Reindeer boots encompass almost half of this young Nenets boy's body. The animal is integral to his people's existence—as written by Andrei Golovnev in Talking Cultures: "Man and deer become almost related. ... The first thing a newborn baby touches outside the womb is the deerskin in which it is wrapped by the midwife. A dead man is also wrapped in deerskins. And between these first and last encounters, a person lives with the deer [and] thanks to the deer."
(Text adapted from "Nenets: Surviving on the Siberian Tundra," March 1998, National Geographic magazine)
(Photograph shot on assignment for, but not published in, "Nenets: Surviving on the Siberian Tundra," March 1998, National Geographic magazine)
