Kills, ruins, pups and the circle of life
We rewarded ourselves after two long days of tundra and river travel with a rest day, getting out for a shorter hike and reading. Peter and I traded Pielou’s A Naturalist’s Guide to the Arctic and Barry Lopez’ Arctic Dreams back and forth. We also both finished Pollan’s book, In Defense of Food.
Then we were ready to get out and explore. The Nigu River is known for its ancient man sites, seasonal buildings of the Nunamiut, “people of the land,” a group of Inuit which lived inland in the winters and then moved to the coast to trade in the summers. Most of these sites were downriver of us, though we had heard of one possibly closer to the headwaters. Looking at the maps, though, it looked like ten miles out which in tundra terrain was not within our range for a day’s travel. Still, we headed upriver.
We stopped to sit and watch the wolf den from a distance for a half hour or more, but the entrances sat silent and dark, as before. We continued on. As we crested a small knoll thick in willow and dwarf birch, a rancid smell floated up on the breeze, normally clean and almost sweet with the tundra scents. “Can you smell that?” I asked Peter, doubting myself. “It’s really awful!” He could. “I wonder if it’s a kill.” I yelled across the tundra around us in case I had missed seeing something around us and pulled out my bear spray. “I hope it’s a wolf kill and not a bear kill,” I said tentatively. Bears will defend their kills by an aggressive attack, and I wasn’t sure wolves would be quite as concerned about us, though I didn’t know. Peter started scouting around, and I looked hard up and down the slopes around us, feeling a tickle of apprehension creep up my spine. Then we saw a brown area on the tundra below us.
The stench intensified as we approached the spot. Tundra plants in an area approximately 10 feet by twenty feet were matted down and had browned. A caribou leg bone, still attached by ligaments by completely free of flesh, lay curled as if it may have been sleeping. The hoof and hair above the hoof was intact. Bones scattered the area, all picked clean, beetles finishing the job on many of them. Many bones were no longer intact or had been pulled apart; it was a long way from an intact skeleton. And yet the kill was recent enough to still permeate the air with the smell of death and decay.
Pielou mentions in her book the human propensity to anthropomorphize and romanticize wolves because of their similarities to our domestic canine companions. But she notes that one only has to watch a wolf bring down a caribou and begin to eat it while it is still alive to quickly dispel these notions. Bears will frequently come to steal a wolf kill, which, according to naturalists, wolves will relinquish. Because of the proximity of the kill to the wolf den it seemed reasonable to assume that this had been a wolf kill, but there were also two piles of bear scat on the scene. The kill had been shared, intentionally or not.
Most astonishing was the utter decimation of an animal. If there was any proclivity to bestow upon the purity of nature any notions of pastoral peacefulness, coming upon a kill will rapidly change that understanding. And yet this animal had been returned, utterly and completely to the land which had produced it. Violently, surely. But completely.
I was happy to continue on. Crossing the river, we headed across a boggy area and then up onto a long ramp of tundra, climbing several hundred feet. Beginning our ascent we heard a familiar howl, and saw at the top of the ramp a quarter mile away one of the dark wolves, pacing and howling. The wind was strong, so that his howl carried to us in waves. By the time we reached the top, he was gone.
At the top of the ramp though, standing against the strong cold wind, a circle of stones stood out. We investigated. It was a small circle, about six feet across and a foot or two high, looking out and down into the valley with a view to the east and the west. “Well, there aren’t any boy scout troops out here to build this,” Peter said. As far as we could tell, it was remnants of the heavy Nunamiut activity here years ago. Nunamiut built structures to hunt and to live, stone fences to corral caribou into lakes where, slowed by the water, they were easier to shoot. Ninety percent of the Nunamiut diet was caribou.
While the land itself lent a sense of the ancient, the undisturbed and timeless, considering the human presence here hundreds and thousands of years ago added a layer of history incrementally closer to our understanding. It connected us to this place all the more, weaving together the strands of land, animal and human history into the original tapestry of the earth. The sense of completeness seemed to support and buoy us as we hiked. We continued on the side of a mountain, past several small lakes draining one into the other, before turning back.
Opting to give the wolf den a wide berth again, we hiked back on the opposite side of the valley and through what turned out to be a marshy bog, at times deteriorating to what amounted to reeds growing in a shallow pond, mud pulling at our boots with every step. It stretched well over a mile, and I despaired of my boots, now soaked. Peter’s leather boots fared slightly better. Finally we saw a small tundra protrusion ahead and aimed for it, then planning to turn back toward our camp.
The feel of dry tundra under our boots was a relief. After slogging through the bog, I was exhausted. We leaned onto our trekking poles and talked about our dinner plans when a movement ahead of us startled me. “What is that?” Four ears poked into the air just above the willows. We took another step, and tiny heads and bodies came into view- two wolf puppies, one light, one dark. They looked at us with surprise but not alarm, and then turned around and disappeared. “let’s look over the mound!” I said. “Maybe they are just playing!” Another step forward, and Peter said “I think it’s another den.” “But the main den is by the river back there! Why would they have two?” A quick look revealed that Peter was right. Puppy scat littered the ground just outside another hole into the earth, and several bones lay around, notably a section of vertebrae with partial ribs still attached, perhaps brought back from the kill site we had discovered. We backed away, and waited at a distance for a long while, but the pups did not reappear.
We later learned that there is frequently a rendezvous site where pups are brought away from the main den to play and explore, and that must have been what we had stumbled upon, despite our efforts to keep a reasonable distance from the den we knew about. Though we had more bog to get through to get back to our campsite, we walked back hardly aware of the mud through which we walked.
The Arctic had given us more gifts than we deserved, far more than we expected, far more than we had even hoped. Perhaps that is the gift of all wilderness, and all life. If we only allow ourselves to be open to it. But to allow us to feel a part of this timeless and primeval land, to see the circle of life pulsing through it, and to know that we were a part of that energy even as we had separated ourselves from it in our normal daily life – that was the gift we have now that we will never lose.
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