Flight of the Reindeer Read online

  Flight of the Reindeer, 15th Anniversary Edition

  The True Story of Santa Claus and His Christmas Mission

  Robert Sullivan

  Copyright © 2010 by ROBERT SULLIVAN Book design by J PORTER

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles.

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  SKYHORSE PUBLISHING,

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  9781616081515

  Printed in China

  Dedication

  TO MY PARENTS,

  who first taught me about Santa Claus—R.S.

  TO LILLIE AND SARAH,

  who make it easy to believe—G.W.

  TO MARGIT,

  who showed me that reindeer really do fly—J. P.

  Acknowledgments

  DEEPEST THANKS AND BEST CHRISTMAS WISHES are extended to my partners, artist Glenn Wolff and designer J Porter. Merry Christmases go, as well, to the experts and Helpers who shared their knowledge regarding The Mission. Special appreciation is extended to literary agent Jeannie Hanson, and to our talented and sympathetic editor at Macmillan, John Michel. The author, illustrator and designer would like to acknowledge the patience, support and inspiration afforded by their wives while they were off chasing reindeer. They would also like to recognize assistance graciously given by the following individuals and institutions: Doreen Means; Adrienne Aurichio; Dave Ziarnowski; Hank Dempsey; The Potter Park Zoo in Lansing, Michigan; the Michigan State University Museum; Baker Library and the Institute of Arctic Studies at Dartmouth College; The Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence, Rhode Island; Joe Mehling; Jim Brandenburg; Doug Mindell; Tim Hanrahan; Erick Ingraham; Tonia Means; Craig Neff; the Grose family; Doug Meyerhoff, Paul Traudt, Mary Anne Spiezio and Quad Graphics.

  Final thanks to Dan Okrent and all colleagues at LIFE magazine for allowing the time to pursue this project.—R.S.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  INTRODUCTION - The Reindeer by the River

  PART ONE - The Echo of Hooves

  PART TWO - The North Pole Today

  PART THREE - The Miracle of Reindeer Flight

  PART FOUR - Eight Tiny Reindeer (Plus One)

  AFTERWORD - Like Down on a Thistle, Evermore

  The End

  Credits

  INTRODUCTION

  The Reindeer by the River

  It Was a Wondrous Thing

  AS A BOY, I knew with certainty that reindeer could fly. As I grew older, I had my doubts. But now—matured and sound of mind—I know again that reindeer can fly. Surely, it is strange. It is strange and marvelous and altogether phenomenal that these deer can spring from the earth and, snouts high and antlers back, mount to the sky.

  IT SEEMS NOTHING SHORT OF MIRACULOUS, but miracles do happen, and that this miracle serves mankind at Christmas seems to lend it all some sense. Reindeer do fly. Many have seen it happen, and you yourself may one day.

  I have seen it happen—once. I think I may have seen it happen twice.

  I grew up in New England in a time when our countryside filled with snow each winter, when the golds and reds of autumn always, always yielded to an ice-blue, frosted-windows tableau. The snow would be ankle deep, then knee deep, then hip deep, ever deeper, deeper, deeper. It doesn’t snow like that anymore, not most years.

  I loved the winter, and I loved snow. I was an all-afternoon sledder as a kid, schussing the hillsides in back of our old white-clapboard house until each evening’s sun had set. Then I would trudge home with my trailing sled, heading for the yellow warmth of the distant kitchen. In the finger-aching cold of five o’clock, I felt most alive. My mind would race, and I found myself wondering about all sorts of things.

  Are all snowflakes truly unalike? Is there even more snow farther north? What’s it like at the North Pole?

  Towards December I would wonder as any kid wonders : Do reindeer really fly?

  One evening, making my way slowly home after an exhausting session of sledding, I saw something undeniably unusual. It was awfully cold, and the northern lights were at play. Suddenly, silhouetted against those greens and blues, I saw something. . . a very large bird, I thought, flying very fast—not too, too far away. As I peered intently, I could have sworn I saw legs dangling from the underbelly. The bird disappeared into the shadows of the horizon.

  On my way home I saw something very strange.

  Or was it a bird? Was it even there? Had I seen anything at all?

  I didn’t dwell on what I’d seen. But neither was I able to remove the memory from my mind.

  IN 1984 I WAS, IN MY GROWN-UP JOB as a nature writer, researching an article on Rangifer tarandus—the reindeer family. I had already learned whatever I could from books—“Reindeer are Arctic and sub-Arctic deer, the North American species of which is called caribou. They are characterized by the possession of antlers by both sexes, they have large lateral hooves and hairy muzzles, and a curious type of antler with the brow-tine directed downwards. The compact, dense coat is usually clove-brown in color above and white below, with a white tail-patch. . .”—I had read all that kind of thing. And now I wanted to go north to see for myself, to watch the animal in its native habitat, to observe its behavior.

  So I made my way to a small Inuit village in far northern Canada called Kuujjuaq. Ever since, it has lived in my mind as a place of great import, a village of wisdom, grace and even magic.

