In the Empire of Ice

by Gretel Ehrlich

  In the morning, Piotr goes ice fishing, and the others gather skis and winter clothes and head toward the village of Pesha, where the gear will be left until late autumn. “We don’t like Pesha village because they use coal. It smells bad, and the reindeer can’t eat the grass because of the coal dust,” they tell me. “When it’s time to sell our reindeer, we take the meat to Pesha first, then it’s flown to Nary’an-Mar, a city northeast of here. We get $200 for a whole reindeer, and it costs only $250 to fly by helicopter to Arkhangel’sk. But we need permits to travel anywhere. If only reindeer could fly.”

  Marie is sewing a new heel onto her son’s leggings with a needle and caribou-sinew thread. I inspect the stitches. “We make most of our clothing in the winter,” she tells me. “Summers, we just make repairs.” Mu Mu, my favorite of the 13 dogs in camp, lies in the flap door, shielding himself from the rain. The women gather to have tea together while the men are away. Marie has put on her best: gold earrings and a paisley head scarf. We eat cookies, sliced apples, oranges, and lemons brought from Moscow.

  “During World War II,” Marie says, “when the German planes came to bomb us, we put white blankets on our tamed reindeer so they wouldn’t see them. It worked! The planes came right over us and flew away. We know where the British plane that crashed lies in the mountains. There are still things in it. Guns and bodies. We don’t touch it.”

  She rummages around in one of her hide boxes and pulls out another box of cookies. “We set the door of the chum in different directions, depending on the season,” she says. “We call autumn dirty wind because of the fog. In spring the bogs come on with cranberries. We pick them before we go to the mountains. In midsummer, up high, we pick other berries and also herbs that we make into medicines because even now, they are healthier than tablets.”

  “Burrasi,” Marie calls out. “Good morning. Get up quickly. Good weather!” she shouts. Today Andrew, Andrei, Gordon, and I will leave the women’s camp and go with the men to the main herd of reindeer that will soon begin calving. Only one man—Rima’s husband, Stas—will stay behind with the five women. The puppies are playing, the men are harnessing reindeer, and the women are busy packing rucksacks with extra clothes and food, freshly baked rolls, salmonberry jam, butter, and tea. Then it’s time to leave.

  I have mixed emotions—wanting to stay here and longing to see the newborn caribou calves. I look for Piotr. He’s fixing an ax. I ask him if he is happy living here. “I would like to see more,” he says. “It’s not enough for me to see just this, to know just this. I can do many things. I can care for reindeer, run an excavator, paint and make carvings, but I want more. I would like to go to art school; I’d carve and paint and draw. Then I could develop a handicraft business and sell my things. I need more space for my life to grow wide.”

  Andrei is calling to me to get on the sled. In the confusion I search for Katya. She has put on her malitsa so we can have our photograph taken together. Afterward, we stand face-to-face, holding each other. Simultaneously, though in different languages, we both say, “I will never forget you.”

  Andrei and I climb onto a sled pulled by Red Beard. He’s a grumpy man and handles his animals crudely. As soon as we’re seated, the reindeer lurch ahead. A piece of wood supporting the runner breaks. I yell at Red Beard. He doesn’t seem to care. Andrei shrugs. The sled holds.

  When I turn for a last look, I realize that Piotr is also staying behind. He’d wrapped the carving that I’d admired and put it on the sled. How could I have known it was a farewell present? I yell, “Piotr! Spasibo!”—thank you. But he has already turned his back to us and is cutting wood.

  The way is not smooth. Only the reindeer and these small sleds could survive in the tundra. We tip and tilt over hummocks, crash down onto ice, slide, fishtail, slam down, dip and drop into meltwater moats, then haul up onto rust-colored humps of lichen and moss, and jolt down again into water. Andrei and I, sharing a seat, grab the sides of the sled to keep from falling.

  “How do you like ‘tundra-thumping?’” Andrew, the filmmaker, asks as his sled bumps by. Being from Barrow, Alaska, he’s used to this kind of ride. I raise a thumb. “Bitchin’,” I say. He smiles, but when the young reindeer hitched to his sled take off in the wrong direction, veering so fast he becomes airborne, his smile disappears.

