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The Prologue: A Talisman in the Snow

In the end, the kyy käärme were exactly where Teemu had said they would be.

When Vuokko and I stepped off the lift, partway up Ylläs Mountain, near the terminus of the long, sloping bench that delivered skiers from dense taiga to treeline to tundra, I clicked out of my skis and scanned the bonsai islands poking from the surrounding sea of snow.

The most promising spots quickly proved disappointing: a warm shelf of small boulders draped in juniper and Labrador tea held only dead leaves; a sere, sandy ridge constellated with lichen-coated rubble was too exposed; a sunny tangle of Lapland’s quintessential Dwarf Birch was picketed by cool, rapidly moving shadows.

Clearly I would have no facile discovery, and superficial searching of the type used to locate the glint of lost car keys on a groomed lawn wouldn’t cut it in messy ground cover. But I knew that. I also knew that what I was trying to find was supremely adapted to not being found.

From the human standpoint, the exercise was an amusing little contest that pitted visual acuity against concealment and logic against camouflage, driven by a hard-wired hunting instinct that would end with a photo instead of a kill and a meal. My advantage was intellectual understanding, whereas my unreasoning adversaries had only a low-watt instinct for survival—albeit backed by some fairly high-voltage weaponry.

Vuokko stood by, amused at my zeal, horrified by my temerity, likely regretful she’d kicked the whole thing off. (Her skis were still affixed—prudently, I imagined she imagined—in case of the need for a quick getaway.) I was more excited than I’d been in years. After all, how often do you find yourself in the Arctic with a meter of snow on the ground, girded by the invincibility of Gore-Tex and ski boots, with a chance to hunt for poisonous snakes?

The trip hadn’t begun so auspiciously. I’d journeyed to Finnish Lapland to work on a ski story for an international travel magazine. Not exactly a pedestrian pursuit, but it was work and very much the bread-and-butter I’d made a career from. In my mind, I was an intrepid adventure-travel writer with a penchant for exotic winter destinations, a cultural plumber of the White Planet. My friends, however, considered my calling a permanent vacation. Even my daughter struggled with the concept. “I’m not sure,” I’d once overheard her say of my job to a friend. “He goes skiing with weird people in weird places and writes about it.”

Her comment contained a certain quotient of truth: here I was, after all, in the waning days of April, traipsing through an ungodly expanse of frozen bog with a troop of fun- and vodkaloving Finns, several hundred kilometers north of the Arctic Circle.

My official escort at Ylläs, Vuokko was milk blonde, of course, and framed her luminous blue orbs with stylish, cat’seye glasses. She spoke an excellent, albeit nasal, version of the King’s English and was both smart and wickedly funny. Her humor was as flat and dry as the crispbread adorning every table in the land, and, combined with the Finnish art of understatement, she could deadpan with the best. After several hours in her company I’d yet to figure out when she was serious.

Toward the end of our first day, we rode a chairlift up the south side of Ylläs. Blazing spring sun warmed the forest below, stirring a strong potpourri of evergreen and moss. I imagined a car deodorizer called Vernal Bliss.

“I love skiing this time of year,” Vuokko sighed, inhaling deeply and leaning back. Then, after a moment’s hesitation. “Well, except for all the . . .” And here she paused to make a wiggling motion with her arm, as if it would help conjure the correct term, a word she then triumphantly spat through a broadening grin, “. . . snakes.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I offered, certain she was dramatizing the hazards of sloppy spring snow or fallen branches. “I’ve been tripped up a few times today, too.”

“No, no,” she laughed. “Snakes. Kyy käärme. You know—the kind that bite you and make you sick.” She laughed even harder and made a Monty Python–like stabbing motion near her mouth with two crooked fingers.

Now a thinking person had any number of reasons to dismiss this idea—latitude, snowpack, Vuokko’s general wisecracking, and the impending national three-day drunk known as Vappu that people were clearly already practicing for. The one that made the most sense, however, was Vuokko’s potential familiarity with a peculiar English phrase I knew all too well: snow snake.

