“The Wild Geese,” from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes.    Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear, in the ancient faith: what we need is here.

The Canning River Delta, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

June 4, 1:07 am

All night long under the midnight sun, the Arctic sings its spring song. Floating in from somewhere behind the wind are the voices of this land: the various musics of Greater White-fronted and Canada Geese, Pacific and Red-throated Loons, and Long-tailed Ducks (we used to call them Oldsquaws), along with a few quieter fowl I cannot name. Nestled in the candlelike glow inside my yellow tent, I lie awake, listening. The temperature hovers below freezing, half the tundra remains covered in snow, the lakes are still frozen over—but these water birds, eternal optimists of the Arctic plains, are arriving ’round the clock, en masse and in voice, for their summer ventures. Off to the north I hear the excited chatter of Tundra Swans. A few hours ago, outside my tent I looked up and watched seven of them materialize out of the mist: elegant, slow-winged creatures pure as snow, passing closely above with the grace of angels.

Bowing into the morning fog on a raw northeast wind, I make my way to the cook tent to build a mug of boreal coffee. Six of us have established a temporary research camp here on the northern fringe of the delta, in the very northwestern corner of the refuge. I’ve joined the others as a volunteer biologist for a study of the nesting success of the local birdlife.

We arrived by bush plane over the past two days, as weather allowed, and set up our bivouac: six identical sleeping tents crowd together like a clutch of eggs, and fifty yards off stands a cooking tent and a warming tent with a wood stove. Farther yet our tiny, makeshift latrine enjoys a holy and priceless view. The tents are staked against the arctic wind with foot-long pieces of rebar hammered into the frozen ground. Yesterday we used ice chisels and sledges to pound larger holes to erect two separate three-wire bear fences, one around our sleeping quarters and one around the food tents. There are a few griz about, and we hope to see them, but they are not welcome inside. The fences are electrified by solar panels—powered by the sun like the living tundra itself.

Around us stretches the vast Arctic prairie, now a mosaic of white snow and golden brown cottongrass and sedges. When the ocean fog lifts (camp is only two miles from the shore of the Beaufort Sea), we can see thirty miles south to the Sadlerochits, last mountains before the North Pole, and beyond them to the massive Brooks Range, blue and infinite in the distance.

Out of the fog and that infinity, the feathered tribe continues to arrive. More Tundra Swans wing in from their winter waters on the Chesapeake Bay; White-fronted geese appear, with their high-pitched laughter, up from the Texas coast. The loons have come all the way from the Yellow Sea off China. We see two long lines of Black Brant—a subspecies of Brant—fifty or more in each, flying eastward, low over the whitened tundra along the coast, nearing the end of their jaunt from Mexico. Must be something about this place, something attractive and valuable that draws them here. Otherwise, why would so many species come from so many distant places for the most important function of life—reproduction? And I don’t mean only water birds. Arctic Terns and many of the shorebirds return here from even more distant places. Caribou and polar bears choose to give birth here. What some have blindly called a barren wasteland appears to me more like a coral reef of the north, a huge sponge of productivity.

Ten Snow Geese, then twenty more, fly across, white as alabaster under a cerulean blue sky. Pintails, Common Eiders, and King Eiders arc overhead in pairs and small groups. The commons are more likely to move out to the coastal barrier islands to breed. A drake King Eider flies close by at eye level. His body is black and white, but his head is the marvel: red bill, orange forehead, green cheek, blue crown and nape—nearly the full spectrum from the neck forward. The Harlequin Ducks are nearly as audacious, but we won’t see them here. They nest up in the mountains, where they walk underwater along the stream bottoms, foraging into the current in the fashion that the water ouzel made famous.

Of all the birds that nest in the refuge, I consider the Pacific Loon the most elegant. With its velvet gray hood, splendid black-and-white collar and cape, and polished poise on the water, it embodies a reserved handsomeness, dignity, and grace. I say this without bias, although my work has focused on loons for nearly three decades. In truth, I haven’t studied Pacific and Red-throated Loons much at all and still have a difficult time separating their voices.

