"She started up the 'slope of the mountain' in front of me. The Arctic wind moved her fur around like a wheat field.  She raised her head and looked at me a few yards away.  I told her she was beautiful...she already knew"

     It was a young walrus, a bull that swam with it's herd in the Bering Sea, along the coast of Siberia and back around the Chukchi Sea.  Hauling out on drift ice and sleeping along the others in a winter's half sun.  It drifted close and silent as it neared the ice flow...the wind was 19 knots and perfect for an approach by an ancient Inuit hunter.  Silence followed the harpoon as it struck...the herd awakened to panic and an insuring rush to the edge of the ice flow to dive deep into the sea, except the young bull, he wavered and was held fast by the hunter and then his demise.  The end began an interesting rebirth in their village.  The tusk of the young bull walrus was carved into a doll amulet, and given to a child.  The doll was given a name along with a place in a special pouch of seal skin and beads., and after many generations, as it then became a family member, it had become lost to an unknown family tragedy, the house was lost and buried by others in the village...1200 years later the sea surged and washed away the ancient house and it's possessions emptied on the sand...discovered by a "Koyuk" man as the tide drained away following a surge from a storm." 

"Cold rain in July, mountain breezes bring in fog and low clouds...ghostly and moving through the ground level fireweed.  The Muskox, rises from his bed in the tundra and moves back towards the foothills, where the herd rests just below tree line, taking grasses and leaving behind 'last year's' wool hanging in the willows."

"Left Nome, Alaska during a most beautiful day.  Even the Arctic Tern has not yet finished their stay on the beaches.  The winds slowed and the many days of rain had begun to dry.  I left certain treasures as yet collected and other treasure that I easily can carry."