NC

By Gleb Raygorodetsky
Photographs by Evgenia Arbugaeva
Clad in a camouflage jacket, the mosquito
netting unzipped from his
hood, Yuri Khudi squats by the fire
inside his large chum. Outside, seven
more of the teepee-like tents cluster
in a semicircle. Swells of Siberian tundra roll
north toward the Arctic Ocean; a reindeer herd
grazes on a distant crest. It’s mid-July, and the
group of Nenets herders that Yuri leads are about
halfway through an annual trek that takes them
400 miles north on the Yamal Peninsula to the
Arctic coast—in normal years, that is.
“It’s been three years since we have made it all
the way to our summer pastures by the Kara Sea,”
Yuri says as his wife, Katya, pours him a steaming
mug of tea. “Our reindeer were too weak for
the long journey.” In the winter of 2013-14, an
unusual warm spell brought rain to southern
Yamal; the deep freeze that followed encased
most of the winter pastures in thick ice. The reindeer,
used to digging through snow to find lichen,
their main winter food, couldn’t dig through the
ice. In this herd and others, tens of thousands
starved. Now, in the summer of 2016, the survivors
are still recovering.
The canvas entrance of the chum flaps open,
and a reindeer, antlers down, bursts inside. It
pauses in front of the fire, shakes vigorously, and
flops down to chew its cud meditatively.
“This young cow lost her mom, so we raised
her ourselves inside the chum,” explains Yuri,
taking a cautious sip of tea. “She doesn’t like
mosquitoes. Hopefully next year she’ll have a calf
of her own. We’re down to about 3,000 reindeer
now, half of our usual herd.”
The Nenets have undertaken this annual migration
for centuries, and at 800 miles roundtrip,
it’s one of the longest in the world. Yuri’s
The Puikos, a Nenets
herding family, enjoy a
inside their chum, or tent.
In summer the Nenets
catch in lakes and rivers
along their trek up and
down the Yamal Peninsula.
In winter they eat more
reindeer meat.
group, called Brigade 4, is a relic of a Soviet collective—under
Soviet rule the Nenets endured
decades of forced collectivization and religious
persecution. They survived centuries of Russian
rule before that. Through it all, they’ve managed
to sustain their language, their animist worldview,
and their nomadic traditions.
“The Nenets are one of the most resilient indigenous
groups in the Arctic,” says Bruce Forbes
of the University of Lapland in Finland, a geographer
who has studied them for decades.
Today, however, that resilience is being tested
in new ways. Climate scientists say the kind of
“rain on snow” event that diminished the herds
three years ago will become more frequent and intense
in the Arctic as the climate warms. As I talk
to Yuri, the region is suffering another record-hot
summer; the thermometer has already hit 94°F. It
hasn’t rained for weeks, and it’s hard for reindeer
to pull the loaded sleighs across the dry tundra.
114 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC • OCTOBER 2017