Today we make our first formal visit to two of the twenty research plots established three years ago when the study began. My compatriots take a primary, focused interest in the shorebirds, our most numerous clients on the swaths of tundra. I’m keeping an eye out for loons and waterfowl—the larger feathered spirits. There’s something about how a swan can raise its cygnets from eggs to fifteen pounds over a short Arctic summer by eating cold vegetables that seems magic to me. The local Inupiat still hunt these creatures, and their knowledge of them is based upon the oldest research ever undertaken in these parts: the science of survival.

Swans float about like icebergs on the river in front of camp. A single Red-throated Loon rockets downriver. One minute later: cacophony at the river bend. She’s found some friends—or maybe antagonists. It’s hard to tell, given the caterwauling. Either way, it resounds with excitement.

As my colleagues pointed out, the racket these two species make can hardly be called a song at all. And by strict definition they are correct. Any ornithological text or field guide will tell you that neither loons nor waterfowl sing songs; they utter calls. In the absolute scientific sense, this is true. Problem is, I’m not an absolute scientist; romantic biologist might be a better description. I cherish these voices because they symbolize the north lands that I love. And if, as the bioacousticians suggest, these voices are tuned to carry through misty winds and above the white sound of driven waters, then they are tuned by the landscape—they are voices of the land, much as their very bodies are built of and powered by local stickleback and blackfish. Even the Red-throated Loon’s cry, compared by some to the sound of a cat in despair, rings eerily melodic if you happen to carry an affinity for loons as I do. To my ear all these voices, in their innocent melancholy and exuberance, reach to that place where laughter and tears meld, and life celebrates itself upon the land. It is music to me.

The wind whips up again in the evening, rattling and wrestling with the tents, another night of wild percussion drummed into our delicate human spirits. The wind, too, is a voice of the land—that same wind that lifts the wings of Tundra Swans and carries the yodels of loons.

Every day we walk the plots. Lapland Longspurs and a few sandpipers have already begun nesting in tiny alcoves in the sun-warmed and hay-scented tundra. The snowfields are disappearing by the acre despite the biting cold of the wind. Ice water collects in the polygons, fills the ponds, and seeps in slow, cold currents through the grasses and sedges into the river and down toward the sea. On average, only seven inches of precipitation fall here each year, but it’s hard to think of this place as a “polar desert” when we’re marching through water up to our knees. Unable to soak very deeply into the soil due to the solid barrier of permafrost, the snowmelt remains on the surface, available to wildlife and irrigating the grasses and sedges. Often we wade across ponds filled with a layer of water above ankle-deep muck, our soles treading upon the concrete hardpan of ice—the permafrost.

Purple saxifrage, first of the Arctic blooms, flowers around us from its low cushions on the drier soils. East of camp I found a broad scatter of swan feathers, a few bone fragments. Over by the river we stumbled onto the skull and rib cage of an arctic fox. A few miles to the north lies the entire skeleton of a muskox, its flesh eaten and the long bones gnawed apart. Here and there on the tundra we find the shells of Long-tailed Duck eggs, the antlers and ribs of caribou. We watch for the droppings of foxes and wolves, deposited on the peat mounds and often twisted with the hair of lemmings and occasionally caribou, sometimes containing the tips of feather shafts. There’s a grizzly track frozen into last year’s mud near my tent. On the riverbank we see many tracks—all sizes and makes of waterfowl—along with those of fox and weasel, and now and then a burst of feathers. All the chapters of life here lie open to the sky. Every walk is a treasure hunt.

Cold again; windy as usual. My crew finds the first Canada Goose nest today near study plot 4B: four eggs nestled in gray down upon a grassy bowl on a small island. The Tundra Swans, first of the waterfowl to nest, are incubating too, down on the lower delta.

Loons of both species, often singly, fly overhead almost constantly now, in different directions, reconnoitering the melt waters, one might assume. Loons are, of course, not waterfowl at all. According to current theory, they are more closely related to penguins and frigatebirds. Adapted to diving, they navigate poorly on land and require stretches of open water for take-offs and landings. Because of this, they will be among the last to alight upon the lakes as they thaw.

