About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory

by Barry Lopez

  Fourteen miles to the west of us was an active wolf den, set just below the rim of a high cutbank above a twenty-foot-wide stream called Iligluruk Creek. Two miles south of the den, across an open valley, was an elongated barren rise where Bob and I planned to camp. From this ridge, running roughly parallel to the cutbank, Bob and I could watch the seven Iligluruk adult wolves in this pack and the four pups born to them earlier that June.

  One evening Craig Lofstedt, a pilot Bob and I had flown with on other wolf research trips in Nelchina Basin in the Alaska Range, six hundred miles to the southeast, helicoptered us out to our campsite on Ilingnorak Ridge. On the way we landed to inspect a caribou kill made just the day before by a yearling Iligluruk wolf. Bob retrieved the lower jaw, from which the caribou’s age could be determined, and a femur. From its bone marrow the animal’s general state of health could be deduced. The carcass had been picked clean. One kill had fed many of amaguk’s neighbors, likely tulugak, raven, and kaiyukuk, red fox.

  As Craig flew us in a wide arc high above the den, we watched a light-colored yearling female stand up and stretch—she was “baby-sitting” while the other wolves were off to the west, hunting into a good wind.

  Craig put us and our gear down on the ridge. We agreed on a rendezvous hour three days hence and he slipped away, lifting the Bell 206 off quietly to the south before heading back east, a courtesy to the wolf at the den.

  Bob and I set up our spotting scopes immediately. Straight across the tundra plain in front of us the light-colored female had lain back down. To the east and west were a scatter of caribou, sixty or seventy of them. The wind was strong from the northwest, gusting to twenty-five miles per hour, and the air was chilly. An hour after we began our watch, two adult wolves loped into view from the west, headed for home. We studied them while they followed the cutbank above Iligluruk Creek for three miles. When they arrived the pups bounded up out of the den. Amid much tail wagging and face licking, the returning adults regurgitated meat for the pups, which they ravenously consumed. A few minutes later the scene was still. All seven animals were resting on the shallow slope above the den entrance.

  Bob and I felt initiated into the country.

  BECAUSE OF the perpetual light and our unobstructed view, we were able to observe animals at any hour over almost forty square miles of tundra. During the odd hours we chose to sleep, we set up a spotting scope in the tent entrance. If you woke up, you’d take a quick look around. Something new—a ground squirrel hiding behind a rock from something, a wolverine preparing to lie down—was always going on.

  The suffusion of sunlight, seeming to empty the landscape of any threat, could make you forget how very remote the country was. When I lay down to sleep I was aware the soil only a few feet below my head was frozen solid, that in the hills around us grizzly bears were tearing up the earth in pursuit of ground squirrels, that somewhere a willow ptarmigan had become an explosion of feathers in a gyrfalcon’s fists.

  At 2:30 one morning Bob rose to look through his scope and spotted a grizzly bear at the wolf den. A yearling male, the lone sentinel with the pups, charged immediately and drove it back down the cutbank. Even at this distance we could see the puffs of dust at their feet as they raced down the incline. Suddenly the bear spun around and chased the wolf, but only about twenty-five feet before they faced off. Motionless, they stared at each other for a few seconds; then the wolf turned his back and walked away. The bear, now some four hundred feet from the den entrance, his curiosity piqued, walked around to the north and stood up on his hind legs, looking around, sniffing. The young wolf eyed him. The bear quartered back slowly toward the den and then charged. The wolf ran to meet him. Both stopped short, staring. In a few moments the wolf turned around and walked calmly back to the den. The bear ambled down to the creek and disappeared in the willows. The wolf weighed perhaps eighty pounds; the bear weighed three to four hundred pounds and appeared to Bob to be a young boar.

  The wolf spent the next fifteen minutes with his nose to the ground, retracing all the bear’s movements before finally lying down to sleep.

  Baby-sitting. And learning about aklak.

  I left my spotting scope occasionally to stretch and walk around Ilingnorak Ridge, inspecting frost-shattered rocks, bending close to see tiny Persian blue forget-me-nots, five blooms of which did not cover my thumbnail, and craning my neck at the phantasms of cloud. I picked up fox dung and short-tailed weasel dung to discover what they had been eating.