  A white-tailed eagle flies up, but still we see no geese. When I ask if the reindeer have begun calving yet, Red Beard shakes his head. We follow the river south to another river, where we are going to have to make a dangerous crossing. The sled stops on the edge of the cliff. I peer over the side. It’s worse than I imagined: The current is fast and the water is deep, with huge shards of broken ice crashing into each other and stacking up on shore.

  I ask the men how we will cross with our animals and heavily laden sleds. They laugh nervously. “We put pieces of wood and logs under the sled runners, so they float like small rafts. The reindeer swim and help pull the sleds across. Their feet are wide, made for tundra walking and good for swimming too, but you have to be careful because the water comes pretty high.” “Will there be problems?” I ask. “Sometimes a sled runner gets caught under a piece of ice or the harness gets snagged, and then there’s trouble.”

  “And then?” I ask.

  They shrug. “Do you swim?” I ask.

  “Nyet!” Laughter.

  Andrew changes places with Andrei to ride with me. He wants to film us crossing the wild river with the reindeer and whatever else comes next—floating, swimming, drowning. I’m nervous about the crossing for all of us. First, though, we must find the big herd, and so we follow the river south. After a long ride we inexplicably turn north onto the rough tundra again. “What’s going on?” I ask. “I thought we were looking for the reindeer.” Another sled comes next to ours: “The reindeer have already crossed. They’re on our side of the river now,” Nikolai says. Enormously relieved, we bump north toward the calving ground.

  During a rest stop, our lead reindeer spooks at something and starts running. One of the others falls inside the hames, tangling his back legs in the lines, and is dragged. Finally, they stop and Arthun untangles the mess. We get back on our sled. Where the snow road ends, we detour into melting bogs and cross a small lake where the top layer of ice is covered with standing water. Reindeer splash through, their legs lifting high, water spraying on both sides. There’s a jolt and the sled drops to a second icy layer.

  Candle ice, hanging in slender fingers at the edges of ponds, pings as we pass. We slide up to a hump of dry land and back down onto ice-glazed snow, the sled runners clattering. Sun sparkle blinds me, and for a moment I’m lost. In a nomad’s life there is no respite from movement, no anchored center toward which or from which to flee. A hard jolt brings me back: We are traveling downstream to find the reindeer, flying across frozen ponds and splashing through the ones that are melting; a second hard jolt dumps us upside down into pond water.

  I call out for Andrew. His face is underwater, but he’s holding the camera straight up in the air. Red Beard hasn’t noticed that he’s lost his passengers. We leap up and run after him. Finally, he stops and we get back on, dripping. There are snow clouds in the air. In polite Russian, Andrew asks Red Beard if he could slow down a bit, to which he growls: “You can hike if you don’t like it.”

  We glide onto a good-size island amid melting ponds. Then we see: The big herd of reindeer are there, 2,500 animals swarming the hillocks and swimming the narrow channels. Something black moves between a few of the animals’ legs. It’s a newborn reindeer, tiny and wobbling. The mother is lying down in the midst of the moving herd: The calf is trying to suckle. Reindeer are running past. The mother gets up, lets the calf suck, then joins the others, with the calf running alongside.

  One of the herders has gone ahead; we hear only his high-pitched, haunting, two-note call. He’s trying to get the reindeer to cross a narrow bridge, but the animals shift nervously in a wide circle. An hour goes by, and another. It begins to rain. A c
rane flies up, along with three geese. At last the animals funnel over the bridge. On the other side is a surprising view, not tundra but a narrow strip of arable land, a hay meadow above the raging river.

  We camp at the edge of its three Van Gogh–like stacks. There’s a tiny hut with a long table inside but no stove. We pitch two tents—that’s all we have.

  Andrew and I are wet at day’s end; rain turns to snow. Over a roaring bonfire the men whittle the ends of a forked stick and roast reindeer en brochette. As snow falls, we cram into the hut, drink shots of vodka, and eat berries and meat at the long table. There are ten of us, and even without a stove, our combined body heat keeps us warm. “The reindeer want to go north. They’d be at the Barents Sea in a few days if we let them go,” Vasily says. “But we want them to stay here until all the calves are born. This is a good place for them.”

