Flight of the Reindeer

by Robert Sullivan

  “All the elves patted Zap and the other dogs as we walked down the main avenue. They said something that in the elfin tongue probably means dog. It sounded like ‘Veeezaa.’

  Morluv the elf, based upon a detailed description by Steger

  Morluv was holding my hand as we went. He kept pointing out this and that, but he was excited too, and he kept slipping into elf language or Chinese or Spanish or something other than English. But finally I realized he was saying, ‘Show you the place, show you the place!’ ”

  The place was on the outskirts, “It was out by the farthest factory, which is beyond the farthest ice fields. The place was,” Steger pauses. “Well, I would call it Reindeerland. There were hundreds of Peary out there, in stables and just roaming the ice. Some were feeding over by the greenhouses—the only non-white buildings up there because they’re translucent. Other reindeer were out at the ‘runway, ’ a hard-packed stretch of solid ice. At the runway, Peary were taking off, one after another. They would start, then they would be a blur as they went down the runway—a speck you could barely see, a spark shooting along. And then there was a flash of light, and you saw the spark disappear into the blue sky. One after another they went. So fast, so fine. I’ll admit it—it brought tears to my eyes.

  “Above us, gliding, were a hundred reindeer—two hundred, five hundred! They coated the sky. They were cruising, then sprinting, then—whoooooosh!—going into overdrive. You can recognize them as reindeer only when they coast through the sky. When they really fly, they just look like a flash of light. They seemed so fast to me, but Morluv kept saying, ‘Those aren’t the good ones. Those aren’t the good ones. Those aren’t the good ones.’ ”

  The “good ones,” the ones that we know—Dasher, Dancer and the gang—were in a grand stable behind the runway, Steger reports. “They were attended by a hundred elves, bringing corn and carrots from the greenhouses,” he says. “Seemed to me they were really pampered. They have this nice, cushy, kind of regal stable—and all the other deer sleep outside. I asked if the good ones were in the stable just then, and Morluv nodded vigorously. ‘Resting, resting, resting,’ said Morluv, ‘resting, resting.’

  “It was spring, of course, when I was there. As I was soon to learn—from Santa himself, in fact—the nine deer who make the annual journey must rest a full four months before they start to train for the next year’s Mission. The short of it is, they burn out. They go so hard for one night, and then just collapse. Time is just different up there, that’s all there is to it. They’re different animals, living in the same world as us but living by their own rules. To them, it all makes sense.”

  Steger adds: “Morluv and I left the reindeer training grounds and headed back into the village. I had so many questions to ask, when Morluv stunned me by saying, ‘Want to meet? Want to meet? Want to meet?’ I asked, ‘Who?’ He said, ‘Him,’ and then he said that weird fa-la-la name. I said, ‘Santa?’ He laughed uncontrollably, nodding up and down like a maniac. ‘Yesyesyesyesyesyes,’ he said. ‘Sandra Claus! Him you call Sandra Claus!!’

  “He took my hand, turned me around once more and led me on.”

  “I can say unequivocally that the villagers are the most industrious people on earth. I mean, elves on earth.”

  – EINAR GUSTAVSSON, Icelandic scholar and elf historian

  STEGER STOPS FOR A MOMENT, and looks at the sky. He is thinking. He looks at the ground, and says slowly, “Santa said I could relate certain things, and others I should not tell. I was surprised by how open he was, and how much information he wanted me to bring back. He seemed to want to seize this rare opportunity—as I did, of course. He said I could say that the village is peaceful, that the village is unarmed, that the village is there for the good of all mankind, that the village loves all countries and all the children of all the countries, that the village will never perish, that the village will never desert us. He added that the village is movable, but there was a twinkle in his eye, and I didn’t know how to take that. I’m not sure what he meant.”

  Steger continues: “He lives in a house—not a castle—out by the reindeer grounds. He does have a wife, yes, and, interestingly, they have two children.”

