Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures With Wolf-Birds (31 page)

The wolf had been indispensable to the ravens in the north, and farther north the polar bear took its place and still does. To the south were great cats. With their sharp, shearing teeth, the predators brought down and cut open animals that were diseased, weakened, or dead. The raven’s long, strong bill could pick meat from the hide and from leftover bones. The mammalian hunters might have tried to take all the meat they could, but unless they were starving or the hunting was poor, they would have left piles of entrails that the birds who tagged along or monitored most hunts would have eaten. Human hunters may even have deliberately left meat, because the presence of ravens could have been seen as an omen for a successful hunt, as they were omens for a successful raid to the Vikings.

If the hunting was good and the hunting bands were small, then hunters likely ate only part of a mammoth before going on to kill the next. Ravens and wolves would have feasted. Since ravens to this day associate with hunting bands of wolves, I suspect that in the north they might still follow people with dogs or associate with dogs near people. Why should a raven care whether it is following a pack of wolves or a pack of fur-clad human hunters? Raven would preferably follow the best. Ravens are the quintessential northern bird. It is no accident that they are also the bird most closely associated with humans in the culture and folklore of northern people, whether Norse, Inuit, or any of a large number of others.

Odin, the ruler of the Norse gods, also called “Hrafna-gwd” or Raven god, kept two wolves at his side and two ravens on his shoulders. The wolves and the ravens accompanied him on the hunt and into battle. Thus, ravens were for thousands of years associated with wolves, and with mind, men, and the gods. From the wolf-raven associations came the northern name “Wolfram,” from Wolf-rhaben or “wolf-raven,” once a great warrior’s name.

I could not follow a Viking raid to trace origins of the old myths. But I could jump on a plane and in several hours be in the Arctic to
see the raven where it has not been persecuted in recent history due to recent ignorance, and where it does not shy away from humans by hiding in the wilderness. I could be where, I hoped, it might instead still seek humans out and associate with them. I hoped to see at least traces of a long relationship, having heard vague rumors that Eskimo hunters “talk to” ravens, and vice versa.

Note:
A parallel example to the one I am proposing here is that of the African greater honeyguide,
Indicator indicator
, as discussed (pp. 164-169) in Donald Griffin’s book
Animal Minds
. The honeyguide is a small bird that feeds on bee grubs, wax, and honey. It communicates with the ratel or honey-badger,
Mellivora capensis
, guiding it to bee nests that the badger then opens. They then share the food. In some areas of Africa, the bird has transferred its honeyguiding behavior from ratels to humans, entering a cooperative relationship with them.

S
ITTING WITH A CUP OF COFFEE
after arriving early at the Montreal Dorval airport, I waited to catch a flight north to Iqaluit, a community of about four thousand people on Baffin Island at the edge of Frobisher Bay, just west of Greenland and north of Hudson Bay.

The Boeing 727-200 that I’d be flying on had only six seats of passenger space. Most of the plane was crammed with cargo. Not a good sign. I had imagined a life of hunters, not people eating imported bread and potatoes. Subsistence these days does not come off the tundra. If ravens live off people, they’d be living off the same lifeline via the airline, not from what hunters provide from the land.

As we popped through the low clouds for a brief stop at Kuujjuaq, I was stunned by the sight. I saw pure white in all directions. The landscape was studded with black spruce trees, willow thickets, and
larch. Soon after continuing on to Iqaluit, I saw no more trees. For an hour, I saw only blinding white. Then the outlines of the tiny settlement appeared. Iqaluit at last. Stepping out into minus 21 degrees Fahrenheit in a light snowstorm, I immediately saw ravens flying in twos and threes against the white sky that blended with sea and land. Ravens stood out, crisp and clear. I could recognize their calls as raven in an instant, but they spoke a different dialect than the one I was used to. From then on, I heard sounds or nuances of calls almost every day that I had never heard before.

