My complexion is dotted with small, red pocks. I’ve developed an incessant twitch. Each hair on my leg is sensitized to movement. The skin on my arms reacts to the slightest touch. Movements in the air result in wild grabs and loud slaps. Many nights I’ve been lulled to sleep by the incessant drone of mighty wings. Windows, tent, hands, clothing, face, skin all bare mark of my frantic actions. Small dots of deep red define a few spots. I have provided just one more meal for the vampire of the north – a mosquito.
I can’t imagine myself in a more magnificent spot. I’m sitting near the border with Northwest Territories. Four hundred sixty-five kilometres of narrow, windy, rocky, rutted and now muddy dirt track stretch to the south. Four sleeps ago I had returned to a fox den to capture a memory of six kits. As evening approached the lure of the Olgilvie Mountains drew me north, towards the midnight sun. I found a high spot, sparse of vegetation, but elevated enough to catch a breeze. I sat, watching the reflections of the setting sun on the rounded hills marking my eastern horizon. There was not a mosquito to disturb my peace. The crumbling hills of limestone talus glow red. A band more ferrous crosses the upper third of the mountain. Weathering and erosion paint the mountainside below the band in red and orange. A darker, maroon dike rises vertically to the mountains ridge. With setting sun, I tuck myself into bed at 1:00am.
This was my introduction to Beringia – a land north of the continental ice and glaciers of a past ice age. Why was the area free of glaciation? It is open to debate, but one theory suggests this was an arctic desert – a place so dry, so hostile, that not even a glacier could form. In its own way it was a northern refuge for some organisms separated by ice from their southern counterparts. This is a land of rolling mountains and vast plains interrupted by up thrust ridges – a seismically active area.
That was five days ago. The gray Olgilvie Mountains are just a memory. I’ve crossed over Eagle Plains – a long drive along the highest ridge of the plain. In 2005 a 70,000 hectare fire reburned an area that had been blackened 14 years earlier. A black spruce forest subsisting on the frozen landscape needs nearly one hundred years to re-establish itself. In the areas which reburned no forest is returning. Instead a startling transition is occurring. The once forested land is becoming a grassy savanna turned lavender by fireweed as far as I can see. Is this what global warming will bring to the north? More fires, more grass, fewer trees . . .
My pace on the northward venture has been slow; painfully slow should it have been anywhere else. I initially thought I could set cruise at sixty kilometres per hour for a leisurely ride – paying little head to the track. There was too much to see. I was missing things. I slowed to fifty. It wasn’t long before the needle hovered below fifty. The only disadvantage to this speed is I now see how large rocks are, how rough the road is. Bear, moose, fox, caribou – all greeted my slower speed. My changing circadian clock has me traveling late in the evening, into the early morning when there are few vehicles on the road, less dust, perfect light, and more time for enjoyment.
Crossing the Eagle River – the haunt of the Mad Trapper – I was startled by a new sight. Another burned plateau. I had noticed this spot one-year ago, as well as glanced at it just one week earlier. There were minor amounts of thermokarst slumping. The south aspect had been slowly oozing, small rivulets down off the embankment. Today, an area of massive proportion has vanished. The normally eerie spruce forest is piled together at the base of an oozing muddy mass – a twisted array of sticks. I wish I had a photograph of it from last week for comparison. Global change – make that global warming – in progress.
A couple hours ago I arrived at the border between the Yukon and Northwest Territories. I stopped across from the withering snowdrift with a view down into the valley. I was mesmerized by the panorama. As far as I could see there was an open, grassy, plain – tundra. A few rounded knolls interrupting the vast landscape added texture in the scene. I felt miniscule. With the window down I listened to the cackling of ptarmigan family, the shrill chirps sung by a collared pika, and the gentle roar of a northern breeze. I felt the need to capture the moment, but feared stepping into the scene would shatter it – a fragile watercolour landscape.
As I sat absorbing the landscape I was transported back to another time. My mind imagined the vast scene with a woolly mammoth sauntering below. I wondered – is this what it was like? Instead I hoped one of the bushes moving, as though a mirage, could be a bear or a caribou – a caribou from the Porcupine Herd. Looking closer I noted I had been deceived again. It was just a ripple of warmth shimmering in the distance transforming lone bushes into living apparitions.
Just north I watched Mount Sittichinli, the highest point in the Richardson Mountains, be touched by a wisp of cloud. A clean, lacy cape slowly capped the peak. The distant plain was obscured, a rounded knoll near Mount Sittichinli grew a drapery, the rippling texture of the plain became veiled, the grassy ledge out my window became a shadow and vanished – only small opening of sky remained over the pass. A window to Northwest Territories remained over the saddle – the great divide where water flows north to the Arctic Ocean. It seemed a dabbling of sun, a hinting of a new light as the lingering shower crosses the range.
Clouds are rolling past; steam rises from the snow drift, the ground around me and my window to the Territory has closed, but I just had a glimpse of the up thrust hill to the west through a break in the mist. Sitting here in my own small world I can imagine the breaking of the clouds in a short while allowing the dapple of clean, evening sun to bring new life to the now washed landscape. Until then, sit with me, enjoy the tranquility, relax in the quiet conversation of the wind, the alluring chatter of rain, and the chime of sleet.
As the mist parts a muskox walks into view – vampires forgotten.
