Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Bashiba Dymouth is an environmental historian, specializing in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic.

In this essay, Bashiba accompanies a Gwichan friend on a moose hunt north of the Arctic Circle,

and witnesses patterns of contrasting stories manifested in the landscape, one of conquest and inattention,

seen in collapsing riverbanks and melting permafrost, and another of restraint held in the

quiet knowing of the moose. At first there is just the too dark flicker, a void of color in the green. Along the river,

muscular willows pack the shore to the waterline. Alder's root in the drier soil of the cut

bank, holding their branches nearly in parallel with walls of

earth that rise 10, 15, sometimes 50 feet over the water.

Where the banks end, the land plateaus, rolling out under the sky with a cover of black spruce,

their trunks narrow from the effort of growing in permafrost.

The peak of Arctic summer in the North Yukon is just beginning

to tilt toward autumn yellow and red. As we move upstream, the foliage blurs into an anticipated

order of branches and leaves. The dark break in this pattern sends a startle down the optic nerve.

The shadow moves again, before its formlessness resolves, a moose. Headlifting,

he steps clear of the willows, keeping one round eye always on us. Like other deer species,

he probably does not see in color, but rather in shape and movement. We are, in his gaze,

a space of dark, solid motion where there should be

river. Stanley cuts the engine and reaches for the rifle. We have come to hunt on the Chisian

Nijik, a river that you will call the eagle if you believe the stories told on the two-dimensional

...