After launching hand-built rowboats in a hailstorm, after facing mosquitoes and avalanches and a predatory bear, I had learned to focus on one thing: the now. Just days before we’d met the caribou, we’d waited in a rainstorm on a riverbank for a food resupply that didn’t come. We’d lain in our tent, shivering and scared, and wondered if we’d meet our end by this most slow and plodding of means. We discovered the limits of our bodies, and then some. For almost five days, we survived on two crumbly granola bars, a few tablespoons of olive oil and a package of instant ramen. Impossible questions hung beside us in the already heavy sky. Had we asked too much of ourselves, and of the land? Was it really worth it in the end?

When the plane finally came to deliver our resupply, we ate until we were sick. As we paddled away the next morning, I wasn’t sure what lessons we had gained, except the fact of our own obvious and humbling mortality.

But on that rainy afternoon, in the collective energy of bodies in motion, hurtling themselves into the current of a cold Arctic river, grace abounded. For hundreds of miles we’d traveled in the shadow of caribou, trusting their wisdom to guide us over terrain that often felt impenetrable. By following their hoof prints and rutted tracks across the mountains, we’d learned that there was always a way forward.

When a caribou calf stopped to sniff me then skittered away to join the others, I realized I’d found what I was looking for. Faith in the unknown. Beauty when I least expected it. The visceral relief of bearing witness to something much larger than myself. After nearly starving on a riverbank, the delay in our food resupply felt serendipitous beyond belief.

In the evening, we set up camp on a nearby island. As dusk fell, we sat in silence with our shoulders pressed together and watched the steady stream of animals crossing. Later, as I lie in my sleeping bag in the dark, I heard them splashing still. By morning, the caribou were gone.