In the Empire of Ice (27 page)

After a long wait, we walk the two miles back to camp. “The walrus must have heard us coming, but they’ll return,” Mamarut says. “There should be walrus all the way down the coast to Moriusaq and out to Saunders Island.” He shrugs nonchalantly and smiles. “Now life begins to get good,” he says with a deep grunt.

The dogs howl a welcoming chorus as a frigid wind lifts the hair on their shoulders. Lanterns are lit. There are four hours of darkness. A late snack is eaten—seal jerky, cookies, and tea. “We’ll go back tomorrow,” Jens says in his deep, purring voice. All eight of us lie nose to nose on caribou skins. The hissing Primus stove keeps us warm.

Before dawn Mamarut is gone. We learn later that he’s gone to the ice edge alone and has harpooned a walrus. “He is always like that,” Jens explains. “He is always going out alone on the ice. He can’t stay still. He is hard to keep up with.”

Mamarut returns rosy cheeked and exuberant. “The walruses were close to the ice edge. They were swimming up and down. When they went underwater, I moved in closer; when they were up, I stayed still. The next time they came up, I harpooned one. The ice was bad but it held me! [laughter] Don’t worry, there are lots of walrus. Narwhal too. They’ll go away for a while, but they’ll be back in a couple of hours, and then we’ll have enough food for all the dogs and us too.”

When there is light in the sky, Jens harnesses one sled while Mamarut sharpens his flensing knives. “I’m happy that the dogs will be getting good food. They’ll have lots of energy for traveling,” he says. We follow the sled, moving quickly in the direction of the dead walrus. It’s important to go back for it before a polar bear comes.

Ahead gray mist curls up like smoke and something moves, not a bear but a slender channel of open water ablaze in sun. “Miteq!” Jens whispers, pointing to an eider duck flying by, then two arctic terns. We approach the ice edge with a keen eye for polar bears. We step carefully: Thin ice bends under our feet, and beyond, water churns.

Mamarut motions for us to stop. There’s the sound of gulping, sloshing, thrashing, blowing. A pod of beluga whales swim by, their ivory backs flashing in sunlight. We stare at them, dazed. Winter was ice tight. Now it has opened, giving life. The chilled water is oxygen rich, glutted with fish and plankton. If winter was otherworldly, so is spring. Another eider duck flies down the lead. Beyond is a delicate ladder of ice laid down flat; its rungs are blue. Rotting ice pans heave out of their turquoise moats, and ice pulls apart into long strands.

More churning. “Aurrit! Walrus coming!” Mamarut says in a loud whisper. They bob up and down, almost comically, gulping and splashing. But before anyone can throw a harpoon, they dive and swim away. It’s not known exactly how far south or west the Atlantic walrus off Qaanaaq spend their winters. Some go to the south coast of Baffin Island. But in the spring, they follow the food sources north, and the breaking up of the ice.

No time is wasted. Mamarut takes out his flensing knives and stands before the one dead walrus. He looks at it with admiration: “The mind of the walrus is wild and aggressive,” he says. “He is always defending his territory. Not long ago we hunted walrus from kayaks, but they attacked our boats and killed many of us. You can walk right up to them when they are resting and they can be gentle. But if threatened, they are fast.”

They winch the animal from the hole in the ice, its whiskers silvered. Tusks and head appear, then the bulbous body shining in cold sunlight. A mature male walrus can weigh 2,500 pounds and live to be 35 years old. With swift, sure strokes the men cut the walrus open. Heart and liver are laid out on the ice, steaming, and a tangle of guts flow from the abdomen. Jens cuts the intestines in long lengths and feeds them to the dogs. Flippers are cut off. They look like hands. Long lengths of skin with an inch of blubber are peeled back. This is mataaq, eaten by everyone for the essential vitamins and minerals in a place where no vegetables or fruits grow.

Meat is stacked on the sled. When flensing is finished, Mamarut leaves a pile of meaty ribs and intestines on the ice. “For nanoq,” he says. “For the polar bears.”

On the way back to the tents, the mood is relaxed and happy. Mamarut’s wild eye seems like a link to the wild animals around him. He talks about what he has learned from polar bears, how, when he fell through the ice once, he put his left arm and left leg up on the edge, using his free hand like a bear paw moving in the water and lifted himself sideways up onto the ice. “We are always learning from the polar bear. He is good for us to see all the time. The bear is his own weapon. He doesn’t need a gun or a harpoon like we do. He can move on water or on ice equally and can hunt anything. He is worth our admiration. Without knowing his ways, I would have died many times.”