More and more waterfowl arrive. Red-breasted Mergansers have appeared, as well as a pair of Northern Shovelers. Someone has seen a pair of Spectacled Eiders, a threatened species listed formally under the Endangered Species Act and a rare nester here. Most of the United States Arctic population nests farther west, where oil leases are likely to be developed. But this was a pair, male and female, and they are known to prefer river deltas, so we are hopeful.

The Long-tailed Ducks would make an interesting study. Tens of thousands of them molt and gather into large groups to stage on the lagoons behind the barrier islands before fall migration. We see them floating, almost always in pairs, on the coldest-looking little ponds among chunks of ice. Common breeders on the coastal plain, they are unusual in two ways. Unlike the other waterfowl, Long-tailed Ducks utter sentence-long calls and molt continually in a sequence of phases from spring through fall, rendering a long series of ephemeral appearances far too numerous and variable to be represented in any field guide. Though ornately beautiful in earthen tones, for half the year it is impossible to match their color patterns with any page in a field guide.

Off the corner of plot 4A I spot a Peregrine Falcon sitting dark and quiet upon a low peat mound, waiting patiently. There’s a reason the Peregrine was once called a “duck hawk,” but this hunter is more likely watching for the rustle of a sandpiper or a nice, warm lemming. (There are a lot of lemmings about this year, which might take some of the predation pressure off of the birdlife.) We honor the peregrine’s presence by pausing our survey so as not to scare up any study birds, duck or Dunlin, for its dinner. I carry no prejudice against predators, myself. After all, I belong to that league, and so does the cute little arctic fox, and the loon. We’re all part of the balance.

The wind howls, coating my spectacles with droplets of fog, burning color into the skin of my cheeks. A harsh land? Some would say so. Who could deny it? But it is this very harshness that illuminates by contrast the abundant and exuberant life here—song and sex and celebration, bloom and productivity. The harshness of winter here drastically reduces the numbers of predators. And the same latitude that creates the long, dark season also creates a summer with twenty-four-hour-a-day sunshine that swells the lowly cottongrass and sedge with solar energy, which in turn becomes goose feather and swan song.

I wonder if the wind tires the goose in the same manner that it soaks away my energy. If so, she doesn’t show it. Down puffed out against the chill, contour feathers preened with oil to shed the mist, that goose out there by 4B nestles down on five eggs tonight, facing the wind and keeping alert for the wrong kind of company.

Out on the plots the tundra is greening up. I find the single flower, bright and cheery, of a buttercup, second one I’ve seen this week. Who can call it a barren wasteland where the innocent buttercup blooms?

The loons are largely gone from the river now. We see them, as well as many of the waterfowl, in pairs on the ponds. One of the characteristics of loons, swans, and geese that seems to pique a certain human wistfulness is the fidelity of these mated pairs. They are said to mate for life, and scientific studies have illustrated that this is for the most part true. Some of them, the loons especially, hold a strong landscape fidelity as well. If Pacific and Red-throated Loons follow the behaviors of Common and Yellow-billed Loons, as we assume they do, they will return to the same lake or pond, and sometimes the same nest site, year after year.

Ducks are a different clan, with a different strategy. Most of them appear to flirt about each year, courting new mates and breaking up shortly after intentions are spent. Interestingly, it is the ducks that show different plumages between the sexes, males strutting about in bright breeding colors designed (by the great evolutionary stylist) to attract females, a necessary requirement every spring. The females are usually drab, giving the benefit of camouflage to the nest sitter. The loons, geese, and swans, which generally mate for life, have no need of such dress-up; plumages are identical (at least to the human eye) between genders.

Pair fidelity appears linked to brooding and rearing strategy as well. After breeding, most of the drake ducks have fulfilled their ecological responsibilities and disappear to the molting areas and an early start south. But both male and female loons, geese, and swans share in the raising of their young at least to fledgling (flying) age. Among them, only the loons share equally in incubation duties.

