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NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY Environmental News Network
National Geographic Magazine October 1996
On Assignment
A whiff of walrus / Big Sky, dirty dishes / Nyet, Charlie
Biographies
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Joel Sartore Image
Photograph by Erin Harvey
   
A whiff of walrus
   Playing possum with walruses in Alaska’s Togiak National Wildlife Refuge for the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC assignment on refuges, photographer Joel Sartore, left, could have used a clothespin. “Some of the worst breath I’ve ever smelled,” shudders Joel, who also accused the walruses of loud snoring. “Their eyesight is terrible, but their sense of smell is good, so I had to stay downwind (on their stinky side) whenever I was close.”
   Joel got even closer to the creatures when local Eskimo hunters offered him a hunk of walrus flesh to cook for lunch. “I knew it would be a bit on the chewy side when I couldn’t cut it with a sharp serrated knife,” he says. “In fact, even after being cooked, it had the consistency of wood. Locals say that it’s best to boil it for about six hours. I didn’t have enough Sterno for that, so I fried it. It was tougher than an old musk ox, which I also tried there, and I worked up a sweat trying to cut through its piano-wire tendons.”

 

Doug Chadwick Image
Photograph by Joel Sartore
   
Big Sky, dirty dishes
   Food was often a problem on the refuges story assignment, which took photographer Joel Sartore and writer Doug Chadwick to many out-of-the-way places. “If I eat one more sandwich from a gas station,” says Joel, “I think I’m going to get rickets.” Chadwick, an experienced outdoorsman (starting his campfire, left), did cook for Joel one night when the pair were camping at a refuge in Montana. As Joel moved to wash up, Doug stopped him from rinsing the dishes in the nearby river. “The water’s filthy,” Doug explained. He then showed Joel how to rub the dishes clean. With dirt.

 

Charlie Cobb Image
Photograph by Michael S. Yamashita
   
Nyet, Charlie
   “Nyet problem, in the Kurils, usually means you have a big one,” says writer Charlie Cobb, left, who heard the phrase often while waiting an entire day on Kamchatka for a helicopter to take him to Paramushir, northernmost of the Kurils, an archipelago in the North Pacific. That morning the mayor of the district had assured him that the chopper would arrive. “The weather is clear,” the mayor had insisted, despite the drizzle. “Nyet problem.”
   Evening approached, and Charlie still had no transportation.“Nyet problem,” said another would-be passenger, who had been waiting three days. The sun was setting by the time the helicopter finally arrived.
   Charlie and his translator looked at the chopper with sinking hearts. A relic of the Soviet military, the machine was already full with 25 people and their bags, so he and the other new passengers constituted an overload. It was not permissible, officials explained, to board additional passengers at the island’s official airfield. But, nyet problem. At the unofficial airfield, on the other side of the island. . .
   Charlie made his flight with no problem.

 

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