Reindeer look almost darling. They’re short — the tops of their heads don’t come up past five feet — and they’re as nervous as rabbits. Both male and female reindeer have antlers; if you approach them from a distance, you might think they would hold their ground. Getting closer, though, you find a frightened, tender animal, which backs away from you and toward the rest of its herd.
They first flew into American popular culture in 1822, when poet Clement Clarke Moore published “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” more commonly known as “’Twas The Night Before Christmas.” The poem describes “eight tiny rein-deer” hitched to a miniature sleigh, whose white-bearded driver whistles and calls:
“Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now Prancer and Vixen! On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donner and Blitzen!”
Kiryak Adukanov has 2,000 reindeer. He whistles to them, too. That’s where the similarity ends.
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Kiryak Adukanov in 2013.
Aiva Lāce for BuzzFeed News
Kiryak is one of the most experienced reindeer herders on the Kamchatka Peninsula, a region in the Russian Far East renowned for its wild natural beauty. It’s July, and we are sitting in alpine tundra, high and flat land that’s dark with moss and berries. In winter, it turns to crystal dunes of snow. Santa hardly visits this part of the world — Russians customarily exchange gifts around a tree on New Year’s Day, while only a religious minority observes Christmas in Orthodox churches in January.
We sit quietly while the reindeer nibble on wet grass and look at us from the white edges of their glossy black eyes. Leaning against a mound of dirt, Kiryak waits for them to settle. He’s wearing wading boots and a paisley-printed scarf around his head. A walking stick is propped up next to him. A rifle is across his lap. Kiryak’s reindeer aren’t examples of the fictional subspecies named R.t. saintnicolas magicalus by Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game, nor will they ever appear for families to watch on ReindeerCam. Instead, they are semi-domesticated creatures tended for slaughter. They have sweet, skittish temperaments and, eventually, savory meat. Any magic around them is commonplace: the gorgeousness of their grazing grounds, their deep history, and the way they make their keepers wonder about what is coming next.
Native herders slaughter up to 120,000 animals each year to satisfy luxury tastes across nine nations.
Kiryak, his wife, Lyuba, and their two sons grew up in a long tradition of reindeer husbandry established by their people, the Evens, a 20,000-strong indigenous group in Siberia. The Evens are one of the smallest of 20 indigenous communities — including Scandinavia’s Sami and Canada’s Inuit — that base their economies on reindeer. Native herders across nine nations slaughter up to 120,000 animals each year to satisfy luxury tastes. Evens’ reindeer meat goes to connoisseurs in western Russia; the venison, harvested from animals that graze across Kamchatka’s pristine earth, sells for nearly $10 a pound. Deer antlers go to China, where they’re sliced or powdered for medicinal purposes.
Herding is not just a job to the Adukanov family. It’s a way of life. Just as Kiryak was taught to herd by his parents, he plans to pass his skills to his sons. It’s an extraordinary inheritance — but one that Kiryak’s 9-year-old grandson, Chegga, and 6-year-old granddaughter, Nadia, may eventually choose not to claim. Yegor, one of Kiryak and Lyuba’s children, works in the herd for now but has trouble picturing that continuing. “There’s no reason anymore for young people to do this job,” Yegor said. “They can make more money more easily somewhere else.”
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Aiva, Andrei, two other herders, and Yegor, July 2014.
Aiva Lāce for BuzzFeed News
It’s exhausting work, after all. Everyone here, whether Even or Slavic, reindeer herder or outside observer, agrees on that. No weekends or holidays. Wages, paid by a private herding company, have shrunk since the Soviet era. And while previous generations of native Siberians were isolated by geography from news of the rest of the world, today’s use cell phones and computers to leap out of the tundra in an instant. When you can google pages of job listings, better pay, and bigger cities, it’s not hard to imagine leaving Kamchatka for something different. The peninsula’s overall population has been shrinking for two decades.
Kiryak will keep going as long as he can, but at 62 years old, he’s nearing the life expectancy for a Russian man. Many of today’s Even herders are in their fifties. If they don’t pass their knowledge on to a new generation, their practice could die along with them. Indigenous herders around the world have faced the same disruptions as the Adukanovs: encroaching private interests, an aging population, and financial incentives for young people to leave. For many native groups, ending their involvement in this industry means parting with a foundation of their culture.
Against the flow of Evens outward, a project spearheaded by Aiva Lāce, a 27-year-old Latvian art restorer turned researcher, attempts to preserve tradition with technology. Lāce moved to Kamchatka in 2013 hoping to experience a new approach to preserving a culture’s physical artifacts. Then she learned about the herders’ trails. Because Even herders are nomadic, their lives leave few material traces. Their architecture is impermanent, their written tradition relatively new (today’s Even alphabet was introduced by the Soviet government in 1937). But their trails through the tundra are obvious records in their annals. To Lāce, these paths are works of art. For the past year, she’s been tracking Evens’ reindeer in order to transform knowledge of the area that was traditionally passed down orally into data points that can be saved and shared.
