In the Empire of Ice

by Gretel Ehrlich

  A thawing landscape is a wreck of a place: broken ground, heaving mud, and ever expanding lakes that paradoxically dry up, leaving no water or vegetation at all. If warming continues rapidly, tundra fires will break out in summer heat, burning underground and thawing even more permafrost. The perfect union between caribou, herder, taiga, and tundra will be lost.

  I return to camp to find a production line of tepee poles being peeled and cut to size. Drawknives are pulled down long pieces of spruce. Perhaps hope for the future resides right here, where people are still making the things they need to live. During a lull in conversation I ask if there have been any noticeable changes in the climate, in bird migrations, storms, temperatures, or ice conditions. They say they don’t know.

  Finally, Vasily says, “The climate is not changing so fast for us yet. Not like it is for others. I have heard about it on the radio. Some things here are even better. In 1975 and 1976, there was a hard crust on the snow here until late May, and it was hard for the reindeer to paw through for something to eat. Now it’s easy,” he explains.

  Nikolai pipes up: “Some river crossings are becoming a problem. I heard that the Nenets on the Yamal Peninsula are having trouble crossing the Ob’ River to get to their winter range because the river is still open in November. We have that trouble too, crossing the Pesha River. Small ones, we can make a bridge, but on the Pesha we have to float across.”

  Autumn is the most difficult time. Vasily says, “Bad weather always makes it hard to cross the tundra.” Are the storms worse? I ask. They’re not sure. “Sometimes it is ice, sometimes it is open water, and there’s fog and rain. Later, the reindeers’ antlers get covered with ice, so there is no water transpiration into their bodies. It’s becoming a problem. Now it’s happening every day at that time of year, whereas before, it was not so often.”

  “In the last years we had fewer mosquitoes, but more biting flies,” Piotr says. “The aleyne, the reindeer, are very bothered by them. They go through the skin and lay eggs. It hurts them, and also it ruins the skins. And yes, spring is beginning a little sooner almost every year.”

  They quickly change the subject to a reindeer sled race to be held in Pesha village next March in which they’ll take part. “We’ll need three or four of the best animals for each sled. The leader has to run straight. No jumping. If he jumps, he’s disqualified. We want to win because first place is a snowmobile and second place is a generator.” The irony of using a reindeer sled to win a snowmobile seems to escape them.

  KATYA HAS INVITED ME to her chum for supper. As she cooks, she teaches me Komi words: skurr for rain, patch for woodstove, purga for storm, vur for forest, shor for creek, yu for river, and tailus budma for waxing moon.

  “I come here to help my mother for half the year,” she says. “My sister comes when I leave, to take over.” They live in the middle and largest of the three chums. Katya explains that two separate families have lived for more than 80 years in this one chum divided by only the patch, the woodstove in the center. “At one time there were 20 of us living in here, and 16 of them were children. Now the numbers are smaller.” She and her two brothers live with their mother on the left side of the chum; five men live on the other side. “What happens if someone doesn’t get along?” I ask. She looks at me quizzically, as if I didn’t understand that they live rich lives of intimacy and cooperation, that any other kind of behavior would be uncivilized. “That never happens here. If there’s a problem, we talk it out among ourselves or send them to town for a few days.”

  Vasily and Katya’s younger brother leave to take the place of the other two men who have been tending the big herd for two weeks. They come into the chum, dirty and hungry but in a fine mood. An old dog follows them and lies by the fire. “It’s OK. He’s a pensioner,” they say, smiling. I ask how it was out there in bad weather. “We don’t have a tent. We just live outside on the snow. It’s OK, but we were down to our last cigarette,” Katya’s older brother laughs. “We broke the last one in half and shared it. Then Vasily showed up and gave us some, and so we survived!”

  Rain stops. The warm air and melting snow produce fog. We’re in a wide opening. Behind us toward the river are trees. The days of frost are over, and the time for skiing is quickly passing. But without skins or snowshoes, we sink to our thighs in three feet of snow. The nights are white, and the ice-covered sea to the north is becoming blue. Ponds leak. The season is neither this nor that, neither winter nor spring, but something between, where the solid becomes liquid, a tawny tundra broth that will later be boiled for tea.

