Soft ropes fly: A reindeer is caught and struggles backward. Another one is roped, and another, until the first six are pulled from the moving mass. Katya, Piotr, both Maries, Stas, Rima, and Red Beard, one of the herders, hold the herd in. Antlered heads rise up and drop. Strips of velvet hang from broken tines. A young herder named Alexander, Katya’s brother, pulls out six more. The rime ice on the net corral jangles.
The men know each animal, which ones worked last and need a rest, which ones are fresh, which ones are young and need to be put next to an experienced animal. Harnessing is slow, but no one ever looks hurried. Each member of the group drives a lead sled that pulls a caravan of packed sleds. Fourteen drivers require at least fifteen reindeer each: three or four to pull the first sled, then two more between each of the six or seven freight sleds.
It’s late afternoon by the time we take off, but because it’s April and we are above the Arctic Circle, there will be light well into the night. Women lead the way. Katya’s mother heads out first, followed by Marie and Rima. They are strong drivers and hold their khoreys parallel to the ground like lances. They know the route, as do the older reindeer. The men’s job is to decide where camp is set up and which direction to face the chum door.
The small sleds glide across the ice-covered ponds and bump over purple hummocks. Katya and I are fourth in the caravan. We share the single seat, really only big enough for one. Her reindeer run at first, and we bounce hard, then they slow to a trot. There’s only a single rein attached to the bridle of the lead deer, with little real control. The dogs are tied to the sides of the sleds and run along happily. Puppies get to ride.
The Eveny people to the east say that when their shamans wear antler headdresses, they become reindeer that can fly. Reindeer, thought to be special because of the hypnotic look in their eyes, are consecrated as sacred and called kujjai. They are protectors who keep their owner from harm, even dying for him or her if necessary. As our sled, pulled by four reindeer, bumps and slides past snow-flocked spruce and open meadows, I can’t help thinking about the cascading disasters Russia (and every Arctic nation) is facing here in the far north, with its acid rain-laced tundra ponds and radioactive lichen, yet it feels as though we’re in a past century, before these anthropogenic calamities occurred. Traveling in a wintry shroud of snow and fog, we are clothed in hide and furs, and the clacking of reindeer feet made by a tendon rubbing across a bone in the foot sounds out a primordial rhythm.
After a long traverse, we head up into the forest. The track through the trees narrows, and we have to duck under overhanging branches as we come to the top of a hill. Below is the frozen Snopa River. To get down the steep ravine and cross the river ice, then climb back up the other side with 87 sleds will take hard work and time.
Katya and I wait our turn. We have been traveling for hours, sharing our narrow seat. While we stretch our legs, the reindeer lie down and eat snow. Katya strokes the lead reindeer’s forehead. Flaps of velvet hang from one tine. “He’s my favorite,” she says. “They always get this one out of the herd for me.”
The Saami reindeer herders to the west, who are linked to the Komi-Zyrian people by their Finno-Ugric language, have a legend about a “wild woman” who was tired of being a human and so became a reindeer, though she still had human thoughts. As a human, she had been childless, but once changed, she gave birth to a reindeer. “That’s me,” the unmarried Katya says, smiling. “I would take this old reindeer for a husband any day.”
Fyodor, a Nenets and the youngest of the group, glides up beside us, jumps off his sled with a flourish, cocks his fur hat to one side, and runs down the hill to help the others. Each sled is eased down the embankment and hoisted over boulders. Down they go, fishtailing across the frozen river and bumping up the other side, three men pushing from behind.
Rangifer tarandus are actually caribou that are called reindeer when tamed. Domestication is only partial. They are simply separated from the wild herd and put into harness, receiving no special feed or shelter to lure them into the sanctuary of the human world. You can look into their eyes and not know what they are feeling, whether they are frightened, bored, angry, or just don’t care. They are not communicators, as dogs and horses are. They only tolerate the harness, preferring, most likely, their other life on the range.
Caribou biologists say that domestic and wild herds are “ecological antagonists.” They compete for feed on the lichen pastures and are sometimes carriers of the deadly anthrax disease. The life span of wild reindeer is only half that of tamed ones, who live to be 14 or 15 years old.
