In the Empire of Ice (30 page)

Long clouds arrow up the fjord like harpoon shafts. There are no whales. Another day goes by, and another. Clouds stream by in blustery gasps. A boat comes in, anchoring in front of our camp. It’s a hunter from Qaanaaq with his little girl. No one goes down to the shore to greet him. He comes into our camp bearing gifts of town food, then leaves the child with us, and motors up the fjord alone.

“He always goes by himself,” Jens says, coolly. “What he just did is wrong. He’s ruining the hunting by sailing up the fjord in front of us. He doesn’t share. He always tries to be first, but usually he doesn’t get anything. You can’t be a hunter and live here alone. We don’t believe in living that way. We do as our ancestors did, working and living together. If he got in trouble out in the fjord, no one would help him.” Harsh words from a gentle man.

The sun makes a rare appearance at 3 a.m. Kayaks are pulled to the water and push into the silver mirror. A narwhal blows in front of camp. Gedeon and Mamarut move quickly toward it. Water flies off their paddles in wild strings of glass and gold. The water looks solid but isn’t. Impermanence is the thing up here, ice becoming water and water becoming ice. Where light falls a certain way, the kayaks disappear altogether and the hunters float, half water, half men.

Five hours pass. Collapsing icebergs break. The sun lifts above serrated pink clouds. Wind ripples water like a hand crushing a page from a book. The foredeck of Mamarut’s kayak turns the color of rust, as if in one day it had aged. There have been no narwhal, but time is not of the essence. “We’ve been drinking 20,000-year-old glacier water all our lives,” Tecummeq says. “What’s a few more hours?”

Nights are light blasted and so are the days.

All evening the children have been playing, catching small fish with their hands and pulling homemade toy sleds with strings up and down the shore. Just as they finally tire and go to bed, the sun completes its elliptical loop around the northern end of the sky and moves into the east until the water goes to glass and morning becomes day.

Under a warm sun, ice is breaking. Marta wakes Gedeon. She thinks she hears whales, but it’s Mamarut making the noise by curling the sides of his tongue and blowing out hard. “Maybe that will make the narwhal come,” he says. Gedeon pokes his head out of the tent and scans the water. Icebergs that have been pushed by wind to the far side of the fjord glisten in the sunlight. Breaking ice makes a banging sound. Mamarut puts his lips to my ear, “Qilalugaq, qilalugaq,” he whispers, laughing and lunging like a narwhal. Marta gives him a look but says nothing. Again Mamarut curls his tongue and blows. This time, the narwhal come.

Gedeon is so fast he’s on the water before I can find him. “He didn’t even put his kamiks on,” his wife tells me. He’s barefoot and mittenless and the air temperature is hovering at 32 degrees.

Then I see him. Bent all the way down on the kayak’s foredeck and hanging onto a piece of drift ice, he’s motionless, waiting, unperturbed. An hour goes by. He hasn’t moved. The narwhal are coming his way.

Turbulent water. Deep breathing. The pod passes. Gedeon bursts forward, his shoulders windmilling. He’s in the middle of the whales now, the water so roiled it’s hard to see the low-riding craft as the animals toss and dive. A narwhal rises up in front of Gedeon’s kayak, the tusk pointing skyward. Gedeon throws the harpoon, then reaches back and tips the float into the water.
“Nauliqigaa!”
Marta cries out—he’s harpooned a whale!

Red, bloodied water and a bobbing float. Mamarut appears. He’s been on his way all this time. Paddling in close, he rises up, straight-backed, and throws the second harpoon.

The animal is towed toward shore. The small waves are red with blood. Gedeon stands knee-deep in the water, waiting for the incoming tide to float the narwhal in. He cuts a patch of skin and fat off the back of the whale and chews on it, then brings another piece of mataaq to his wife, scores the fat, garnishes it with soy sauce and wasabi, and shares it with the others.

The men have been sharpening their knives. Everyone helps. The head is cut off and the long tusk removed. Gedeon washes it in the fjord, and it comes out white. The narwhal was female, and she was lactating. That means her calf will probably die unless another whale adopts it. When Jens sees that I’m upset he says, “We cannot see in the water who is male and female, who has a calf and who doesn’t. Now we know that’s why she struggled so hard.” There’s a pause and he begins smiling: “Are you going to cry again?” He’s not being irreverent, he’s teasing me, remembering the time I cried during a polar bear hunt. “You are still like my grandson was eight years ago!”