  In the 13th century the Komi were ruled by a prince who lorded over a vast area of arable land called Perm. The Komi were farmers then, but when small groups of them moved north, they learned to herd reindeer from their neighbors, the Nenets, with whom they have frequently intermarried. “I’m a Nenets,” Stas tells me, “but I’m married to Rima, who is Komi.”

  At one time the Komi were drafted by the Cossacks to fight the Khanti, Mansi, and Nenets. Later the old divisions vanished, and all nomadic reindeer herders were subjugated by the Russians and forced to pay taxes in furs. These “small people,” as the Russians referred to them, were vanquished by smallpox and robbed of their reindeer wealth.

  Vasily says that a week ago he visited the Nenets camp near Indiga. “They are staying 20 kilometers [12 miles] from the sea, but there is only one tent in camp because the men live without any women. They stay on the tundra for a month, then go back to the village, and other men take their places. The reindeer don’t know them. It must be difficult. They live in ‘brigades.’ They are no longer yumdai, ‘always moving.’”

  Vasily takes pride in the fact that he and his group still live nomadically. “We do not live against the tundra, against the reindeer. We move with it,” he says. Over and over he intimates how quickly the “open soul” of the herder can be corrupted.

  “We don’t make rules for each other. We know each reindeer, each person in camp. If the reindeer goes straight when he is harnessed, we see that; if he runs away, we see that in the person handling them, too.”

  Life on the tundra is not romantic. Vasily says, “A hard time of year is right now, in the spring, when we have to move so often. But it is harder in June when we are moving every day to get away from the mosquitoes. The reindeer run so fast, we have to leave the loose ones far behind and go back for them in the morning.”

  He muses silently for a while, then says softly, “You have to know what the reindeer are thinking to live with them the right way. Autumn time, when the mushrooms appear, they run to them. There are all kinds of mushrooms. We like them too; we salt them and save them for later.”

  In northeastern Siberia, Chukchi reindeer herders declare that “the owner of the world is Earth.” They eat red mushrooms that are hallucinogenic, believing they represent “a separate tribe.” According to Waldemar Bogoras, a noted anthropologist, the mushroom spirits are thought to be very strong. When the mushrooms come out of the Earth, “they can lift a large tree-trunk on their heads and shatter rocks to pieces.” They lead humans on intricate paths in the world, enabling them to see in those places what is false and what is real.

  “The Komi don’t eat that kind of food,” Vasily tells me, nor does he remember having shamans. “A long time ago, there were forced baptisms, and it was then that we became Russian Orthodox Christians and are still believers today.”

  The Nenets on the Yamal Peninsula say that a mark in the shape of a drum appears on the body of a child who will become a shaman. A “spirit master” will come in a dream to that child. Later, these children go through the usual period of isolation and initiation, and after, wear a special coat hung with metallic pendants, images of the sun and moon, bear teeth, raven wings, talons, and claws much like the belt the Komi wear, though they say that their ornaments are merely decorative.

  The long prodding stick the Komi carry could have been the sacred staff carried by a Nenets shaman, with the carved head of a spi
rit protector on top and used alternately as a divining rod to find water. These powerful shamans would select a site for a séance in a place representing the conjunction of the “three worlds:” river, tree, and the cosmos, or tundra. Nenets believe that the most important temple is not the one people go to on Sundays but an island or any remote and inaccessible place. The least visited is the most sacred of all. A Nenets elder, Avvo Vanuito, once explained that “the major gods live at the end of the Earth.”

  RAIN IN THE NIGHT. Then the sky clears and we can see a slim moon and Venus. To the northeast the horizon is blue. It looks like the sea, but it isn’t. To the south a hard-blowing wind has erased ground and sky. The visible simply ends as if expunged; three leafless birch trees are the gateway to the barren tundra beyond.

  By morning the white world of flocked trees around us has vanished. I wash my face using water from a small iron pot hung by a chain. From its spout, water pours into my hands. Outside, the trees are black arrows shooting up from snow-covered ground, pointing toward a new season.

