On the Run in Siberia

A Leap in Time

187 a leap in time Early in the morning I am woken by a peculiar dream. I see myself lying on a reindeer skin, dreaming that I am lying on a reindeer skin, dreaming that I am lying on a reindeer skin, dreaming. I sit up in my sleeping bag and know right away that I am still not awake. Then I jump from one dreamed reality to the next and to the next again in the space of a few seconds, but none of them offers anything but the same repetition. When I finally come to myself and look around, I am lying on a reindeer skin in a large hide-covered tent, surrounded by a couple of Danish journalists and some local Chukchi. The wind whistles through numerous holes in the hide cover, which is stretched out over a large, dome-shaped skeleton of wooden poles. The cold, gloomy draft of air breathes through the whole of the oval space. I can no longer sleep, not so much because of the wind and my tent mates’ snoring, but more because of my troublesome dream about being trapped in an endless series of reflections. I put my clothes on and fumble my way through the dark tent and out onto the treeless tundra. Here I attempt to light a cigarette, but the wind is too strong. Instead I sit on one of the many jettisoned sleds and gaze at the grass-covered expanses, the stony ground, and the meandering line of the river out in the boundless nothingness. It is fall of 2008, and I am on the Chukchi Peninsula. Over the past couple months, a crew of Danish journalists has been following the world famous Danish polar explorer Knud Rasmussen’s old sled route around the whole of the Arctic world.1 However, they them- 188 . a leap in time selves have traveled not by dogsled but by plane and helicopter. I joined the expedition in Chukotka, which is the northeastern outpost of Siberia, where Rasmussen was stopped in 1924 and sent back after crossing the whole of the Inuits’ territory from Greenland to the Pacific Ocean. For thousands of years, before any Europeans had turned up, Inuits and Chukchi traveled by dogsled across the ice-covered sea— or paddled in kayaks in ice-free periods—to exchange merchandise with each other.2 Their ancient trade was blocked as a result of the conflict between the Communist East and the capitalist West during the Cold War. These circumstances also severed the Inuits’ ties of kinship, which formerly stretched across the Bering Strait. Only now can Inuits again visit their tribespeople on the opposite shore.3 The most striking difference between the indigenous peoples on either side of the Bering Strait is that the Alaskan populations have abandoned their traditional way of life and language during the seventy years’ separation. At least this is what the journalists tell me. They can hardly believe their eyes when, after a long drive with a tracked vehicle across the icy desert, they arrive at a Chukchi camp where people still live in hide-covered tents, dress in fur garments, and speak Chukchi. As for myself, I am less impressed. I have traveled through so many wildernesses on countless tracked vehicles and even more sleds and I have seen so many indigenous hunters and reindeer herders who live in the same way that I find none of it unusual anymore. Is it because, after the many years in Siberia, I have finally become so familiar with the indigenous people and their way of life that I can no longer get excited about—and perhaps do not even notice— what makes them seem different and exotic? After all, people are only strange in the eyes of strangers. For those who live with the indigenous people year in and year out, they become friends and acquaintances , or even family, and in time their lives and beliefs become just as natural as the changing seasons. . . . Maybe this is how it is for me. Long after my return home to Denmark , Siberia still lives in me. Every time I am at the family’s vacation house in Sweden, I go out to a special place in the forest and sacrifice a leap in time . 189 cigarettes and vodka to the bear I shot. On Grandma Akulina’s advice , I have placed its skull in a...