Flight of the Reindeer: The True Story of Santa Claus and His Christmas Mission
The bird disappeared into the shadows of the horizon Or was it a bird Was it even there Had I seen any thing at all I didn’t dwell on what I’d seen But neither was I able to remove the memory from my mind S N 1984 I WAS IN MY GROWN-UP JOB as a nature writer researching an article on Rangifer tarandus the reindeer family I had already learned whatever I could from books Reindeer are Arctic and sub-Arctic deer the North American species of which is called caribou They are characterized by the possession of antlers by both sexes they have large lateral hooves and hairy muzzles and a curious type of antler with the brow-tine directed down wards The compact dense coat is usually clove-brown in color above and white below with a white tail-patch I had read all that kind of thing And now I wanted to go north to see for myself to watch the ani mal in its native habitat to observe its behavior So I made my way to a small Inuit village on my way home i saw something very strange T SEEMS NOTHING SHORT OF MIRACULOUS but miracles do happen and that this miracle serves mankind at Christmas seems to lend it all some sense Reindeer do fly Many have seen it happen and you yourself may one day I have seen it happen once I think I may have seen it happen twice I grew up in New England in a time when our country side filled with snow each winter when the golds and reds of autumn always always yielded to an ice-blue frosted windows tableau The snow would be ankle deep then knee deep then hip deep ever deeper deeper deeper It doesn’t snow like that anymore not most years I loved the winter and I loved snow I was an all-after noon sledder as a kid schuss ing the hillsides in back of our old white-clapboard house until each evening’s sun had set Then I would trudge home with my trailing sled heading for the yellow warmth of the distant kitchen In the finger-aching cold of five o’clock I felt most alive My mind would race and I found myself wondering about all sorts of things Are all snowflakes truly unalike Is there even more snow farther north What’s it like at the North Pole Towards December I would wonder as any kid won ders Do reindeer really fly One evening making my way slowly home after an exhausting session of sledding I saw something undeniably unusual It was awfully cold and the northern lights were at play Suddenly silhouetted against those greens and blues I saw something a very large bird I thought fly ing very fast not too too far away As I peered intently I could have sworn I saw legs dangling from the underbelly in far northern Canada called Kuujjuaq Ever since it has lived in my mind as a place of great import a village of wisdom grace and even magic S S T A Y E D W I T H A N I N U I T F A M I L Y very gentle quiet and good-humored folks 1 I learned a great deal about reindeer by watching several species in their natu ral surroundings at Ungava Bay and I became aware of Inuit customs too I learned about Inuit traditions and Inuit religion Some of the people’s beliefs were steeped in a northern mythology Much of it seemed pretty strange to 1 We often call these natives of northern Canada Eskimos but they call themselves Inuit which means simply the people 12 12
me legends of singing fish whales with horns like unicorns ghost bears Most of the traditions had to do with animals The Inuit were not at all insulted when I appeared sur prised by some of their stories and superstitions They would often laugh quietly among themselves Yes my hostess once said I have never seen the ghost bear and I never expect to see him either But the Inuit were ada mant on the subject of reindeer They believed beyond any doubt that reindeer could fly The fervor with which my hosts talked of flying rein deer made an impression on me This wasn’t a singing fish this was something else They just wouldn’t hear a discour aging word on the subject The reindeer fly my host once told me It is simple It is like the moon Like fire It is hard to understand but it just is Their passion on this single and singular assertion led me to wonder On a cold gray day in November my host and hostess took me down to the village’s museum which was actu ally just a shack way out at the end of a winding lonely little-used dirt road I brought my camera and I have since congratulated myself for remembering it Inside the shack there were all these old I guess you’d call them scrapbooks They lay scattered and uncatalogued on shelves of unpainted wood The room was lit only by our lantern it was not a particularly pleasant place that museum But there were those books that my friends insisted I see I took several of them to the dusty wood table in the center of the museum’s single room I sat down on a rickety wooden chair The pages of the first book were made of leather Between these heavy leaves were etchings on birch bark scraps of very old writings knife drawings all kinds of things The illustrations were of animals that were supposed to be walking talking and yes flying Many of these ani mals were reindeer These weren’t exactly funny sketches they certainly weren’t intended to be but if they had been you might have said they had been drawn by an ancient Inuit Dr Seuss I asked my host if the illustrations existed simply because Inuit believed reindeer had a sacred aspect Maybe the ancient artists were S ONDER YES but certainly not believe I kept expressing doubt mildly and polite ly but emphatically They would just shake their heads and say Of course it is true Some times they would smile but they weren’t laughing with me on this one They were laughing at me The Inuit seem to regard the one we call Santa Claus not only as a miracle worker but also as a friend and neighbor 13 13
likening reindeer to angels My host insisted this was not the case They fly was all he said There was one item I’d call it a drawing It was an etching on leather done with the point of a knife It obvious ly showed a deer pulling a sled seen in front of a full moon I asked the Inuit if this was supposed to be Santa Claus Who is Sand in Claws my hostess asked I soon discov ered that Inuit ideas of who delivers the gifts on December 25 are quite different from ours The man we know as Saint Nicholas does indeed have a place among the Inuit but he is no red-suited ho-ho-ho ball of fun to them He’s an Inuit saint a man of great seriousness and firm intent They claim to know him as an ancestor He came this way one thousand years ago said my host He lived to the east some five hundred miles But only for a very short time And then he went north He left behind many small deer As we left the museum my Inuit friends could tell that I still didn’t accept the idea of flying deer I was trying to be agreeable but they could tell S H E Y D I S C U S S E D their next step at a commu nity council to which I was not invited Then just before I was to leave Kuujjuaq I was escorted by a party of Inuit from the village to a riverbank not far from town The north-flowing Caniapiscau River enters Ungava Bay just above Kuujjuaq and that’s where we went to the mouth of the Caniapiscau where the big stream flat tens and grows wide The Inuit elders the tribal leaders obviously had decided that this field trip was an acceptable thing to do And so while I sensed some slight hesitancy about unveiling whatever secret was going to be unveiled our little party made its way through the trees to the river In the north a reindeer rep resents a noble spirit as well as a source of food and even a means of transport When we arrived at the Caniapiscau we pushed aside the brush and there before us as if made to order was a mammoth deer He weighed I would say about six or per haps even seven hundred pounds He was very big for a reindeer He was one of the extensive St George’s herd the herd I had traveled to Kuujjuaq to learn about He was browsing at the edge of the forest As I say you come across reindeer everywhere up there the St George’s herd comprises 300,000 deer spread all over northeastern Canada So it was nothing unusual to find this big fellow munching lichen by the river I had been watching him and his brethren deer move alone or in groups for nearly a month and I felt I had come to understand them I felt in my arrogance that I knew just about every thing there was to know about them And then And then it happened Suddenly this enor mous buck stopped turned took a short run and after a soft grunt and a forceful liftoff he soared across the water It was astonishing two hundred yards in a single bound He was in the air forever it seemed He was flying I gasped then shivered I was too stunned to snap even one picture The Inuit said that this was nothing compared with what the little ones could do The little ones that live farther north one man said Those are the real fliers S V E R S I N C E M Y E X P E R I E N C E in the far north I have spent whatever free time I have had investigating this flying-deer phenomenon and how it applies to Santa Claus’s annual Mission I had gone to Kuujjuaq to investigate the biology and physi 14 14
