48 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020
my eyes caught something on the
ground: the ravaged carcass of a musk
ox. There was qiviut everywhere, in un-
ruly clumps. After an hour stuffing my
bag, I tried to separate the ox’s skull
from the spine but found that there was
“still too much flesh and maggots on it
to be comfortable.” I used a rock to break
off the horns and kept those instead.
The hunters who came to the island
for musk oxen appalled me, but I under-
stood the impulse to borrow what I could
from the natural world. When I was
eleven, living in Washington, D.C., I
took a taxidermy class at the Smithsonian,
led by Dr. Charles Handley, a bat expert
who served as the head mammal cura-
tor. A kind man, he arranged for me to
work as a summer volunteer in the base-
ment of the museum, stuffing pangolins
and flying foxes alongside the scientists.
That fall, my father moved the fam-
ily to Indonesia, and Handley encour-
aged me to collect specimens for the
Smithsonian. I began to fantasize about
expeditions into the jungle. The year in
the States had been traumatizing, with
the assassinations of Martin Luther
King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. Their
deaths had been deeply felt in my fam-
ily, and I could not understand the kill-
ers’ hatred. The United States seemed
like a violent and evil place, and I was
happy to leave, especially to explore one
of the last great tropical wildernesses.
Our stay lasted only six months; a
bout of dysentery nearly killed me and
my younger sister, and we were evacu-
ated to Singapore. Then my brother fell
ill, too, and my father quit his post and
moved us back to Washington. When
our flight stopped for a layover in Cal-
ifornia, I ran away. I set off from the
Bay Area with the intention of hikinginto the Sierras and living off the land,
as Uncle Warren had once done. State
troopers stopped me at the edge of
national-park land, sternly informed me
that I was the subject of an all-points
bulletin, and drove me back to my fu-
rious parents.
I was deeply disappointed to be back
in the United States. Not only was it an
unhappy and divided society but its nat-
ural environment was being rapidly sub-
dued. In the U.S., with its freeways and
subdivisions and shopping centers, na-
ture had been made frivolous, turned
into roadside scenery. My parents took
me to talks about the end of the wild,
the end of the indigenous peoples and
their ways of life. I felt that if I didn’t
hurry up I would miss knowing the nat-
ural world altogether.
I was fascinated by men like Geron-
imo, Richard Francis Burton, and Shack-
leton. They were dead, but there was al-
ways Warren, who was said to be able
to catch trout with his fingers, “like an
Indian.” Being “like an Indian,” to my
childhood understanding, meant cast-
ing off the demeaning absurdities of
American life, finding ways to encoun-
ter nature without fear.
At camp that night, I thought about
Tom’s uncle, a trusted elder, living on
his own in nature—not unlike Uncle
Warren, in a way. For weeks, he stayed
on the beach in complete isolation, net-
ting salmon from the ocean and drying
them in the sun on wooden racks. I wor-
ried that he might resent my intrusion,
so I mulled how to present myself. What
could I say to demonstrate respect?T
he next morning, energized by my
haul of qiviut, I followed the river,
skirting its bends to save time. An hour
into the hike, I paused to scan the hori-
zon and noticed a shape against the
green tundra in the distance. Through
my binoculars. I could see that it was
an animal, on its side, its belly distended,
two legs in the air. It wasn’t a musk ox,
but it was big.
I took off my backpack, propped up
my rifle as a signpost, and walked closer.
The animal was a reindeer doe. She was
in labor, and she looked terrified, legs
swaying, eyes bloodshot and grotesquely
wide, ears twitching. I retreated to about
fifty feet away and sat for half an hour,
trying to soothe her. I told her that“Later, son—right now Daddy is busy sowing disinformation.”