No loon nests yet. The Yellow-billed Loons I’ve studied in the western Arctic would be on eggs by now, secreted down by the narrow open margin of a larger frozen lake. But they are not known to nest on the coastal plain of the refuge, perhaps due to a relative paucity of larger lakes here. They seem to be social creatures, preferring the juxtaposition of many larger lakes in the western Arctic, where the plain is wider. But they migrate through here, and the local Natives know them well. A hunter from Kaktovik told me that he remembered a single Tuullik feeding thirteen people around his father’s table. And how did it taste? About a five, he said. On a scale of ten? No, he said, once every five years would be often enough.

Clearest hour of the season so far, tonight. We stare out across the green-gold prairies to the Sadlerochits, snow-veined and purple in their Arctic majesty. Above and beyond them, the rarefied pinnacles of Mounts Chamberlin and Michelson in the Brooks reach toward a three-quarter moon. The first little longspurs hatched today; I’ve seen the tiny miracles in their little grass caves. More of the geese are hunkered down laying eggs. The Pacific Loons are yodeling, defining and defending their territories, a behavior penultimate to breeding. But I hear another music beyond them, more a feeling than a sound: the subtle chords of exultation from the land itself. Or perhaps my own heart.

Today is a day off for me, and I plan to mosey overland to a distant set of ponds where I’ll scout for loon nests. We haven’t found one yet. I pack my field notebook, lunch, binoculars, and shotgun (in descending order of importance), and set out before noon. The gun is loaded with slugs for the rare case of a grizzly threat. Every team or individual from our crew venturing afield is required to carry one. Wouldn’t want to lose one of us; we have enough paperwork to do already.

I walk north in a set of parallel ruts that runs clear to the coast. Made decades ago by a vehicle driving on the tundra, they remain scars in the earth today and will for a long time to come. This may be a harsh land, but it is delicate, too. Its wounds heal slowly or not at all.

The water birds up here are the wariest I’ve ever seen. As I crest a low hill, a pair of Canada Geese a hundred yards away lifts off in fright, discussing it in counterpoint:

Gaak
Leek
Gaak
Leek
GaakLeek
GaakLeek
LeekGaak
Leek
Gaak
Leek
GaakLeek. . . . Polite, graceful, but intolerant of me, they disappear, still conversant, behind a low roll of tundra.

We already know many of the effects of industrial invasion on these timid creatures from studies conducted west of here, where oil and gas exploration and development have occurred. Obviously, a spill anywhere, particularly during staging or migration, would be catastrophic. Nesting and feeding habitat losses; disturbance of these wary and retiring creatures at critical times; changes in hydrological schemes and lake levels; and the usual increase in opportunistic predators, which feed on refuse and find shelter at developed sites. These include bears, foxes, ravens, and gulls, which also keep a hungry eye out for wild eggs and nestlings. All are factors either proven or considered likely to add to the challenges of breeding and survival of the waterfowl and loons here as well as shorebirds and other members of the feathered tribes.

The very study I am part of has been undertaken to better understand the significance of these factors, although the National Academy of Sciences has already reported them as part of the cumulative environmental effects of oil development. Although this Section 1002 area does not support a preponderance of nesting water birds, it is the refuge’s heart of production for waterfowl and loons, and includes critical migration habitats. Our site on the Canning River delta is important to the study because here there is no development. It serves as a “control” or “benchmark” area against which the effects at developed sites may be compared. The refuge’s coastal plain is the last part of our Arctic coastal plain that is not available for leasing—the last benchmark area. Everything from Point Thomson to Barrow is open for leasing or already developed. And, ironically, the Canning River delta could be the first spot in the refuge affected by industrial changes. This is the entry point from the existing oil fields to the west; the Alaska State government hopes to build a road nearly to the refuge boundary, just a few miles from here, if the oil companies don’t get to it first.

The value of this area as the final wild comparison was not missed in the argument for protecting these refuge lands the first time around. Lowell Sumner himself suggested that this is a place where the land could still have the “freedom to continue, unhindered and forever, if we are willing, the particular story of planet Earth unfolding here. . . . ”

If we are willing.

Don’t think about it, I’m thinking. We came here to celebrate, not to fret and mourn. The northeast wind whistles through the grass. The nesting geese hunker low, facing into it. A veil of down and breast feathers stretches off behind each one in the downwind, southwesterly direction, eroded from the thick, blanketlike covering that insulates their eggs. As I approach the ponds, one of them flops off her nest, calling in consternation.

