A third migration—and the last.
The gate
Of Beringia was long since drowned, the vast
And grassy bridge submerged beneath the weight
Of melted glaciers and the risen sea—
But the Arctic passage still lay open
To those who had the technology
And the will: the frozen ocean's token
Was not a barrier but a road.
From western Alaska's coast, a thousand years
Before the present day, the Thule strode
Across the top of the world, the frontiers
Of ice and wind and the perpetual night
Of Arctic winter holding no more fear
For them than the savanna's noonday light
Held for the peoples of the warmer sphere—
For the Thule had mastered the impossible.
The kayak—the skin-and-bone invention
That made the Arctic sea accessible,
The single-seated craft whose tension
Of walrus-hide stretched over driftwood frame
Created the most intimate of boats:
The hunter wore it like a second claim
Upon the water, sealed at the throat
With a drawstring skirt that made the man
And the vessel one—and when the wave
Rolled the kayak over, the Thule plan
Was not to drown but to behave
As the water wished, and roll back up—
The Eskimo roll, the first and finest
Marriage of the body to the cup
Of the killing sea, the divinest
Trust between the human and the hull.
The umiak—the open boat, the freight-
Carrier of the women and the full
Cargo of the camp: the household's weight
Of tents and tools and children and the dried
And cached provisions of the hunting season—
The umiak could carry what the tide
Of migration needed, and the reason
Was its breadth: where the kayak was the sword,
The umiak was the shield, the broad
And stable platform on which the horde
Of family and possession rode.
The dog sled—the winter road revealed
By the partnership of Thule and dog,
The traces fanning out across the field
Of sea-ice in the freezing fog,
The driver standing on the runners, the whip
Cracking over the team of huskies bred
For nothing but the pull—the relationship
Of human and canine, the thread
Of ten thousand years of domestication
Brought to its most essential test:
Without the dog, no Arctic habitation
Was possible—the dog was the expressed
And living engine of the Thule world.
And the igloo—the snow-house, the proof
That genius is the ordinary unfurled
To its logical extreme: the roof
And walls of the very thing that kills you—
The snow itself, the frozen enemy
Turned shelter—the compacted igloo fills you
With the warmth of body heat, the remedy
Of insulation in the substance of the cold.
Forty blocks of wind-packed snow, cut clean
And spiraled inward to a dome—behold
The architecture of the unforeseen:
A house that rises in an hour, that melts
In spring, that leaves no scar upon the land,
That shelters life where nothing else compels
Survival—the igloo is the hand
Of human ingenuity laid flat
Upon the ice and saying: even here.
Even in the coldest habitat
The planet offers, even in the sheer
And killing darkness, I will make a home.
And the whale—the bowhead, the leviathan
Of the Arctic seas, whose body was the tome
Of Thule prosperity: a single cetacean
Could feed a village for a season's length,
Its blubber rendered into oil for the lamp
That burned through the polar night, the strength
Of bone that framed the house when damp
And driftwood failed, the baleen's springy plate
That served as every tool the Thule lacked
In metal—the whale was the estate
Upon which the Arctic civilization's pact
With the frozen ocean was secured.
The Thule hunted from the umiak's deck—
Six hunters in a skin boat, the cured
And braided sinew line, the wreck
Of the toggling harpoon's ancient art:
The head that turns beneath the blubber's mass
And holds, the float of sealskin that the smart
And patient hunter pays out on the glass
Of Arctic water while the whale dives deep
And tires—and surfaces—and tires again—
Until the great beast, robbed of sleep
And blood, succumbs, and the domain
Of one whale's body feeds the waiting shore.
And as they swept—from Alaska east,
The Thule people opened door by door
The Arctic's frozen corridor, the feast
Of new waters and new hunting grounds:
The Beaufort Sea, the Archipelago's maze
Of islands, Hudson Bay's enormous bounds,
The Labrador coast's fog and the haze
Of Greenland's western fjords—in four
Brief centuries they crossed the continent's crown,
Three thousand miles of ice from shore to shore,
And everywhere they settled, the Dorset went down.
The Dorset—the people who were there before,
Whose smaller, quieter, lonelier tradition
Had held the Arctic for a thousand years or more—
The Dorset had no dog, and the condition
Of their isolation was their poverty
Of technology: no bow, no dog, no large
And open boat—the Dorset's mastery
Was intimate and small, the narrow barge
Of the individual hunter's skill,
And when the Thule came with dogs and bows
And the organized and collective will
Of the whale-hunt's crew, the Dorset froze
Into the margins, into the memory
Of the Inuit who call them Tunit—
The gentle giants of the promontory,
The old ones who were strong but could not fit
The new world's pace—and vanished from the ice.
Honor the Thule—the last great migration,
The final wave that paid the price
Of the Arctic's impossible invitation
And accepted it—who built the kayak's shell,
Who trained the dog, who spiraled snow to dome,
Who chased the whale through the ocean's swell
And made the frozen darkness home—
The proof that there is no environment
On this planet's face so hostile, so extreme,
That the human mind, with its intent
And its refusal to concede the dream
Of habitation, cannot find a way
To live there—not to merely survive
But to prosper, to hunt, to sing, to pray,
To raise the children and to keep alive
The stories of the ancestors who first
Looked out upon the ice and did not turn
Away, but said: this too can be traversed,
This too is ours—and we will learn.