The boat slid up to the shore and we jumped out and set the anchor in the soft Yukon mud. We grabbed our packs and threw in a water bottle, some dry fish, crackers, and candy bars from the the blue grub box that we had to store our food in in the boat.
We had brought some ground moose burgers in tinfoil and started a fire so we could cook and eat before our long march to look for eggs. The tundra is where the waterfowl nest. Geese, swans, cranes, and ducks. Seagulls and loons set out on tiny tundra islands and points and hope to successfully rear their young.
After a filling meal, we head out for our long tundra march. The spongey ground is still frozen under foot but the surface is moist and wet much like a soaked mattress of moss. The birds will gather up some of the lichens and moss into a nest and line it with down plucked from there own breast.
We are not the only egg hunters on the tundra this day. We have fox and otters and even bears to contend with. And of course muscle cramps from the long exasperating walk on the tundra (that is more swamp than land).
We walk for hours checking each little lump. We watch for pieces of down caught on a low blueberry bushes as a tell-tale sign that a nest might be near. Then a loud rush of wings take off, a mere few steps away. A sandhill crane that was lying flat and camoflaged perfectly, takes flight. There, two camoflauged eggs sit on a tudra lump haphazerdly with just a few sticks and grasses for a nest.
We take the eggs; they will be the freshest eggs we have had all year.
It's still early in the nesting season, the cranes will go and renest, much like when you take a chicken's eggs. We pack our precious cargo in canvas sacks lined with the damp soft moss and resume our search. For it's Easter time in the tundra.
