Rough-legged hawks take over an abandoned Alaska airstrip floodlight - - nature often prevails over such Arctic encroachments. (A lemming dinner awaits the hawk chick on the right.) As I exposed this photograph, clinging to the top rung of a rusted ladder 20 feet off the ground, the adult hawks shrieked and swooped on me from above. The chicks peeped hungrily at me, so I left as quickly as I came.

Muskoxen guarding a calf on Flaxman Island. The muskox preceded the Paleo-Eskimos across the Bering land bridge and survived extremes that killed off all other North American oxen, such as the woodland and shrub oxen. Muskoxen are actually members of the goat family. Although mostly passive, a bull muskox in rut would have had no trouble charging up the bluff--with its cloven goat hooves--and goring me for interupting their peace.

Caribou migrate across the continentís roof like the bison that once filled the Great Plains. Here in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (where oil developers clamor for the unknown quantity of fossil fuel lying beneath the coastal plain), the Porcupine Caribou herd--nearly 180,000 strong--aggregates and collectively flees south before winter.

At Shingle Point, after a beluga whale was stripped of muktuk, Inuit confront life and death at a much younger age than most North Americans. But here in their culture, the whale is a sacred animal of renewal, whom they share their lives (and souls) with in a treasured reciprocity. In such a society, vegetarians and animal rights advocates do not exist, if only because the people believe that they already champion animal rights, and that they could not exist without the animals who give up their lives to sustain others' lives.

The soulful David Amagainik (who taught me a lot about maps) contemplating bones in an ancient stone house, Elu Inlet, mid-July. I've never met a more graceful person--utterly lacking in ego, yet the man carried himself with true regality. Without words or gestures, David seemed to be able to communicate all that was important.