In the Empire of Ice (28 page)

“When I was a boy, my father went out from Moriusaq and saw the track of a polar bear. He followed it and finally got very close to the bear. His chance to shoot came, but just then the polar bear turned and looked at him. The bear had a human face and was smiling at my father and saying, ‘Take me, I’m yours.’ The dogs were scared and ran away. My father stood there. He couldn’t shoot. He let the bear go. If a person has special talents, animals will come and ask to be your spiritual helper. You are only asked once by nanoq. But my father denied him and ran away. He had his chance to get the powers. After that, I was afraid of having to meet that kind of polar bear.”

March 23. The Breast casts a long shadow over the frozen sea, and a city of icebergs carries morning light on its shoulders. The ice was pink; now it is dull white, an Arctic sponge sopping up walrus blood. The plan is to go south to the village of Moriusaq, then out to the ice edge at “Walrus El Dorado”—two tiny islands near Saunders Island—because with this extreme cold, they say, there will be a solid ice edge out there.

We wait in the hut until the wind dies down. The hunters line up on the illeq and listen reverently as Jens continues his polar bear story:

“One time when we were hunting at Walrus El Dorado, I went up on the land to look out for the ice edge. Suddenly, I began to feel as if there was a polar bear nearby. I had no gun and the dogs were at the bottom of the hill. I could hear the bear breathing. It was very close, so close I thought I wouldn’t be able to get away from him. I ran down the hill to the dogs and could hear steps behind me. When I got to the dogs, they were acting wild, so I cut them loose and they went running up the hill to find the bear. We got our guns and followed them. We searched, but there were no tracks. Then, suddenly, the bear appeared. It had a human face like the one my father saw. I didn’t know what to do. Then, like my father, I said ‘No’ to it. I had to. I didn’t know what would become of me if I had gone with it, and I had a family to take care of. I was afraid it would kill me. Now, especially when the weather is changing, I sometimes feel it come near.”

The spirit world of the Greenlanders was sent underground by Scandinavian missionaries, who arrived in west Greenland in 1721. But if the polar bear spirit is still strong, is it searching for us? I ask Jens. He nods yes. Would the world be different if we had listened?

All is ready. Sleds are loaded, whips unfurled, lash lines pulled tight. As soon as the dogs are hitched up, we sit quickly and career off the hill through snow-dusted cubes of turquoise—pressure ice squeezed by wind waves at the shore—and glide out onto the Inuit highway, made of sea ice and breathing holes.

Our single track across the ice up to the hut has been demolished by drifting snow. Now the track is a broken wave of rubble. We pick our way through the ruined ice south toward Moriusaq, population 21, where Jens and Mamarut were born and grew up and where Mamarut’s wife, Tecummeq, teaches school.

To be traveling again feels good, no matter how harsh the conditions. Just before we bounce up and over a huge piece of ice, Jens clamps his leg down over mine as I grab for his shoulder. The sled tilts almost vertically, and we are laughing. I look back. Mamarut has fallen off his sled. He runs behind it, then alongside, flinging himself on, belly down.

Out on the frozen expanse the dogs run fast. They have walrus in their bellies, and they are wild. Wind drills frigid air into our flesh, burning our faces in a long strip, but I’m warm inside my sealskin mittens, polar bear pants, and kamiks. Without them, we couldn’t survive.

As we reach Moriusaq, another storm comes. The villagers emerge to greet us and help unload. In Tecummeq’s spacious house, water has been heated for Aleqa and me to bathe. Tecummeq’s school has two students. Not long ago she says she didn’t need a job because she went hunting with Mamarut. “I was always with him on polar bear and walrus hunts. That’s where I’m happy, that’s where I belong. I would like to quit this job and go with him but we need some money. My husband cannot make money from the extra skins because the world market won’t allow us to sell them. To live in town is like prison.”

We wait out the storm. For dinner, polar bear meat is served, and there is a quiet reverence as it is eaten. The men go outside and build a small igloo for fun. Mamarut trains Tupiassi’s dogs to behave in front of a polar bear. Tecummeq and Aleqa make sealskin purses. I wash my long hair and braid it again.

