White 150 is just one in a long line of reindeer that have occupied Albon almost every April since 1995. When we reach the reindeer, Ropstad dives at her, and soon White 150 is pinned on the snow. She tries to buck it off.Ī third snowmobile, the one I have been riding, along with a Norwegian veterinarian named Erik Ropstad, has been following the action. As the poles fall, the net wafts down atop the deer and catches her antlers. Each passenger quickly lifts his pole, then lets go. The two racing snowmobiles close in on one of the three reindeer, a young female with a collar and white ear tags. But that doesn’t mean they’ll walk right into a trap. With no natural predators here, and accustomed to snowmobile traffic, they’re not particularly afraid of people. A close relative of Alaska’s caribou and the semi-domesticated reindeer of Scandinavia, this sweet-faced, stubby-legged subspecies looks part ungulate and part teddy bear. These shaggy gray and white creatures are known as Svalbard reindeer, after this island group nearly 500 miles north of the European mainland, east of Greenland. It drags on the snow as they rush toward three goat-size animals sprinting out in front of them. A rider on another snow machine holds a pole at the net’s opposite side. In the other, he holds a pole fixed to a square net the size of a studio apartment. He clutches the side of the speeding vehicle with one hand. It’s a frigid Tuesday morning in April, and Steve Albon is riding on the back seat of a snowmobile below white peaks on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen, in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.
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