After Lyn Peplinski, the director of the Iqaluit Research Center, had shown me my berth for the next few days at the Center, I immediately left to walk along what I presumed to be the Frobisher Bay shoreline. A man was shoveling snow out of a boat. Jokingly, I asked him if he was going out for a ride. “Not till early July,” he told me. “But the shoveling is something to do on a Sunday afternoon.” We exchanged names. Kalingu Sataa, a carver of stone figurines, soon talked about seal hunting, ravens, and stone-carving. “Do they sell fur parkas here?” I asked, because I had been told they are now almost impossible to buy.

“My parents, who live in the house over there, have a caribou parka,” he said. “My mother made it years ago. She might sell it.”

We walked to the house just across the street, and I met a smiling elderly couple, Kalingu’s parents, and Naudlak, his sister. Kalingu’s father, Akaka, had been born in an igloo, and lived in Iqaluit most of his life, as had Kalingu himself, who was perhaps forty years old. Arctic explorers Freuchen and Salomsen had written that Eskimos believe ravens show them the presence of bears and caribou by their flight, and conversely, that ravens follow hunting parties, as they follow polar bear. I asked if ravens ever show hunters where animals are, so that the animals would be killed and the ravens could feed. Like most elderly Inuit and young preschool children, Akaka spoke no English, so Kalingu translated: “Yes, by dipping their wings.” That was what I had long wondered about and had come to see.

Anyone who has watched ravens will have noticed them flying along, pulling in one wing, then righting themselves again. Do Inuit really
believe
that means the raven is talking to them? Kalingu was
ambivalent, saying it was “just something that you learn when you grow up Inuit.” Then he was quiet. Eventually, he said that these days people don’t watch or notice ravens very much anymore. They watched them much more closely in the old days, when the
tuktu
, the caribou, were more scarce. In those days, they had no guns and they could get to hunt the
tuktu
only after long dog-sled travel. For 4,500 years in this land, hunting was the ultimate skill. Hunting required keen senses, guile, knowledge, strength, and endurance. When stalking caribou, hunters often took off all their clothes so that they would not rustle as they crept to within spearing distance. I presumed that was in the summer, because the March subzero temperatures were not conducive even to wearing traditional western clothing. I was freezing.

Returning to the topic of parkas, Akaka asked if I wanted to see his. His wife brought it from cold storage outside. It was a beautiful piece she had made out of light-colored caribou fur for the back and front, and dark-colored fur for the shoulders. Its hood was trimmed with wolf fur. He said he would not likely ever wear it again, and he sold it to me for $150 Canadian. That parka would make a big difference, perhaps
the
difference, just a few days later in Igloolik on an island in the Foxe Basin, the third and last settlement I would visit. I would accompany Charlie Uttak and several of his friends there on a several-day-long caribou hunt and Arctic char ice fishing expedition some 100 kilometers from the village. It would be an unforgettable ride at 50 kilometers an hour in minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit, swerving around frozen-in blocks of sea ice, hanging on to sealskin thongs on a sledge, the
qamutiik
(or
komatik
), pulled by a Yamaha snowmobile.

The ravens were all over Iqaluit. They were perched on power poles, on roofs and on back porches of residences, and on commercial buildings with people coming and going. I watched about twenty of them loitering at a day-care center where people were walking in and out with their kids. Nobody paid them any attention. Ravens were in practically every backyard where dogs were tied up. Dozens of ravens congregated on the ice with groups of Eskimo dogs. Almost anywhere, at any one moment, I could see ravens perched or flying about. Most were vocal. On many street corners, I saw lone ravens sitting on power
poles, absorbed in elaborate monologues as if exercising their varied repertoires. At the same time, they expressed a lively variety of body postures. It looked like play, because there was usually no visible audience of other ravens to whom they could have been “talking.” It would be stretching to speak of raven “calls,” because the birds were stringing together series of very different sounds into often unique sequences. It was easy to imagine that the birds were talking to each other or to themselves.

