In the Empire of Ice (13 page)

Next week Vasily will live out on the range with the expectant reindeer, but for now, he’s dreamy eyed and quiet. He sits back against the tepee poles with his mother’s sleeping head against his thigh and speaks slowly, with the quiet reserve of a much older man: “We like it here, living in a chum, because these poles we have carved from the forest, and these walls we have sewn together from our reindeer. That is the meaning of home.”

Clouds wheel by the smoke hole. There has been no sun during the day, no moon or stars visible at night. Directly north is the shallow Barents Sea, whose influx of warm Gulf Stream water from the Atlantic moderates the ecosystem. In the summer, beaches are blanketed by colonies of nesting seabirds: arctic terns, ivory gulls, Sabine’s gulls, little auks, and pink-footed and barnacle geese. The huge bearded seals, narwhals, and walrus breed and rest along the shore. Cod is abundant. But the sea and all its life are polluted.

To the west is the Kola Peninsula, which has the highest density of nuclear reactors in the world. A former naval storage facility for spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste, its storage tanks are leaking, and radioactive contamination is migrating into groundwater and the surrounding atmosphere. (As if acknowledging its environmental problems, the Russian government has agreed recently to develop wind farms there.)

The richly productive Barents Sea is a dumping ground, where 7,000 tons of solid radioactive waste and 56,500 cubic feet of liquid waste have been deposited. Eighteen nuclear submarines were abandoned there, giving off cesium-137, cobalt-60, strontium, and iodine worth 312,500 curies. The Chernobyl disaster gave off 50,000 curies; 1 curie is enough to kill a human.

Rising sea-surface temperatures in the Barents Sea, northeast of Scandinavia, are the prime cause of the retreating winter ice edge over the past 26 years, according to research by Jennifer Francis, associate research professor at the Rutgers Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences. “The recent decreases in winter ice cover are clear evidence that Arctic pack ice will continue on its trajectory of rapid decline,” Francis concludes.

To know nothing of these things, is that happiness? Perhaps to know and be powerless is worse. Piotr blows out the kerosene lamp and makes his way back to bed by match light. The tent shudders; a frigid wind blows. Above and below transboundary pollution, beauty makes its mark on the ear, the retina, and the heart. Here we are living in an elegant reindeer universe: Chum coverings, clothes, sleeping bags, food, thread, glue, and transportation come from this one animal. Unlike hunters on the ice, who search for prey they cannot see, whose whereabouts are undependable, the herders take their food supply (reindeer) with them.

When everyone is asleep, I stick my head out the flap. Snowflakes tap my cheek. Taiga is my headrest and tundra my bedcovers. Smoke curls up from every chum, and the dogs sleep, noses tucked under tails.

MORNING. I ski alone across the open meadow, down to the Snopa River, with no idea of where it might lead. A hard crust formed on the snow during the night. Russia is a country of beauty and abuse. Under one ski are leaf-plastered shelves of ice at the river’s edge; under the other is coercion: Stalin’s terror, the tyrannies of Communism, and the surge of capitalism without a fully realized democracy.

Siberia was the Russians’ frontier before it became their dumping ground. First contact with indigenous people between the Dvina River and the Ural Mountains had occurred by the early 1400s; they were “conquered” by 1456, and by 1620 the annexation of western Siberia was deemed complete.

I asked the Komi how they were treated during the Stalin years and later by the Communists in the 1950s. “They forgot about us,” Vasily said. “We weren’t collectivized like the Indiga Nenets were, their reindeer taken, herders and their families removed from the tundra, the men forced into all-male brigades. They left our families alone.” Was that because the Komi look like Russians and are therefore racially “acceptable,” or were their numbers too small to be bothered with? Vasily shrugs.

To the east, the Nenets on the Yamal Peninsula rose up against Soviet authority in the 1930s. They were spirited and independent and had no need for Russian things. Soviet Army men came onto the tundra of the Yamal and demanded to be given reindeer and sleds. In some cases thousands of animals were taken, leaving behind only a herd of a hundred. Shamans were incarcerated or killed. One powerful shaman who was inadvertently left behind called for a “holy war” against the Russians and a
mandalada,
an assemblage, was formed. The leaders made demands: that the stolen reindeer be returned, imprisoned shamans be released, their children not go to Russian schools, trading posts be banned, and Soviet laws be denounced. But time and again, the Russians overpowered the Nenets rebellion. Eventually, the tundra Nenets leaders were arrested.

