Animals: Naboktoolik to Kittigazuit

Andy Bahr is a tough, squat, nut-brown little Laplander who is reputed to know more about reindeer than any man in the world. He was past 60 and settled down to running a Seattle apartment house when Carl Joys Lomen, “Alaskan Reindeer King,” went to him one day in 1929 with a problem. On the barren rim of the Arctic Ocean in northernmost Canada some thousands of Eskimos were in a sorry fix. Banging away with white men’s guns, they had killed off or scared away most of the caribou and walrus on which they lived. Unless they could find some new source of food and clothing they were doomed to slow extinction. To their worried guardian, the Canadian Government, reindeer seemed the best solution. But there were no reindeer within a thousand trackless miles of the hungry Eskimos.

Carl Lomen, who had a quarter million reindeer in Alaska, solved their problem by contracting to deliver 3,000 head to the Kittigazuit Peninsula, just east of the Mackenzie Delta. Andy Bahr solved Carl Lomen’s problem by agreeing to lead the drive. On Dec. 16, 1929 after months of preparation and a reconnoitering trip by airplane, he set out from Naboktoolik, small Eskimo village in western Alaska, with three Laplanders, six Eskimos, a medical attendant, a geographer, 39 sleds piled with supplies and 3,000 reindeer. His goal lay 1,200 miles away over desolate mountains and across barren snow fields. Said he: “We’ll be getting there in about 18 months.”

But Andy Bahr’s drive was to be measured in years, not months. Storm after storm beat down. Time & again wolves picked off a few of the herd, stampeded the rest. They came to rivers frozen glare-smooth and the drivers had to notch the ice with picks to give the animals a footing. Fawning seasons forced long halts. In summer black, torturing clouds of flies and mosquitoes swept across the tundra. In winter men and beasts wandered off in blizzards to be gone for days or weeks. For months at a time the whole troupe was lost to the world. In the spring of 1932 a Canadian searching party found half the herd about 300 miles from its goal. The drivers had not seen Andy Bahr and the other half for four months.

Year later the reunited herd reached the Mackenzie Valley, settled down for a winter freeze before making the 60-mile dash across the Delta. Last January the final drive began. Half way across a blizzard scattered the herd, sent them scampering back. When they had been rounded up again neither men nor reindeer felt like making another try.

Last week what was left of the herd— about 2,100 head—still waited beside the Delta. Gone were the three Lapps, the six Eskimos, the medical attendant, the geographer who had set out from Naboktoolik six years before. But tough old Andy Bahr was there with new drivers, ready any day to begin the end of the greatest man-managed animal trek in history.