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by Joshua Hunt. Beneath the glow of the morning sun, thousands of reindeer plod across the frozen far reaches of northwestern Canada. In the slow moving scrum, the animal's bodies almost disappear under a cloud of vapor as warm breath collides with cold air. A forest of antlers seems to dance in the mist. Glimpsed from afar, the migrating herd looks like one long, sinuous streak of brown painted across

the snow canvavas of an Arctic landscape. In the distance are four Inuvialuit herders on snowmobiles, armed with rifles and keeping watch. They are alert, attuned to the rhythm of hoofs falling on frozen earth and on this crisp morning. Their job is to escort the reindeer to their calving grounds, but in a grander sense, they are also helping to

write a new legacy for this storied herd. They're really smart animals, said dus Douglas Esagok, whose seven winters working with the reindeer mak him among the most experienced of the indigenous herders. I'm always talking to them when I'm moving them. It kind of calms them down when they recognize my voice or the sound of my snow machine. As Canada's last free ranging reindeer herd drives forward just north of the Arctic Circle, the animals carry with them

a link to a legendary experiment. It began about one hundred years ago after the number of local caribou that the Inuvialu wheat long depended on began to decline, and a bold plan was hatched to address food scarcity by importing reindeer. Caribou and reindeer are the same species, but the latter have been domesticated. Something similar has been tried at the turn of the century in nearby Alaska, when waves of reindeer boarded boats and trains to make improbable

journeys from Siberia and Norway to North America. In late nineteen twenty nine, a chunk of what was then a burgeoning Alaska reindeer population, some thirty five hundred reindeer, set off for Canada under the care of Sami and Inuit herders. The arduous, zigzagging, fifteen hundred mile journey ended up lasting more than five years, marking a difficult beginning to what came to be known as the Canadian Reindeer Project. Now decades on, a group of Nuvialuit stakeholders is taking the

project further into uncharted territory. The herd, which has been cared for with the help of the Inuvialuit but family owned, was formerly purchased in twenty twenty one by the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation. Under the watchful eyes of Esagoch and his colleagues, the herd has more than doubled to nearly six thousand reindeer, making possible an ambitious plan to build a sustainable path to self reliance for Inuvialuit people living on their ancestral lands.

The ultimate goal is to have reindeer abundantly available for Inuvialuit. That's goal number one, said Brian Reid, director of the in Inuvialuit Community Economic Development Organization. There's the food's security component to this herd, but there's also job creation and the economic component to it. The reindeer's transferred to Inuvialuit ownership goes beyond an attempt at establishing stability for the future.

It also represents a chance for the Inuvialuite people to take control of a herd imported to their homelands by a colonial government in the nineteen thirties. When the reindeer came to the Northwest Territories, the role they were meant to play in the lives of Uvialuit people was mostly

to replace their ancestral food gathering customs. The Canadian government had been establishing administrative stations and allowing the creation of trading outposts throughout the region following its acquisition of the Northwest Territories in the late eighteen hundreds. The indigenous population had for centuries subsisted primarily on hunting and fishing, but with cariboo and decline, reindeer were imported to address food shortages.

This also changed the relationship the Inuvialuite had with the land. As reindeer could be raised as livestock, reindeer are classified as domesticated animals, the same as a cow or a chicken or a pig, said Wade felgrays all day and just keep moving slowly and slowly and slowly, finding greener pastures. In the years before the IRC took control of the herd, the reindeer were owned by in an in new Viluite family, the Binders, whose associations with the reindeer stretched back to

their arrival in the Mackenzie Delta. The Binders had grazed the animals and sold reindeer meat, but had increasingly struggled with too few herders to stave off predators and keep the herd from splintering. As the number of reindeer dipped, the Inuvialuite leaders at the IRC were in the process of recognizing the powerful role that a bolstered reindeer population

could play in the community. Plenty of Enuviluite continue to hunt for their food, but it can be a costly and time intensive effort, and, as any hunter will attest, some seasons are better than others. Over recent decades, many families have moved away from the traditional subsistence model, depending instead on food markets and grocery stores stocked by Southern

food food supply chains. But in twenty twenty, at the outset of the global pandemic, many of those supply chains broke the RC, which began to envision a roll for the herd in addressing food shortages. Could see clearly that the thread was not hypothetical but immediate. We've been able to really capitalize on the country food that's abundant in our region, but also tie in the reindeer herd so we could alleviate the pressure on the local caribou herd

and save the sustainable protein source, said Wade. The purchase of the herd, he added, was part of a two pronged plan toward food sovereignty. The other initiative was the opening of the Country Food Processing Plant in the town of Inuvik, where reindeer, among other food sources, could be prepared and then sent off for distribution to families in need.

