Immanjarok and the Shaman’s Ghost

February 17, 2008

Photo of author pulling sled on the frozen surface of the Arctic Ocean

North Alaska in February; a profoundly disinterested sky dashed with sharp shards of still light. An auroral streak-milkwhite and arching from horizon to horizon-is just fading and now gone. Released from a spell, I walk again. Behind me the lowest cuticle of the eastern horizon brims a dull orange.

Snow speaks under my boots. At one footfall there is a deep cough as snow granules are crushed together; with the next there is the tight squeak of a screw boring into bone-dry wood. At other times I will hear the stretching of metal, the muffled crump of artillery in a war movie, the crack of a baseball bat.

The air is frigid and dry, supercooled, as though it derives from a canister of liquid oxygen. It has no taste.
My supply sled trundles along behind me, nosing steeply up over humps of snow and then crashing down the other side. I’m only fifteen miles from Barrow. Ahead the sky isn’t lightening and the indigo void swallows everything. I can only tell the horizon because the stars stop abruptly in a line.

A glimpse of light. I stop walking and squint. Dense fog curls out from around my frostbite mask. I wave it aside and hold my breath. Again? Yes-a blink. A spark. A twinkle of light, very distant. Although sweat is already beginning to freeze inside my clothes, a chill wriggles down my spine and my scalp prickles.

Back in Barrow, before starting the trek, I’d asked a native hunter what (other than polar bears) I should worry about out on the tundra.
“Immanjarok,” he’d said, “the Little People. They trick you. It’s dark most of the day this time of year, right? So they trick you with lights. You see a light out there and then you follow it out on the sea ice and then the ice breaks and you drown.”
“Huh,”
“Yep. Immanjarok. Little people that trick you. If you see a light out there, don’t follow it.”

The light is gone. I scrape my goggles. The spark was dead ahead, on my compass bearing for Barrow. I have to go that way. Immanjarok. Huh.
Trekking on the surface of the frozen ocean I hear groans and crashing sounds as though I’m walking on the roof of a cathedral and large pieces are falling away underfoot. I wonder when I myself will finally break through.

Later-as I wrestle the sled up off the sea ice and onto a frozen beach-another wink, on the edge of my vision. I hop up from my work and look, left and right. My clothes are loud, iced and crackling. There! And it blinks out. Am I losing my mind? Immanjarok. I’m out of danger, now, on the tundra, right? Not necessarily. There are holes out here, not as deep as crevasses, but snowed-over holes that can swallow a snowmobile and could gulp me and the sled easily. I look left and right.

The light is gone. It was just a sprite, a mote; a speck of gold sweeping past you in a clear stream. There are polar bears out here as well. Seven miles to town, right? You’re not safe till you’re inside a building. Nobody locks their doors because everyone wants a place to duck into when a bear comes. I’ve obsessed about polar bears for months. One Indian hunter told me they stalk people, maybe for days. The stress has been enormous, and every day, out shooting video or recording sound, I’ve anticipated the heavy tackle from behind. Now I wonder about Immanjarok. What am I being led towards? A hole in the snow? A winter-hungry, desperate bear?

Miles later the snowscape has lightened with dawn. Ahead is a telephone pole, a toothpick standing on the horizon. Then a yellow gleam near it and then that’s gone, only the short dark line sticks up from the snow.

Later I see a snowplow clearing the road to town. I step onto the hard-packed ice road and wave at the snowplow as it comes up behind me. I drag down my frostbite mask as an Indian man leans over, opens the passenger’s side door, and tells me to hop in. I lash the sled to the back and we trundle off. He’s the first person I’ve seen in ten days.
“What you been doin out there on the land?” he asks.
“Just looking around, I guess. I wanted to feel the cold.”
He nods and says “You been talking to the creator.”
“Guess so.”
Later he says “You know when I first saw you I thought you was a ghost.”
“How’s that?”
“You was a mile out but I saw you and I thought you was the ghost of an old shaman who used to live out East there.”
“Huh. A shaman dragging a sled? Did they drag sleds?”
“I dunno,” he says, “but there was an old one who lived out East there. Shamans were kinda crazy guys, they had to live alone. People was scared of ‘em. So he lived out there except when he came into town for supplies or to heal someone or something. I thought you was his ghost and that you were leading a polar bear. I couldn’t see too well, you know, so I thought the sled was a polar bear following you.”
“I’m glad it wasn’t.”
“Yeah,” he laughs, “me too, I guess.”
“Hey,” I ask, “Have you been out here long? Did you see lights out here before sunup?”
“What, you mean Little People?”
“Well,”
“There’s all kinda lights out here on the land,” he says, lighting a cigarette. “Nobody know what they are. Maybe you saw my headlights.”
“No, it was just one light and it didn’t move.”
“Yeah,” he says, smiling, “I seen that out here sometimes.”

The Indian man shifts gears and turns for town.

About the author: Cameron M. Smith is a writer in Portland, Oregon. He has traveled from the Arctic to the equator. His writing has appeared in South American Explorer, Archaeology, Playboy, Spaceflight and many other magazines, and in the anthologies, They Lived to Tell the Tale: True Stories of Adventure from the Legendary Explorers Club and The Best Travel Writing 2008. His blog (amphibianadventures.blogspot.com) covers his recent activities.