Lāce, who has spent five weeks with Kiryak’s herd, has a long list of motivations for her project. “The short version,” she said, “is because it’s very interesting.”
The Kamchatka peninsula juts into the Pacific Ocean. It’s walled off from the rest of Russia by mountains, which rise into some of the most active volcanic belts on the planet. Though it’s roughly the size of California, Kamchatka has just about 320,000 residents; that’s like leaving the state with only the population of Riverside, then pouring in some lava for good measure.
Over 4,000 miles from Moscow, Kamchatka has long been home to indigenous groups. Its forbidding terrain likely kept it from being colonized by Westerners until the 1700s. Once the Russian government started encouraging settlers, however, the region’s cultural makeup radically shifted. Now nearly 4 out of every 5 inhabitants are ethnically Russian, while native northern people — Evens as well as Koryaks, Chukchi, Itelmens, and Aleuts — make up only 4 of every 100. With families spread out across Siberia, Evens themselves made up a slim 0.58% of Kamchatka’s population in the 2010 census.
Most of the region’s residents, especially its Slavic ones, still live in the coastal capital city, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, where Russia’s colonial ships first arrived. That urban density leaves central Kamchatka open. This is where the herders range.
Under the Soviet Union, Russian reindeer herders were employees of a regional sovkhoz, a state farm, where the government owned their animals and paid out regulated wages. These days, a private company has replaced the sovkhoz model on Kamchatka. That organization pays Kiryak’s salary, delivers supplies by helicopter, and sells the slaughtered animals at the end of the year. The company didn’t respond to interview requests for this article, but Lāce and her supervisor said that the 50 herders in its employ earn about $300 per month, less the cost of groceries, medicine, and any deer lost along their way.
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The town of Esso, March 2012.
Julia Phillips for BuzzFeed News
While the Adukanovs keep a house in the 1,900-person town of Esso, Kiryak devotes almost all of his time to tending his herd across the enormous protected territory of Bystrinsky Nature Park. Part of the “Volcanoes of Kamchatka” UNESCO World Heritage Site, the park was founded in 1995 with the stipulation that herders should be able to continue grazing reindeer over the same ground their great-grandparents did. Over the park's 5,000 square miles, some of the only signs of humans are the herders’ trails: brown lines of earth stamped flat by generations of Even feet to form a giant, unchanging loop.
In the heart of Kamchatka’s ferocious landscape, these trails outline Kiryak’s daily routine. He pairs up with another man on a 12-hour shift with the animals, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. or 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. The reindeer graze until they’ve eaten their fill, lie down for an hour and a half, then stand to eat again. Once the herd picks one bit of tundra clean, Kiryak and his partner hike with it along the trails to the next fresh patch of earth.
While the reindeer move across Bystrinsky meal by meal, the other members of the herding camp pack their things onto horses and ride five or so miles to the next destination. The group always has a couple other men who are off shift, and Lyuba when her health permits. It also comprises up to a dozen assorted relatives, including children during holidays from school in Esso. This summer, Chegga and Nadia helped out. They were both so small that they had to be tied onto their horses’ saddles with wool scarves.
The Evens’ trails are crucial for taking them the safest way to their necessities: a fast-moving stream for fetching water, a clump of brush for tying animals, a cluster of whittled tent poles for erecting the yurt where they cook their food. Knowing these resources are near allows a group to travel light as it moves camp each day. Horse blankets double as people’s sleeping mats. One tent serves four herders, since they sleep in shifts. Three canvas walls and three plastic tarps are all that’s needed to cover the yurt and waterproof it. Supplies are pared down to the essentials: a knife, a cutting board, a couple teakettles, flour, sugar, salt.
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Aiva Lāce for BuzzFeed News
At each new campsite, Lyuba hurries to get water boiling while the men tie up the horses. She has short hair, full cheeks, and a permanent curve in her back from a life bent over a hearth. All her dishes revolve around reindeer meat: reindeer in rice for breakfast, in noodles for lunch, in broth for dinner, and dried in strips for snacking throughout the day. When, after a week or two, the meat runs out, Kiryak kills one of their animals and Lyuba butchers it.
These deaths are a necessity. As they are fattening the reindeer for a year-end slaughter outside Esso and the company-managed sale that follows, the herders themselves have to eat. The killing is done by knife or gun. Kiryak and the other men then strip the deer carcass, peeling the skin off its torso like an unzipped vest. Once the furs soften, a herder can sleep on the body pelt and use the flattened face as a seat. The leg skins — warm, flexible — are the most valuable; they’ll be saved for the herding company to offer to fur traders. Chegga doesn’t have a knife of his own yet, so he holds the deer in place while his grandfather cuts. They break the carcass down in pieces — head, legs, ribs — and carry those back to camp.