As the visiting “raven man,” I was invited for an interview at the CBC station with Gail Whitesides as host. She introduced the interview with a song about the northern raven. After the interview, the station switchboard lit up with people offering anecdotes and raven call imitations. By far the greatest number of anecdotes I heard were about ravens’ play. The ravens use power lines as their toys, hanging upside down, swinging up, and somersaulting over. They sometimes hang from them with their bills. Sliding down roofs is another pastime. One woman told me of watching a group of ravens take turns rolling down her roof. As they got to the bottom edge of the roof, they either walked or flew back up to roll down again.

The next most talked-about aspect of the town’s clowns, the ravens, was their feeding antics. “Ravens eat anything,” which makes them disgusting to some people. A large congregation of them surrounding the sled dogs on the ice left not one dog scat in sight. If they cannot intercept enough food at the front end of the dog, they get it eventually at the other end. Feeding at the dog’s front is preferred, but it is more dangerous, although ravens can reduce the risk by working in teams of two or three. Without carnivores, the ravens would here starve, even though out on the open land, I was told, ravens occasionally chase down and kill ptarmigan. Overall, the carnivores, especially humans, provide them with most of their food, and beyond the town on the tundra, ravens were scarce.

People who had been to many different towns in the north all agreed that ravens from the western towns, such as Inuvik and Yellowknife, were “totally different” from those of Iqaluit. The Iqaluit ravens still have the decorum to keep out of your way. In Inuvik
and Yellowknife, they are “totally fearless,” “cheeky,” and “they will scream at you if you get between them and a garbage can.” “They’ve even landed on top of my dog!” someone told me. Some people hope to scare them off by setting up plastic great horned owls, but one man who had tried this told me, “They act as if they are thinking: ‘Is this a fake owl intended to scare us off? Good, it’s a great perch to sit on, so there!’”

Hall Beach, the next hamlet I visited, is a mostly Inuit community of about five hundred people, where two DEW (Distant Early Warning) radar towers dominate the landscape. They were built in the 1950s to alert us to Russian nuclear-tipped missiles coming over the North Pole, but now have other uses. I’d seen an active raven nest on the DEW tower at Barrow, Alaska. Mike Wesno, who teaches at the Hall Beach school, picked me up at the tiny airport next to the towers with his snowmobile. It was dusk, and minus 30 degrees. Would I like to go for a spin? Indeed. After dropping off my gear at his house, we took a frigid evening ride out to the towers. At least a hundred ravens were perched all over the high steel girders, and the birds were not huddling together, as I expected at these low temperatures and howling wind. This site was a nocturnal communal roost, not a nesting site. Suitable sites for communal roosting must be few and far between on the tundra, and DEW towers suffice for both.

The next morning, I awoke to the Eskimo dogs’ mournful howls all around the village. As in Iqaluit, the dogs were tied without shelter below the houses on the sea ice. Curled into balls with their backs to the wind, the dogs looked at me with one eye over their furry tails tucked around them as I walked by. They were all well attended by retinues of ravens. I noticed one raven, whom I called “Scraggly Tail,” loitering around a particular dog pack for several days in a row.

The few ravens that foraged at the edge of this town were much shyer than those at Iqaluit. Nor did they here subsist on garbage; the dozens of plastic garbage bags along the street were not ripped open as they lay there for at least three days. Most of the ravens were getting their food elsewhere. I presumed it was beyond the ice flow edge, where tidal currents maintain open water and where there is drifting,
or pack, ice. It is the seal and walrus hunting ground of the polar bears and Inuit.

Jona, one of Mike’s Inuit students, graciously offered to take me on his dogsled out across the half mile of solid sea ice up to that flow edge. The dogs plodded across the blinding white snow as we left the frozen shoreline at the edge of the village. Jumbles of almost translucent turquoise ice-blocks were frozen in place, and we wound our way around them until we came to the edge. The water flowed by, silent and black, like oil. It was eerie.