So far I’ve been referring simply to the Canada Goose, or “CAGO” in the birders’ shorthand that I use in my field notes. But someone working the far opposite extreme of my field of wildlife science has been peeking into the genes of these geese and has decided that they ought to be divided into two species, Lesser Canada Goose (actually the larger of the two) and Cackling Goose. Because the Canadas here in the Arctic are of intermediate and differing sizes, the scientists aren’t certain what to call them, and so we have promised to collect a few feathers from each nest for DNA analysis.

Interesting work, but there is a danger, I think, as we divide and categorize life. Focus down too fine, and you lose the big picture. The poets recognize this: “Erase the lines:” wrote Robinson Jeffers, “I pray you not to love classifications. / The thing is like a river, from source to sea mouth / One flowing life.”

Amen to that. Nevertheless, biologist that I am, I wade out on the slick permafrost pond bed toward the nest. The goose flushed at my approach, and I have a responsibility now. I collect a dozen breast feathers from the veil into a plastic baggie and then reach down to close the downy nest liner over the clutch like a purse—field etiquette to minimize heat loss and camoflage the nest from predators until the goose returns. When I lean over the eggs, their radiant heat warms my face with remarkable intensity: six hot little globes of sunlight recycled and resurrected into life, cooking along embryologically at 100 degrees F out here upon the open prairie, eighteen inches above the ice age.

I walk the shoreline of another pond with a pair of Pacific Loons on it, and here I find what may be the very beginnings of nest construction—a rude circle of soggy grass pulled together on a shoal just offshore. The pair acts nervous and I leave quickly, but not before observing a pair of Spectacled Eiders nearby and a nesting Canada Goose with a pair of King Eiders hauled up and dozing against her nest, male on one side, female on the other. Relating these wondrous sightings to my colleagues over dinner, I hear of their own remarkable observations: Camp hit a record high of 39.5 degrees F today, three caribou appeared across the river, and someone collected the first mosquito (deceased).

Summer Solstice

We find a skiff of snow on our tents this morning. The Arctic summer arrives, and I must fly out tomorrow. I’ll miss the loons and the eiders laying their eggs, their newly hatched broods, the griz following the caribou in. Generously, I leave all that to my colleagues.

In the evening I take a seat on the saxifrage and look out over the complex of ponds on the lower delta. Geese, swans, gulls, loons, all varieties of ducks—Lord, everything I’ve been seeing seems to be out there in a huge array and concentration, and all of them are singing and shouting at once in so many tongues. Exuberant, self-willed, so full of life. I pause a long time here with my notebook on my knees, scribbling my thoughts and prayers beneath a warm Arctic sun. Biologists are concerned about the status of Northern Pintail and Long-tailed Duck populations. The Spectacled Eiders are threatened, and the King Eiders seem to be disappearing. Across a few decades, Alaska’s Red-throated Loon population declined by half. There is much to do, much to defend. But for now, and for a long time into the evening, I will tarry here and listen. It is enough that the night is magic, and down on the delta the angels are singing.

Kaktovik, Barter Island

September 13

Dropping out of the clouds over the Hulahula River, my first impression of the landscape is how red it appears. The tundra as far as I can see appears cloaked in rusty rubescence, not the tawny green I’d left behind nearly three months ago and fifty miles to the west. Autumn by the Beaufort Sea: season of the aurora borealis, the Inupiat whale hunt, the arrival of polar bears. And the final upshot of the water-bird season: the great migratory gatherings, the final exodus.

I walk south of town and onto the tundra. The sedges have turned to gold and the cottongrass is fading, too, its mop-tops looking a bit wind stressed. Along the edges of standing water, which is just about everywhere, the Arctophila grass has gone red (carotenes over chlorophyll)—the rouge I’d seen from the air.

Near a small freshwater lake, I come upon several hundred Greater White-fronted Geese hunkered down in the lee of the wind. They appear to be a congregation of family groups. Occasionally one or two of these short strings will take flight—laughing like schoolgirls. A significant number of white-fronts stage on the refuge coastal plain prior to fall migration, primarily in August, stripping the sedges to boost fat reserves for transit out of here. I suspect these may be among the last waves to fuel up on the local pasturage.

