In the Empire of Ice (12 page)

The word “tundra” itself comes from the Finnish,
tunturi,
meaning “completely treeless heights.” Tundra is low in biodiversity and supports only a handful of mammals but is home to more than a thousand species of flora and thousands of birds and bugs.

Permafrost lies under 25 percent of the total land area of the Northern Hemisphere, its presence depending on the balance between geothermal heat from the Earth’s interior and the average annual air temperature. Russia’s far north has more permafrost than any other nation, but as the world warms and wildfires spread across the Arctic, subterranean ice is imperiled, and the greenhouse gases it sequesters are being released.

Tundra has peaty gley soil carrying continuous mats of mosses with patches of lichen, dwarf willows, sedges, cotton grasses, berries, and such Arctic flowers as saxifrage and dryas, but it is the lichen “starch,” full of amino acids and vitamins, that nourishes and sustains reindeer throughout the winter. In turn, the tundra-adapted animals sustain the lives of these northern people: Komi, Nenets, Eveny, Sakha, and Chukchi, among others. But as the Earth warms and the permafrost melts, even this marginal ecosystem will become toxic, a place of methane emissions, radioactive leaks, breaking pipelines, expanding lakes, reduced vegetation, and ultimately another heat sink. “A place only a mosquito would like,” one of the herders says.

AFTERNOON. Nikolai floats through a sea of reindeer. We cannot see his sled over the moving animal mass, only his shoulders and head. They swarm over the hill panting, and in the fog their breath spills out in white plumes. They approach the portable corral warily, flanked on all sides by the old women and their sons. Finally, they flood in, one black dog barking at their heels. Packed tightly, they’re a boiling mass. The reindeer push at the fence, and the women lean in, holding the top edge of the net high. Antlers clack, brown noses stick up out of the swirl. One huge male rises from the crowd, pawing at the animal in front of him, and accidentally paws Katya in the face. Tears come but she waves me away, indicating that she’s all right.

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.”