A recipient of the National Book Award along with many other honors, American author Barry Lopez is best known for his books and essays about the "relationship between the physical landscape and human culture." In this excerpt from Arctic Dreams (1986), Lopez traces the process by which North American caribou "trek hundreds of miles each year between their winter range near the tree line and well-defined calving grounds on the tundra." Observe how Lopez maintains our interest through varied sentence structures as well as precise descriptive and informative details.
Migration of the Caribou
from Arctic Dreams, by Barry Lopez
Scientists are uncertain what starts caribou on their northward journey--knowledge that they have stored enough fat to carry them through, perhaps. They endure spring blizzards on their journeys and cross ice-choked rivers with great determination and a sure sense of bearing, but they also choose paths of least resistance over the land, often following in each other's tracks through deep snow. Pregnant cows are normally in the lead; mature bulls may be as much as a month behind the cows, or never arrive at the calving grounds at all. By the end of their arduous journey the females are thin and tattered-looking. Behind them, in places where they have had to cross rivers in a stage of breakup, there may be the carcasses of hundreds of drowned and fatally injured animals. Their calving grounds, writes biologist George Calef, appear "bleak and inhospitable. Meltwater lies in pools on the frozen ground, the land is often shrouded in fog, and the wind whistles unceasingly among the stunted plants and bare rocks." The advantages of these dismal regions, however, are several. The number of predators is low, wolves having dropped away from the herds at more suitable locations for denning to the south. Food plants are plentiful. And these grounds either offer better protection from spring snowstorms or experience fewer storms overall than adjacent regions.
Most calves are born within a few days of each other, and calving occurs at least a month before swarms of emergent mosquitoes, blackflies, warble flies, and botflies embark on a harassment of the caribou that seems merciless to a human observer. If one were to think of events that typify arctic life--the surge of energy one feels with daily gains of ten or fifteen minutes of sunlight in the spring, or waking up one morning to find the ocean frozen--one would also include that feeling of relief that descends over a caribou herd when a wind comes up and puts hordes of weak-flying mosquitoes to the ground.
After calving, cows and their offspring join immature animals, barren cows, and the bulls in "postcalving" aggregations of 75,000 or more animals, their numbers stretching from horizon to horizon. They trek slowly south, breaking up into smaller herds. The first fall storms catch them in open country, an in the cold, snowy air these "gray shepherds of the tundra," as the Alaskan poet John Haines calls them, "pass like islands of smoke." They take shelter in the short timber of the taiga for the winter.
After the herds have gone, the calving grounds can seem like the most deserted places on earth, even if you can sense strongly that the caribou will be back next year. When they do return, hardly anything will have changed. A pile of caribou droppings may take thirty years to remineralize on the calving grounds. The carcass of a wolf-killed caribou may lie undisturbed for three or four years. Time pools in the stillness here and then dissipates. The country is envied of movement.
Selected Works of Nonfiction by Barry Lopez
- Of Wolves and Men, 1978
- Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, 1986
- Crossing Open Ground, 1988
- The Rediscovery of North America, 1991
- About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory, 1998
- Apologia, 1998
This passage appears in Chapter Five ("Migration: The Corridors of Breath") of Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, by Barry Lopez (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986; reprinted in a Vintage paperback, 2001).