Scanning the lake I find to my delight a pair of Pacific Loons with a chick that still is not quite adult size. At my approach they utter a catlike MAAA-AAaaaaaaaw and move away. The pair has foregone the exodus of their conspecifics, remaining behind to fledge this chick. Given the late nesting dates over on the Canning, I imagine that such families throughout the area are right now challenging their deadlines in an ages-old drama in which the tooth of the arctic fox, the sharp eye of the peregrine, and the bite of autumn freeze-up contribute to the loons’ grace and survival by removing the slow, the inept, from their reproductive gene pool.

Walking the shoreline I find the tracks of a grizzly sow and cub, strolling the opposite way. On the horizon above the far shore, half a mile away, I see the griz herself, perched atop a peat mound like a circus elephant balanced on a barrel. I deduce from her movements that she is digging for lemmings. We peer at each other for a moment, across the distance. No threat for now, we’re both thinking, but we’ll keep an eye out.

A pair of swans with three blue-necked cygnets flutters in from somewhere, perhaps driven by my approach. The young are fledged but not yet as tall as their parents—another family pushing the deadline. Good luck to them, too. They swim together nonchalantly but directly to the south shore to continue on foot into the wetlands there. At a mile away they stop and begin to feed again, among numerous families of pintails I hadn’t noticed.

One of the loons takes off, flies above the bear uttering a phrase I hadn’t heard before, circles the lake, and disappears. Several white-fronts lift, fly off, but circle about and return. Excitement fills the air: die Zugunruhe, the behavior biologists used to call it—“unrest before the journey.” A hard chill rides in that same air, and my hands are growing stiff. The grizzlies remain occupied with their lemmings, the swans have disappeared in the marsh, and the loon adult and chick have moved to the center of the lake, safe from two-legged intruders. I sneak off to leave them all in peace, walking in the tracks of bears back toward town.

The wind has changed overnight and blows jauntily from the west now, under clearing skies. The fog has lifted, disappeared.

Out by the lake, and across all the tundra I cover, there are only a few geese to be seen. The pintail families are reduced to singles hunkered down in the ditches, lifting only at my immediate approach. Juveniles, I assume. A pair of scaup has appeared on the lake, en route eastward. They seem to prefer the company of Glaucous Gulls. Safety in numbers, perhaps. The loon chick floats beside one remaining adult. And with the swans I count only two cygnets. A Peregrine Falcon passes overhead; I’d seen it dive on a pintail earlier, narrowly missing. The bears have disappeared.

Through the rarefied air I can now gaze out past the island, across the mainland tundra, up the Sadlerochit River to the golden foothills and all the way to the mighty blue-and-white Brooks beyond. Somewhere out there, scattered across the refuge coastal plain, 300,000 Snow Geese may be feeding. They move in from western Canada to these rich prairies in mid-August to fuel up on cottongrass stems and horsetail shoots for their autumn migration. In three weeks they may consume as much as 4600 tons of cottongrass alone, biologists calculate. It may take years for the cottongrass stands to regenerate after an intensive harvest, so the geese require an extensive foraging area. For them and the Greater White-fronted Geese, these limited feeding areas across the entire coastal plain are crucial; loss of habitat or even disturbance there at this time of year could diminish their survival rates, particularly for juveniles. Aircraft disturbance is the primary concern. Disruption of feeding here could reduce their migration fat reserves by up to 50 percent, reducing their chances for survival along the way to their wintering grounds.

I scan the far-off tundra hard through the binoculars—10x42s, excellent glass—hoping for some distant waggling line of white against the burnished tundra, before the golden foothills, but see no sign of them. Perhaps they, too, have already left for the Sacramento Valley, Bosque del Apache, Chihuahua.

An air of anticlimax: On the saltwater in the lagoons I see only a few small groups of eiders (females and young; the males left a long time ago, avoiding all reproductive chores beyond conception), a pintail here and there, a few Red-breasted Mergansers, several bands of White-winged Scoters, and one solitary Surf Scoter, bouncing in the waves. Several larger flocks of twenty to fifty Long-tailed Ducks float about, but tens of thousands of them that had staged in the lagoons between here and Canada have left. The last of them that I see stream in before the pink twilight in nervous flights from the sea, coming in low over the barrier islands into the safety of the lagoons for the night.

