I was younger then and full of fire and ideas. The north helped me to slow
down a bit, to understand who I was and to experience things that I had
never done before.
The wildlife, it goes without saying, was impressive. The first view I had was
as the plane banked over a brilliantly white expanse of ice where we would
land. What I saw then began a series of events that lead to the greatest
moment in my young life. A herd of caribou, thousands of them, were
running across the tundra. I knew about caribou, but like most southerners, I
had never seen one. The numbers were staggering and I often think now
about how lucky I was to have seen them that way, especially seeing as now
there are many fewer.
At the camp, my first up-close encounter with wildlife was meeting the local
wolverine. I was young so the guys played up the danger with me.
“Yeah, I heard that, one time, this wolverine was still trying to leap for a
guy’s throat after it’d been shot.”
That was encouraging! But the wolverine wasn’t to be trifled with either. It
was hungry and our camp had some pretty incredible calorie laden food just
for the taking. The first day I saw it in person, it was dragging a 40 pound
roast of beef down the hill from camp after having raided our freezer (which
was just outside the cook tent). That was one roast that we were never
going to eat, especially after the meat had been fouled by the stinky
wolverine. The camp boss took a few shots to drive it off, but missed.
The next time I saw it, I was on my way alone to the camp garbage dump at
the far end of the esker we were camped on. I backed up slowly, never
taking my eyes off the thing; the other men had taught me to treat it with
respect! We even tried hunting it down with the helicopter but without
success.
Later on that summer, after the ice was “out” as they say up there and we
could once again have float planes arriving, I experienced great beauty, an
event that I still carry with me some 40 years later.
I heard them first. Their breathing reminded me of a steam engine snorting.
They must have been frightened by something that day because they stood
in a circle. Their long hair hung down, almost touching the tundra.
Musk ox! Protecting their young, they stood in a circle, heads down. Any
animal (perhaps that wolverine?) would have to go through them and their
horns.
I stood on the opposite bank of the lake and held my breath. It wasn’t that I
thought directly about beauty that day, but seeing these animals was a
beautiful thing, something rare and wonderful, something that I somehow
knew would never happen again.
It’s hard to say now what I did next. I had no camera. There is no record of
this event that I can point to, although my father did send me up a camera
later that season. But it is not in photographs that meaning resides.
It is in memory. Perhaps, then, that is what an incident of great beauty
teaches. I remember it. The animals themselves are long gone, but then they
aren’t; they still live on inside me. What we have seen (and done) is what
makes us who we are and when we are presented with something rare and
wonderful it is worth remembering.