In the Empire of Ice (25 page)

Qaanaaq, population 648, appears with its rows of houses perched on a hill. There’s shore-fast ice, but off its two signature islands, Kiatak and Qeqertarsuaq (Herbert Island), the ice is torn. It lies in long threads like strands of hair. The North Pole, awash in open leads and floating drift ice during summer months, is only 700 miles away. Out in the strait there’s a sprawl of calved ice, blocks and bergs that look like dumped furniture. This is a Greenland I no longer recognize.

I CAN’T HELP IT. I dance for joy because I’m in my Greenland “home” again. In the one-room airport I’m greeted by Hans Jensen, who owns Qaanaaq’s small hotel. All year he has been sending me sea-ice data sheets and satellite images of the coast of Qaanaaq. “The ice is starting to break all the time now,” he says, loading my duffle bags in what used to be Qaanaaq’s only automobile. Then I see someone whose bearlike walk gives him away. It’s Jens Danielsen.

“Hello,” I say. “Hello,” he replies, but his eyes dart with shyness. He’s tall, wears glasses, and speaks with a regal voice. He has just been elected mayor of Qaanaaq. We stand at the edge of the airport and look out at a crumpled wall of brash ice. Dogs are staked out on the ice-strewn beach. Sea smoke rises in curling waves from open water beyond.

“The current directions are changing,” Jens says softly. “Last year there were icebergs from Qaanaaq all the way to Herbert Island. You know how we always hunted on good ice in May? Now it is often not possible because the heavy ice pack in the north that used to protect the ice here is gone. Now there’s nothing for the new ice to hang on to.

“The big ice from the north brought walrus. Right now is the time when people went to hunt for them. When the first sun came on February 17th, we always hunted walrus at the ice edge at the very tip of Kiatak. Now we can’t get out there at all.”

The Qaanaaq Hotel is a five-room guesthouse in the top row of houses, with a beautiful view of the islands looking west toward Ellesmere Island. The rooms are small and simple, Danish-style. I slip into my beloved polar bear pants, tighten the suspenders, pull on the sheepskin inner boot and the sealskin kamiks, and carry my anorak and mittens to the shore, where Jens’s brothers-in-law, Mamarut, Mikele, and Gedeon, are harnessing their dogs. A blue bruise hovers over open water. For months we had been planning to go out on the ice, and they’d said to come in February, when it would be cold and the ice would be good. But it’s warmer here than the eastern United States was when I left, despite the 36-degree difference in latitude.

I walk the icy paths around town, past Rasmussen’s house, now a small museum, past the kommune offices where Jens is in charge, and the grocery store, now ten times bigger than it was when I first came here in the 1990s. I peek into the woodworking shop; a few men are building new dogsleds. At the shore, in front of the old, one-room bachelor houses, their dogs are staked out, waiting to go to work.

Mamarut is untangling trace lines. Instead of tying the dogs two by two, Greenlanders use a fan hitch, so they fan out in front of the sled, pulling when they want, tucking under the lines, and going to the back when they need to rest.

“We should be hunting walrus now,” he says ruefully. “Walrus is critical. With it we can feed our dogs and our families. But we cannot go south, we cannot go to the islands, we cannot go north,” he says looking out at the sea. He’s the strongest hunter of the family, a man who hunts every day. To be townbound is particularly hard for him.

“I try to get some food every day. Now I never know when I’ll have anything. It could happen that soon we will have to reduce the number of dogs. Yes, some hunters are already shooting them because there is no longer enough food.” He pulls his sealskin ear warmer down low. He has a moon face blotched by frostbite and nicked by scars; his dark eyes are like two smaller rounds, tiny moons in eclipse. One eye wanders. With it I imagine he’s able to predict weather and the location of marine mammals under the ice.

We climb on the sled, our legs hanging over one side, ankles crossed. To the west the tail end of Herbert Island is lost in snow flurries. Close to shore the white floor is so thin it cracks as we cross. Mamarut snaps the whip above the dogs’ heads.
“Huquok,”
he yells. “Go faster.” The dogs zigzag through a labyrinth of brash ice, and out where the way should be hard and flat, moats of open water jiggle ice pans and a biting wind takes hold.