Whimsical epithet for an invisible scapegoat, the term is frequently invoked by snow-sport enthusiasts to excuse their own ineptitude—a phantom whose absurdity is its very reason for existence. When someone trips up or unceremoniously plants face-first in the snow for no discernible reason, companions commonly dismiss it with colloquial utterances like “Uh-oh, snow snakes gotcha” or “Musta been the snow snakes.”

The snow snake was once native only to North America; however, modern mobility, the global march of English, and perhaps even text messaging have allowed the mythical creature to disperse, expanding its range to the point where it’s now referenced by ski cognoscenti in even the farthest-flung locales. Vuokko, dearest, surely this is what you meant?

Apparently not.

She was insistent: venomous snakes appeared around several of Lapland’s ski hills every spring and were numerous. She would show me tomorrow, she promised.

“It’s not so much that I’m afraid of the snakes,” she’d bubbled. “I only worry about running over them. Ha!”

The absurdity was much on my mind that evening. Snakes slithering over snow? Possible? A joke? Or merely the bad translation I suspected? (After all, linguists perpetually debated the origins and structure of Finnish, a sui generis among languages.) But whether Vuokko’s revelation was true seemed to matter less than the degree to which I desired it to be.

The ski resort of Ylläs is draped over a massive, treeless boil of wind-hammered basalt, a geological zit rising from the taut skin of surrounding forest. For much of its November-to-May season, the hill is a bastion of Arctic frigidity, but it was sunny and warm again when I rendezvoused with Vuokko.

“Everybody is talking about the snakes today,” she glowed. Her friend Teemu, the mountain manager, confirmed a rash of reports; to prove it, he put out a call on his radio.

“We had one here, crossing the track,” crackled a lift operator. “I’ve just seen five in one place,” radioed a maintenance worker making his rounds on snowmobile.

In fact, Teemu said, first thing that morning a large snake had dashed down the T-bar line, scattering skiers like bowling pins. This news conjured a most fantastic picture for a place where wildlife encounters usually involved Reindeer, Arctic Fox, or drunks.

“Check between Tower 7 and Tower 9,” he advised in what now seemed surrealism of the highest order. “There are always a few in that area.”

So that was where we’d headed. And here a confession is due: I actually knew a lot about snakes—perhaps too much. Like any critical mass of knowledge, this one came with an abiding fascination with all there was yet to know on the subject. The current intrigue had me entertaining this emergent other, an academic id in need of gratification.

As we rode the T-bar, Vuokko’s chatter drifted in one ear and out the other. I was too busy eyeing up a low ridge of glacier-plowed rubble ahead as a likely place for a den or hibernaculum—the communal sanctuary in which snakes commonly wait out winter.

Sure enough, the formation neatly straddled the track just below Tower 8. Here we stepped off the T-bar; I kicked off my boards and looked over the few patches of exposed ground. Nothing.

And then that subtle cognitive shift. Like booting up a computer program. In a mental menu bar, under “Locate,” was a pull-down checklist: south-facing aspect, wind-sheltered microhabitat, thermal inertia, route of retreat. This itinerary quickly singled out a mossy depression several meters away, where a tangle of ground-hugging blueberry was warmed by radiant heat from two large trees and buttressed by their roots. I took but a single step toward it before freezing in stride. In the hollow, as if placed on instruction, lay two camouflaged coils adeptly playing to the contrasts of sun and shadow. Plate-sized pinwheels in charcoal, slate, and chocolate. Reaching, limbless and silent, for the waxing sun of summer, a mere hand’s width from the waning snows of winter. Geometric. Captivating. Beautiful.

