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Photo of the Day

March 13, 2005

Reindeer Boots, Siberia, Russia, 1996

Photograph by Maria Stenzel

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 and photograph shot on assignment for, but not published in, "Nenets: Surviving on the Siberian Tundra," March 1998, National Geographic magazine)