For thousands of years the Nenets people held the island of Vaygach, or Khebidya-Ya, to be sacred ground, home to the hekhe, their heavenly guardians, where offerings were once brought from across the Bolshezemelskaya tundra to the wooden images at Cape Bolvansky Nos. Isolation kept traditional customs alive there, along with belief in the sky god Num and the oral transmission of legends about shamans and heroes, well into the mid-twentieth century. The photographs collected here, made in 1930-1940 by the polar explorer M. S. Sinitsyn, document the island's last storyteller, Neloko Vylko, whose epic cycle of tales, Spirits of the Tundra, was published only seventy years after it was recorded. The pictures show a vanishing way of life - reindeer herders and hunters, Nenets camps and Russian settlements, and the first Soviet polar station - alongside legends and two previously unknown Nenets tales gathered on the island.