ON ONE OF his evening walks across the Arctic tundra, Barry Lopez found himself bowing. Not an extravagant thing, but from the waist, with his hands still in his pockets. He bowed to the horned lark he encountered on her ground nest, who returned his gaze with a stare as resolute as iron. He bowed to the golden plovers he surprised crying from their eggs, and to the eggs themselves, touched with a glow as soft and pure as in the paintings of Vermeer. When he came to a shred of musk-ox wool caught in the lavender flowers of saxifrage, he bowed to that, too.
By doing so, he surprised himself a little. But he kept the habit going. It was a gesture of respect for fecundity and beauty, for the mystery of these lives in a place that seemed barren. It was prompted, too, by the astonishing serenity and clarity of the Arctic light, a breathing light, pure as first-water diamonds. He felt wonder, and not only for small, close things. When he raised his field glasses he could see the true differentiated colours of the tundra, the bloom of glittering spray around caribou as they shook themselves, the several shades of grey in an iceberg, dove-grey and pearl and smoke, and the cobalt gleam of distant melt-ponds that held at their centres a core of aquamarine ice, like the heart of winter.
He went to the Arctic—as to the Antarctic,...
