In the Empire of Ice (14 page)

The Nenets on the Yamal Peninsula say that a mark in the shape of a drum appears on the body of a child who will become a shaman. A “spirit master” will come in a dream to that child. Later, these children go through the usual period of isolation and initiation, and after, wear a special coat hung with metallic pendants, images of the sun and moon, bear teeth, raven wings, talons, and claws much like the belt the Komi wear, though they say that their ornaments are merely decorative.

The long prodding stick the Komi carry could have been the sacred staff carried by a Nenets shaman, with the carved head of a spirit protector on top and used alternately as a divining rod to find water. These powerful shamans would select a site for a séance in a place representing the conjunction of the “three worlds:” river, tree, and the cosmos, or tundra. Nenets believe that the most important temple is not the one people go to on Sundays but an island or any remote and inaccessible place. The least visited is the most sacred of all. A Nenets elder, Avvo Vanuito, once explained that “the major gods live at the end of the Earth.”

RAIN IN THE NIGHT. Then the sky clears and we can see a slim moon and Venus. To the northeast the horizon is blue. It looks like the sea, but it isn’t. To the south a hard-blowing wind has erased ground and sky. The visible simply ends as if expunged; three leafless birch trees are the gateway to the barren tundra beyond.

By morning the white world of flocked trees around us has vanished. I wash my face using water from a small iron pot hung by a chain. From its spout, water pours into my hands. Outside, the trees are black arrows shooting up from snow-covered ground, pointing toward a new season.

The net corral no longer holds ice. When the reindeer are brought in, the sun sends spears through clouds, but once again a dense fog descends as the Earth warms after a long Russian winter.

Alexander hacks a deer head into quarters and throws the bits to his dogs. Sixteen reindeer are taken out of the herd and harnessed. Some are young and wild. When Arthun, one of the youngest herders, who came from a town to the north, harnesses three of them, they take off in the wrong direction. The older men stand and watch. It is a long time before he can turn them again.

In the middle chum Katya folds clothes and helps her mother pack the kitchen: Porcelain cups go into a padded wooden box with a lid, plus the plates, spoons, forks. The reindeer skins are stacked and loaded on a sled, then the walls of the chum come down and we stand exposed to the snowy world. The spruce poles are dragged away, the skins folded, the kitchen table is gone, and the ashes from the woodstove are dumped. Sleds are repacked. We are traveling again, one in a series of moves that will take us to spring camp.

The day is cold, and we bundle up to travel. To live nomadically in western Siberia doesn’t mean one is homeless. Quite the opposite. Home is wider than four walls. Home is the wall and roof and floor of each season. White, green, and brown. It is taiga and tundra, mountain and river, lichen, moss, berry, reindeer, and bog.

Fourteen long caravans clatter down from high ground and patchy forests. One of the dogs, Buryan, named for a Russian snowmobile, not only herds reindeer but also, when tied alongside, helps to pull the sled. It’s rough going at first, but ahead is a long straightaway. Suddenly, we glide, the harnessed reindeer trotting with the dogs and loose reindeer running alongside. Taiga and wintry weather will soon be behind us, open tundra is ahead.

We come to the snow road that leads to the village of Snopa. The reindeer clamber up the road’s steep side, and instantly the ride becomes smooth and fast. For a while things are split in half: winter and snow on one side, summer and sun on the other. The trees thin out. Then we leave them for a cool vastness, an ice-flattened world of brown hummocks encircled by tangled vessels of slush, water, and ice.

Here and there dwarf willows poke up, so short that only the topmost leaves show. Mosses rule. They are closed communities that stabilize the soil temperature, hold in moisture, and discourage other plants from taking over. But lichens are life giving. They produce a sweet “starch” made of polysaccharides, amino acids, and vitamins that is ingested by reindeer and is used by birds for nests. When we stop for a rest, I kneel down, scrape away snow, and press my hand in. The tundra is a sponge, but a fragile one. Lichens, if undisturbed, grow only two-tenths of an inch per year, and if reindeer overgraze it, the tundra mix can take six years to regrow.

As the day warms, fog returns. With little visibility the caravans become separated, and we see the tail end of the last sled vanish. Snow blows onto the tracks. Andrei, my translator and guide, takes a compass reading just in case we get left behind. Flat land, flat all the way to the cod-rich, polluted Barents Sea. We pass the tilted dunes of tundra, thick with tiny yellow berries and small orange flowers. Another bend and another, and finally we see the other sleds in the distance. Half an hour later, we’re at camp.

