Four Quarters of Light (32 page)

I was only too happy to get inside the canvas. The chill here soon bites into you. I hoped we would not have to spend the night. Some of the crew went prowling around taking stills of the eerily empty plain. I lay back and waited, munching on biscuits and dark chocolate, and started updating my diary. This trip to try to catch the caribou migration had not been on my original itinerary. It was a bonus to get this far, but I was sure it wasn't going to be our lucky day. I was feeling a bit deflated and was wondering how I would explain to Audrey and the kids about the close encounter with the caribou that never happened. The numbing cold was making me sleepy. I lay back and closed my eyes, recalling again the events of the last few days. Then I began to hum to myself.

It must have been about one and a half hours later, after eating, writing and dozing, that I looked out of my tent. Unbelievably, we were surrounded by caribou. There were several hundred of them in small groups and in larger bands, some mothers and their young idly munching the tufts of tussock grass. They seemed oblivious to us as they trudged indolently to the south and east. The cameraman and soundman had moved away from the tents to make the best of this opportunity. I was left alone in the middle of this mass movement. Every so often some of the creatures would stop, look momentarily at me, then emit a comical grunt and move on, their spindly legs and feet making sucking noises in the boggy land.

I had to admit I felt very alone and more than a little frightened. Being in the middle of this phenomenon about which I had read and heard so much was disconcerting. I looked around for the crew, needing to keep contact with where they were. Though the creatures avoided me with total indifference, my panic grew. What would I do if something spooked them and they suddenly stampeded? I remembered what I had been told about bears and wolves avoiding the calving grounds, but I reminded myself that we were miles from that special place. These animals were caught up in some kind of primal drive that took no heed of me. Then I also recalled what I had been told as I left the Gwich'in village: ‘You must thank them for letting you sleep on
their grave.' The statement had been made in a half-joking manner, but it was the other half of that advice that had to be considered. I remembered the moose mother at McCarthy and slowly turned in a circle, silently thanking the caribou for coming to visit me.

Then I spotted the crew carefully walking in and out of the main group of caribou families. The young creatures seemed giddy and vulnerable, and the older animals, looked at individually, were scraggy and skinny. But the huge herd was moving with one mind and one purpose. They were magnificent. I thought of the dance in the village hall and how all the dancers there had moved as if with one mind. I didn't feel afraid any more, and I chuckled softly. The caribou grunted in my direction as if they were laughing too.

I watched this shuffling, snorting, grunting procession for another hour. The caribou came in fits and starts, in large and small groups, and then seemed to vanish into the thick sea fog that began to settle on the coastal plain. I thought we had seen the last of them, but they just seemed to keep coming like shadowy forms moving in and out of breaks in the mist. Inside a minute there would be nothing but grey mist against a grey sky, and then the head and antlers of several males would appear and disappear. Then, just for a few seconds, you might see three or four juveniles, less driven by migratory instinct, run and leap into the mist as if they believed it would support them. Then they too were gone and all that was left was a ghostly grunting and snorting. For a moment you believed it was an Arctic illusion or the backwash of a dream the place had instilled in you.

Soon we were all huddled together, confirming excitedly that it was no dream. Then one pilot who had seen it all before and was more earthbound than the rest of us suggested we should leave before the fog became too thick. This was the sort of weather that could delay you for days. If it got any worse, to attempt to take off and navigate through such conditions could be fatal. ‘You could still be here in the new year with the caribou licking the lichen off your bones,' he warned good-humouredly. I
remembered what Tex O'Neill had told me about impatience and leaving things to the last minute, so we packed quickly and roared off out of the foggy nothingness.

Our pilot informed us that out of the possible thirty or forty thousand calves born here only half of them will survive predators and the severe winter, and those that do will return again next year to do it all again. ‘That's the way it's been here for ever,' he concluded.

Sometimes we caught a glimpse of them from our vantage point in the heavens – a seething mass of brown flowing over the land, unaffected by every obstacle this sublime ecosystem put in their way. One daunting memory stuck with me, a momentary vision of an adult male charging out of the mist. His antlers seemed bigger than the bony frame of his body. His nostrils glared and steamed against the chill air and his big black eyes looked right through me – then he was gone. Or was he?

The extraordinary act of thousands of animals migrating thousands of miles, year after year, across this primeval landscape of earth and water to give birth and perhaps to die is profound testimony to something living and unseen in the land itself Neither science nor language has the capacity to explain or reveal it, and the raw experience of it is greater than language or logic. Aldo Leopold, the great proponent of the concept of ecological science, once wrote, ‘Only when the end of the supply is in sight do we discover that things are valuable.' Later, he wrote, ‘It was here that I first clearly realized that the land is an organism, that all my life I had only seen sick land, whereas here was a biota still in perfect aboriginal health.'

I had had my stay in the wilderness, and I had found it warmly enriching. I'd come up close to a unique life experience for which I remain grateful. But I had to acknowledge that I didn't have the resilience to make a life there.

I arrived in Fairbanks exhausted and weak, less from the physical rigours of the past week than from another kind of exposure the wilderness creates in the heart. It was good to be back in my cabin in the hills above the town. A couple of days here would allow me to think through the whole experience with the Gwich'in and the caribou. Now that I was away from my Arctic encounter I had to admit I wasn't quite sure what I made of it all. But one thing I did know: it was making me ask more questions about the wilderness than I thought I had answers for. I also had to admit that I was glad to be back in a place I knew, with familiar things around me and people I knew nearby.