  Within a few yards of the tent a golden plover, a horned lark, and a whimbrel had built nests—without trees everyone must nest on the ground, relying for protection on camouflage and distraction ploys when predators show up. With patience you can locate the epicenter of a bird’s distraction displays and find the nest—four or five speckled or spotted or brindled eggs in a grass-lined cup. But the feeling that you’ve invaded the bird’s privacy is too sharp, the skree, skree, skree of the alarmed plover somehow humiliating. I would back away carefully.

  Four and a half hours after the yearling wolf drove the bear off, about seven in the morning, we saw an adult female wolf traveling toward the den at a steady trot, a laminar flow over the contours of the land. The slight discoloration of hair around her mammae, her round-as-a-melon belly, and her overall bearing revealed—to the Nunamiut, who taught Bob, who showed me—who she was (mother), where she’d been (successfully hunting), and where she was going (home). She stopped briefly a quarter mile west of her current den at a new den site the wolves had been excavating, and then continued on. She came to a sudden dead halt at a spot where the bear’s still fresh trail crossed hers. She investigated it for a few moments before going on quickly to the den. The pups charged up out of the ground to greet her, jumping and pawing and bowling one another over in their efforts, seemingly, to embrace. She regurgitated meat for them and the yearling. After nursing the pups, she sniffed all around the den area and curled up to sleep.

  An hour and a half later she roused her pups and headed west with all of them trailing clumsily after her. She led them to the new den, a move, we speculated, precipitated by the bear.

  ONE EVENING I sat on the tundra near the tent watching nagrulik, horned lark, on her nest. It was cold. The lark, her feathers ruffled to insulate herself, sat resolutely on four eggs, staring back at me. I recalled a story. Bob and several Nunamiut were out looking for animals one summer night when a chilling fog settled over them. The men began gathering willows for a fire to heat tea. Suddenly one man made a beckoning gesture with a willow stick. At first no one could see what was up—he was waving at a porcupine, telling him to come over and join them.

  When I looked up (it was as though I had been telling nagrulik this story), a caribou cow was looking at me, a hundred feet away. When finally she caught my scent she snorted violently and trotted off. Whatever I was to her, she’d grasped it and dispensed with me. A good feeling, I thought, for an interloper like myself to imagine here.

  At midnight each night, when the sun was low in the northern sky, the clouds seemed to glow in greatest spectacle. We’d fix dinner and sit with our tin cups of tea, bundled in parkas and wind pants, and watch solar iridescence, a faint, translucent lime green and soft pink marbling in the clouds. Our rudimentary meals, under such auspices, seemed exquisite. We would glance at each other and cock our heads, speechless before the expanse of pleasure.

  At 3:30 one morning a light-gray female wolf appeared at our camp. She came up over a rise, watched us for fifteen or twenty seconds, then moved away obliquely downhill. Every hundred yards or so she stopped and looked back at us, until she was about six hundred yards away. We watched her for a half hour as she continued north toward the den, investigating a clump of dwarf birch, flushing a ptarmigan, rolling on her back in the lichens, leaping in the air repeatedly to snap at long-tailed jaegers divebombing her.

  She might have stumbled onto us while returning from a hunt, or come over on purpose to see who we were, in her country.

&nbs
p; Late one afternoon we started out across the stretch of tundra that separated us from the den, to see if we could get any closer to the wolves. There is no walking on level, open ground as arduous as walking across wet tundra in summer. It’s like walking across a field of bedsprings covered with a layer of basketballs. In an hour we’d gotten no more than three quarters of a mile. By then we’d lost sight of the den behind a rise of land and a storm had begun piling up clouds in the west. We turned back. Nipailuktak, short-eared owl, watched us from his hunting perch on a tussock. We passed avinnak’s house. Avinnak, tundra vole, was poised right there in his entrance. Hey, nipailuktak! Look at this! On the vast plain, Bob and I were like two small birds, sparrows or warblers, against the sky.