Already the first chum is going up. Even this close to the Arctic Ocean there are trees in view because of the warming influence of the Gulf Stream. This is spring camp, and the chums will stay here until June. Sun shines through the fog, but the wind is frigid. “Maybe the wind has come to take the fog away,” Marie says. She sinks all the way to her knees as she collects snow to melt for water. Inside the newly assembled chum, birch-bark peelings, gathered a day earlier, are used to light the fire. She pulls out a loaf of stale bread, picks a reindeer hair from the top of the cranberry jam, and cuts reindeer meat on a hand-carved cutting board.

We’re camped near a forest island called Kol’-Ostrov. The night before I dreamed that it exhaled gyrfalcons, brown bears, and swans. Now Andrei and I ski to it. He is on wide Komi skis with old leather bindings, pushing himself along with a pole because, he says, he wants to live the Komi way. The Komi make their own glue from boiled reindeer antlers. Those from the males are best, the herders say, and with it, they glue reindeer hides to the bottoms of the skis to keep them from sliding backward. “The best skin to use is from the river otter. We glue it to the bottom when we’re hunting. It’s very soft and makes no noise,” Vasily has told me. In the spring the width of the ski is more important than the swiftness of the glide. The Komi skis function more as snowshoes, as a way to float on softening snow.

We stop for a snack, and for a moment, I wonder where in the world I am. We’ve come a long distance by plane, train, helicopter, snowmobile, and reindeer sled, yet it all feels familiar, like home. Not just the landscape but the way of living: shoveling snow, cutting wood, cooking on a woodstove, melting ice and snow for water. Distance and language are not the only things that matter. It is how we live wherever we are, close to the ground, shitting in the snow, sleeping on pine boughs in a circle of humans and animals.

Andrei, trained as a biologist and an avid naturalist, looks for bear tracks, wolf tracks, but sees none. Up high there are falcon nests, but because it is early in the season they are still empty. We cross a melting cranberry bog, dropping through one layer of ice and water to a second, firmer ice floor. In the distance, shifting lake ice booms. A swan flies into the Kol’-Ostrov. “The Earth is waking up. You can hear it,” Andrei says with a smile. On the horizon another small lake appears. The Komi call it Happiness, because it is home to so many birds. The Komi love birds and favor the ptarmigan that come and stay in camp; they say that when the geese arrive, the reindeer will start calving.

EVENING. Blue sky and open country. Fires in every stove. Reindeer grazing in the distance. This is the camp where the women will stay until calving is over in late May. Mu Mu, one of the small black dogs with soft black hair and tiny stand-up ears, and another dog sit together on the seat of a sled and howl, as if to say finally, it is spring.

Katya sweeps the floor of the chum with three raven wings. I ask her if the feathers are a sacred amulet. She laughs at the suggestion. “No, they’re just for cleaning.” She’s a wide-eyed beauty, vigorous, affectionate, and innocent. Outside, on the tundra, in her hooded
malitsa
she’s a medieval nun, but in the chum, wearing black tights and a turtleneck, she’s modern, efficient, quick-witted.

In June she’ll return to the small town and her older sister will come to camp and take her place. “Every year I say, ‘This will be the last,’ but then I come back. They say about people like me that I have tundra fever. Well, maybe I do. I love it here too much to stop coming,” she says.

We dig trenches to keep meltwater from seeping onto the floor of the chum and lay firewood in front of the stove. A sharp wind comes up, then stops. Katya takes off her malitsa, hat, and mittens. She washes her hair. With it dripping, she says: “Skurr!” Rain. We run outside to snatch our still wet clothes from the line and hang them over the woodstove.

Katya’s face alternately registers excitement, sadness, and calm. “I feel very good now, inside of myself,” she says. “I had bad experiences with men and also because of racism, because I am not Russian. When I went to college, people made fun of me because I was Komi. And the men, well, there was always too much vodka. Now I am a woman not looking for a man, a woman who lives in two worlds. This is best for me. Yes, maybe this is the only way.”