When it’s our turn to cross the river, Fyodor takes over and Katya and I run alongside. “He’s showing off,” Katya whispers to me with a smile. Traveling again, thick trees give way to a series of huge meadows, at the far end of which a new camp comes into being.
Despite the lateness of our arrival, the camp is a hive of activity. It’s ten in the evening by the time the first chum goes up, the two center poles forming an A-frame and the other poles carefully balanced against them. Four wooden planks, the portable floor, are put down on either side of the woodstove, and cut pine boughs are laid around the perimeter with reindeer skins. Fires are started in the sheet metal stoves so that by the time the chum is enclosed, the stove is hot enough to heat water for tea and cook the evening meal. Across the skeletal poles, the men unwind the hide cover as big as a sail. It takes 25 reindeer skins to cover one chum.
Logs from the forest are ferried in on reindeer sleds, and firewood is cut. At our chum, the last to go up, Marie bosses the men as they push the reindeer skins to the top of the chum. “Not too high, down on that side…no…no, OK, that’s right, higher, it’s going to be bad weather tonight,” she yells, as if they’d never done it before. Unruffled, her sons do her bidding.
The back wall of the tent with the sewn-in window is carefully adjusted to let light in on the low kitchen table. An oilcloth is smoothed out, and on it Marie lays dishes, silverware, tea, cookies, and candies. Chai is poured. A candle is lit. The movable world of the Komi people is again in place.
One o’clock in the morning, and outside the men, having worked late, rest on the huge pile of firewood they’ve just cut and tell stories: “Two years ago in December and January, in just this place, three wolves came into the herd and ate some of our reindeer,” Vasily tells me. “There was very little snow, so the wolves could get away from us. But when they came back, the snow was deeper and we were able to shoot them. We didn’t eat the meat, but we used the skins.”
That same year a bear attacked three harnessed reindeer near their chum. “We were eating when the dogs began barking,” they told me. By the time they ran outside to kill the bear, the reindeer were already dead. The bear stayed around camp all night and found their cache of meat. “It ate that, too. It ate everything.” They look at the woods nearby. “Maybe we will have a bear come into camp tonight,” they say, smiling. “They are smarter than we are, so watch out!”
The evening brings no wolves, no bears, only sun touching down on reindeer hides. Snow falls. Marie ties a red wool scarf over her head, shuffles out away from the camp activity, scoops clean snow into three buckets, and hauls them into the chum to melt for tea. The dogs are fed and curl up under the sleds for shelter.
The sky darkens and the spring air is cold. I follow Vasily and Piotr through the flap of the chum. It’s warm inside. Vasily looks boyish, with brown bangs and big, soft eyes. He tells how when it was time for him to go to boarding school he hid when the helicopter came for him. “We were on the tundra, but there were some trees nearby. I ran into the forest and dug a cave in the snow, but the pilots found me and dragged me away.”
Like children all over the Arctic, Vasily found this enforced separation from camp life and de-acculturation traumatic. He and the other children spoke only Komi when they arrived at school, and it took an extra year of classes just to learn Russian. They said they couldn’t digest the food. “Especially porridge,” Vasily
says. “Before then, we had only eaten reindeer meat, fish, and berries.” As he talks, Marie makes his bed with loving care. She piles up skins, positions a large pillow against the chum wall, and lays out his sheepskin bag at a right angle to her bed so that his head is almost in her lap. At 46 he’s still sleeping with his mother.
Piotr turns on the radio. It’s cheap and battery powered and blasts only static. Then voices do come on, something about Moscow’s weather followed by polka music. He’s the restless one of the two brothers and fends for himself. His spartan bed is on the other side of the chum. He asks if I know Madonna and looks disappointed when I shake my head no. Mike Tyson?” No. “Tina Turner?” Again I shake my head, laughing. He says: “I know more about her than you do: I know she’s 58 but looks 28.” Vasily gives his brother a dirty look: “They can have plastic put on their face, but they can’t fix their health,” he says. “You shouldn’t be interested in these people. They think we are poor. But we use everything. No, we are rich. We are healthy living this way.”