  The wind changed around to the east that evening. When the wolves left to hunt they headed east for the first time since we’d arrived. We followed a single wolf with our scopes. He was sneaking up a willow-lined ravine, drawing close to several grazing caribou. The caribou got wind of him and exploded away. A second wolf appeared and both wolves gave chase. The gap between the caribou and the first wolf remained at two hundred yards or so for four or five hundred yards before the second wolf broke away to disappear over a rise, followed soon by the first wolf. A mile later the caribou slowed back to a walk.

  The storm came up while we slept, holding us tent-bound for twelve hours. When I stepped outside once to re-anchor the tent against the savage punch of the wind, I suddenly saw golden plover in my mind and horned lark, the birds I’d been visiting, sitting there on their nests in the wind and rain.

  After the storm passed, the evening warmed and a few mosquitoes came out, the first we’d seen. Nunamiut distinguish between juvenile mosquitoes, migulaitchiak (literally, “white socks”), and larger mosquitoes, kiktugiak. These were kiktugiak, big as horseflies. But the wind picked up and they were swept away.

  About eight that night Bob stood away from his scope, stretched, and wandered off. I continued to study the country in slow, methodical sweeps, along Iligluruk Creek, along the ridges, down each crease in the land, the likeliest places to pick up something. Caribou were moving west, several hundred of them in enclaves small and large, drifting over some twenty square miles. One group of fourteen would pass, I saw, within three or four hundred yards of the den if they grazed on in a straight line. Four of the adult wolves were off hunting and two more were asleep in willows at the foot of the cutbank, where they wouldn’t see the caribou. The seventh adult was sleeping at the crest of the bank. If for some reason she woke and stood up, she might see them.

  The caribou came on unawares. I called to Bob to return to his scope, though it seemed unlikely anything dramatic would happen. The caribou were now almost in line with the den, just to the north of it. The three wolves remained asleep. Then the one at the crest rose to stretch. She saw the caribou and took off quickly to the east, downwind of them. One of the two wolves at the foot of the cutbank, responding to some signal, bounded out of the willows and ran up the cutbank. He, too, looked at the caribou before taking off after the first wolf.

  Several minutes later, fourteen placidly grazing caribou jerked their heads upright and bolted west in a stiff-legged trot. The wolves might have let themselves be seen, to set up an ambush by the third wolf, or the caribou might have caught the scent of the den. We didn’t see them following in the caribou’s wake. Like most caribou-wolf encounters, this one came to nothing.

  While we were watching this event unfold, Craig Lofstedt flew up and landed on Ilingnorak Ridge. He shut down the helicopter’s turbine. The ridge fell back into its deep quiet. The three of us stood there with our hands in our parkas. I wondered if I would be able to remember the skree of the plovers, if I could make that sound in my head again; or remember the resistance to my arms and shoulders of rocks the size of oil barrels a grizzly bear had shoved aside in its search for a ground squirrel; or recall an image of caribou crossing the gray-green Utukok late at night, shaking off water in twos and threes against the sun, the explosion of diamond fragments.

  After we loaded the helicopter I walked away in a wide circle to say good-bye to the birds.

  The following day I flew out of our base camp, south up the Utukok, over the De Long Mountains, and down the Noatak River into Kotzebue. A single seat was available on a commercial flight headed south to Nome, then on to Anchorage. I took it, and phoned a friend in Anchorage to arrange for a shower during the layover necessary before I could get a flight south to Oregon, a straight-line descent from Iligluruk Creek of 2,300 miles.

  The evening of the day I arrived at my home in the western Cascades, I walked down to the riverbank below the house and stood in the Douglas fir and ash trees. The sky above was newly dark to me, blue-black with thousands of stars shining. A visible moon. It was warm enough to stand there barefoot. I heard salmon slapping the water. Ikalugruak, the Nunamiut might have hazarded, male migrating salmon, their bellies red as the edge of a rainbow. Swimming right here, in this place, on this night.

  8

  THE AMERICAN GEOGRAPHIES

  IT HAS BECOME COMMONPLACE to observe that Americans know little of the geography of their country, that they are innocent of it as a landscape of rivers, mountains, and towns. They do not know, supposedly, the location of the Delaware Water Gap, the Olympic Mountains, or the Piedmont Plateau; and, the indictment continues, they have little conception of the way the individual components of this landscape are imperiled, from a human perspective, by modern farming practices or industrial pollution.