Late at night Vasily returns from Pesha slightly drunk. As if ashamed of him, his mother lowers a cotton curtain over their two beds. In the dark, Piotr lies on top of reindeer skins, smoking. He says the Nenets living nearby are having problems keeping their language alive. “They have given up living all the time with their reindeer. We Komi are still
vetziny,
nomads. I’m proud that I speak Komi and wear a malitsa. I prefer this way of living, always moving with the animals and our families. I lived in town once and worked. I know what town is. Living with the reindeer, making everything we need, and requiring very little else. That means we are free.”

He sits up and stubs out his cigarette. The night’s darkness breaks into something darker. A line of pine and leafless birch trees follows the twists of a river flowing north. Fresh air swoops down through the smoke hole. Piotr says, “If I had a million dollars, I wouldn’t buy a house, or a car, or get a wife. I’d travel.” When I ask where, he says, “To the places in the world where there are reindeer, to Lapland (Sápmi), Mongolia, and Chukotka.” In other words, he would never venture far from home. “But if I want to travel, I must begin getting a passport now because it takes years to get one.”

In the morning, Piotr goes ice fishing, and the others gather skis and winter clothes and head toward the village of Pesha, where the gear will be left until late autumn. “We don’t like Pesha village because they use coal. It smells bad, and the reindeer can’t eat the grass because of the coal dust,” they tell me. “When it’s time to sell our reindeer, we take the meat to Pesha first, then it’s flown to Nary’an-Mar, a city northeast of here. We get $200 for a whole reindeer, and it costs only $250 to fly by helicopter to Arkhangel’sk. But we need permits to travel anywhere. If only reindeer could fly.”

Marie is sewing a new heel onto her son’s leggings with a needle and caribou-sinew thread. I inspect the stitches. “We make most of our clothing in the winter,” she tells me. “Summers, we just make repairs.” Mu Mu, my favorite of the 13 dogs in camp, lies in the flap door, shielding himself from the rain. The women gather to have tea together while the men are away. Marie has put on her best: gold earrings and a paisley head scarf. We eat cookies, sliced apples, oranges, and lemons brought from Moscow.

“During World War II,” Marie says, “when the German planes came to bomb us, we put white blankets on our tamed reindeer so they wouldn’t see them. It worked! The planes came right over us and flew away. We know where the British plane that crashed lies in the mountains. There are still things in it. Guns and bodies. We don’t touch it.”

She rummages around in one of her hide boxes and pulls out another box of cookies. “We set the door of the chum in different directions, depending on the season,” she says. “We call autumn dirty wind because of the fog. In spring the bogs come on with cranberries. We pick them before we go to the mountains. In midsummer, up high, we pick other berries and also herbs that we make into medicines because even now, they are healthier than tablets.”

“Burrasi,”
Marie calls out. “Good morning. Get up quickly. Good weather!” she shouts. Today Andrew, Andrei, Gordon, and I will leave the women’s camp and go with the men to the main herd of reindeer that will soon begin calving. Only one man—Rima’s husband, Stas—will stay behind with the five women. The puppies are playing, the men are harnessing reindeer, and the women are busy packing rucksacks with extra clothes and food, freshly baked rolls, salmonberry jam, butter, and tea. Then it’s time to leave.

I have mixed emotions—wanting to stay here and longing to see the newborn caribou calves. I look for Piotr. He’s fixing an ax. I ask him if he is happy living here. “I would like to see more,” he says. “It’s not enough for me to see just this, to know just this. I can do many things. I can care for reindeer, run an excavator, paint and make carvings, but I want more. I would like to go to art school; I’d carve and paint and draw. Then I could develop a handicraft business and sell my things. I need more space for my life to grow wide.”

Andrei is calling to me to get on the sled. In the confusion I search for Katya. She has put on her malitsa so we can have our photograph taken together. Afterward, we stand face-to-face, holding each other. Simultaneously, though in different languages, we both say, “I will never forget you.”

Andrei and I climb onto a sled pulled by Red Beard. He’s a grumpy man and handles his animals crudely. As soon as we’re seated, the reindeer lurch ahead. A piece of wood supporting the runner breaks. I yell at Red Beard. He doesn’t seem to care. Andrei shrugs. The sled holds.

When I turn for a last look, I realize that Piotr is also staying behind. He’d wrapped the carving that I’d admired and put it on the sled. How could I have known it was a farewell present? I yell, “Piotr!
Spasibo!
”—thank you. But he has already turned his back to us and is cutting wood.