Piotr says nothing. He lights a cigarette and looks up at the smoke hole. He turns to me once more: “Will you vote for Hillary Clinton?” I’m not sure, I say, though when I ask why he wants to know, he can’t give an answer. Piotr is wrestling with ideas about personal and political freedom. Russia’s contemporary upheavals, from tyrannical dictatorships to totalitarianism to perestroika to the iron rule of Putin, haven’t garnered him the freedom to travel, to vote, to voice his opinion, or to make enough money to go to art school. A few years earlier he left the tundra for a job in Arkhangel’sk, but he didn’t like city life so he came home. “They didn’t pay me enough, and I had no free time. I hated it. Not enough money to rent an apartment or have a girlfriend; no time to do carvings.”
From the other side of the chum Marie’s snoring gets louder. She shifts and groans. Earlier, I heard a snow bunting’s bell-like song. Now, burning birch logs in the woodstove click and fizz. Tundra sounds seem to come one by one, the grunt of a reindeer, people sleeping, a radio going dead.
There’s a bump on the side of the chum and the tent flap flies open: Young Fyodor slides in on his knees. He sits on a low stool facing me, eyes glistening from vodka as he cocks his fur hat. He wants to talk. He wants to tell us about his life, and before anyone can object, he begins:
“My mother is Nenets, my father is Komi. I grew up in Oma. It’s a Nenetsy village. That’s where my mother is from. But when she got married, we moved to Pesha to work with reindeer. My mother stays in the village and shows movies once a week at the community hall. I grew up on the tundra. That’s why I’m here now. I served two years in the elite tank unit in Moscow. I had been out here with the reindeer, but the guys from Pesha said I had to go to the army, and they took me to the waiting helicopter.
“When I got to Moscow, the army psychiatrist wanted to know what went on in the mind of a nomad. I told him: ‘Reindeer.’ Two years later, the same guys from Pesha came and brought me back. So here I am!” he exclaims with a comical smile, jumps up, knocking the stool over, and abruptly leaves.
Piotr fiddles with his shortwave radio again. This time, news about Chechnya comes on. He holds it closer to his ear: “We are interested in what goes on there,” he says as the voices fade. In frustration, he shoves the radio under a jacket, and still fully clothed, pulls his single reindeer skin up to his chin. “I sleep with my boots on,” he tells me. “It’s from living outside with the reindeer all my life. I would prefer to sleep outdoors all the time.”
Six miles away, Katya’s two brothers are camped out with the main herd of 2,500 reindeer. Despite the snow, they have no tent. “It would make us lazy and sleepy, and then the wolves and bears would come and eat the calves,” one of them tells me. Guard duty lasts a week, then two other herders will take over. “We were 12 years old when we began to stay out with the reindeer,” he tells me. “It’s hard sometimes, but we like it. Our reindeer clothes keep us warm.”
Next week Vasily will live out on the range with the expectant reindeer, but for now, he’s dreamy eyed and quiet. He sits back against the tepee poles with his mother’s sleeping head against his thigh and speaks slowly, with the quiet reserve of a much older man: “We like it here, living in a chum, because these poles we have carved from the forest, and these walls we have sewn together from our reindeer. That is the meaning of home.”
Clouds wheel by the smoke hole. There has been no sun during the day, no moon or stars visible at night. Directly north is the shallow Barents Sea, whose influx of warm Gulf Stream water from the Atlantic moderates the ecosystem. In the summer, beaches are blanketed by colonies of nesting seabirds: arctic terns, ivory gulls, Sabine’s gulls, little auks, and pink-footed and barnacle geese. The huge bearded seals, narwhals, and walrus breed and rest along the shore. Cod is abundant. But the sea and all its life are polluted.
To the west is the Kola Peninsula, which has the highest density of nuclear reactors in the world. A former naval storage facility for spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste, its storage tanks are leaking, and radioactive contamination is migrating into groundwater and the surrounding atmosphere. (As if acknowledging its environmental problems, the Russian government has agreed recently to develop wind farms there.)
The richly productive Barents Sea is a dumping ground, where 7,000 tons of solid radioactive waste and 56,500 cubic feet of liquid waste have been deposited. Eighteen nuclear submarines were abandoned there, giving off cesium-137, cobalt-60, strontium, and iodine worth 312,500 curies. The Chernobyl disaster gave off 50,000 curies; 1 curie is enough to kill a human.
