Arctic Circle: Birth and Rebirth in the Land of the Caribou

Every year without fail in early April, caribou from the Yukon and Alaska make a journey to a small corner of Alaska to give birth to their young. The journey an ordeal of mountains and blizzards, of ravenous wolves, scant forage, and river crossings with ice chunks the size of pickup trucks is the longest migration of any land animal on earth. Despite it all, the females find their way to the calving grounds on the coast of the Beaufort Sea, deliver their calves in June, and then begin their long journey home.

This is their story, told by an author who travels to the Arctic in his seventh decade to witness a few moments of this endless turning circle of birth and rebirth and to answer the question, What is the true nature of the North? Is it the good and generous land of which the Inuit sing, or, in the words of the Arctic explorer, Elisha Kent Kane, Horrible! Horrible! a dwelling place of darkness and death?

Personal and profound, chock-full of adventure, literary references, natural history, and ecological concerns, Mr. Reid has written a memoir that is moving and poignant, evocative
and cautionary. Arctic Circle is a book, in short, that no reader concerned with the fate of the Far North could resist.