"We’ll work in the reindeer herd as long as we live."
Then Lyuba’s bloody work begins. She prepares the separate cuts of meat, sets some to boil, and wraps the rest in plastic sacks to keep bugs off. Lyuba’s practiced at it, but dissecting a 300-pound animal without waste still takes long hours. She spends this time talking to herself. In her sixties, she’s going deaf, and she now speaks quietly and constantly with the expectation that no one else can hear. While other camp members came to her kitchen area for a bit of liver or a cup of tea one day during my two-week visit, she leaned over the fresh meat. “Oh, my back. What am I going to do? The pain.” She turned a leg bone over and cracked her blade down. “This knife is too dull. It’s not usable. It’s too difficult.” Gripping the bone, she split it in half to expose the marrow. She handed it to Chegga, her little herder. Once he took the treat, she tucked her chin and got back to her work. Inside the yurt smelled like iron, wet cloth, and burnt fur.
It wasn’t what she’d intended for herself. Though she grew up in a tiny herding community in northern Kamchatka, she moved to the Esso area as a young woman to teach kindergarten. In the early 1980s, she met Kiryak. He used to walk miles just to visit her. That changed her plans.
After decades, the constant upheaval of herding life is exhausting. Camp members sleep on mats and furs on the ground. Some of the land they stay on is high enough to have continuous permafrost. Despite the fire in the center of the yurt, nights are cold. Lyuba’s sick. Her bones hurt. She wears a back brace and has to keep one swollen foot elevated all the time. When the winter comes and the herders stay up to two months at each place, Lyuba goes back to their house in Esso. She doesn’t expect Kiryak will ever leave this labor. “We’ll work in the reindeer herd as long as we live,” she said.
Over the meat, she raised her voice for Chegga. “Are you going to be a herder like your grandfather?” she asked. He was ignoring her to play a game with his sister. “You will,” she told him anyway. “And fix your sick grandmother. Go to university and become a doctor, too.”
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Aiva Lāce for BuzzFeed News
To adapt to changing technology, the Evens have long been revising their routines. Valentin Solodikov, a semiretired herder who worked in the tundra for 25 years, remembers 50 or so years ago when his relatives rode reindeer to move camp. Santa’s preferred mode of transport wasn’t so efficient — herders now ride horses, which can carry bigger loads for greater distances. In the 1980s, Solodikov and his co-workers started using snowmobiles instead of skis for winter travel. Not so long ago, the reindeer-herding company installed a radio transceiver in its office. Herding camp members now carry a field radio and antenna in their packs, so they can transmit status updates to the office twice a day.
Herding on the peninsula has continued to adjust this way, incrementally, for convenience’s sake. Lāce’s project marks a more radical shift. Lāce’s first visit to the herd “activated a magnet” in her, she told me this fall. When her first volunteer year in Kamchatka ended in 2013, she applied to a German environmental foundation for funding to stay on. In 2014, Lāce started bringing paper maps to Kiryak’s camp and asking him to pinpoint their paths. But the established maps, which reduced the park territory to miniature scale, didn’t correspond to what Lāce and the herders saw on the ground. So in April 2015, after getting more money from the foundation and support from Kamchatka’s Association of Specially Protected Nature Territories, she bought three-ounce GPS trackers for five of the six Even herding teams working in the park. Solodikov helped her distribute the trackers to the teams. On trips between Esso and the park territory, he brings along fresh batteries to keep the devices on.
From the park office in Esso, Lāce monitors the herders’ movements as they switch camps. She can pull them up on her computer screen at the park deputy director’s request — here’s herd two, here’s herd six. A string of points shows where they’ve traveled over the past months. Her high forehead, long jaw, and pale skin give her the solemn look of a girl in an antique photograph. Here’s herd four, she says. Kiryak’s.
Lāce is no longer a Bystrinsky volunteer, but she’s not quite an employee either; she comes into the park office each day, works on a park computer, and responds to the park deputy director as though he’s her boss, but receives no salary. Still, she finds her project too compelling to stop. According to Lāce, there are so many reasons to map the herders’ trails that it’s surprising no one’s done it before. First, it records indigenous knowledge of the territory. It’s also important for herders’ safety, so if there’s an accident, their parent company can send a helicopter to retrieve them. It’s necessary for the park to maintain its protected status by showing that reindeer grazing grounds are indeed safe on its territory. And it makes it easier for scientists and tourists to follow established routes on their trips.
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A supply run, July 2014.
Aiva Lāce for BuzzFeed News
