Seth Kantner's Changing Alaska

October 25, 2008

Photo: Seth Kantner

I’m sitting in Bob and Carrie Uhl’s apartment, trying to educe stories about fox hunters in the 1920s, when the subject of caribou gets in the way. From a soup pot, we’re eating caribou tongue and ribs from an animal I shot the previous day.

Carrie is watching TV. She’s 84 or so and Inupiaq; when McCain raises his fingers on the screen she leaps out of her chair and recoils. “Adii! Monkey!” In her old hands she grips a pencil and paper, marking a line each time he says, ‘My friends’. Bob pauses, smiles, struggles to remember what he was saying. He’d been explaining how the land was less vegetated with willows in the early part of the century, and the fox hunters used that to their advantage.

Now he deviates to caribou, how in 1951 or ‘52 the coast saw the first caribou to return here in that century. He stops, asks me about the caribou I saw yesterday, and where had I crossed the new ice? He raises his eyebrows but doesn’t chide me. A surge of animals, he says, often comes through around October twelfth or fourteenth, large numbers, and in a hurry because of the disturbance of the rut.

In my mind I disagree with the exactness of his dates. But suddenly I see a truth in his words that I hadn’t thought of before—how during the rut the largest concentrations of caribou I’ve seen have swept through and disappeared, often in less than a week, leaving the tundra empty again.

“Have more soup,” he encourages. But I’m standing, apologizing for visiting only an hour. I pull on my gloves and beaver hat. “I have to go. I want to see what the caribou are doing.”

It’s after four p.m. when I lash my survival bag and camera equipment on my snowgo. It’s a few degrees above zero, blowing twenty. I race across a short stretch of lagoon ice, bounce over the tidal flats, skirt open water at the channel by Travis Nelson’s tent, and then head northeast on new ice. I glance back—the sun is falling into the west and a cloud bank.

Five miles out, the ice is pocked with tracks that were not here yesterday. At Lockard Point I stop and glass the white expanse ahead. Caribou! I swing the binoculars right, and then left. As far as I can see in both directions, dots fade into distance, caribou.

In the bay between Lockard and Pipe Spit, I shut off my machine and frantically strap on my camera pack. Two Honda four-wheelers speed past and chase a herd east. I clamber up a seventy-foot bluff. The willows and tundra are tracked and lined with trails.

Up on the bluff I’m sweating and toss off my beaver hat. I change lenses, f-stops, memory cards. My ears begin to sear in the bitter wind, my hands are freezing and still I’m trying to get a photo to show what’s out on the ice.  Too much telephoto and I just get a portion of the herd; too wide angle and the animals look like specks of dirt on white.
Out toward the horizon the procession stretches in lazy undulations, marching on toward me. The end swings like a loose hose, spraying caribou to the north and then to the south of my position. I pack up and run south, and then half a mile in the other direction. An hour passes, two, three.

Finally, it’s getting dark and still animals pour around me, unceasing. The wonder of it swells my chest. In the cold and falling light there’s a huge feeling here on the ice, like an army is retreating, or refugees, or simply something so big coming, and so not human.