The present study identifies the dominant strategies of time representation within the ethnocultural context of Anna Nerkagi’s novel “White Lichen”. The relevance of this research stems from the fact that the lexical and grammatical tools employed in the narrative construct an ethnically specific perception of time, conceptualized both as an external life space and as an internal state of the tundra dweller. The transformation of temporal lexical semantics leads to the denotative ontologization of time through the nominative unit life and predicative elements such as to be and to live, as well as to the creation of figurative analogies between the natural world and the northern human being. Changes in grammatical semantics occur not so much at the level of aspect-tense forms, but primarily through situational context. The past tense is used to describe the experience, behavior, reflections, and emotions of the northern individual, serving to depict actions and events within a dynamic perspective of the external world. The present tense reflects the familiar world, creating an illusion of vision or life’s truth. The future tense shapes the inner world of the characters and determines the path guided by ancestral wisdom. In “White Lichen”, we observe an intersection of temporal vectors: grammatical forms of the present and future tenses, when used in a past context, represent actions as real.