The place had changed a lot in the few weeks since I had last been there. The road up to the cabin was deeply rutted and muddy with permafrost melt. The
Pequod
would have been useless here and would have had to be abandoned like a land-locked
Marie Celeste
. Also, the place was less quiet: birds and birdsong were everywhere. A big raven stared down at me studiously as I kicked and scraped the muck from my boots. And my old companions, the mosquitoes, were still in abundance.

The drive up to the cabin had shown me just how fast things
change. Wild flowers were everywhere, clumps of bluebells contrasting with the blue flowers of Jacob's ladder and the deep-pink hue of wild rose bushes. In many places the diamond willow was already laying down its blanket of seed fluff. The cottonwoods were also casting off millions of seeds, creating mini clouds of white fluff with every summer breeze. That evening, as I sat on the porch with a steaming mug of coffee, a plate of digestive biscuits and slices of processed cheese, I also thought I noticed a difference in the clarity of the light from what I had witnessed up in the Arctic. Maybe it was just the burgeoning colours that softened it. It certainly didn't have the austere quality I'd found in Arctic Village, and even more so at Caribou Pass and beyond. It would be summer solstice soon, I thought. The big black raven paraded up and down on his branch cawing impatiently, as if to say, ‘Everyone knows that, bimbo, now throw me a biscuit!' As I watched him, flotillas of tiger swallowtail butterflies pirouetted past the cabin and alighted on the ground, flapping their wings where they sat. They, at least, were applauding me. I arose, took a bow and headed for bed.

I made a few notes before turning in. I had been thinking how oriental the evenings were. It was a mixture of the omniscient quiet, the curious quality of light that lulls the mind and makes it more receptive to how the wilderness opens itself up to you. When I was here before, at the end of winter with the snow still on the ground highlighting the ghostly black trees, I had thought of haikus and Japanese prints. It had all seemed so pristine and eternal then. Even with summer colouring up the canvas of the landscape, there was something quietly revelatory about it like the best of oriental art.

Kno Hsi, an eleventh-century Chinese painter and philosopher, proposed the idea that man relishes natural landscape because it enriches his own nature. Like me, he was an irredeemable romantic and seeker after things. He writes, ‘. . . the din of the dusty world and that locked-in-ness of human habitations are what human nature habitually abhors, while on the contrary, haze, mist and the haunting spirits of the mountains are what
human nature seeks, and yet can rarely find.' The ancient painter philosopher obviously believed profoundly in the restorative and redemptive quality of the wilderness, and a part of me wanted to believe but still needed to be convinced of his thesis.

I skipped through my notebook until I found some references about travel as a search for a spiritual homeland and a heightened sense of authenticity. I tried to apply this to my own recent travels in the Arctic refuge. Had I found beauty or a vision of paradise? No, I had to confess I hadn't. I could not apply these nouns to my stay in the Arctic. I had another list of words to convey what I felt about the place. It was about hardship and endurance. It was brutal and confining. It was a struggle, physically and psychologically. But it did make you think and examine your own values. There were moments when you felt moved, perhaps by something sublime. Maybe that's all it is really about, not the search for beauty in some earthly paradise but rather something more transcendent. Something akin to a beatific experience that flares up like a candle in the wind and is gone again. It may leave you once more in the dark but it will have lighted your way.

All this thinking brought me back to my Athabascan Anglicans. I had not expected to discover the Gwich'in to be a confessed Christian community who found spiritual consolation in the wilderness. In a way they were like modern-day Essenes, who dwelt in caves near the Dead Sea and lived a life of purity and simplicity while awaiting the Second Coming. And their reverence for nature, and especially their empathy with the spirit of the caribou, was a very Franciscan view of the world. Indeed it could even be Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Shinto or Taoist. Eastern thought had never made the schizophrenic division between man and nature that the West had. Neither had the Gwich'in, and that was why they were primitive but profound theologians. They knew that everything in life and in nature was sacred and that man was only another sacred creature. When they spoke about their brother the caribou, they meant it.

All this theological speculation was making my head light. I
suddenly remembered St Augustine and his constant admonition that man should not take joy from life but rather should spend more time in contemplation of his salvation. With that kind of advice, no wonder we couldn't see the wood for the trees and no wonder the modern traveller is essentially still a pilgrim in search of a spiritual homeland. St Augustine and his confederates in classicism had been misdirecting us for centuries.

As if he had been reading my thoughts, the big black raven that squatted on the tree outside my cabin started strutting up and down the branch, cawing and calling out in what seemed like hysterical derision. It was as if he was both mocking my speculations and laughing along with me. Then he would perform clownish leaps from branch to branch and sit for a few moments lecturing me, his throaty voice becoming stern and almost threatening. Then he would suddenly flap away to another tree and march drunkenly along, proclaiming with complete abandon that I was absolutely right about that self-indulgent Salvationist, St Augustine! Next he would flutter down to a low branch near the house and sit silent for a few moments, staring at me with imperious disdain before barking at me, ‘Be careful, Keenan, you don't become too saintly yourself!' Another time he flew with such ease and immense grandeur to another high branch, where he fluffed his shiny black feathers like a wise old academic adjusting his gown and announced that he knew stories from the shadowy edge of history that philosophers and theologians had not yet even conceived of. So it went on for what seemed an hour or more. I sat thoroughly enraptured until finally this egotistical and audacious wit of a bird decided he had entertained me enough and was gone. Even in daylight this great black creature could disappear as if by magic.