Before any reindeer could be harvested, though, the herd needed to be nurtured back to full strength, the RC brought on Esagoch and fellow in to Valawite herder Steve Cockney Junior, who then spent months reuniting the dispersed reindeer herd. One of the main challenges was rounding up all the stray animals that were spread out over a huge area, said Essegok. Some groups had strayed as far afield as eighty miles, which meant days of travel for Esagok and his partner.

These smaller groups of reindeer were vulnerable to wolves and other predators, and while many animals had been lost and others roamed beyond the two herder's reach, Esagox said, we brought all of them together, the ones that we were able to locate anyway. Since then, the ir C has hired four additional herders, with the crew pulling two week long shifts of four men on and two men off

at any given time. As a result of their efforts, the herd's numbers have swelled up to six thousand, enough for Country Food Processing to start its work with the reindeer. Last spring, the plant, now staffed by five full time employees, led its first official harvest, preparing one hundred seventy six reindeer from the herd as roasts, round meat, and ribs, among other items that were then distributed to Inuvialuit community members.

The meals provide a crucial source of country food grown and sourced in the region, allowing Inuvialuite households that may not be able to hunt for themselves a chance to stay connected to the land and to this chapter in the Inuvialuit story. For Esigoch, the opportunity to play such a critical role in this new form of food stability and cultural revitalization has been a crash course in learning

by doing. In just seven years, he Cockney and their team became the heirs to an indigenous tradition imported from the other side of the Arctic, where the Sami had long mastered the practice. His responsibility to pass this knowledge on to younger herders was made lest daunting, he said, by the fact that the region's indigenous hunters already have most of the skills to do the job, given their familiarity with the landscape. It's not that heart of a

job if you grow up hunting, he said. We try to talk to the younger guys and explain things the best we can, but a lot of it is hands on. You learn by doing it and by watching and observing the animals. The reindeer teach them too, he said. Often it feels as if they are the ones leading the way. How reindeer got to America. In the eighteen nineties, the idea of raising domesticated reindeer took root in Alaska, leading to a herd being imported to replace dwindling numbers of

free range in Cariboo as a regional food source. Next, where space and time merge, the glow we see from distant galaxies is as old as Earth's ancient rocks. A dazzling project puts the age of starlight in perspective. Periods of time lasting thousands, millions, or even billions of years might seem unfathomable. So Mark Chan, a photographer and teacher in Houston, decided to visualize this very mysterious idea of deep time in more relatable terms, the stars over our

heads and the rocks under foot. Since twenty twenty two, he's been hiking into wild places, including national parks, at night and deploying a custom made projector to layer Nassau images of star symp systems onto iconic natural formations in split second verse. Each resulting photograph features an earthly setting roughly as old in years as the stars distance from

Earth in light years. This blend of geological and galactic perspectives, capturing how our planet has coexisted with the universe, is now part of an ongoing series he called Pilgrimage of Light. By comparison, we humans have been here for only a flash by Hicks Wilgan. Twenty million years ago, subterranean pressure raised the gigantic limestone formations the house to day's Carlsbad caverns, juxtaposed here with a spiral arm of the Pinwooll galaxy

twenty two point three million light years away Scorpius. This star cluster, some twenty eight thousand light years from Earth, appears on trees at the base of Half Dome, an impressive cliff carved by glaciers moving through Yosemite Valley during multiple ice ages, the last of which was thirty thousand

years ago. Constellation Virgo sediments within the dry lake bed that forms Bryce Canyon first appeared thirty million years ago, about the time when M one four, also known as the Sombrero galaxy emitted the light scene in the Hubble telescope constellation Carina with snow falling Photographer Mark chen cast an image of star cluster n GC thirty three twenty four beneath the lights of the South Rims Grand Canyon Village.