  I STAYED WITH AN INUIT FAMILY, very gentle, quiet and good-humored folks.1 I learned a great deal about reindeer by watching several species in their natural surroundings at Un ava Bay, and I became aware of Inuit customs, too. I learned about Inuit traditions and Inuit religion. Some of the people’s beliefs were steeped in a northern mythology. Much of it seemed pretty strange to me—legends of singing fish, whales with horns like unicorns, ghost bears. Most of the traditions had to do with animals.

  The Inuit were not at all insulted when I appeared surprised by some of their stories and superstitions. They would often laugh quietly among themselves. “Yes,” my hostess once said. “I have never seen the ghost bear, and I never expect to see him either!” But the Inuit were adamant on the subject of reindeer. They believed, beyond any doubt, that reindeer could fly.

  The fervor with which my hosts talked of flying reindeer made an impression on me. This wasn’t a singing fish, this was something else. They just wouldn’t hear a discouraging word on the subject. “The reindeer fly,” my host once told me. “It is simple. It is like the moon. Like fire. It is hard to understand, but it just is.”

  Their passion on this single and singular assertion led me to wonder.

  WONDER, YES, but certainly not believe. I kept expressing doubt, mildly and politely, but emphatically. They would just shake their heads and say, “Of course it is true.” Sometimes they would smile, but they weren’t laughing with me on this one. They were laughing at me.

  The Inuit seem to regard the one we call “Santa Claus” not only as a miracle work
er but also as a friend and neighbor.

  On a cold, gray day in November, my host and hostess took me down to the village’s “museum,” which was actually just a shack, way out at the end of a winding, lonely, little-used dirt road. I brought my camera, and I have since congratulated myself for remembering it.

  Inside the shack there were all these old—I guess you’d call them scrapbooks. They lay scattered and uncatalo ued on shelves of unpainted wood. The room was lit only by our lantern; it was not a particularly pleasant place, that museum. But there were those books that my friends insisted I see. I took several of them to the dusty wood table in the center of the museum’s single room. I sat down on a rickety wooden chair.

  The pages of the first book were made of leather. Between these heavy leaves were etchings on birch bark, scraps of very old writings, knife drawin s—all kinds of things. The illustrations were of animals that were supposed to be walking, talking and, yes, flying. Many of these animals were reindeer. These weren’t exactly funny sketches—they certainly weren’t intended to be—but if they had been, you might have said they had been drawn by an ancient, Inuit Dr. Seuss.

  I asked my host if the illustrations existed simply because Inuit believed reindeer had a sacred aspect. Maybe the ancient artists were likening reindeer to angels? My host insisted this was not the case. “They fly,” was all he said.

  There was one item. . . I’d call it a drawing. It was an etching on leather, done with the point of a knife. It obviously showed a deer pulling a sled, seen in front of a full moon. I asked the Inuit if this was supposed to be Santa Claus. “Who is Sand in Claws?” my hostess asked. I soon discovered that Inuit ideas of who delivers the gifts on December 25th are quite different from ours. The man we know as Saint Nicholas does indeed have a place among the Inuit, but he is no red-suited, ho-ho-ho ball of fun to them. He’s an Inuit saint, a man of great seriousness and firm intent. They claim to know him as an ancestor. “He came this way one thousand years ago,” said my host. “He lived to the east, some five hundred miles. But only for a very short time. And then he went north. He left behind many small deer.”

  In the north, a reindeer represents a noble spirit as well as a source of food and even a means of transport.

  As we left the museum, my Inuit friends could tell that I still didn’t accept the idea of flying deer. I was trying to be agreeable, but they could tell.

  THEY DISCUSSED their next step at a community council to which I was not invited. Then, just before I was to leave Kuujjuaq, I was escorted by a party of Inuit from the village to a riverbank not far from town. The north-flowin Caniapiscau River enters Un ava Bay just above Kuujjuaq, and that’s where we went, to the mouth of the Caniapiscau, where the big stream flattens and grows wide. The Inuit elders—the tribal leaders—obviously had decided that this field trip was an acceptable thing to do. And so, while I sensed some slight hesitancy about unveiling whatever secret was going to be unveiled, our little party made its way through the trees to the river.

  When we arrived at the Caniapiscau, we pushed aside the brush, and there before us, as if made to order, was a mammoth deer. He weighed, I would say, about six or perhaps even seven hundred pounds. He was very big for a reindeer. He was one of the extensive St. George’s herd, the herd I had traveled to Kuujjuaq to learn about.

  He was browsing at the edge of the forest. As I say, you come across reindeer everywhere up there—the St. George’s herd comprises 300,000 deer, spread all over northeastern Canada. So it was nothing unusual to find this big fellow munching lichen by the river. I had been watching him and his brethren deer move alone or in groups for nearly a month, and I felt I had come to understand them. I felt, in my arrogance, that I knew just about everything there was to know about them.