Rising sea-surface temperatures in the Barents Sea, northeast of Scandinavia, are the prime cause of the retreating winter ice edge over the past 26 years, according to research by Jennifer Francis, associate research professor at the Rutgers Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences. “The recent decreases in winter ice cover are clear evidence that Arctic pack ice will continue on its trajectory of rapid decline,” Francis concludes.
To know nothing of these things, is that happiness? Perhaps to know and be powerless is worse. Piotr blows out the kerosene lamp and makes his way back to bed by match light. The tent shudders; a frigid wind blows. Above and below transboundary pollution, beauty makes its mark on the ear, the retina, and the heart. Here we are living in an elegant reindeer universe: Chum coverings, clothes, sleeping bags, food, thread, glue, and transportation come from this one animal. Unlike hunters on the ice, who search for prey they cannot see, whose whereabouts are undependable, the herders take their food supply (reindeer) with them.
When everyone is asleep, I stick my head out the flap. Snowflakes tap my cheek. Taiga is my headrest and tundra my bedcovers. Smoke curls up from every chum, and the dogs sleep, noses tucked under tails.
MORNING. I ski alone across the open meadow, down to the Snopa River, with no idea of where it might lead. A hard crust formed on the snow during the night. Russia is a country of beauty and abuse. Under one ski are leaf-plastered shelves of ice at the river’s edge; under the other is coercion: Stalin’s terror, the tyrannies of Communism, and the surge of capitalism without a fully realized democracy.
Siberia was the Russians’ frontier before it became their dumping ground. First contact with indigenous people between the Dvina River and the Ural Mountains had occurred by the early 1400s; they were “conquered” by 1456, and by 1620 the annexation of western Siberia was deemed complete.
I asked the Komi how they were treated during the Stalin years and later by the Communists in the 1950s. “They forgot about us,” Vasily said. “We weren’t collectivized like the Indiga Nenets were, their reindeer taken, herders and their families removed from the tundra, the men forced into all-male brigades. They left our families alone.” Was that because the Komi look like Russians and are therefore racially “acceptable,” or were their numbers too small to be bothered with? Vasily shrugs.
To the east, the Nenets on the Yamal Peninsula rose up against Soviet authori
ty in the 1930s. They were spirited and independent and had no need for Russian things. Soviet Army men came onto the tundra of the Yamal and demanded to be given reindeer and sleds. In some cases thousands of animals were taken, leaving behind only a herd of a hundred. Shamans were incarcerated or killed. One powerful shaman who was inadvertently left behind called for a “holy war” against the Russians and a mandalada, an assemblage, was formed. The leaders made demands: that the stolen reindeer be returned, imprisoned shamans be released, their children not go to Russian schools, trading posts be banned, and Soviet laws be denounced. But time and again, the Russians overpowered the Nenets rebellion. Eventually, the tundra Nenets leaders were arrested.
The Cold War of the 1950s and 1960s left no one untouched, but the hand of radioactivity is hard to perceive. Just to the north of this camp the radioactivity blew east in the prevailing winds all the way across the Siberian tundra, only to be sucked up by lichen, which take their nutrients from air not earth. These, in turn, are eaten by reindeer, and the reindeer are consumed by reindeer herders and townspeople alike.
I ski and ski. Under the snow and the active layer of earth that freezes and thaws seasonally are bodies of ice, lenses and veins of it inside rocks, under hummocks and mountains, even under ponds. What floats on top is the thinnest veneer of matted green, but there’s a spangled ice-rich garden beneath that has grown and changed shape unseen. Farther east, toward Siberia, huge ice wedges have joined into what Vladimir Kotlyakov, a geographer who has focused on environmental science and glaciology, described as “an almost continuous ice massif” that in some places is a mile thick.
Now Russia’s permafrost is feeling less permanent. It is beginning to melt, outgassing millions of tons of methane a year. German climatologist John Schellnhuber from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany told me that once it gets going, “the air will smell like rotten eggs and Earth’s ‘fever’ will come on ten times as fast.” Methane has 25 times more effect as a greenhouse gas in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Though summer-thaw ponds and bogs have always released methane, more of it was taken up and held by the permafrost itself.
In the Empire of Ice Page 10