The cluster's proximity to Earth ninety nine two hundred and sixty light years loosely corus responds to how long Age humans started living in settlements. Next, the warrior women of the Viking Age. For centuries, historical accounts of the Great Norse fighters focused on men and their remarkable feats in battle. Now new evidence shows that some Viking women excelled as

warriors too, and wielded power far beyond the battlefield. By Heather Krinkle, it was on a sleepy Sunday morning in Stockholm's Central train station when I felt once again a familiar thrill, the jolt of being hauled out of the moment and transported to another older world. I was in Scandinavia, researching a story and having a coffee with an Uppsala University archaeologist, Charlotte headin Steyrna Johnson. She had offered to show me Birka the site of an early Viking town

on an island west of Stockholm. As we passed the time before our faery departed from a nearby k head in Styrnay Johnson reached into her pack and pulled up a large copy of an engraving that had appeared in a nineteenth century Sweetest newspaper. Unfolding it carefully, she placed it on a table and smoothed out the wrinkles. As I gazed down at the paper, I felt the solid walls of the train station slip away, and the Viking

age suddenly reach out to me. The engraving, rendered in almost photographic detail, portrayed a large underground Viking burial chamber containing skeletal remains and an arsenal of Viking weapons. In eighteen seventy seven, Head and steer Na Johnson explained a Swedish archaeologist named how Mehr Stolpa had discovered the grave now known as VJ five eighty one, near a Viking military garrison in Birka. I stared at the depiction of

the grave at the far end of the chamber. On a ledge, Stolpa and his team found not just one, but two horse skeletons lying side by side in the center, a human skeleton rested on its side, hinged forward at the hips, as if the body had once been seated on something. Two iron stirrups lay near by, as well as surviving bits of costly clothing and an ancient board

gang arranged around the skeleton. Stolpa found in arsenal fragments of a sheathed sword of broad axe, a battle knife for hand to hand fighting, two spears, two shields, and more than two dozen arrows. Notably absent were items of jewelry that researchers had long associated with Viking women, including brooches. Based on the contents of this spectacular grave, it was Stolpe's conclusion that the occupant was a man, an important

male warrior. This finding was widely accepted by other Scandinavian researchers, and as news of Stolpe's discovery spread, Sweden's Nielistrude tigning New Illustrated magazine published a remarkable engraving of the Birka warrior's burial, inspired by the archaeologist's technical drawing. So detailed and compelling was this illustration that it was published and

re published for decades in books on the Vikings. The burial was unusually rich in grave goods, even by today's standards, had in Styrna, Johnson says, and it got a lot of attention. For nearly one hundred forty years. Stolpa's interpretation of the burial went unquestioned by archaeologists. Generations of Scandinavian researchers accepted the view that warfare was the exclusive business of men during the Viking Age, a period that began around the mid eighth century a d and gradually wound

down in the mid eleventh century. Medieval Scandinavian poets, after all, and vividly evoked the surreal horrors of Viking combat in their nightmarish versus. A sword was slaughter, fire or corpse gleam. Spears were blood snakes or the fires of odin the battle itself was weapon, thunder, spear storm, and army reddening. In all, Scandinavia's early poets coined around three hundred, three thousand, five hundred figures of speech to describe warfare and weaponry,

a terrifying richness of language clearly agreed scholars. The brutal realm of Viking combat was no place for a Woman, the Birko warriors, male identity stuck Birka, and the entire Viking world were arguably getting even more attention to day. With a host of new excavations across the North and the advent of advanced investigative techniques such as ancient DNA sequencing and isotopic analysis, archaeologists have been uncovering an increasingly

complex picture of Viking life. Evidence now shows, for example, that the Viking Age began decades earlier than previously suspected, when heavily armed Viking warriors sailed to what is now Estonia around seven fifty and met violent deaths at the

hands of their enemies. And over the next three centuries, Viking expeditions crossed at least eight seas, journeyed to some three dozen countries, and encountered more than fifty two cultures, from Canada's east coast to the steep mountain passes of Afghanistan. No other Europeans of the day were so daring, so

driven by curiosity and wanderlust. In Eastern Europe, Viking trading expeditions journeyed along the dangerous rivers of modern day Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, fending off attacks from mounted warriors on the Eurasian steps to reach two of the richest cities in the world at the time Constantinople now Istanbul and Baghdad, and by at least the early eleventh century, intrepid parties of these Scandinavian ski seafarers landed on the coast of