The water was covered with tiny loose ice crystals. A seal popped up, looked at me, and quickly submerged. In the distance, I saw faint white ghostlike outlines of drifting ice floes. This was the world of polar bears, walrus hunters, and ravens. I realized why nobody had seemed anxious to take a newcomer out in an unsteady boat with the lethal combination of minus 30 degree temperatures, dark drifting water, and fog.

We loitered awhile, examining an igloo and the bloody trail where a seal had been dragged on the snow. After returning to the village, I felt a strange tug to
walk
back. This time out at the edge, I saw two ravens ahead of me perched on an ice block. One flew off, veered toward me, and made a wide loop back toward the flow edge where I had just seen the seal. It then rejoined its companion, again perching on the ice block it had just left. If I had been a hunter, I might have interpreted the raven’s behavior as a sign beckoning me to go in the direction of the flow edge. I would have then approached this seal. But had I gone in another direction, I may also have found another one.

Both ravens lifted off from their perch when I came near them. The sun was already low on the horizon, and in liquid, sliding wing strokes they swung toward the village where the dogs lay curled on the ice, then disappeared as black dots on the horizon toward the DEW tower.

In the afternoon, I gave another presentation on Maine ravens at the school. Afterward, Mike and his wife Ina and about a dozen of the high school students and I went to the dump, where we found six ravens. There was not much raven food beyond one grotesquely
burned dog sticking out of the snow and one
iqumaq
with some meat still remaining inside.
Iqumaqs
are “sausages” about four feet long and one foot thick that are made by sewing walrus hide together to enclose raw walrus meat and fat. They are buried in the ground on permafrost to be stored for many months and to ferment until they acquire the proper flavor.

Near 3:00
P.M.
, we saw many ravens returning to the DEW tower from the distant ice pack. When the seal and walrus hunting is good, the bears eat only the fat, leaving the rest of the carcass. The ravens and perhaps Artic foxes finish the rest. An old hunter, Noah Piugaattuq, whom I met in the village, explained to me that scavenging ravens are noisy, and polar bears will become used to their calls. Polar bears sometimes feed on dead marine animals that ravens find first, and the bears are attracted by the raven’s calls. When hearing ravens’ cries at food, bears without a kill to feed from often become distracted or attracted. Inuit hunters therefore imitate raven calls as a technique to get closer to a bear.

I wished I could have stayed longer at that sea hunter’s village, but I had to catch my flight to Igloolik. While waiting for the plane in the afternoon, when the sun was still 10 degrees above the horizon, I watched the ravens sky-dance over the DEW towers. They had come back to their roost at least four hours before sundown. They played in twos and threes, repeating violent chasing flights that took them high into the sky. They dove and tumbled down over and over again. The walrus hunters had probably been successful; these ravens were well fed.

No raven had wing-tipped to me so far to indicate potential prey, as Akaka Sataa at Iqaluit had talked about. Akaka had also told me that an incantation was required by the hunter to elicit wing-tipping, and the magic words to address the raven were not given away to just anyone. In the old days, the incantation was bought from the shaman, because the magic words were very valuable. Abe Okpik, an elderly man of Iqaluit who was no longer a hunter, and whose uncle was named none other than Tulugaq (raven), later had told me that when out on the land hunting caribou, or out on the ice hunting polar bear,
a hunter seeing a raven fly over used to look up to it and call its name loudly three times: “Tulugaq, tulugaq, tulugaq.” Having the bird’s attention, he would then yell to it, telling it to tumble out of the sky in the direction of the prey. If the raven gave its musical gong-like call three times in succession, then the hunters went in that direction and killed it. “They believed in the raven strongly, and followed it,” said Okpik. “And after they killed the caribou or the polar bear, they always left the raven the choicest tidbits of meat as a reward.” It seemed absurd to me that a hunter could signal to a bird, and the bird would in turn provide information asked of it. Yet I wanted to keep an open mind to the possibility of communication.