The Cold War of the 1950s and 1960s left no one untouched, but the hand of radioactivity is hard to perceive. Just to the north of this camp the radioactivity blew east in the prevailing winds all the way across the Siberian tundra, only to be sucked up by lichen, which take their nutrients from air not earth. These, in turn, are eaten by reindeer, and the reindeer are consumed by reindeer herders and townspeople alike.

I ski and ski. Under the snow and the active layer of earth that freezes and thaws seasonally are bodies of ice, lenses and veins of it inside rocks, under hummocks and mountains, even under ponds. What floats on top is the thinnest veneer of matted green, but there’s a spangled ice-rich garden beneath that has grown and changed shape unseen. Farther east, toward Siberia, huge ice wedges have joined into what Vladimir Kotlyakov, a geographer who has focused on environmental science and glaciology, described as “an almost continuous ice massif” that in some places is a mile thick.

Now Russia’s permafrost is feeling less permanent. It is beginning to melt, outgassing millions of tons of methane a year. German climatologist John Schellnhuber from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany told me that once it gets going, “the air will smell like rotten eggs and Earth’s ‘fever’ will come on ten times as fast.” Methane has 25 times more effect as a greenhouse gas in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Though summer-thaw ponds and bogs have always released methane, more of it was taken up and held by the permafrost itself.

A thawing landscape is a wreck of a place: broken ground, heaving mud, and ever expanding lakes that paradoxically dry up, leaving no water or vegetation at all. If warming continues rapidly, tundra fires will break out in summer heat, burning underground and thawing even more permafrost. The perfect union between caribou, herder, taiga, and tundra will be lost.

I return to camp to find a production line of tepee poles being peeled and cut to size. Drawknives are pulled down long pieces of spruce. Perhaps hope for the future resides right here, where people are still making the things they need to live. During a lull in conversation I ask if there have been any noticeable changes in the climate, in bird migrations, storms, temperatures, or ice conditions. They say they don’t know.

Finally, Vasily says, “The climate is not changing so fast for us yet. Not like it is for others. I have heard about it on the radio. Some things here are even better. In 1975 and 1976, there was a hard crust on the snow here until late May, and it was hard for the reindeer to paw through for something to eat. Now it’s easy,” he explains.

Nikolai pipes up: “Some river crossings are becoming a problem. I heard that the Nenets on the Yamal Peninsula are having trouble crossing the Ob’ River to get to their winter range because the river is still open in November. We have that trouble too, crossing the Pesha River. Small ones, we can make a bridge, but on the Pesha we have to float across.”

Autumn is the most difficult time. Vasily says, “Bad weather always makes it hard to cross the tundra.” Are the storms worse? I ask. They’re not sure. “Sometimes it is ice, sometimes it is open water, and there’s fog and rain. Later, the reindeers’ antlers get covered with ice, so there is no water transpiration into their bodies. It’s becoming a problem. Now it’s happening every day at that time of year, whereas before, it was not so often.”

“In the last years we had fewer mosquitoes, but more biting flies,” Piotr says. “The aleyne, the reindeer, are very bothered by them. They go through the skin and lay eggs. It hurts them, and also it ruins the skins. And yes, spring is beginning a little sooner almost every year.”

They quickly change the subject to a reindeer sled race to be held in Pesha village next March in which they’ll take part. “We’ll need three or four of the best animals for each sled. The leader has to run straight. No jumping. If he jumps, he’s disqualified. We want to win because first place is a snowmobile and second place is a generator.” The irony of using a reindeer sled to win a snowmobile seems to escape them.

KATYA HAS INVITED ME to her chum for supper. As she cooks, she teaches me Komi words:
skurr
for rain,
patch
for woodstove,
purga
for storm,
vur
for forest,
shor
for creek,
yu
for river, and
tailus budma
for waxing moon.