  The net corral no longer holds ice. When the reindeer are brought in, the sun sends spears through clouds, but once again a dense fog descends as the Earth warms after a long Russian winter.

  Alexander hacks a deer head into quarters and throws the bits to his dogs. Sixteen reindeer are taken out of the herd and harnessed. Some are young and wild. When Arthun, one of the youngest herders, who came from a town to the north, harnesses three of them, they take off in the wrong direction. The older men stand and watch. It is a long time before he can turn them again.

  In the middle chum Katya folds clothes and helps her mother pack the kitchen: Porcelain cups go into a padded wooden box with a lid, plus the plates, spoons, forks. The reindeer skins are stacked and loaded on a sled, then the walls of the chum come down and we stand exposed to the snowy world. The spruce poles are dragged away, the skins folded, the kitchen table is gone, and the ashes from the woodstove are dumped. Sleds are repacked. We are traveling again, one in a series of moves that will take us to spring camp.

  The day is cold, and we bundle up to travel. To live nomadically in western Siberia doesn’t mean one is homeless. Quite the opposite. Home is wider than four walls. Home is the wall and roof and floor of each season. White, green, and brown. It is taiga and tundra, mountain and river, lichen, moss, berry, reindeer, and bog.

  Fourteen long caravans clatter down from high ground and patchy forests. One of the dogs, Buryan, named for a Russian snowmobile, not only herds reindeer but also, when tied alongside, helps to pull the sled. It’s rough going at first, but ahead is a long straightaway. Suddenly, we glide, the harnessed reindeer trotting with the dogs and loose reindeer running alongside. Taiga and wintry weather will soon be behind us, open tundra is ahead.

  We come to the snow road that leads to the village of Snopa. The reindeer clamber up the road’s steep side, and instantly the ride becomes smooth and fast. For a while things are split in half: winter and snow on one side, summer and sun on the other. The trees thin out. Then we leave them for a cool vastness, an ice-flattened world of brown hummocks encircled by tangled vessels of slush, water, and ice.

  Here and there dwarf willows poke up, so short that only the topmost leaves show. Mosses rule. They are closed communities that stabilize the soil temperature, hold in moisture, and discourage other plants from taking over. But lichens are life giving. They produce a sweet “starch” made of polysaccharides, amino acids, and vitamins that is ingested by reindeer and is used by birds for nests. When we stop for a rest, I kneel down, scrape away snow, and press my hand in. The tundra is a sponge, but a fragile one. Lichens, if undisturbed, grow only two-tenths of an inch per year, and if reindeer overgraze it, the tundra mix can take six years to regrow.

  As the day warms, fog returns. With little visibility the caravans become separated, and we see the tail end of the last sled vanish. Snow blows onto the tracks. Andrei, my translator and guide, takes a compass reading just in case we get left behind. Flat land, flat all the way to the cod-rich, polluted Barents Sea. We pass the tilted dunes of tundra, thick with tiny yellow berries and small orange flowers. Another bend and another, and finally we see the other sleds in the distance. Half an hour later, we’re at camp.

  Already the first chum is going up. Even this close to the Arctic Ocean there are trees in view because of the warming influence of the Gulf Stream. This is spring camp, and the chums will stay here until June. Sun shines through the fog, but the wind is frigid. “Maybe the wind has come to take the fog away,” Marie says. She sinks all the way to her knees as she collects snow to melt for water. Inside the newly assembled chum, birch-bark peelings, gathered a day earlier, are used to light the fire. She pulls out a loaf of stale bread, picks a reindeer hair from the top of the cranberry jam, and cuts reindeer meat on a hand-carved cutting board.

  We’re camped near a forest island called Kol’-Ostrov. The night before I dreamed that it exhaled gyrfalcons, brown bears, and swans. Now Andrei and I ski to it. He is on wide Komi skis with old leather bindings, pushing himself along with a pole because, he says, he wants to live the Komi way. The Komi make their own glue from boiled reindeer antlers. Those from the males are best, the herders say, and with it, they glue reindeer hides to the bottoms of the skis to keep them from sliding backward. “The best skin to use is from the river otter. We glue it to the bottom when we’re hunting. It’s very soft and makes no noise,” Vasily has told me. In the spring the width of the ski is more important than the swiftness of the glide. The Komi skis function more as snowshoes, as a way to float on softening snow.

