Fairly early on in our days here I reflected on the subject of reindeer bottoms. That is, if you were lucky enough to see reindeer, and you felt like taking a photographic reminder of the event, the chances were you’d only record a shot of their backsides as they retreated into the birch scrub. We have very many photos of reindeer bottoms.
This led to the realisation that this was the joy of reindeer, and of all experiences of wildlife here – that you just can’t pin them down. Trying to share this with our visitors was difficult though, because they were always so disappointed if they didn’t get that perfect shot of reindeer, or the northern lights.
Coming to the end of our period in Kiruna we were inspired to make a book recording some of our memorable experiences and placing them in the landscape on a drawn map. This was an overlap of our imagination with the geographical reality. I used the real map to find and record the real names of prominent features, and alongside these we wrote the name we had given to our experience at the place.
Yesterday on a journey into the fjäll we took that book with us to help put names to the various peaks you can see from the road. So many times we’d wondered which was which, but somehow we’d never got round to doing the research. Now was our chance, armed with the drawn map we peered up at them as we passed. A solitary peak could be named, but groups of peaks were problematic because they blended into one another, depending on which direction you looked at them from. And then as the road curved sharply round one wasn’t at all sure which peak we were looking at – was it the same one we’d seen half an hour ago from another angle?
Reindeer bottoms revisited, I thought. After all these years we still had to learn that not being able to pin something down, photograph it, or name it, was the best thing about the experience.
