Stretching into the snowy
horizon, thousands of reindeer pull endless rows of wooden sleds
covered by thick, furry reindeer pelts.
Reindeer skins cover everything: the women who wear huge hooded
parkas; the men who walk with prodding sticks to keep the animals in
line; and the children who ride on the sleds among the only
household items that these nomadic Arctic people own.
These Nenets reindeer herders have just struck camp in
northwestern Siberia, dismantling teepee-like dwellings known as
"chooms," and piling the pelts, wooden support poles, floorboards,
extra clothing and kitchen utensils onto the hand-hewn sleds. The
kitchen sink, consisting of a large metal bowl, goes too.
The Nenets are headed to reindeer summer pastures farther north,
even though we're already well above the Arctic Circle on the
pancake-flat peninsula known as Yamal. In the Nenets' native
language, Yamal means "back of the beyond" or "end of the earth."
The peninsula is a treeless landscape at the top of the Earth,
primarily tundra. Some of the Nenets who migrate with the reindeer
will never see the inside of a building. Their constant movement
brings them near a town only in April and November, at either end of
the reindeer migration season.
"There is no bad weather on the tundra," says Sergei Serotetta,
the leader of the group I am visiting. "The tundra is our home: We
know how to live here whatever the conditions."
A tough, sinewy man with a heavily lined face, Sergei eagerly
lends me clothes made of reindeer pelts when it is obvious that my
modern outdoor gear -- store-bought coat and boots -- is inadequate
for the temperatures, which can plummet to 40 below in winter. The
thick reindeer hairs provide the same insulation that allows the
animals to thrive in the bitter cold. I am told that a human can
sleep comfortably outside in a blizzard wearing the parkas and
thigh-high leggings made from the animals' fur.
The Nenets live with the reindeer the way the Plains Indians of
the Americas once lived off of bison. The animals provide the raw
materials for clothing, dwellings, food, rope (for the all-important
lassos), transportation and even artwork. About 175,000 reindeer
still roam the region, some 3,000 of them with Sergei's group.
As many as 60 pelts cover a choom, which stays quite cozy with an
ever-present fire in the central stove. We eat meals of raw reindeer
meat and frozen fish (no need for refrigerators here) around small
tables set upon floorboards and mats of small branches, which double
as sleeping space.
About 35,000 Nenets live in the Yamal region, a third of whom
still live a strictly nomadic lifestyle. Yet the Nenets are not a
"stone-age tribe" as a New York Times headline recently
called them. Since the 1930s, Nenets children have attended boarding
school in Yamal's only real town, Yar Sale. They are flown in and
out by helicopter at the beginning and end of each school year, a
commuting expense once covered by the Soviet Union, and still picked
up by the regional government.
The young men serve in the army, as all Russians are required to
do. Yet many return to the Yamal peninsula to follow the annual
reindeer migration, often traveling up to 600 miles with the
animals. The summer months are spent fattening the animals on the
protein-rich grasses and sedges in the north. In the fall, they move
back south to pass the bitter winter where the animals can scrape
away the snow to munch on lichen and scrub, and where the Nenets can
find trees for firewood and new sleds.
I have visited their realm twice now in the past year, and will
return this summer to migrate with the Nenets and their herds as
they fashion their lives out of the rough tundra.
After the sleds are loaded and ready to begin the journey north,
I squat on some parkas in the cold wind to sip tea and eat raw fish
a final time with Sergei and his clan.
"We look forward to meeting you again soon, when it'll be
warmer," Sergei says with a laugh. "Doe lyetom!" (until summer).
Bill Gasperini is a CBS radio correspondent based in
Moscow. Discovery Channel Online will return to Yamal with Bill this
summer as he migrates with the Nenets and their reindeer.
You can email Bill at gone@online.discovery.com
Here are some other places we've GONE...
Ojos
del Salado
Finger
Rock
Chinguetti
Antarctica
Climbing
in Thailand
Lake
Titicaca
Caving
in England
To
the Moose's Tooth
El
Capitan
Colombia's
Lost City