  We stop for a snack, and for a moment, I wonder where in the world I am. We’ve come a long distance by plane, train, helicopter, snowmobile, and reindeer sled, yet it all feels familiar, like home. Not just the landscape but the way of living: shoveling snow, cutting wood, cooking on a woodstove, melting ice and snow for water. Distance and language are not the only things that matter. It is how we live wherever we are, close to the ground, shitting in the snow, sleeping on pine boughs in a circle of humans and animals.

  Andrei, trained as a biologist and an avid naturalist, looks for bear tracks, wolf tracks, but sees none. Up high there are falcon nests, but because it is early in the season they are still empty. We cross a melting cranberry bog, dropping through one layer of ice and water to a second, firmer ice floor. In the distance, shifting lake ice booms. A swan flies into the Kol’-Ostrov. “The Earth is waking up. You can hear it,” Andrei says with a smile. On the horizon another small lake appears. The Komi call it Happiness, because it is home to so many birds. The Komi love birds and favor the ptarmigan that come and stay in camp; they say that when the geese arrive, the reindeer will start calving.

  EVENING. Blue sky and open country. Fires in every stove. Reindeer grazing in the distance. This is the camp where the women will stay until calving is over in late May. Mu Mu, one of the small black dogs with soft black hair and tiny stand-up ears, and another dog sit together on the seat of a sled and howl, as if to say finally, it is spring.

  Katya sweeps the floor of the chum with three raven wings. I ask her if the feathers are a sacred amulet. She laughs at the suggestion. “No, they’re just for cleaning.” She’s a wide-eyed beauty, vigorous, affectionate, and innocent. Outside, on the tundra, in her hooded malitsa she’s a medieval nun, but in the chum, wearing black tights and a turtleneck, she’s modern, efficient, quick-witted.

  In June she’ll return to the small town and her older sister will come to camp and take her place. “Every year I say, ‘This will be the last,’ but then I come back. They say about people like me that I have tundra fever. Well, maybe I do. I love it here too much to stop coming,” she says.

  We dig trenches to keep meltwater from seeping onto the floor of the chum and lay firewood in front of the stove. A sharp wind comes up, then stops. Katya takes off her malitsa, hat, and mittens. She washes her hair. With it dripping, she says: “Skurr!” Rain. We run outside to sn
atch our still wet clothes from the line and hang them over the woodstove.

  Katya’s face alternately registers excitement, sadness, and calm. “I feel very good now, inside of myself,” she says. “I had bad experiences with men and also because of racism, because I am not Russian. When I went to college, people made fun of me because I was Komi. And the men, well, there was always too much vodka. Now I am a woman not looking for a man, a woman who lives in two worlds. This is best for me. Yes, maybe this is the only way.”

  Late at night Vasily returns from Pesha slightly drunk. As if ashamed of him, his mother lowers a cotton curtain over their two beds. In the dark, Piotr lies on top of reindeer skins, smoking. He says the Nenets living nearby are having problems keeping their language alive. “They have given up living all the time with their reindeer. We Komi are still vetziny, nomads. I’m proud that I speak Komi and wear a malitsa. I prefer this way of living, always moving with the animals and our families. I lived in town once and worked. I know what town is. Living with the reindeer, making everything we need, and requiring very little else. That means we are free.”

  He sits up and stubs out his cigarette. The night’s darkness breaks into something darker. A line of pine and leafless birch trees follows the twists of a river flowing north. Fresh air swoops down through the smoke hole. Piotr says, “If I had a million dollars, I wouldn’t buy a house, or a car, or get a wife. I’d travel.” When I ask where, he says, “To the places in the world where there are reindeer, to Lapland (Sápmi), Mongolia, and Chukotka.” In other words, he would never venture far from home. “But if I want to travel, I must begin getting a passport now because it takes years to get one.”