Excerpt: Being Caribou

In 2003, Canadian couple Karsten Heuer and Leanne Allison spent five months following the migration of the Porcupine Caribou Herd through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

After a 1,500-kilometer trek across the tundra, they returned to tell politicians and activists what they saw. Click here to visit the couple's Web site.

Read an excerpt from "Being Caribou," by Karsten Heuer below.

It was somewhere on the tattered edge of tree line that we saw our first wolf, and when we did, the ribbons of caribou that had been continually surging past us for two days suddenly ceased. "What's going on?" I wondered aloud as more than a dozen lines of caribou funneled into a V-shaped gully then stopped. They'd been coming for more than an hour, trickling over the ridge we'd camped atop the night before, a net of dark, moving lines covering the white slope we'd descended all morning. But now, backing up above the bottleneck of rock at the bottom of the gully was a reservoir of caribou thousands deep. Leanne set up the tripod and began to film.

"There!" she said, looking through the zoomed-in viewfinder. "To the right."

Using binoculars, I focused on the dot she was looking at: an animal half the size of all the others and 100 yards below the lead caribou, crouched motionless behind some rocks.

"Any others?" I asked, searching the adjoining gullies and hollows for pack mates.

Leanne shook her head.

The seconds ticked past while the wolf remained in position and the mountainside of caribou grew quiet. Even from where we sat watching, more than a mile away, the tension was palpable. Palms sweating and hearts pounding, we waited, stamping warm blood into our feet. After five long minutes, the standoff finally broke. It took just a fraction of a second for the closest caribou to react to the lunging wolf, and when they did, the entire mountain of animals moved in unison, erupting in a wave of flashing, spinning bodies like a turning, choreographed dance.

What had been a stagnant mass of animals suddenly became a single, fleeing organism, and it veered left then right as it surged upward, pulsing silver and black like a school of darting fish. I lowered the binoculars and stood mesmerized by the pattern, watching as 2,000 animals turned back on themselves, rushing for the ridge in a dark cloud of retreat. Columns of snow rose from within the stampeding herd, spreading like a veil behind them, and into it charged a dark smudge that began to close in.

When the wolf was within a few strides of the nearest animals, the blanket of caribou began to unravel from the bottom up. Chasing first one animal and then another, the wolf tried to isolate its victim, but what had started as a straightforward ambush turned into chaos. With the fabric of the herd shredding in all directions, the wolf followed first one thread and then another, hooking left, right, then left again, losing ground with each switch. Indecision led to hesitation, and after a couple of last, desperate lunges, its all-out gallop faltered to a trot.

Leanne and I stood in silence, frozen with awe, as the last of the caribou disappeared over the ridge.

"Can you believe that just happened?" I finally whispered.

But she was too busy to answer, still recording as the wolf lay panting and gulping mouthfuls of snow.

April 15: Upper reaches of Waters River, Yukon. In six short days, we have skied and stumbled our way into a river of life, leaving behind the frenetic months of fund-raising, food preparation and research that typified the winter in Calgary. No traffic jams, no scheduled phone calls, no long nights of letter writing while the brakes of buses and trucks screech outside. In a week, we have traded people for caribou, high- rises for soaring mountains, and a gridlock of streets for winding valleys.

There's still pressure, but it's different, surging through instead of gathering within us. No schedules, no timetables, no flashing lights and signs saying which way to go next. It is wolves that tell us when to stop and caribou that urge us forward, pushing and pulling us across this landscape from behind and ahead.