I look back at the heap of innards steaming on the ice. Already the ravens have discovered it and are diving down to the feast. The sharing of food between humans and animals is a practical and moral necessity. “Sometimes things go against us and we don’t get anything to eat,” Mamarut says. “Our lives are based on how nature gives us animals. And we give food back to them,” he says, speaking softly and slowly, as if looking back in time, remembering incidents of hunger in his village.

ONCE THERE was a great famine in east Greenland, when two winters followed, one upon the other, without a summer in between. Huge blocks of ice began to shoot up out of the sea, and the bottom of the ocean seemed to be covered with ice. At the end of the first winter there were no living things. The sea was ice covered all summer. The second winter people consumed their skin clothing and kayak-skin coverings. Corpses were cut up and devoured. Parents ate children and children ate parents. Then they began murdering one another for food. After eating human liver, they went mad and their hair fell out. But a few did survive. Summer came again, and all who came after are descended from the time of winter and cannibalism.

Back at camp, Jens makes a slit in the walrus stomach and pokes around in the brown juices with his knife. He spears a scallop and offers it to me. “You first,” I say. He pops it in his mouth.
“Ummmm. Mamatuk,”
he says. “Good.”

Sun shines through frostfall, and the hairs in my nose freeze instantly. Our thermometer reads 44 below. We’ve been thrown into a hall of light that no longer confers warmth. This is a cold sun, so cold it might not be a sun at all. Mornings, we wash ourselves with snow because it melts from body heat, and afterward we dry ourselves with snow because it absorbs moisture.

“In the last two or three years there were big storms and high waves in November,” Jens says. “That was new. We never had storms like that break up the ice before. The ice refreezes, then we have screw ice. It’s hard on hunting. There are now so few days of getting food. This year the ice didn’t come until December, later than we’ve ever known.” A thin cloud slides over the sun, making the day suddenly colder. Jens is pensive, sitting on an upturned fuel can looking out to sea. “Our lives are based on ice,” he says. “Without it we can’t live, we can’t eat. Ten years ago the ice was six feet thick. When the ice was thick, nothing bothered us when it was cold like this. Now the ice is so thin, just a little wind wave breaks it. It has been like this for the last three years.”

We sleep in white tents at the shore. When we wake, it’s hard to know if it is morning or evening. “We are lost,” I say, but it doesn’t matter. There are larger powers at work here: Sila rules.

On the vernal equinox a front pushes in fast. “We have to go now before the storm hits us,” the hunters say. Sleds are loaded hastily as wind gusts increase. The men kneel on flapping caribou skins and pull the lash ropes tight. The dogs are wild eyed. The moment the lines are hooked to the sleds, they roar off. The hunters make flying leaps toward the moving sleds, just barely making it aboard.

For days we travel south along the mountainous coast. Out on the frozen sea the world is made of wind-driven drifts and upended, see-through pieces of ice. Ocean currents have squeezed ice into a chaotic labyrinth. At an impasse the dogs moan and cry. Jens stands up on the sled, surveying the scene, then lifts and turns the front sled runners. We bump through a narrow passage, pulling our legs up to our chests to squeeze through.

A hard wind makes it too cold to stop for tea. Behind us is a bank of clouds layered black and white. Ice fog and blowing snow shroud the horizon. A single pointed mountain sticks up through the fog.
“Amaumak,”
Mamarut yells over to Jens’s sled, making a cupping gesture to indicate a breast because that’s what the word means. We stop and hack off a piece of glacier ice from a stranded floe, then continue on. Jens points to something buried in snow. The dogs clamber up a steep hill to it. Then I see: a tiny hut covered in snow, with only a bit of roof and part of one window visible.

We slide off the high loads on the sleds, and for a moment the wind stops. The only thing alive is ice, moaning and cracking in tympanic reports. Cold is the thing. It is a kind of night, a wall that isolates us from the rest of the living world. Two ravens tumble end over end as if their mock fall to earth might shatter the clouds and let in more sun. We check a thermometer: 59 degrees below zero. “Issiktuq”—cold—Jens says, laughing as the wind kicks up again.

