The official report read: Today the ground squirrel succumbed to high-velocity lead poisoning. I hope I am not stealing Jobby’s thunder here, as those are his words and his deed, but I do enjoy reporting things! Bob told us to shoot it if it was messing with the Science, and as it was seen digging up the graminoids and eating Jeanie’s bugs, some of us felt that it qualified for a special delivery bullet. “Some of us” are not vegetarians.

That’s about all there is to report. We are in Atqasuk. The kids came to visit… I tried to count, but cannot get a more accurate count than “14ish.” In other words, too many.

Speaking of killing the ground squirrel, we killed a few other things today. Plants. After point framing a 70 x70 cm square, we snipped them off at ground level and packed them into environmentally-unfriendly Ziploc bags. This is called “collecting biomass.” In the dry sites we refer to it as “making tundra cake,” and we get much pleasure from carefully removing delicious slices of inch-thick sod from the mighty tundra, but at the wet sites the act is more like a haircut, and the five-and-a-half inch blades of the kitchen knives we purchased from the trusty Stuakpaq are not nearly as useful as the bumble bee scissors.

I don’t know about my teammates, but I always feel a bit guilty desecrating the plants in this fashion. We also, at the request of Bob, are helping out some scientists that we’ve never met from across the country.  These people have asked us to do things like insert soil probes into our plots, probes which made a horrendous tearing sound as they sliced through the root structures of our science. The other audacious researcher told us to pick leaves from plants inside the plots- the very idea! However, we grimly did as we were told… weeping all the while.

I’d like to go back to Barrow, but I am getting work and sleeping done here, so what more can I ask for? I have my health. Well, I do now. There are little to no lingering effects of my illness of last week. I’m sure the bulk of the credit for my return to health should go to Hiroki, who kindly presented me with a water-resistant paper crane. I feel ever so much better. Well, my finger hurts a bit, but that has more to do with the fact that I cut it with the bumble bee scissors than with my general health.