On my final day of maneuvers, I walk a few miles west to a set of ponds where a local says he’s seen hundreds of waterfowl recently. The tundra around the ponds is littered with the feathers and droppings of geese, but the ponds are perfectly quiet and empty of birdlife. Only a family of Short-eared Owls remains in residence. They flap about and perch on the peat mounds, watching me from beneath Groucho Marx eyebrows.

A telling silence. As those spirits arrive with the spring snowmelt, so do they disappear on the autumn winds. The white-fronts, the pintails, and the rest of the swans wing eastward; the Brants, the eiders and Long-tailed Ducks, and the loons disappear into the west. The four-month burst of life under the all-night sun is over; only the stragglers remain. Even the whales are migrating past us toward warmer seas. The Kaktovik whalers beached their third bowhead last night, and the polar bears have swum a hundred miles from the pack ice to clean its bones. Time to leave this place to them, the Gyrfalcons and ptarmigan and other spirits who will keep watch on the place over winter. Among the latter is Cygnus, the swan, my celestial talisman. I saw her three nights ago, high in the sky with the aurora playing through her outstretched wings. The same constellation is also known as the Northern Cross. Cygnus, head down in the sky, becomes the crucifix, heads-up. “Anticipate resurrection,” wrote Terry Tempest Williams.

Of course. That age-old story of the cycle of life: departure and return—and then revival. Here we find it rendered by both the swans and the stars, the ecological texts and the Gospel (one a metaphor of the other). We are not at the end of a cycle after all, but rather a beginning—an embarkation. Here, those anxious voices have been crying all along—here is where it all begins.

I march eastward again, across the quiet and empty tundra toward my dinner, the big silver bird, and that other world down below. Nearly back to camp I hear, startlingly close above me but invisible in the mist, the excited laughter of geese.

© 2006. “Angels in the Mist” by Jeff Fair reprinted with permission of the publisher from Arctic Wings: Birds of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, published by Braided River, an imprint of The Mountaineers, Seattle, WA.

Jeff Fair is a wildlife biologist with four books to his credit, including Moose for Kids and The Great American Bear. His essays have appeared in Alaska Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, the Boston Globe, Equinox, Ranger Rick, Audubon Magazine, and Appalachia, where he is a contributing editor. In 1998 he received the National Wildlife Federation’s Farrand/Strohm Writing Award, and in 2001 he was selected for the Alaska State Council on the Arts’ first Tumblewords roster.

Arctic light up the drainage into the Aichilik- this drainage has no name

River walking in the drainage to the Aichilik

About a mile down, our drainage met another, larger drainage with braided streams on a wide bed. Neither of these drainages or creeks have names, part of the Arctic landscape untouched and nameless. Instead of scaling the steep slopes on either side and wrestling our way through miles of tundra, we dropped into this wider river bed, donning gaiters for the small fording we would do.

Caribou tracks

Semipalmated Plover

Common Redpole

Semipalmated Sandpiper

Female Harlequin Ducks

We made our camp on a small tundra section of a wide gravel bar, surrounded by active birds. As the evening set in, the temperature dropped especially precipitously. We scrambled for river baths and jumped into fleece and down. By midnight I had given up watch of the Arctic light for the comfort of the sleeping bag. Peter, bundled head to toe, remained outside in his Crazy Creek reading. And saw the wolf.

Peter rinses in the Aichilik

Mark writes in his trip journal

Elegant Paintbrush

We retraced our steps the next day to an area we’d marked on the GPS as being especially full of birds, another boggy and willowy spot in a large gravel bar. For each camp Mark and Peter scouted extensively, looking for recent bear sign, ensuring we weren’t camping anywhere in someone- or something else’s territory. Old bear scat was all we found. We camped in peace other than the continued cold north wind. The next day we would ford the Aichilik and make our way over a saddle to the Leffingwell Fork.