“I come here to help my mother for half the year,” she says. “My sister comes when I leave, to take over.” They live in the middle and largest of the three chums. Katya explains that two separate families have lived for more than 80 years in this one chum divided by only the patch, the woodstove in the center. “At one time there were 20 of us living in here, and 16 of them were children. Now the numbers are smaller.” She and her two brothers live with their mother on the left side of the chum; five men live on the other side. “What happens if someone doesn’t get along?” I ask. She looks at me quizzically, as if I didn’t understand that they live rich lives of intimacy and cooperation, that any other kind of behavior would be uncivilized. “That never happens here. If there’s a problem, we talk it out among ourselves or send them to town for a few days.”

Vasily and Katya’s younger brother leave to take the place of the other two men who have been tending the big herd for two weeks. They come into the chum, dirty and hungry but in a fine mood. An old dog follows them and lies by the fire. “It’s OK. He’s a pensioner,” they say, smiling. I ask how it was out there in bad weather. “We don’t have a tent. We just live outside on the snow. It’s OK, but we were down to our last cigarette,” Katya’s older brother laughs. “We broke the last one in half and shared it. Then Vasily showed up and gave us some, and so we survived!”

Rain stops. The warm air and melting snow produce fog. We’re in a wide opening. Behind us toward the river are trees. The days of frost are over, and the time for skiing is quickly passing. But without skins or snowshoes, we sink to our thighs in three feet of snow. The nights are white, and the ice-covered sea to the north is becoming blue. Ponds leak. The season is neither this nor that, neither winter nor spring, but something between, where the solid becomes liquid, a tawny tundra broth that will later be boiled for tea.

In the 13th century the Komi were ruled by a prince who lorded over a vast area of arable land called Perm. The Komi were farmers then, but when small groups of them moved north, they learned to herd reindeer from their neighbors, the Nenets, with whom they have frequently intermarried. “I’m a Nenets,” Stas tells me, “but I’m married to Rima, who is Komi.”

At one time the Komi were drafted by the Cossacks to fight the Khanti, Mansi, and Nenets. Later the old divisions vanished, and all nomadic reindeer herders were subjugated by the Russians and forced to pay taxes in furs. These “small people,” as the Russians referred to them, were vanquished by smallpox and robbed of their reindeer wealth.

Vasily says that a week ago he visited the Nenets camp near Indiga. “They are staying 20 kilometers [12 miles] from the sea, but there is only one tent in camp because the men live without any women. They stay on the tundra for a month, then go back to the village, and other men take their places. The reindeer don’t know them. It must be difficult. They live in ‘brigades.’ They are no longer
yumdai,
‘always moving.’”

Vasily takes pride in the fact that he and his group still live nomadically. “We do not live against the tundra, against the reindeer. We move with it,” he says. Over and over he intimates how quickly the “open soul” of the herder can be corrupted.

“We don’t make rules for each other. We know each reindeer, each person in camp. If the reindeer goes straight when he is harnessed, we see that; if he runs away, we see that in the person handling them, too.”

Life on the tundra is not romantic. Vasily says, “A hard time of year is right now, in the spring, when we have to move so often. But it is harder in June when we are moving every day to get away from the mosquitoes. The reindeer run so fast, we have to leave the loose ones far behind and go back for them in the morning.”

He muses silently for a while, then says softly, “You have to know what the reindeer are thinking to live with them the right way. Autumn time, when the mushrooms appear, they run to them. There are all kinds of mushrooms. We like them too; we salt them and save them for later.”

In northeastern Siberia, Chukchi reindeer herders declare that “the owner of the world is Earth.” They eat red mushrooms that are hallucinogenic, believing they represent “a separate tribe.” According to Waldemar Bogoras, a noted anthropologist, the mushroom spirits are thought to be very strong. When the mushrooms come out of the Earth, “they can lift a large tree-trunk on their heads and shatter rocks to pieces.” They lead humans on intricate paths in the world, enabling them to see in those places what is false and what is real.

“The Komi don’t eat that kind of food,” Vasily tells me, nor does he remember having shamans. “A long time ago, there were forced baptisms, and it was then that we became Russian Orthodox Christians and are still believers today.”