  And then. . .

  And then it happened. Suddenly this enormous buck stopped, turned, took a short run and—after a soft grunt and a forceful liftoff—he soared across the water. It was astonishing: two hundred yards in a single bound! He was in the air forever, it seemed.

  He was flying.

  I gasped, then shivered. I was too stunned to snap even one picture.

  The Inuit said that this was nothing compared with what “the little ones” could do. “The little ones that live farther north,” one man said. “Those are the real fliers.”

  EVER SINCE MY EXPERIENCE in the far north I have spent whatever free time I have had investigating this flying-deer phenomenon, and how it applies to Santa Claus’s annual Mission. I had gone to Kuujjuaq to investigate the biology and physiology that govern the earthbound lives of reindeer. I came away determined to unravel a far greater mystery.

  When poring over photographs in one collection of Arctic artifacts, I was astonished to find this image—undated, unsi ned but wholly real.

  I have, by now, read dozens of books—both old and new—on reindeer and caribou: books of natural history and books of pure mythology. I have found a clue here and a clue there, a possible source here and another there—I’ve even found an old photograph of Inuit looking skyward, at what seem to be flying deer. I have learned of several people who have first- or second-hand information concerning Santa Claus and his tremendous undertaking. It turns out there is a small network of people around the world that helps the great elf, and I have been fortunate in gaining the confidence of this network.

  I promised that I would never try to exploit or in any way intrude upon Santa Claus and his Christmas Mission. But, I said, I needed to understand some things. And I added that I was sure others wanted to understand as well. An interesting discovery: As I reached deeper into this marvelous story, I learned that although Santa Claus feels strongly that he and his elves must live and toil in isolation, he is not at all reluctant to have us know certain facts about his Mission. In fact, he seems to want us to know. In 1986 he told Will Steger—the Minnesota adventurer who is the only person alive to have ventured into Claus’s North Pole camp—that he is happy to divulge how he does what camp—that he is happy to divulge how he does what he does. “Because,” he told Steger, “then maybe people will understand why I do it.”

  I HOPED to come to some better understanding of this “why.” But to get there, I realized I needed to figure out the “what” and the “how”—What did Santa Claus do each year, and how did he do it? What I needed to know about was this: There was once an Inuit somewhere in Canada—a hunter who lived long, long ago. On a midnight, moonlight hunt, something strange and wonderful had happened in the sky, and he had seen it. He had been moved by it, and he had set it down in an old leather book. What was it? What had he seen?

  What did it mean? Did it have anything to do with that nonbird “bird” I had seen, years before, beyond the far fields and forests of a New England landscape?

  You see, I already knew with absolute certainty, deep in my soul, that there was an ancient Inuit who had seen, one December night long ago, a sleigh being pulled by deer and silhouetted against the moon. Fascinated by this vision, he had scratched out a picture with his knife on a piece of leather. This had been saved in a dark little shack on the outskirts of a village named Kuujjuaq. In an old, tattered scrapbook sits a hunter’s picture of Santa Claus and a flying reindeer. It is a wondrous thing.

  Two items in the museum intrigued me, so I photographed them. In the upper righthand corner of the birch painting, reindeer can be seen taking flight. The leather etching speaks for itself. But what tale does it tell?

  PART ONE

  The Echo of Hooves

  Searching for Yesteryear’s Deer

  HOW OLD IS the jolly old man? Unless he chooses to tell us-and it is exceedingly unlikely that he will, for he is a lovely but reticent man—we will never know. That is to say, we’ll never know how old he is in the way that we count the years. Surely he is immortal in a spiritual sense.

  AND SURELY HE IS LONG-LIVED in any sense because we do know that he has been on the job for nearly two thousand years. There are records of children in norther
n Africa getting mysterious presents as long ago as that. There are stories of strange midwinter visitations made to Native Americans that long ago. There are aboriginal traditions in Australia that speak of a flying man from the north. There are reports of a curious Arctic city of elves that date that far back. There is even firm support for the claim of those Inuit of Kuujjuaq: Yes, indeed, Santa Claus did pass through their land a thousand years ago. He and his community settled for a short while just to the east, and then—exactly as the Inuit said—they uprooted themselves and went north.

  “ By reading histories, we can trace the origins of Santa’s nation far beyond its establishment at the North Pole.”

  – PHILIP N. CRONENWETT, librarian of Arctic studies and authority on northern civilizations

  “If you look at the evidence—and I mean evidence, not legend—then you arrive at a few pieces of certain knowledge,” says Philip N. Cronenwett. “Piece Number One: Santa Claus opened shop two millennia ago, give or take a decade. Piece Number Two: He has been in business every year since, although some years, it is clear, were difficult for him—very hard indeed for him to deliver during those years. Piece Number Three: He has modified his approach, he has gotten better at what he does. Piece Number Four, and this is a tangent to Piece Number Three: He has had to change his location. He did not start all this activity at the North Pole. That’s something I find fascinating.”