  During the night, wet snow pushes at the tent. In the morning the sky is black over white-topped haystacks. We drink pond-water tea. It is brackish, having been “sieved” through furled lichen leaves. Breakfast is reindeer soup. The bones are fed to the dogs. Red Beard’s gruffness softens as he begins to sing. I don’t know why, but I ask him if he’s ever been in love. “Yes,” he says quietly. “I once had a wife. I have a son. They’ve never been here to see me.” Lines from a poem by Anna Akhmatova float into my head: “She whom people call spring / I call loneliness.”

  MORNING. We travel to the reindeer, half a mile away. Two more calves have been born. They are black dots in a swimming sea of animals. Soon there will be more than a thousand calves. In the meantime the men are roping young reindeer out of the herd to put them into harness for the first time. In the roiling herd the men, carrying soft ropes, run like gazelles. Katya’s younger brother wrestles a young animal to the ground, slipping on a halter and dragging the terrified animal to a willow bush, where it is tied.

  The herd is stirred up and running. Baby calves wobble, trying to keep up. They can run within a day of being born. When the animals stop for a moment, a calf tries to suckle, but the female strikes at him with her front foot (apparently it’s not her calf) and the young animal is lost in the swirl.

  At last, both the herders and the herded need rest. The men make chai-pi on an open fire. Whole slabs of reindeer meat are laid directly on the coals—a leg, some ribs, another leg. The meat sizzles and drips grease into the flaring fire. We cut off pieces from a leg, seared on the outside, raw on the inside, and pass it around. The men joke about how the smell of meat will attract bears and wolves. Bread is cut from a loaf and passed. The exhausted reindeer are bedded down in a wide circle around us. “We eat them but they still love us,” one of the herders says.

  I ask Vasily how he was selected to be chief. He answers shyly: “Alexander was chief before me, and when he got tired of it, the men got together and asked me.” He says that they are here on the tundra, herding reindeer, only to help their aging mothers. When I ask him what he will do when his mother dies, he says, “Maybe I’ll stay in a small chum with the other men and live outside like this and care for reindeer. It’s all I know how to do.”

  THE TUNDRA IS MELTING. It has opened like a cadaver, all its secrets exposed. We’ve said goodbye, left the big herd, and followed the villagers’ road past the neat haystacks. We turn east to find our newly erected chum and bump so fast over bulging hummocks of matted moss that my teeth chatter. We drop down into ponds where, a few days ago, there was ice. Now the water is so deep it comes up over the tops of the sleds, and when we emerge, the runners are threaded with duckweed.

  This is a normal spring melt, but deeper down is the insidious melting of permafrost that stretches all the way from the Kola Peninsula to the eastern shore of Chukotka and the Bering Sea. Thermal expansion of water is drowning islands and peninsulas, and lakeshores are being inundated. Critical nesting sites for the Siberian crane are being lost. Tundra soils that have warmed up to above 32°F. are collapsing. Snow, once liquefied, flows into ground fissures—wedges that formed thousands of years ago—and melts out huge tunnels of subterranean ice. Then these collapse, leading to more fissures.

  Warming temperatures are endangering reindeer health. Late autumn or early spring rain falls on snow, drilling through the white cover and pooling on the ground, then freezing and forming a surface too hard for the reindeer to penetrate with their hooves.

  Pollution, especially airborne soot from the burning of coal and from diesel engines, settles on snow, causing it to melt faster because the soot is black and decreases the albedo. Spring runoff can come a month or two earlier than it used to. Herders who used ice to cross from summer to winter pasture find they are trapped by high rivers and cannot cross at all.

  Methane fluxes—there are an estimated 15 million tons of methane emitted per year from the vast storehouse of the frozen ground—are the biggest threat to the tundra. “The tundra is killing itself,” one Russian scientist said. “It is sending out more methane than it is taking in. It has to freeze for the ecosystem to work. The tundra is turning green.”

  Spring has turned to summer weather. The ground thaws. We head to our new camp, a small chum near Snopa village put up by the men who are not tending the reindeer. On the way we pick up a few stray animals and splash through slush that quickly turns into running streams. Ponds have come into being that were earlier covered with ice and snow, and watery moats have widened. Water flies across the seat of the sled. The reindeer run fast. They know they’re going “home,” and the livelier they are, the wetter and bumpier the passage. But the sun is out and we’re laughing.

