Life and Death In the Arctic

One of North America's most high-stakes environmental battles in years appears to be reaching its final moments in Congress, yet no one has a greater stake in the outcome than a small native tribe north of the Arctic Circle.

In the next few days, Congress is expected to decide the fate of the Republican-led proposal to allow oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Held in the balance is not only one of North America's most beautiful wilderness areas but a way of life thousands of years old. The 5,000-member Gwich'in tribe of northwest Canada and nearby Alaska depends for its livelihood on the twice-yearly migration of caribou through its lands as the animals travel to and from their calving grounds in the Arctic refuge.

If the caribou population is markedly decreased by oil drilling, as the Gwich'in and environmentalist groups fear, the Gwich'in will lose their main source of food and a crucial part of their culture. For that reason, the tribe has been a frequent fixture in congressional lobbying, with the tribe's leaders often traveling to Washington to join the fight against the drilling plan.

Yet for anyone who makes the journey back with the Gwich'in to their lands north of the Arctic Circle, it is clear that this debate in Congress is both vitally important and almost abstractly remote.

In April, I accompanied two Gwich'in hunters on a 220-mile hunting trip via snowmobile up the Porcupine and Bell rivers, east of the Gwich'in hamlet of Old Crow in northern Yukon Territory.

Out on the hunt, the only thing real was the vast and empty northern frontier, in which uncertainty and sheer chance are constant companions. The thin line between scarcity and plenty is harsh -- an echo, perhaps, of what a new northern oil boom could bring.

Out on the hunt

Wind blew silently up the canyons one late April night, slipping along curled bluffs, across snow and ice toward distant mountains. At midnight, the glow of sunset lingered on the horizon, promising Arctic summer soon to come. But for two native hunters there was nothing but failure.

Robert Kyikavichik's snowmobile had keeled over sideways into the slushy surface of a frozen river. The way ahead had become an impassable quagmire after a sudden thaw. And the big herd of caribou believed to be nearby was nowhere in sight.

Kyikavichik and his hunting partner, Harvey Kassi, would have to turn back toward home, 100 miles downriver in Old Crow, having failed to obtain their families' main sustenance.

"No caribou," said Kyikavichik. "No meat this time."

For thousands of years, the springtime ritual of hunting caribou has been repeated. The 5,000-member Gwich'in tribe of northwest Canada and nearby Alaska has sustained itself by the sometimes generous, sometimes cruel luck of the hunt. Tribal members prosper when the animals are numerous, and they suffer hard times when the caribou are scarce.

The Gwich'in caribou hunt is a ritual nearly as old as human presence in the continent. At a site 35 miles southwest of Old Crow, a village of 310 people, Canadian archaeologists have found stone tools that they believe date from as much as 20,000 years ago -- among the oldest human finds in the Western Hemisphere. That historical period coincided with the last ice age, a time when Alaska and Yukon were the only part of northern North America left uncovered by ice and when a land bridge across the Bering Straits allowed human migration from Asia.

Archaeologists say early inhabitants of the region survived by hunting caribou, woolly mammoths, bison and horses. Another archaeological dig near Old Crow unearthed a spring caribou hunting site 1,200 years old. Modern-day Gwich'in carry out this same tradition with snowmobiles and rifles.

Kyikavichik's and Kassi's hunting trip began in Old Crow, which lies north of the Arctic Circle and is accessible only by air or by river, on snowmobile or canoe. This time, the hunting party's departure was slowed by weather that was freakishly warm for late April -- sunny and in the 40s. "This must be global warming," Kyikavichik said, frowning. "It's too hot, dangerous." (During this period, record highs were reported throughout the region, with Anchorage, Alaska, hitting 70 degrees.)