The entry to the hut is dug out, dogs are unharnessed, and lash ropes untied. My fingers don’t work. I help unload sleds using my wrists. Always observant, Jens quietly leads me into the hut, lights a Primus stove for heat, and gently holds my hands. “Frostbite comes quickly, and you don’t know it. It’s like a bad dream, a ghost putting its hands on you,” he says. Windows rattle. A hunk of walrus is hung from the ceiling. When it begins thawing, large pieces are cut off and fed to the dogs.

The dogs always come first, and the humans eat what’s left. Without dogs, it would be impossible to get home. A battered tin pot is put on the single burner and stuffed with pieces of ice. They crack and pop and melt. In the Arctic we are always thirsty—it’s too cold to carry water with us, and living on the frozen sea, there is little potable water. We make herb tea quickly, then Gedeon puts meat in the remaining water to boil. Jens and Mamarut mend broken harpoon shafts. Dinner is walrus-heart soup.

Each hunter has his specialty. Jens’s is dogs. When most of the dogs in Qaanaaq died from distemper in 1988, he was selected to choose and buy 250 young dogs from around Greenland and bring them back to town. “Dogs and humans have been together for at least 20,000 years,” he says. “Dogs came with Arctic people from Siberia and were first used here by the Saqqaq culture to carry loads. When the Thule people came, around
A.D
. 900, the dogs were used to pull sleds, as they do today. We haven’t advanced much, have we?” Laughter.

Our stomachs are full and heat spreads throughout the tiny cabin. Stories are told. Mamarut tells of being lost with his wife, Tecummeq, who is a great-granddaughter of Robert Peary. “We were out on the ice near Moriusaq and there was a whiteout. We were lost. I kept looking at my dogs to see which way they were looking. I let them go where they wanted. They can smell danger—open water or a polar bear—so it was best to let them find their way. They headed out, and then I saw there was an opening by an iceberg that I recognized. I knew where I was then. The dogs took me to an iceberg that I knew so I could find my way home.”

We spend three days waiting out weather in a 14-foot-by-16-foot hut, all eight of us squeezed in tight. Aleqa Hammond, who has joined us as a translator, builds a “women’s igloo”—an ice wall for bathroom privacy on one side of the hut, with a niche to hold our mittens for quick retrieval, since exposure of the skin for more than a minute results in frostbite.

We pass tins of salve and a mirror to doctor frostbitten noses and cheeks. With tweezers Jens plucks the sparse hairs from his face because, he tells me, they gather frost. Mamarut and his younger brother Gedeon sharpen knives. We eat mataaq, dipping the knives in salt first, then scoring the fat just under the walrus skin. This is the source of vitamin C and all other minerals necessary to sustain human life. “It is our orange and lemon,” Gedeon says with a sly smile.

Arctic-hare socks and sealskin kamiks are dried, boiled walrus, which tastes like salty pot roast, is eaten. The men beg Aleqa to tell ghost stories and she does until the sound of snoring begins, then we sleep.

Morning. Windy and minus 50 degrees plus windchill. Mamarut peers out the one window at Breast Mountain: “Only the nipple shows,” he says smiling. One of the great hunters of Qaanaaq, Mamarut is always giving credit to his teacher: the polar bear. “A man can’t walk on thin ice, but a polar bear can. We learned how to cross thin ice from nanoq. They lie flat out on the ice to distribute their weight. That’s what we do too.”

In the evening the dogs are fed. The hut and sleds are blasted white. Jens feeds his dogs first, then Mamarut, then Gedeon, then Tupiassi—the order tacitly reflecting the respect assigned to the hunters. “Our dogs are like their owners,” Jens says. “They love to eat. They are like running stomachs!”

Mamarut: “I think I just heard my lead dog say thank you.”

With close to 60 dogs here, eight of us, and the extreme cold, almost a third of the walrus has been consumed. We’ll soon run out of food. It is the first day of spring.

MARCH 22. Warmer today. Up to minus 35 degrees. The sky is blank and the sun is an ashen orb shrouded by ice fog. Blowing snow stacks up on the dogs and sleds, half-burying them. The hunters turn their sleds upside down and work on the runners. Rough ice and hikuliaq, first-year ice that is salty, is hard on everything—on the soles of kamiks as well as sled runners.

Later, Mamarut repairs his kamiks with a thick steel needle, narwhal-sinew thread, and a thimble made of sealskin. We eat a late night snack of what Aleqa calls swim feet—walrus flippers that are slightly gelatinous and taste of mushrooms and red meat—then the room goes silent. Jens sits at the edge of the sleeping platform and the others turn to him in a quiet reverence. He begins a story, a special one about the polar bear spirit: