Living in the Bones
May 02, 2024 at 11:16PMAmid a moose hunt on the Yukon’s Ch’izhìn Njik river, Bathsheba Demuth considers the natural beauty of the land and animals, alongside the toll humans have exacted on the earth in the Anthropocene. Will this epoch, the first marked indelibly by human influence, be the end of the earth’s story?
ALL MOOSE begin as stone.
The taiga’s pulse of winter freeze and summer thaw grinds rock into dust, as do the rasp-tongues of glaciers high in some mountains. Streams suspend this silt in their waters and feed it into rivers; rivers flood, coating their shores in a slick of young soil. Willows push out sprouts, their roots drawing nutrients from the mud into new leaves rich in phosphorus and calcium. From rock-born elements, willows condense the raw stuff of bone and flesh. You might not think so by looking at it, but the green gauze of foliage is dense with protein. Moose gorge, stripping catkins as the snows melt, using their flexible noses and lips to select new leaves. A bull grows forty or fifty pounds of new bone in his antlers each summer; a yearling will add nearly the same to lengthen her femurs and widening scapulae. A grown cow sets no antlers but must nourish the bones and tissues of her fetal calves.
I read, shortly before coming to the Arctic, that the air over northern Canada had warmed 2.3 degrees Celsius in the years since Stanley was born. The same atmospheric warmth provoking the charismatic dissolution of Greenland or Antarctic glaciers is at work on the flatlands of Ch’izhìn Njik. The permafrost, which runs through this earth like a dispersed spine, is liquifying. But knowing causes is not the same as making sense. The earth is ceasing to cohere: how to make that coherent? The way I know to do this is with the pattern of a story. But what we see on the river has no end. We are telling from a middle or a beginning, with no view of where it will resolve.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/05/02/living-in-the-bones/
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