The ice is so bad we cannot go north. Instead, we go around the bend into the frozen fjord to a hut the brothers have skidded out onto the ice. Normally, they go far and stay out a month at a time. Now they are jigging for halibut an easy walk from town. In 1998 the spring ice between Qaanaaq and Ellesmere Island was solid. Just nine years later, good sea ice is becoming a rarity. “The ice used to be deeper than my body,” Mamarut says. “Now it’s only seven inches thick. Twice the fjord ice at Siorapaluk has gone out completely and refrozen. We’ve not seen it do that before.”

Mamarut’s hut is warm, the
illeq,
the sleeping platform, lined with caribou skins. A box-size generator sits on a shelf. I ask him what it’s for. Smiling, he points to a pointed lightbulb, the kind used for a chandelier. A palm-in-the-hand–size radio plays Greenlandic country music.

The topo map I’ve carried with me since 1993 is spread on the table, and Mamarut traces the lines we’ve drawn on the map over the years, indicating the ice edge in spring from year to year. It is a lane of open water where walruses can be harpooned. Now the ice edge is so close to town there’s almost no use marking it. “There’s really no ice edge at all,” Mamarut says. “It’s just the end line of the screw ice.”

Outside Gedeon and Mikele open two fishing holes with an iron rod and skim off the ice floating on top. Mamarut gets on his hands and knees and looks down inside. “You never know, there might be a seal swimming by,” he says smiling. He’s trying to be cheerful, but I know he’s not. He stands up and looks around with the innocent face of a young boy. “We’ve only been getting halibut these days. No seals, no walrus.”

The three brothers unspool their long lines down into the fjord’s dark water. “They say fish is good, but we don’t like it. It’s not strong food. We prefer eating seal,” Mamarut says. Because the sea ice is so bad, he will be going by dogsled up and over the edge of the ice cap to hunt caribou and musk oxen. It takes enormous strength and endurance to make such a trip and he’s almost the only one to do it. He shows us on the map the arduous route he will take: up a long valley south of Thule Air Base, and the mountains above Bowdoin Fjord. “There were never musk oxen and caribou here,” Mamarut says. “Now the herds pass behind town. The herd is increasing in size. That’s because of global warming. There’s more vegetation. It used to be only rock and ice. But for now, until spring, we will get fish. That’s the only food we have.”

The wind rises. It shears off the top of the mountains, pushing snow off the ice sheet. Last week, Gedeon, the youngest of the brothers, got caught in a terrible blizzard. He’s strong, lithe, and eager—too eager to be out on unsafe ice, his quiet older brother Mikele says. “We were hunting out on the ice by Kiatak,” Gedeon explains. “A storm came in fast and brought much snow. We’re not used to deep snow. It’s usually too cold at this time of year. The ice was thin. It’s always thin now, so you just go out on it, you have to.”

The wind blew hard suddenly and the ice came apart. Gedeon was on one piece of drift ice and his friend on the other. The ice started moving fast, going out beyond the islands, toward Canada. When the ice began to fall apart, Gedeon’s friend cut his dogs loose and the sled went down into the water. “He was holding his dogs—there were 12 of them. Then they went down too and he was standing alone, going out to sea,” Gedeon says quietly, no expression on his face.

“My ice was going fast too,” he says. “Dissolving at the edges. I’d cut my dogs loose, too. They were scared. They lay down flat. More ice broke off and took my sled. I had my new cell phone,” he says, suddenly smiling. “Sometimes these modern things are good. It only works if you can see the village, but I could still see the buildings at the shore, so I called my wife. Marta got help. I waited. I didn’t think we would live. But a helicopter came from Thule Air Base. They got my friend first, then they hauled my dogs up, and me. Right then, the ice I’d been on cracked apart and disappeared.”

Storms that bring 12 feet of snow in 12 hours are almost unknown here. Qaanaaq was buried. It was hard for Gedeon to find his way around. The female dogs with puppies suffocated because snow blew into their doghouses. The dogs staked out on the ice were half-buried, but they dug themselves out. Some of the sleds blew away and crashed on the rough ice. People were stuck inside their houses and couldn’t get their doors open. Other hunters who were out on the ice found shelter in huts here and there along the mainland coast and on Herbert Island. “They were lucky to be able to get inside. Otherwise they would have been blown away.”