  I do not know how true this is, but it is easy to believe that it is truer than most of us would wish. A recent Gallup Organization and National Geographic Society survey found Americans woefully ignorant of world geography. Three out of four couldn’t locate the Persian Gulf. The implication was that we knew no more about our own homeland, and that this ignorance undermined the integrity of our political processes and the efficiency of our business enterprises.

  As Americans, we profess a sincere and fierce love for the American landscape, for our rolling prairies, free-flowing rivers, and “purple mountains’ majesty”; but it is hard to imagine, actually, where this particular landscape is. It is not just that a nostalgic landscape has passed away—Mark Twain’s Mississippi is now dammed from Illinois to Louisiana and the prairies have all been sold and fenced. It is that it’s always been a romantic’s landscape. In the attenuated form in which it is presented on television today, in magazine articles and in calendar photographs, the essential wildness of the American landscape is reduced to attractive scenery. We look out on a familiar, memorized landscape that portends adventure and promises enrichment. There are no distracting people in it and few artifacts of human life. The animals are all beautiful, diligent, one might even say well behaved. Nature’s unruliness, the power of rivers and skies to intimidate, and any evidence of disastrous human land management practices are all but invisible. It is, in short, a magnificent garden, a colonial vision of paradise imposed on a real place that is, at best, only selectively known.

  THE REAL AMERICAN LANDSCAPE is a face of almost incomprehensible depth and complexity. If one were to sit for a few days, for example, among the ponderosa pine forests and black lava fields of the Cascade Mountains in western Oregon, inhaling the pines’ sweet balm on an evening breeze from some point on the barren rock, and then were to step off to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, to those rain forests with sphagnum moss floors soft as fleece underfoot and Douglas firs too big around for five people to hug, and then head south to walk the ephemeral creeks and sun-blistered playas of the Mojave Desert in southern California, one would be reeling under the sensations. The contrast is not only one of plants and soils, a different array, say, of brilliantly colored beetles. The shock to the senses comes from a different shape to the silence, a difference in the very quality of light, in the weight of the air. And this relatively short journey down the West Coast would still leave the traveler with all that lay to the east to explore—th
e anomalous sand hills of Nebraska, the heat and frog voices of Okefenokee Swamp, the fetch of Chesapeake Bay, the hardwood copses and black bears of the Ozark Mountains.

  No one of these places, of course, can be entirely fathomed, biologically or aesthetically. They are mysteries upon which we impose names. Enchantments. We tick the names off glibly but lovingly. We mean no disrespect. Our genuine desire, though we may be skeptical about the time it would take and uncertain of its practical value to us, is to actually know these places. As deeply ingrained in the American psyche as the desire to conquer and control the land is the desire to sojourn in it, to sail up and down Pamlico Sound, to paddle a canoe through Minnesota’s boundary waters, to walk on the desert of the Great Salt Lake, to camp in the stony hardwood valleys of Vermont.

  To do this well, to really come to an understanding of a specific American geography, requires not only time but a kind of local expertise, an intimacy with place few of us ever develop. There is no way around the former requirement: if you want to know you must take the time. It is not in books. A specific geographical understanding, however, can be sought out and borrowed. It resides with men and women more or less sworn to a place, who abide there, who have a feel for the soil and history, for the turn of leaves and night sounds. Often they are glad to take the outlander in tow.

  These local geniuses of American landscape, in my experience, are people in whom geography thrives. They are the antithesis of geographical ignorance. Rarely known outside their own communities, they often seem, at the first encounter, unremarkable and anonymous. They may not be able to recall the name of a particular wildflower—or they may have given it a name known only to them. They might have forgotten the precise circumstances of a local historical event. Or they can’t say for certain when the last of the Canada geese passed through in the fall, or can’t differentiate between two kinds of trout in the same creek. Like all of us, they have fallen prey to the fallacies of memory and are burdened with ignorance; but they are nearly flawless in the respect they bear these places they love. Their knowledge is intimate rather than encyclopedic, human but not necessarily scholarly. It rings with the concrete details of experience.