North America. On the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, researchers have discovered the remains of a Viking base camp inhabited in ten twenty one, exactly four hundred seventy one years before Christopher Columbus laid eyes on the Americas. Clearly, the Vikings had a remarkable talent for making history, But for decades many scholars focused on the men of the North, assuming they were the only seafarers, pillagers, and traders. But what

about the North women? What were they doing during that time? Archaeologists seldom paid as much attention to them, assuming that Viking women were primarily homebodies. When you go into a museum, says Marianne Mohen, an archaeologist at the University of Oslo, chances are you will find the women doing one of two things, holding babies or cooking. Was it really that simple and straightforward. Until recently, there were few clear answers.

But as more Scandinavian women gravitated toward the field of archaeology in the late twentieth century, some began examining the lives of the North women from fresh perspectives. Today, their analyzes of new excavations and old museum collections are revealing many surprises and a larger female presence. Some Viking women wielded great influence in the North as powerful queens, regents, cirruses, sorceresses, landowners,

leaders of sacred cults, alliance builders, traders, and travelers. Beneath a huge earth and burial mound at Osburg in Norway, for example, researchers in nineteen o three discovered a sleek Viking longship adorned with fine carvings. It is the most lavish Viking grave known to archaeologists. The ship rimmed with tapestries and other artworks, and contained the remains of two high status women, one of whom was likely a respected

ritualist and powerful sorceress, judging from her grave goods. In the Viking world, sorceresses were said to possess many magical powers, from predicting the future and controlling the weather to performing battle magic dark rituals to turn the tide of war. In Viking warfare, says Neil Price, an archaeologist at Uppsala University, magic was as important to fighting as sharpening your sword.

Many most of this magic was conducted by women. Other women were skilled old artisans who played a critical role in outfitting the famous Viking raiding and war fleets. They produced a high quality wool cloth for the sales on

Viking longships, who was an enormous task. Experimental archaeology conducted at the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark, for example, as revealed that producing just one sale for a large warship would have required at least ten thousand, two hundred sixty nine hours of labor, the equivalent of some three point five years using a standard of eight hour work

days without any weekends off. In addition, women made all the high quality wooden woolen clothing worn by the crew of such a warship, and Danish textile expert Lee's Vandr Jorgensen has calculated that as much as seventeen point five years of labor by a team of women was needed to clothe a crew of seventy. Clearly skilled female artisans were integral to the success of the Viking raids and other military campaigns abroad, but the involvement of women in

Viking warfare did not end there. Remarkable evidence now suggests that at least a few of the North women were trained in combat as warriors. The revelations began just over a decade ago in twenty fourteen, when Anna Schelstrom, a biological and medical anthropologist at Stockholm University with a reputation for thorough research, started examining the remains of the famous Buca warrior as part of an ongoing study on the

health of the Vikings. During her scientific assessment of the individual in BJ five eighty one, Cheldschum determined that the warrior would have been roughly five feet seven inches tall, just slightly shorter than the average Viking mail, and probably died between the ages of thirty and forty years. But as the anthropologist began evaluating the sex of the skeleton, she discovered something intriguing. Several key anatomical indicators didn't fit

the profile of a male. The width of the greater sciatic notch on the warrior's pelvis, for example, was considerably broader than the mean value for males. It resembled that of female's whereover, the warrior's pelvis possessed a wide groove known as the preuricular sulcus, usually a female characteristic, and the warrior's chin was small and pointed, another female traite. Indeed, several features of the skeleton, Schelstrom explained to me later

via e Maale, were feminine. Puzzled, she asked two other anthropologists to evaluate the sects of the skeleton independently. Both came to the same conclusion. The famous warrior, Viking warrior at Birka, seemed to be a woman. The old Norse sagas contained intriguing stories of warrior women. Danish scholar Saxo Grammaticus included several of these legendary female figures in his book Gesta Deorum Story of the Danes, completed in the early twelve hundreds. One of the most famous was lud Gerda,

