The Terror and Tedium of Living Like Thoreau

A couple of years ago, I woke to three birds circling over my body, barking. I’d been sleeping in a bivouac, a kind of raincoat for a sleeping bag, camped in the tundra of Alaska’s Kantishna Hills. I unzipped the bivouac and popped my head out, peering up as the eerie silhouetted birds swooped toward me. The moon was a low and yellow sliver in the eastern sky; clouds to the northwest stacked in electric oranges and dark purples.

The birds' bodies stretched wide, their faces were flat. I could see faint stripes on the undersides of their extended wings. One of them landed on my food canister nearby and hissed. The other two circled about fifteen feet above the ground. They rose, then dove toward me, then rose and circled once more. They kept a rhythm: every few circles, one of them plunged toward me again. They eyed me from above, barking all the while like angry watchdogs. When one came close enough to claw at me, I flung my arms overhead and screamed, “Stop! What’s wrong! Go away! Please!”

I was terrified. I wasn’t just scared because I feared the birds might claw through my skin or poke out my eyes, which I did, but also because I felt so disoriented. They weren’t acting like other wild animals I’d encountered. These birds knew where I was and weren’t running away. They were coming closer. I felt like prey.

The attack didn’t abate. The birds kept circling, barking, hissing. The moon rose and whitened. Stars emerged. At some point, I zipped myself back into my bivouac and listened to the strange sounds from inside it—feeling awake, thinking about sleep, anticipating violence.

Some time later, I woke to an empty sky and a risen sun. It was silent, still, and hot. There was no one to ask about what I’d seen the night before. The memory melted away into some far-off image I puzzled at and hardly believed. No one could tell me if those birds had been carnivorous falcons on the hunt for human flesh or nightmarish ravens carrying some omen of imminent doom. No one could tell me if what I’d seen was a dream, or if this world was less predictable than I’d thought.

My first steps out of my sleeping bag were tentative. The