REINDEERING

REINDEER CROSSING, NORTHWEST TERRITORIES

Men on snowmobiles herd reindeer from winter grazing grounds to spring calving grounds across the frozen Mackenzie. It’s an annual spectacle: two thousand reindeer plowing through snow, skating on the ice road. Next year there’ll be no ice road. The event will take place, though less eventfully. Without that hurdle of ice.

The reindeer are not native to the Mackenzie Delta. They were driven by Saami and Inuvialuit across the Bering Strait from Siberia. It was an epic ordeal. To secure food for starving nomadic hunters forced to settle and abandon a thousand years of living and moving with migrating caribou.

The herd is itself an animal. I sense this, riding Kylik’s snowmobile so close to the herd's periphery. Our approach sets the reindeer milling, a flexing of collective muscle and nerve that has larger, stronger, faster bodies circle smaller, weaker, slower. Grow a thick hide round a vulnerable heart, shelter stragglers in a blizzard of antlers.

But what cosmic intelligence will adapt the animal to the melt?