We linger in twilight at the fishing holes. The hut is cozy, and despite the disappointment over the ice, the hunters prefer the hut to a house in town. As we prepare to leave, Gedeon notices that Qav, an old man at a camp close by, is having trouble untangling his fishing lines, and we walk across the ice to help. Qav travels to the ice on his child-size sled pulled by a single dog. “He’s 93 years old but he comes out fishing every day. He lives in the Elder House and keeps everyone supplied with halibut,” Mamarut tells me. Providing food and sharing it is still an essential aspect of Inuit culture, and Qav has not lost track of his obligations.

He’s delighted to see us and immediately tells a story: “I used to go on long trips on the ice. Way north past Washington Land, then over to Ellesmere Island and down the coast of Baffin Land. I was gone for months and months, but I always had food. Finally, they gave me a two-way radio. I had to call on certain days, so they wouldn’t come looking for me in an airplane. I don’t know why they worried. I was always fine. Now it’s very different from when I was a hunter. Now the ice is dangerous. I’m old, but I still come here to get halibut every day for the Elder House. Yes, I still provide the food we like to eat every day.”

Returning to town, the sled bumps hard. The ice is a gong, and we are hitting it. As the dogs race ahead through winding shore ice, we pull in our arms and legs and hang on tight as we bang against pitched-up slabs and broken floors that once lay flat. An ecosystem in collapse looks like this: all rupture and rattle, all scattered fragments wrenched from their ancient foundation, all translucent bits of ice drowning. We are, each of us, a whole within a whole, but the thread that holds our disparate parts in some cockeyed union has pulled out.

We unpack the sled in the dark in a mutual state of despair. A month from now the walruses, belugas, narwhal will be moving north, and female polar bears will emerge from their snow caves with their young. Ringed seals and bearded seals will haul out on the ice. Faithful to their birthing sites, their white-fur young will stay hidden on a ledge of ice beneath the snow. Walruses will use drift ice and shore ice to make their shallow dives for shellfish, and polar bears will ride the ice like a taxi, as spring winds push and pull the floes south and north, close to shore and away. Narwhal will lift their long, twisted teeth to test the weather and eventually swim in pods of ten or twelve to the openings of ten-mile-wide fjords, where they will mate and calve.

Mamarut, Gedeon, Mikele, and Jens will head out on dogsleds with their kayaks tied on the sides in an ice age amphibious brigade. Culture is as bound up in biological diversity as biology is embedded in culture. Culture is “a product of biology,” biologist E. O. Wilson has written. When we lose an ecosystem we are losing our thumbprint uniqueness, our way of knowing the world and our strategies for survival. This time, not as simple as a meteorite crash that ended many lives, we are willing our own extinction.

Mamarut says we will not be able to go out hunting at all this week. “The ice is too thin,” he says. He looks down the coast. “That trip we took in 2004, down to Moriusaq and Saunders Island to find walrus—we could never do that trip again. That’s how bad the ice is now, and we thought it was bad then.”

QAANAAQ. 1998. I’ve been happily stranded in town for two weeks because of weather. Today there’s a whiteout. A handsome older woman named Sophie rescues me from a snowbank, invites me into her small house, lights a candle, gives me tea. She grew up in Dundas village, where Knud Rasmussen and his fellow Danish explorer Peter Freuchen had lived. In her younger days, Sophie was a shaman’s apprentice, a woman who made songs and played a hand drum. She knew the stories about Sedna, the goddess of the sea, who released animals to be hunted only if humans had behaved. She knew the incest story of the sun and moon and tales of orphans who, because of their ill treatment, became wise.

She knew how to use a ptarmigan head as a weather vane: The head was cut off and the beak turned in the direction of the prevailing wind. She knew the history of her own civilization and its slow destruction by outsiders, people who did not understand the path of ice. As soon as Arctic people were moved off the ice, rock, dirt, and tundra and into houses and towns, their many gods were reduced to one, “as if they were trying to make us feel lonely in the world where we had always lived,” she says.

In 1721 Hans Egede, a Lutheran from Scandinavia, arrived in West Greenland—far to the south of present-day Qaanaaq—to introduce Christianity and ban the rituals of local shamans. By the time Sophie was a young woman in the 1940s and ’50s, the missionaries and teachers had penetrated the northwest coast of Greenland all the way up to Thule. “They made us stop singing, but we did it anyway. Before they came, the shamans held winter séances, even in modern times,” Sophie says. “They were wrapped up tight, like mummies, and went under the ice to comb Sedna’s hair. That’s where the seals came from. They came from her, from way under the ice. They came up for air.”