Although I’d never actually seen one, this snake could be only one thing—the mildly venomous European Adder, Vipera berus, a species whose generalized habits, hardiness, and adaptability made it the world’s most widespread reptile, ranging from the United Kingdom to the Russian Far East and China, south to the Alps and Central Asian steppe, and, as it was aptly demonstrating, north to the continental Arctic.

The species’ ubiquity in northern climes also explained its heavy presence in Norse mythology—Europe’s most fertile screed of post–Ice Age animism—which held that the “World Ash” Yggdrasil, a tree supporting the nine cosmological worlds of top-god Odin, was guarded at its roots by a great serpent, Jormungander, frequently depicted in illustrations as the lowly European Adder. The scene before me provided an eerily genuine example of life imitating art in the service of some heavy ancient beliefs.

Crouching, I crept closer to the snakes, observing the subtle full-body inflations effected by every breath. Their coils rose and fell like slow bellows, each exhalation resembling a mute sigh of resignation. How did it feel to draw fresh air for the first time in eight months? To emerge each spring to spend but a few dozen desperate weeks battling anew with the rigors of the north? One thing every organism needed to survive up here was a well-honed thermoregulatory behavior and morphology that took advantage of every erg of environmental heat. Thus the snakes’ bodies were both dark and stout, heat-absorbing and heat-conserving traits, respectively. To cope with the short Arctic growing season, females would judiciously store sperm from infrequent matings and bear a handful of live, largish young every two or three years when the food supply, at least some of which could be foraged for under cover, was especially abundant. Viperworld, Arctic edition.

There had been a time when things like snakes coiling under trees had been my primary focus, for I’d been immersed in the scientific milieu of herpetology—the study of reptiles and their amphibian cousins—for many years. A distant past that erupted happily into consciousness in serendipitous moments such as these. This time, however, it had arrived with a pang of sadness and confusion.

I put the hash of strange feelings aside and bent to the task of photography; a discovery like this couldn’t go uncaptured (that hunting instinct again). The cold-blooded snakes were lethargic enough for me to carefully pick up the larger of the two and admire it more closely, in the eternal dialectic of the herpetologist—forever checking the locked, unblinking stare of lidless eyes against his or her own faltering humanity, comparing each new color or pattern to a mental trove of organic art.

A viper’s vertical pupils are vaguely evil looking, and scales above the eyes form small ridges to effect a stern but benign scowl, like a skeptical teacher. The characteristic dark zigzag down an adder’s back looks to have been inspired by the decorations of ancient pottery, but very likely the converse was true. I handed Vuokko my camera and cradled the animal on my arm for a portrait. Vuokko leaned in and snapped the shot, then turned on her skis and set off to join friends while I gently lowered the snake back to its blueberry cradle. But warmed and emboldened by handling, instead of coiling back into the brush, it bolted. Out over the snow and down the path of least resistance—Vuokko’s tracks. I did her the supreme favor of not calling attention to the surreal sight of the trailing serpent as she slid onto Ylläs’s main run.

I’d come to Finland to write about skiing, but a deeper self had emerged, like a clump of brown tundra melting out of a white landscape. A pair of diligent, unassuming creatures milking what sparse heat they could from an unforgiving earth had conjured some uncertain emotion in me but also a comforting certainty—a feeling of connectedness and a knowledge that the reason I was even here was somehow related to these animals.

Was this gift from Odin a true epiphany? Or something I’d secretly known all along? Although I’d long oscillated between two very different worlds, they had never collided quite like this before. If reptiles and amphibians had been such an important part of my life’s equation, I suddenly wanted to know why. And why, in some sense, I’d released them.

Pieces to this puzzle were scattered across the globe, in the hands of dozens of people, hanging like price tags from a thousand memories, associations, and experiences. I would have to gather them one by one and carefully sort and fit them together—partly through recollection, partly by returning to those storied places, partly by making new journeys. I’d see cool things. Connect with old friends. Discover new animals. Have an adventure or two. The prospect sounded fab save for one small thing: it scared the living shit out of me.