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March/April 2006 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Titanic ice In-depth: On ice Feature: Dance of the dunlins Feature: Off the rails Feature: Being caribou The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations Explorer À la carte Mosaic

One of the world’s last great animal migrations occurs every spring in the Yukon and Alaska. Driven by instinct, the Porcupine caribou herd makes the long and dangerous trek from its Yukon winter range to calving grounds in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, while politicians far to the south have, for the past 25 years, debated opening up those calving grounds to oil and gas development. The caribou cannot argue their case, of course, so two Canadians, Karsten Heuer and Leanne Allison, decided to become their advocates. In an unprecedented odyssey, the newlywed couple spent five months in 2003 following the huge herd’s 1,500-kilometre migration on foot through bitter storms, across 40 rivers and over mosquito-infested lowlands, bearing witness to the delicate balance of its existence.

Leanne bumps me for the umpteenth time as she shifts positions. "Are they still out there?" she asks. I unfold my knees and ankles as I carefully squeeze past the mound of gear she has pushed aside in order to cook. Then I lean out the door. Thirty metres away, eight caribou cows lie waiting to give birth, while behind them stand two others, each nursing a wobbly legged calf. I nod.

"How many?" she whispers.

I squint into the fog, trying to make out shadows and ghostlike shapes. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. For all I know, every pregnant cow in the 123,000-member herd is out there. Until the weather clears, it is impossible to say.

On May 31, five days ago, we arrived at the Jago River in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), a protected zone of some 7.8 million hectares in the northeast corner of Alaska. When we got here, half a dozen cows flushed out of the bushes and waddled off, looking very pregnant and agitated. Feeling terrible for disturbing them, we pitched camp right there, despite the standing water, assuming the soggy campsite would suffice for a few hours until the animals drifted on. But then six cows became twelve, and the following hours brought dozens more. They laid down around us. They waited. And although more arrived, none moved off.

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