  “All that exists lives,” the Chukchi reindeer herders say. Their compass has 22 separate directions, and the sun is a man walking, wearing bright garments. His wife is called Wandering-around Woman. For the people who live with reindeer, diurnal and seasonal movements are continuous yet intricate—full of life—and we feel that too, traveling with the male reindeer that have been separated from the calving herd.

  Near the snow road that leads to Snopa, we enter the men’s chum. It’s small and dark inside because there is no window, and the low table where they eat is strewn with dirty dishes, empty vodka bottles, and half-eaten bits of reindeer. The fire has gone out and the door to the stove has been left open. Everyone is gone. “Where’s Fyodor? He was supposed to look after things,” someone says. Arthun looks toward town with a mild look of anguish. I step away to stand in the middle of the “highway.” It is five feet above the tundra and packed hard. Here and there a rivulet cuts through, forcing reindeer sleds to go around. I pace up and down. The road is a white string that leads to vodka on one end and in the other direction, who knows where?

  Nikolai and Arthun walk to town. They don’t want to be left out of the fun. “We only get near a village once a year, so we go in,” Vasily says. A dog cries. It’s Mu Mu. Red Beard has gone to town and neglected to feed her, so I give her scraps of meat. That night, for the first time in almost a month, I sleep alone in my own tent. In the middle of the night, using hot water from a thermos, I treat myself to a sponge bath, put my long underwear back on, and stretch out in my down bag, happy.

  Men’s voices wake me. Nikolai and Arthun return from Snopa drunk, but Fyodor is still missing. One of the older herders sends them back to fetch their friend. A few hours later, they return again empty-handed. “I’m afraid that he may be getting married tonight,” Alexi says, “and we need him!” It’s late when the rest of the men come back. There’s loud talk, drunken arguments, and yelling. I pull my cap down low over my face and sleep.

  In the morning squabbling ptarmigan wake me. The chum is in total disarray, and the men are asleep with their clothes on. Reindeer graze nearby, and despite the spring warmth, the snow road is still intact. Then I see Fyodor in the distance, walking bandy-legged toward the chum. He’s alone. There’s no woman with him, but he’s carrying a puppy.

  “Guess what?” he says to me. “I can speak five languages now. Do you want to hear them?” I ask him to s
peak English. He cocks his fur hat and comes closer, his face almost touching mine: “Mac, mac mac, mew, mew, mew…”

  “What’s that?” I ask. “English,” he says, grinning. Stepping back, he spreads his arms wide, dropping the puppy carelessly. “I was almost married last night!” he says. “But Alexi broke up the ceremony.” The dog disappears inside the chum. “Oh well. Next year when we are camped here by the side of the snow road to Snopa, I will go again to the village. She’ll be there and I’ll ask her to live with me on the tundra.”

  PINE WIND. Ten swans circling. Partridge noise in the brush. Of all the men, Arthun, the youngest, is the most responsible. When he goes out to check the reindeer, I ski up and down the snow road in search of bear tracks, wolf tracks, or incoming swans. “You have to stay here for a whole year before you know how we live and who we are,” Arthun says as he passes by in his reindeer sled. “Yes, you are right,” I say.

  Later, a horse-drawn sleigh driven by a Nenets man, with his young daughter beside him, appears. They’re bringing Red Beard home. “He was too drunk to walk, and he might have frozen to death out here,” the man says gently. Tundra etiquette means that both villagers and reindeer herders look out for each other. We invite them in for hot chocolate and tea. The little girl looks terrified and I try to console her. In his drunken state Red Beard sings, then falls back against a bedroll and begins snoring.

  In the morning we pack. Fyodor is missing again, so Andrei, Gordon, Andrew, and I are asked to help bring in the reindeer. The men are ashamed to have to ask for our help, but we’re secretly delighted. We drive the animals toward the portable corral and push them forward until they hit the far end, then mingle, antlers clacking. One by one the men rope them out of the herd and take them away to be harnessed.