who married a Viking warlord. According to Saxo Grammaticus, she was an accomplished warrior who refused to dress as a man in battle. Indeed, she fought with her hair unbound and streaming down her back, But most twentieth century archaeologists dismiss such stories out of hand as the inventions of medieval story tellers. They believed Viking women spent their days as traditional homemakers, preparing food, cooking, making clothes, and caring

for children. Hence Styrna Johnson wasn't so sure. She had conducted extensive research at Birka and knew that the garrison hall there had once bristled with iron weapons, and that it rested upon offerings of iron spearheads. It was a profoundly martial place, one dedicated to the spear lord himself Odin. The decision to bury an individual so close to the Viking garrison and its sacred ground was in itself a mark of high esteem, one likely awarded to a distinguished

military figure. Could a woman warrior have been buried in that prestigious grave, as luck would have it headed. Styrna Johnson and Chelstrom had received generous funding to conduct a large DNA study of prehistoric human remains in Sweden. The well preserved Buka warrior skeleton was a prime candidate for the project, so in twenty fifteen, scientists at Stockholm University proceeded to take two tiny samples, one from the individual's canine tooth, the other from an upper arm bone, and

successfully extracted ancient DNA from both. With this, geneticists generated genome wide data to identify both the sex and the ancestry of the fighter on a molecular level. Heaven Styrna Johnson had received the results from these tests not long before we met at the train station in Stockholm. The individual in the famous warrior grave, she told me, had genetic affinities to the modern inhabitants of southern Sweden. But the most fascinating result came from the DNA analysis of

the warrior's biological sex. The individual in BJ five eighty one Hedden, Steerna Johnson announced is a woman. This line of scientific research soon got more complicated, however. In twenty seventeen, Steerne Johnson and nine of her colleagues published their DNA study on the Burka woman in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. To their surprise, the eight page report, which was peppered with phrases like epiphysial union and nucleotide positions,

set off a firestorm. While some Viking specialists were impressed by the research, others took strong issue with it. Some critics suggested, for example, that the Birka great may have originally contained both a male warrior and a female companion, and that the skeleton of the male was removed at some point, but there was no evidence at all to show that a second body was ever interred in the grave. Other researchers raised a more theoretical objection. The dead, they noted,

did not bury themselves. Mourners, they suggested, could well have placed a trove of costly weapons belonging to the dead woman's father or husband in the grave as symbols of the woman's high status. But other evidence clearly indicated that the weapons were hers. Some old Scandinavian poems, for example, explicitly described the practice of Mourner's bearying dead warriors with

their weapons. Besides, no one had suggested that all the weapons in the Birka Grave were merely family heirlooms when the skeleton was thought to be male, so why bring up that data. Now Stunned by the reaction, Hadden, STEERNA. Johnson, and several other researchers decided to expand their investigation of the famous grave. Some team members pored over historical records

for even brief mentions of Viking warrior women. Perhaps the most intriguing reference came from the twelfth century text bodach gerre Bar the War of the Irish with the Foreigners. In it, an Irish writer recorded the names of sixteen Viking commanders who led attacks on the region of Munster in the mid nine hundreds. Among these military leaders was a Viking woman, ingen Riad, whose name means red girl or red daughter. The name may have come from the

color of her hair. She was clearly an important figure. She is a Viking, she is a captain of a ship, and she's the commander of a fleet. Uppsala University archaeologist Neil Price, a member of the team, told me Headensteerna Janssen and her colleagues took a closer look at the goods in the famous buick A burial. What was particularly

striking was the equestrian character of the grave. Although the Vikings are best known for their seafaring abilities, prosperous families in the North bred horses for riding and for work on their farms. The Burka woman likely came from just such a privileged background. And several clues pointed to her equestrian abilities. This concludes readings from National Geograph magazine for today.

Your reader has been Marcia. If you've enjoyed hearing this content, please give us a call at eight five nine four two two six three nine zero. Thank you for listening, and have a great day.