The temperature has risen abruptly. When we look out the window we see a
puikkarneq
—a mirage that blunt-cuts the top of the icebergs. Two hunters, just back from Saunders Island, report that the ice is breaking up rapidly, that they just barely made it home, so the much anticipated walrus hunt is called off. A meeting is held to decide what to do. “If we go out now and the ice breaks up, we might be able to ride a piece of drift ice until the winds shifts and it drifts back, but if it doesn’t, then we’re in trouble,” Mamarut says. It’s decided to go north again—a one-week trip to Siorapaluk or out to the island of Kiatak. We’re trying to retrace our steps in search of better ice.

SUN DOG. Water glitter. Sun-glazed icebergs. The dogs are running fast. Trace lines catch on rough ice. Dogs are dragged, lines are snapped, dogs get on their feet in the chaos and keep trotting. We thread our way through open leads.
Hikuliak,
new ice, is all broken, and blown snow is overlapping like fish scales. Bits of ice are strewn about like cut crystals. The ice along the coast on which we traveled three days ago is gone.

An island of gray mist hangs in the air. Open water extends all the way to Ellesmere Island. We spend the night in the hut next to Breast Mountain again. In the morning we’ll have to go up and over a part of the ice cap to get north up the coast. For the first time the hunters realize that the ice conditions we’re experiencing aren’t anomalous but have become the norm, yet they can’t yet conceive of a world without ice.

“These last couple of years we have been wondering why the pack ice from Canada-side didn’t come,” Jens says. “It always came every summer, but the last two years it hasn’t been there. We wonder what has happened to our ice. Even the ocean current has changed—it’s not just that the ice isn’t there, but the sea is acting differently. If there is no ice, that will be very hard for us. Even in the summer it has changed. The sea is not calm and we have lots of rain. There are rivers coming down the mountains and through our town. We never really had rain.”

Another night at the hut and the wind howls. Mamarut makes a new whip from a bearded-seal hide. It is a long, thin strip, thinner at the end. “I want to be tough going up the inland ice,” he says, laughing. In the afternoon we load up and cross the narrow fjord behind the hut. The Greenland ice sheet is before us. The hunters pick a smooth route and we start climbing.

Partway up the ice cliff lobes of gray-blue ice bulge out, cracked and mortared with snow. Deep drifts lie sideways like collapsed sails. Crevasses gape. At one point I jump off the sled to push from behind, but Jens yells at me angrily to get back on. Near one summit we enter a no-life zone, a soundless verticality—not quietude, but noiseless noise, a frigid din.

This is the mother ice, the center of emptiness, the umbilicus where Sila was born. It is a remnant of the last ice age, which ended 11,500 years ago and still covers 82 percent of the island. The ice slides off the mountainous coast like white frosting, feeding hundreds of outlet glaciers whose long tongues float out on Davis Strait, Smith Sound, and the Arctic Sea. From the sea ice below I’ve heard dry summit music: wind blowing snow across ice.

I once thought of the ice cap as an unblinking jewel light, unscathed and invulnerable. Now the glaciers are wounds with ablating flanks, broken knees, and long tongues. If the entire ice cap melts, it will have added 23 feet of fresh water to the ocean systems; it is melting at almost 8,500 cubic feet per year. If the glaciers retreat far enough, seawater intrusions will pry off the ice of its bed and the whole thing will collapse—a huge watery wound mixing with stinging salt.

We bump over translucent patches of ice that are crosshatched and grooved with dirt. Crevasses are sun-combed. One gaping ravine runs to the left of the sled, and at one point we slide perilously close. The dogs struggle: Our sled weighs between 800 and 1,000 pounds. The dogs use their claws like crampons to gain altitude.

Up and up we go, one false summit giving way to another, the dogs entering a vertical valley where long, elegant shadows cross our path, turning the world blue. Ahead an extruded hunk of ice pushes out of a wind-blasted drift, like a walrus breaking though ice, Jens says. On the other side, a series of ice ridges fall away. At the top we cruise through a snow-covered bowl, fly over a cornice, and “catch air,” thumping down hard on the other side. I look for the Timersit, the giants who live on the ice cap and eagerly devour humans, but see none.

