Oh what fun it is to herd reindeer on a Swedish ranch

By Doug Lansky, Globe Correspondent, 12/13/98

IRUNA, Sweden -- I never glimpsed Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer while I was above the Arctic Circle. But I may have inadvertently eaten him.

While working for Nils Nutti, a Sami (PC for Lapplander) reindeer herder who lives 35 minutes by snowmobile from the nearest road, which is then over an hour by car from the nearest town, I ate what he ate: reindeer meat.

Fruits and vegetables aren't easy to come by when the snow is six feet deep in most places. So breakfast was reindeer jerky.

Lunch was fried reindeer fillet. Dinner was reindeer jerky again.

I felt weird eating reindeer. Nothing wrong with the taste. It just didn't seem right. After all, I had seen the Rudolph Christmas TV special about 15 times. And not only was I eating reindeer, I was lassoing them. Nils taught me how to throw a rope around their necks and then hold on while a bounding reindeer dragged me across the snow-covered field on my stomach.

``Go get that medium-dark one with horns,'' Nils would tell me, pointing to a group of about 40 reindeer, 25 of which fit this description. Nils knew each of his 300 reindeer as if they were his own children, but only a few of them had names. Not Donner or Blitzen, either. Nils called one Big Dark One with Broken Antlers and another Small White One with No Horns. His entire herd was marked in the traditional Sami way: with specially shaped pieces clipped from their ears. It looked as though Mike Tyson had been let loose in the reindeer pen just before I arrived.

Nils, one of the nicest guys you'd ever want to meet, assured me there was a very good reason for lassoing these reindeer, and explained that it didn't hurt them. We had to isolate the reindeer that weren't eating so they could be nursed back to health, Nils said.

How nice, I thought, then, when they regain their health, we can eat them.

Nils confines and feeds his reindeer during winter with the help of his father, Henrick, who is 78, hard of hearing, and moves at the speed of tai chi. Normally the reindeer are on their own for food, but because there has been unusually deep snow for the last 10 winters, they have had a hard time fending for themselves.

Following the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986, toxic vapors drifted over and contaminated some of the feeding land in Sweden. To keep the reindeer from eating the contaminated grass and moss, herders began feeding them a newly developed reindeer food, which looks a lot like dog food. But I can't tell you what it tastes like.

Twice a day, it was my job to to tow a small trailer with reindeer food around the feeding pen with a snowmobile, then fill 25 feeding bowls with a shovel. The work went faster when Nils could take a break from trying to reexplain to his father why I was doing his job for free and give me a hand.

I was working for room and board. The board I mentioned already. The room was not much bigger than a sauna, and usually just as warm. I had to share a small reindeer-skin bed with Nils while his father snored a few feet away in his own bed.

Between the beds was a table, and at the foot was the wood-burning stove that made us sweat all night. No electricity. No running water. But Nils did have a cell phone, and sometimes it even worked.

To supplement his reindeer-meat income, Nils occasionally allowed tourists to visit his Arctic ranch. I witnessed two such tours during my stay. The first comprised five Indian travel agents from New Delhi. This was the second time they had ever seen snow, and they looked perpetually vexed by it. Upon their arrival by snowmobile, Nils welcomed them into his traditional Sami tent, which looks exactly like a tepee. What is a tepee doing in northern Sweden? (Get ready for an educational nugget.) Most anthropologists agree that the Sami, Eskimos, and Native Americans came from a shared ancestry that dispersed over Arctic land bridges previously linking the continents.

Nils fried up his reindeer fillets over an open fire inside the tepee, much to the dismay of two Indians, who were strict vegetarians. (I didn't spot any chunks of glowing nose in the meat, but the way Nils cooked, I could have easily missed it.) Then, following lunch and storytelling, Nils let the Indians try their hands at reindeer lassoing, which is extremely difficult -- mainly because when you're holding a lasso, the reindeer know exactly what you want to do and they don't let you get anywhere near them. In a precious moment not captured on video, a Sikh man with a lasso chased a reindeer while wearing the fashion-forward combination of snowmobile suit and traditional turban.

The following day, there was a tour from England and Ireland.

Just for fun, I borrowed some of Nils's reindeer boots, strapped a reindeer lasso around my chest, and Nils told the tourists I was his cousin, a professional reindeer herder who couldn't speak English. The group posed for pictures with me, saying things like, ``Geoffrey, just take another photo with Nils's cousin, he doesn't care.'' Before the group left, Nils reintroduced me as an American, and the group nearly went into catatonic shock.

This was the most fun I ever had with a tour group.