December 26th until the following December 24th, Santa Claus himself wears white. ‘The reason should be pretty obvious, pretty obvious,’ this little elf told me.”

  It wasn’t until weeks later, when film was developed, that some of Steger’s wildest notions of what he might have seen were confirmed.

  Steger digresses briefly: “Well, they’re all little, but this one was particularly short. His name sounded like Morluv, and he was the first one I met. ‘Pretty obvious, pretty obvious, pretty obvious,’ he kept saying—in English, once he had figured out which language I spoke. He speaks dozens of them. ‘Pretty obvious, pretty obvious. I mean, well, it should be obvious. It’s camouflage, you see. How do you hide in a tree? You do a green thing. In the desert? You do a brown thing. In the snow? You do a white thing! Voila—Here it is, here we are, the whitest white thing in the world! White on white on white on white on white!’

  “He had surprised me,” Steger continues. “He was up near the ridge, about a half mile from the village. He’d snuck up on me because he was as curious about me as I was about this amazing vision I had stumbled onto. He actually broke a law, I found out later. It’s a rule in the village that if you see anything coming—anything at all—you’re supposed to hide. But this Morluv was a fun-loving sort and really excitable. Hiding was the last thing on his mind. I guess he hadn’t broken a law, exactly, because he wasn’t punished—not while I was there. They just have these rules, and everybody obeys them. ‘That way,’ Santa told me later, ‘everybody lives happily.’ He then said, ‘Tell your friends that. It works fine if you try.’ ”

  “Zap went through the whole range of emotions that day. He was afraid, he was exited, he was joyous. So was I. ”

  – WILL STEGER, referring to his longtime lead husky

  STEGER PAUSES AGAIN, picks a piece of grass from the bankside and starts chewing it. Now, the gleam of humor comes into his eyes. “I was there only a few hours, and Morluv became a great friend. They insinuate themselves into your affections, these elves. In ten minutes you feel like you’ve known them ten years. Morluv was a little crazy and a whole lot of fun. He was about two feet tall and said he was four hundred years old, more or less. ‘In your human years,’ he said, making it sound like dog years. He said four hundred was young, considering where he lived.

  “Did you know,” asks Steger, “that elves—or any animals, for that matter—live much longer at the Pole? It’s true. It’s the elf’s physique and biology, and also the temperature. They’re very small and efficient, and their metabolism slows down to almost nothing because of the cold. Every minute that you live in New York City, an elf could do a full day’s work. Every carrot they eat is roughly equivalent to three square meals for us.

  “But anyway—I’m getting away from my story.

  “He was about two feet tall, and he stunned me—I jumped a mile. He comes up and starts going crazy in elf language, elfese, or whatever—then tries French, German, Gaelic and about twenty other things on me before I hear him going ‘Who’re you? Who’re you? Who’re you???’ And I say I’m Will Steger from Minnesota, and this doesn’t mean too much to him, apparently. But he says this guy he knows—and then he gives the weird, elfin name for Santa—he says this guy must hear about this, and he puts his hand on the sled like he’s going to guide it down into the village—like I’m a prisoner. And I’m thinking, ‘This elf’s two feet tall!’ So I yank the sled away, even though I obviously want to go to the village. And you know what? The sled doesn’t budge. Not a half-inch. I yank again. Nothing. The elf’s two feet tall, maybe four hundred years old, and as strong as an ox. Ten oxen!

  “So I mumble, ‘Let’s go.’ He hops aboard, and we slide down into the village.

  “At one point, Zap looked back and snarled at Morluv. Morluv smiled and went ‘zzzzzzz.’ Zap went quiet immediately, and seemed to like Morluv from that moment on. I learned while I was there that the elves have an uncommon, even uncanny way with animals. They love them, and are loved in return. It’s principally between them and the reindeer, since that’s the animal up there. But I’ll tell you—my dogs didn’t want to leave.”

  NEITHER DID I, really, after what I saw up there,” Steger continues. “And heard. And experienced
. And learned. In two hours I got the most phenomenal education that you can imagine. My eyes were open wide, and I learned what the world can be. “No, wait. What the world is. At its best place, right now.”

  Steger’s thoughts return to the village: “What happened was, Morluv took me down into town, and I was walking down these narrow ice streets, watching all the elves go about their chores—their lives are nothing but chores, yet they love the chores.” Steger smiles at the remembrance. “They’re constantly grinning, and they always seem in an incredible hurry. They carry huge loads, and they hurry along. The streets are clogged with reindeer, too—the white ones, the Peary. They’re everywhere, never harnessed. And the elves will be carrying loads of stuff, and they’ll is hop on a Peary and say, ‘Heeeee!’ and the thing will just bound out of sight. Incredible leaping ability! They just spring into the air, and disappear over the tops of these thin, icewalled buildings.

  “The most amazing thing about my visit was this—no one stared at me! No one cared about this ‘man’—this man who was twice as big as any of them—walking down the street. They had jobs to do, places to get to. They smiled at me, and I tried to smile back. I was just so stunned by the whole experience, I couldn’t be sure if I was smiling or laughing or crying.