  A quick word about the Claus family: Mrs. Claus is an often mentioned woman in northern lore, so even before Steger gave evidence there was good reason to believe in her existence. Gleaning from various traditions, we can assume she is an able administrator who focuses on local matters while Santa Claus oversees the global operation. “Seems to me, she runs the Pole,” says Steger. Mrs. Claus is in charge of the factories, which are in operation twenty-four hours each day, 364 days a year. Einar Gustavsson, the Icelander who envisioned Santa’s flight from Greenland and is an expert on all aspects of elfin society, says this is in no way unusual for a community of elves. “They are by far the best workers in the world,” he says. “This is because our ideas of time spent well and time spent poorly are inverted in an elfin society. Work is fun to them. Watching television is not fun. They love to go to work. I would presume the factories of the North Pole are turning out product at about a half ton an hour, and I would presume this makes those factory workers pretty pleased and proud.”

  Neither of the Claus children works in the factory. “They’re not lazy,” Steger says. “They’re just outdoorsy.” The boy is an able reindeer trainer; the girl’s an exercise rider. In fact, she is the one who takes large teams of Peary on thousand-mile midnight flights, to work on their technique and stamina. “Mrs. Claus is awfully proud of the daughter,” says Steger. “It seems the girl is just about the best reindeer jockey in five hundred years.” It’s interesting to note: The “girl” is, herself, perhaps 300 or 400 years old—if we can extrapolate from references to the children in Sami histories.

  “We shared tea and cookies, using silverware with a Santa pattern,” says Steger of his visit to the household. “I think cookies are the national food up there, everyone’s always eating cookies—the Pole is on one big sugar fix. Anyway, we shared tea and cookies by Santa’s fire, and he talked with me. He was a little chagrined at first when Morluv brought me to the door. But, as his wife explained to me, elves do not stay chagrined. Chagrined, mad, angry, vengeful—these are foreign to them. They shed these emotions like a winter coat in springtime.”

  Steger’s voice indicates that his tale is reaching a close: “As I say, he told me a lot. He told me, very succinctly, why he did what he did—‘Out of love’—but he would not tell me when he started, nor what prompted him to start. He told me how hard it is on the deer, not to mention the elves. But he felt that all of his faithful—the elves and the deer—did the work because they wanted to. He told me. . .”

  The tea service reflected the Claus family’s good cheer and sly humor.

  HE TOLD STEGER A LOT, and told him to bring the message south—minus the few precious secrets that must never be revealed. Santa Claus was, by accounts, a gracious host as he sat there in his long underwear, sipping his tea, gently petting the head of a young Peary caribou that rested by his feet. Steger laments that he had not brought his camera from camp: “It was only supposed to be an hour’s scouting trip!” But then he reconsiders and says he is happy he didn’t have it, happy that the marvelous experience exists only in the warmth of memory. “It’s interesting, when we got back to America and developed the film from other parts of our trip to the Pole, the photos confirmed that we had seen strange things in the sky. In certain frames there are small but undeniable unidentified flying objects. I’m certain—now—that these were the reindeer.” Steger told Claus as he departed, “I’d love to have my friends meet you.” Claus answered, “Yes, wonderful, that would be pleasant.” And so Steger and Zap headed back to camp excitedly. They found the others without problem. Steger gathered his compatriots in a lathered rush, and the eight of them pointed their dog teams due north.

  They searched and searched but never saw sign of Santa Claus, his village or any flying reindeer. On the fifty-fifth day of th
eir expedition they reached the Pole: True North. Still nothing. When Steger traveled to the Pole again in 1995, he traveled an empty expanse. Nothing.

  But. . . he knew that the ice cap was not the white void it seemed. He felt the presence. He saw nothing, but he felt. . . something.

  “The dogs were never bothered by the reindeer flying overhead,” says Steger. “They were northern dogs, and seemed to understand.”

  PART THREE

  The Miracle of Reindeer Flight

  Mysteries Explained, Science Revealed

  DESPITE FIRSTHAND testimony, some people still doubt. “Really?” they ask. “Do they really fly?” Well, we shouldn’t feel shy about asking, we shouldn’t feel bad about disbelieving. The fact is, debate has raged forever, not just among children but among scientists as well.