After a dinner of rice and narwhal Jens sits pensively. Two years ago his kayak flipped over, trapping him underwater, and he almost drowned. He says he feels fear now, whenever he gets into his boat. “Sometimes I just sit in it and hang onto the side. I can’t go any further.” The others listen quietly. Fear and failure are treated with as much respect as bravery and hunting success. He continues: “The elders tell us not to cross danger, to respect our fear, because it may be the thing that saves our lives. Even this morning I felt it in my chest when we went out. I get dizzy and can’t tell where I am.”

SUNDAY. We pile into Jens’s skiff and motor over to Qeqertat, a tiny subsistence village perched on a mound of rock ten miles across the fjord. It’s the only village for 50 miles. At the small inlet where we tie up, there’s a stone-and-turf house, its roof studded with caribou antlers and narwhal skulls. Seal blood stains the boat ramp. Kayaks are stacked on drying racks hung with a fringe of narwhal jerky and walrus meat gone dark from the sun.

Jens takes me over the crest of a hill to see something. I look down: Hundreds of sled dogs are tethered in a small valley. Jens smiles and makes the motion for going out on the ice with them. “Soon, it will be winter again,” he says, “And then you and I will be on the ice, where we are happy.”

Later we join the others and stroll through the tiny village. It’s here that they still remember how to make traditional string figures of Greenland’s animals—a wintertime activity that has delighted Inuit children for thousands of years. Narwhal skulls crown every roof. An elegant older woman in black sealskin kamiks greets us. I’d met her the year before in the village of Siorapaluk, north of Qaanaaq. She’s tiny and alert, with sparkling eyes. “I’m here in the summer and there in the winter,” she tells me. Her name, Pallunuaq, means “a polar bear crawling on all fours to keep from going through thin ice.”

We sit down with her at the shore in the sun. She says that at 73 her eyes are going, but when she was young she could manage anything. She was born here and says it was always a place of good hunting. “But all the people I grew up with are dead. They’re all gone. Missing them makes me feel I want to go with them. It’s hard.”

When I ask how it was here when she was growing up, she says that the animals were fatter then and didn’t have to swim as far because there was nothing to scare them, no motorboat noise.

“Our houses were made of stone and turf and heated with narwhal oil. They were warm and nice. We built the walls thick. We were never cold. Everyone had a blubber lamp burning. Ours was a foot wide, and we’d make the flame go high. If my lamp went out, I took the light from a neighbor. There was always someone taking care of the lamps.”

Her father hunted every day. When he came back, she’d scrape and dry the skins, so they were ready to use for clothing. From early spring until late September they lived in tents, then they built their winter sod houses. “Our walls were lined with sealskins—not that crap we have today. Life was very nice then.

“We traveled by dogsled or kayak. My mother and I sewed the tents. That way we always had a place to live. Life was portable. Everyone had a task. Even the children. It was all skins. No cloth. There was a lot to do. I’ve sewed skins so much that my fingers are shaped funny. See, they are tapered. They hurt, and sometimes I wish I could cut them off. I started sewing when I was five, and I still sew all my clothes, mittens, and kamiks.”

She remembers that her father was a good hunter and they always had meat. “But sometimes the tents fell over in storms. If a whiteout lasted for days, it was not easy, but it was always worth living. We had a good life.”

She had never seen a shop until the small one was built here in Qeqertat. “We had only what we caught or could find. We liked best the mataaq. It is the best food I know. I’m not keen on things we get in the shops. There have been many changes in my life. That’s OK. But the worst one was alcohol. It’s the worst thing that was brought to our world. We could do nicely without it.”

Pallunuaq met her husband when he came to Qeqertat after his forced relocation when Thule Air Base was being built in 1953. “The Americans wanted our land and they threw us out. We had nothing to say about it. My husband’s mother arrived here with three small children in September when winter had already begun. No one was given a house. They made it through to summer in a tent. They were strong.”

Her father told her she would make a good wife and to choose the best man around. “I was happy with the one I chose. We had eight children. The first ones, I gave birth to them alone in a tent. The rest were born with a midwife. They nursed me until I had no breasts left.” She points to her flat chest. “I nursed each one of them until they were two.”

Winters were spent sewing and dancing. “We had a gramophone, and we sharpened the needle like we do an ulu [woman’s knife]. We went to Imina’s house because it was biggest. There we danced the polka until we were dizzy; we danced the dark time away.”

