by Richard Kahn

The owl flies silently over my head, white and brown wings making no sound…over the river into the tundra, the owl drops out of sight and then emerges from a fold in the land a small creature tucked in its talons…Screeching peregrine chicks hidden somewhere on the cliff face, strident calls, chaotic screaming…pleading, hidden from view. The adult falcon, invisible, screeches a warning…

A group of silent black and white geese run across the gravel bar…Gulls watch, their incessant call not so much the call of the wilderness, but more like a reminder that the familiar lives in the most exotic places…or, perhaps, a reminder that the exotic is merely a perspective shift of the familiar.

Loons call, they are distant silhouettes on the water, sometimes sounding like ducks or geese…sometimes laughing…they run across the surface of the river beating their wings as their feet stir up white wakes…They leave the surface, turn and head upstream, heads down, necks extended, wings beating the air, they fight to fly unlike the hawks, eagles, falcons and owls who float effortlessly on the air…hovering, soaring, hurtling towards the ground, blasting straight into the sky.

And then there is the raven, dark shape, calls like a gull, flies like a hawk, soars with the eagles…In the middle of the night the raven’s call wakes me up…it is close, and unlike anything else I have heard here…sound like wind passing through a long pipe…a bird flute…it is unique and unlike the mimicking cries I hear from the raven during the day…If the caribou are the magician animals, dancing across the tundra, appearing and disappearing mysteriously in their own way, then the raven is the magician bird…dark like a shadow…silent or noisy at will, a mimic or a unique individual…secure, curious, nomadic…

NPR-A by Richard Kahn

Rain all night…the clouds are down on the lake…It is a cold grey morning…Patches of blue sky breaking through until the days changes in character…Bright sun, light wind, blue sky…the grasses glowing yellow…Pools of water gathered in the folds of the dunes…the hum of the land is loud in my ears…There are no caribou to be seen… their tracks in the sand have been eroded by the rain…The wind blows sand into the ridges…but the day is dry…We walk up though the dunes, past the loon pond and head south in the direction of the vanished caribou. Ground squirrels watch as we cross the tundra. We stop for lunch finding shelter behind an outcrop of blowing grass above a break in the dunes. A highway of tracks marks the passing of caribou. I set up the video camera pointing out across the sand looking east across the lake. We eat lunch and wait. There are several caribou in the distance…We wait…the caribou graze moving slowly in our direction…We wait…a young bull, a cow and her calf, the ground squirrels run across the dunes, they stand, they flick their tails, they chatter and then run for their holes in the side of the dune… The caribou graze and move closer, until the young bull is just below us. He looks directly at me, pauses, and then goes back to grazing…the cow and the calf move closer and then trot off to the east. The bull walks past us up the highway of tracks and disappears over the hill. In the distance more caribou graze and move closer…we wait…the bull returns…he takes another long look at me and then begins to graze. Caribou walk along the lake. A bull walks into the lake until the water reaches his chest…he stands there, brown body, blue water, his antlers silhouetted in the bright sunlight…the caribou graze around us. The ground squirrels chase each other through the tundra. We spend the day in the dunes, sheltered in this one spot, in the shadow of blowing grass, watching the caribou come and go…A day spent on caribou time…watching them meander from plant to plant, walk, sit, trot, graze and then disappear…We pack up, no caribou in sight, ground squirrels in their holes, a gull calls imitating a loon a loon answers. There is not a cloud in the impossibly blue sky…low angled yellow light has the grasses shinning and the dunes glowing…The lake is a deep blue rippled by the wind and shining bright in the evening light…there is a slight chill in the air…It is quiet, there are no animals to be seen…no birds singing, no bugs…just silence…peaceful serene…

Tomorrow we will leave this place, we’ll fly back to the Colville, back to moving water, cliffs, and tundra…This place is unique…A threshold…an entryway into another world, another arctic, another way to think about the land…There are no mountains here…There are no rocks…the only stone we’ve found in ten days is an obsidian spear point…Josh picked it out of the sand and blew away the dust…it shone deep black in the sunlight…We passed the point back and forth, touching the hand of a man extended backwards and forwards through time…and then Josh dropped the point back into the sand where he had found it…This is not iconic Alaska…but it is true wilderness…fragile…intricate…vulnerable. Filled with the change of the weather and the light…wind, silence, blowing sand, harsh cold, dark clouds, rain…migrating caribou…grasses and willows…intense in it’s simplicity…filled with poetry…powerful in it’s simplicity…spare in it’s grammar…It has taught me a simple notion…It is not what you take from the land that has meaning…It is what the land gives you…a concept so simple that it has eluded me until I walked across the dunes and sand of this place…This place is fragile, the caribou mark the land and the wind and weather erase their passing. The only sign of caribou are the deep trails they have worn over time into the tundra high above the lake.

Our presence is intrusive here. If we had met just two other people here we would have been crowding the space. This is a place which should be left alone…rarely visited but widely understood…the elements of wilderness distilled to their most basic ingredients. Sky, water, plant, bird, animal…mixed together they provide the flavor of wilderness. The willows are the caribou…the caribou are the willows.

Nothing wasted here, I reached down to pick up a handful of dried grass to scatter over the spot where I had pitched my tent and find a bird’s nest.

Time passes, one thing becomes another …the caribou tracks which had been a river flowing across the sandy plain have been erased by the rain and scattered by the blowing wind…the tracks become grains of sand the grains mark the passing of the wind forming ripples and eddies around the grasses that dance beside the lake…the sky unfolds around me clouds form and shred…the horizon encircles me…the sun on one horizon the moon on the other…the cloudless sky fills with darkness…fog descends over the dunes…the world turns grey…caribou drift through the mist…silence…only the hum of the land remains constant…ripples