By Barry Lopez, excerpted from the book About This Life
I don’t know, of course, whether you’ve ever been in the high Arctic in summer, but I would begin by telling you how striking the light is. For two months or more the sun doesn’t dip below the horizon. In a treeless, winter-hammered landscape like Alaska’s north slope, the light creates a feeling of compassion that is almost palpable. Each minute of light experienced feels like one stolen from a crushing winter. You walk gently about, respectful of flowering plants, with a sense of how your body breaks the sunshine, creating a shadow. You converse in soft tones. The light is – perhaps there is no other word – precious. You are careful around it.
The wind always feels close here, a gentle breeze, a heavy blow, the breathing of an unfathomable welter of clouds which passes continually overhead, an ocean in which weather is being conceived. It’s figuring out what it wants to do before moving south and east across North America: now altostratus, now cirrus, now cumulonimbus, like exercises. After lunch a mare’s tail sky; at one in the morning a rainbow appears to the south, half as broad as my fist, driven into the tundra like a sheet of iridescent steel.
But for the wind against your ear and the keening of fifty species of birds, it is as quiet as the moon. The wind surrounds the bark of a fox and it evaporates. In sun-warmed, goose-down clothing, you turn your cheek to the source of light and feel sheltered; you see amid the dwarf birch and dwarf willow at your feet speckled eggs cradled in birds’ nests. The grace so apparent in first life seems nowhere else so tender, because night never comes here.
From the slope of a hill above this river, you can look out across two hundred square miles of tundra through air transparent as a polished windowpane. If the Earth were flat, you could see all the way to Iowa. It was into the expansive country, this place of interminable light and clear, rolling air, that Bob and I had come. In it we would watch wolves.
. . .At 2:30 one morning Bob rose to look through his scope and spotted a grizzly bear at the wolf den. A yearling male, the lone sentinel with the pups, charged immediately and drove it back down the cutbank. Even at this distance we could see the puffs of dust at their feet as they raced down the incline. Suddenly the bear spun around and chased the wolf, but only about twenty-five feet before they faced off. Motionless, they stared at each other for a few seconds; then the wolf turned his back and walked away. The bear, now some four hundred feet from the den entrance, his curiosity piqued, walked around to the north and stood up on his hind legs, looking around, sniffing. The young wolf eyed him. The bear quartered back slowly toward the den and then charged. The wolf ran to meet him. Both stopped short, staring. In a few moments the wolf turned around and walked calmly back to the den. The bear ambled down to the creek and disappeared into the willows. The wolf weighed perhaps eighty pounds; the bear weighed three to four hundred pounds and appeared to Bob to be a young boar.
The wolf spent the next fifteen minutes with his nose to the ground, retracing all the bear’s movements before finally lying down to sleep.
. . . Four and a half hours after the yearling wolf drove the bear off, about seven in the morning, we saw an adult female wolf traveling toward the den at a steady trot, a laminar flow over the contours of the land. The slight discoloration of hair around her mammae, her round-as-a-melon belly, and her overall bearing revealed – to the Nunamiut, who taught Bob, who showed me – who she was (mother), where she’d been (successfully hunting), and where she was going (home). She stopped briefly a quarter mile west of her current den at a new den site the wolves had been excavating, and then continued on. She came to a sudden dead halt at a spot where the bear’s still fresh trail crossed hers. She investigated it for a few moments before going on quickly to the den. The pups charged up out of the ground to greet her, jumping and pawing and bowling one another over in their efforts, seemingly, to embrace. She regurgitated meat for them and the yearling. After nursing the pups, she sniffed all around the den area and curled up to sleep.
An hour and a half later she roused her pups and headed west with all of them trailing clumsily after her. She led them to the new den, a move, we speculated, precipitated by the bear.