She says she heard many stories of shamans from her father. The white men forbade them to tell the stories, but the families told them anyway. “Once, my father was on a frozen lake looking for a snowy owl when he felt something near him. He turned and saw a polar bear down on his elbows like a human. He couldn’t shoot it, and the bear didn’t attack him. My father said the bear had just wanted to come near.”

Pallunuaq’s sons all grew up to be hunters, except one. They go north of Siorapaluk to hunt polar bears. “Things have changed a lot, but if you want to live up here, you can’t manage without being a hunter. That’s why I don’t think hunting traditions will disappear. But I know humans are changing the world. They don’t respect things as they should. When things go bad, that’s the reason why. I heard they are even changing the weather.”

MID-AUGUST. Ravens tumble, churning the air into a cooler season. For the first time since we arrived in July, the all-night light has begun to dim. I’m huddled on the deck of Jens’s red boat coming down from the head of the long fjord. It’s well below freezing. We thread our way between icebergs. I tap Jens on the shoulder and point. The sky has already begun to grow dark, and for the first time since April, we can see a new moon.

All week, Jens has been moody, worried about his dogs, which have summered on Herbert Island. “I don’t think anyone has fed them this week,” he says. As we round the corner and head north, we can see a red ship anchored in front of Qaanaaq’s warehouses. It is the once-a-year supply ship from Denmark.

“Some years the ice was too thick and they had to turn around,” Jens tells me. “Now the ice is not coming in early anymore, so we get things for the store, but we need ice more.”

Town seems ridiculously large and noisy. We’ve been gone a long time. I notice that some people are drunk. Why? I ask Hans, who also works as one of the town’s policemen. “People are drinking more than they used to here. Before, we had more murders and suicides. Now, it is not about anything. Maybe just forgetting,” he says.

After a short sleep and something to eat, we head to Herbert Island. It’s time to bring Jens’s sled dogs home. Gedeon passes us in his kayak. He’s seen orcas at the mouth of the fjord. “They scare the narwhal toward shore, so maybe I can get another one there,” he says. Jens smiles. He’s happy just to be seeing his dogs again. “In six weeks or so the ice will spread out between Qaanaaq and Herbert Island and up north to Siorapaluk,” he says. Despite the bad ice last spring, he’s still hopeful. We putt-putt toward the island. The sea is choppy and the empty dinghy towed behind his boat bounces hard.

Green meadows with hummocky grass and small ponds greet us. This is Herbert Island, also known as Qeqertarsuaq. Once it had a thriving village. Now the houses are deserted, except for one still used in summer by a Qaanaaq couple. We clamber up ice-clad rocks. Jens calls to the dogs. He’s laughing now because he can see them lunging and leaping, yowling with joy. There’s a calm happiness in his eyes.

Four at a time, he leads them down to the skiff. Or rather, they pull him. They know the routine and jump into the small boat. “Be good now, please don’t embarrass me,” he says, going back up the hill to get four more, leaving me to mind them.

When the skiff is crammed full with not an inch to spare, we head out. All 15 dogs ride happily. This isn’t their first time crossing a rough channel. After a while all fall asleep but one, and he rests his chin on the gunwale, watching the water.

Though the distance appears short, the trip takes four hours. As we approach Qaanaaq, the dogs sit up and begin howling. Ilaitsuk, Jens’s wife, waits at the shore. “By the time the ice begins to come back, their coats will be thick,” Jens says, looking at the dogs with a calm happiness in his eyes. The kayak, the open sea, and lunging pods of narwhal are Gedeon’s realm. For Jens, it’s these dogs and traveling on the sea ice. A wing of spray flies over the animals’ heads as we approach. They know that winter is on the way. Jens makes the gesture of snapping the whip, then moves his hands laterally, indicating the spread of ice.

When Jens whistles, the dogs look around expectantly. Ilaitsuk is waiting at water’s edge. It’s almost dark and the moon is out. We drop anchor and row the dinghy full of dogs ashore.

2007. It’s late February and I’m in Qaanaaq. I climb the hill behind Hans and Birthe’s guesthouse in the evening. Lagoons of open water are threaded with melting sea ice. I see water sky—mist unfurling like incoming waves from areas of open water and lifting into the sky. Farther south there’s open water all the way to Moriusaq and Savissivik, and looking north toward Siorapaluk, open leads are like black sores.