  MAMMALOGISTS HAVE BEEN FIGHTING for years about whether it’s true flight or what some of them used to call extended leaping,” says zoologist Tony Vecchio. Vecchio is director of the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence, Rhode Island. Only recently, he says, have scientists and Santalogists agreed that reindeer are, in fact, flying. And news of this codification in the ranks of techno-thinkers has been slow to spread. Many people you pass on the street, day in and day out, still do not believe.

  “And that’s really too bad,” Vecchio continues. “Because the flying deer is just about the most astounding animal in the world. He should be believed in, he also should be looked up to. Santa’s team of eight—plus, of course, the one with the nose—they are perfect mammals. They are unique and beautiful, not to say miraculous. They’re the pinnacle of evolution.”

  “This particular reindeer, known as the Peary, is not a miracle. But it is something close to a miracle. ”

  – TONY VECCHIO, zoologist and animal biologist

  ALTHOUGH WE KNOW that the Peary caribou is the true flier, many species of reindeer can sort of fly. A 600-pound woodland caribou in Canada can clear a river with a jump and glide, thanks to its extremely elastic tendons and other characteristics that it shares with the Peary. But it is only the Peary that can travel long distances and that can actually climb to high altitude. The Peary is the one that “mounts to the sky.”

  The question is: How?

  “Rangifer tarandus pearyi is closely related to the larger reindeer but is a singular animal,” says Bil Gilbert, our naturalist from Pennsylvania who has written extensively on Arctic fauna for Smithsonian and other magazines. “A Peary weighs only a hundred-fifty pounds—that’s where the ‘eight tiny reindeer’ thing comes from. It’s the smallest deer in the world, and if you looked at it alongside a moose, an elk or even a regular white-tailed deer, you’d never guess they were related.”

  Perhaps, but lots of flightless things are small. What else is there?

  “Well, as the northernmost deer in the world,” continues Gilbert, “the Peary is awfully hardy and strong. You can imagine how tough it is to survive at those latitudes up there, with that weather—the cold, those vicious winds. But Peary thrive there. They have a phenomenal strength-to-weight ratio, the greatest of all mammals by about three times. It’s such a strange little deer, a lot of people don’t understand it, and therefore they don’t believe in it.”

  AS YOU MIGHT IMAGINE, the Peary isn’t commonly seen. Tiny as it is, camouflaged in its snow-white coat, based in a habitat that is forbidding in the extreme, it has developed an almost mystical reputation: Does it really even exist? In this sense of borderline reality, the Peary is a member of a fascinating, semi-mythical menagerie of beasts that seem to fall somewhere between truth and illusion. The ocean-going narwhal and the Himalayan snow leopard can be seen as the Peary’s animal-kingdom cousins. In his 1978 book The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen tells of an Asian Lama, Milarepa, who, “to confound his enemies, resorted to his black Nyingmapa Tantra (magic) and transformed himself into a snow leopard at Lachi-Kang (Mount Everest).” And in his bestselling Arctic Dreams, the equally esteemed Barry Lopez writes of the narwhal, “No large mammal in the Northern Hemisphere comes as close as the narwhal to having its very existence doubted. . . . We know more about the rings of Saturn than we know about the narwhal.” Magic and rumor—so it goes with the Peary. Yet all of these species are certifiably real; they are not just so many Sasquatches. What mystique they possess is attributable to their exotic looks, to their elusiveness and to the quasi-spiritual regions where they dwell.

  A maneuver such as this demonstrates how the Peary is constantly using all of its unique physical attributes to better advantage.

  “Everyone asks about the Peary’s magic,” says Gilbert. “It’s such an odd creature, people ascribe all sorts of things to it. It lives such a long time that people say it’s immortal. It is not. Many Peary can fly, so some scientists insist it’s a bird and not a mammal. Hardly. A bat is a mammal, and a bat flies. In fact, a bat’s gliding mechanism is very similar to a Peary’s. Many Peary live on the ice cap, so some people speculate that it subsists on snow. Nonsense. The Peary needs precious little food, but it does need food.”

  Other legends dispelled: There are those who say it is a superdeer brought to earth by Saint Nicholas for his purposes only. Simply not true. Nicholas—or whoever he is—has been adept at harnessing the Peary to his needs, and at breeding Peary. But if these are just ‘Santa’s deer,’ then why aren’t they all on the ice cap? Why have they been photographed on Ellesmere, been seen also at the Kane Basin on Greenland, at Hyperit Point on Axel Heiberg Island, on North Devon Island, on Prince Patrick Island, on Meighen Island? They are all over the place up there, and in number. There are, perhaps, a half million Peary on earth, approximately ninety-five percent of which live or migrate above the Arctic Circle. Gilbert enumerates other characteristics of the breed: “They’re built for the cold and wind. They’re low to the ground, strong and sure-footed. Those in Santa Claus’s village are also particularly suited for the dicey proposition of living on an ice cap. How so? Well, like all reindeer, they are absolutely phenomenal swimmers. Their hair is hollow in the center which gives them buoyancy, and their large splayed hooves make for terrific paddles. So if the surface ice cracks beneath them in summer, they can churn back to the shelf and clamber up. They can even go into a midwater liftoff like a huge duck if they want to exert the effort. I’ve seen that happen on Ellesmere. It’s the most sensational thing I’ve ever been witness to. It is something that just takes your breath away.”

  “The Peary is the Babe Ruth of reindeer. It has innate talent, a yearning to be the best and an unquenchable joie de vivre.”

  – BIL GILBERT, naturalist and author

  THE PEARY CARIBOU IS REAL, and the Peary caribou can fly. But again, how does it fly? “It is actually easier to comprehend than it is to believe,” says Gilbert, whose book How Animals Communicate shows an uncanny understanding of the motives and desires of wildlife. “Let me explain it to you.”

  Gilbert proceeds to do so: “I think the most important aspect of all is willpower. It’s like with a great athlete—if he has the tools, great, but does he have the drive and desire to get the most out of these tools? The truly successful flying deer, certainly including the ones used by Santa, must have tremendous intestinal fortitude.”

  Gilbert goes on to explain how all reindeer and caribou are splay-hooved, and this creates a large surface area useful for all kinds of walking, running and thrusting: “Physically, the two most important aspects of a flier are the hooves and the antlers.” After centuries of living in snow-covered lands, the North Pole Peary has developed a hoof every bit as big as that of a St. George’s herd caribou. This acts as a kind of snowshoe when he’s on the ground, and in the air it acts as a small, solid wing. “Trust me,” says Gilbert, “it’s a big hoof for a little deer. It’s as if you had size-fifty feet. Try thinking of it that way.”

  The hoof must not only be large and flat on the bottom but also streamlined from toe to heel. It’s rather like the wing of an airplane in this way, and creates the same effect. Wh
at’s at work here is called Bernoulli’s principle, and has to do with air rushing over a flat surface, thus creating loft. “It’s pretty technical,” says Gilbert, “and I won’t bore you with that part.”

  ALSO IMPORTANT is antler configuration. “Let me start by saying that reindeer are the only antlered animal on earth to have a tined forehead at the base of the antler—it’s a protruding, bony forehead,” Gilbert informs us. “On a big reindeer it seems like a little bump, but on the Peary it seems like a massive shelf sticking up from his head. For him, when in flight, it’s like a spinnaker on a sailboat—it’s an extra sail, banking the wind up and over. Whooosh! And it has other practical applications. When the deer is on the ground, the tine can be used as a shovel. A lot of reindeer use it this way when foraging for lichen and other moss on the snow-covered tundra. But consider how it might help the Peary on Santa’s traveling squad. They can get out of any bad-weather mess they might encounter, or can clear the way to a window or chimney in two seconds flat. The tine also keeps snow out of their eyes, even when flying through blizzard conditions.”

  Gilbert’s talking fast and clearly enjoying himself. “Another thing about the antlers—reindeer are one of only three kinds of deer in the world to develop the palmated, or broad-ended type of horn. This too creates wind resistance, and thus loft.4