We think of the inland ice as unpopulated and lifeless, but it is full of life. Bacteria and snow algae—
Chlamydomonas nivalis
—color the edge of the ice cap and its glaciers red. Small indentations called cryoconite holes dot the surface. When cosmic dust falls on the ice cap, it absorbs heat and bores holes into the ice. Tiny aquaria form in these hollows: A miniature ecosystem arises deep inside, where iron bacteria, blue-green algae, and green algae feed nematodes, rotifers, and
Diphascon recameri
(water bears).

The ice is alive and we are dead, or are we just lost? The snowdrift’s spirit laughs at us as it brings on stronger and stronger storms. Behind a torn finger of glacier we rest a moment. The hunters lay loops of soft rope under the sled runners for brakes. We take off, following a tortuous streambed down.

Jens navigates with his voice, his whip, and his prodigious weight, using his heel as a rudder. We’ve shed our anoraks in order to be lithe. Balance is essential on such a ride to keep from getting broken legs and smashed heads.

Jens is on one knee and drags his free foot in the snow to brake and steer. I grab caribou skins and lash ropes and lean into the corners as if on a bike as we accelerate. The sled tips onto one runner, bangs down, then tips the other way. Finally we stop. Before us is the sea that divides Greenland from Ellesmere Island. The sun is going down and the horizon is golden. There is open water as far as we can see and broken ice at the shore. The tide is coming in, and huge plates of ice break apart and jostle restlessly. “Impassable,” the hunters say, talking among themselves.

There are hand gestures cutting the air. Then we get going again, following an ice foot inward, up a fjord. We have nothing to feed the dogs, and they’ve worked hard. Ahead there’s a hut. Jens taps me on the shoulder and points: There’s a drying rack with meat on top—extra food the last hunter left for those coming after. Jens smiles. Tonight we will eat soup, but the dogs will get seal.

ISSANGIAQ
—SPRING WIND. For the first time it’s above zero. We cross Ikersuaq—Big Opening—at the mouth of the fjord and travel into a world of ruined ice. Once sea ice was leaf and lid, flattening the ocean’s torment. Now it is frozen chaos, and by comparison, the sea beneath seems tame.

The hunters pick a route that will take us to the outermost island of Kiatak. They say there is always good ice between the islands at this time of year. We pass a single polar bear track three times bigger than my hand. The men stop to inspect it. The track is fresh and going in the direction we are going. No one says anything. Quietly we move on.

Behind us mist makes runnels down the face of the glacier with sun stripes peeking through. The air is humid and feels cold. Kneeling on the moving sled, Jens pulls on his fox-fur anorak. We rumble across broken surface and tipsy pancake ice in turquoise moats and lanes of gray slush ice.

What had been mist is now flying snow and pale light erasing the place ahead that separates sky and ice. The hunters never imagined that this whole month would be spent looking for ice good enough to travel on, that there would be no way to hunt for food. In the old days, before there was a store in town, people and dogs would already be going hungry. In the Arctic, bad weather and bad ice can make things go wrong very quickly.

We travel for hours. Once Greenland was an icy paradise; now this last remnant of an ice age culture is wearing thin. “A few years ago it was even worse. A lot of people were suffering from not having enough to eat. We can only wonder why it is like this, why we can’t change it,” Jens says. Climatologists are already saying that if emissions aren’t cut within ten years, Arctic sea ice may never return. To read about it is one thing; to feel the ice go out from under your feet and to go hungry is quite another.

Gedeon gets two seals in a net he set the previous November. They are flensed, the blubber stripped away, the meat cut up and fed to the dogs. We eat what’s left. The next day we follow an ice foot around the northeast side of Kiatak. A third of the way up along the island, the ice foot ends abruptly and we are forced to jump down a 14-foot-high cliff. Below what should be solid ice is a gray, watery plain of rotting ice.

The dogs are scared. They can smell open water and know the ice is dangerous. The hunters unhook the dogs and push the heavily packed sleds over the precipice. They bounce and slide though slush. Then it’s the dogs’ turn, but they scramble backward, digging in their heels. Gedeon pulls at the trace lines. Finally, his dogs go over, leaping onto unsteady ice. The others follow. Gedeon and Jens jump. Mamarut ties a rope under my arms and lowers me down, because the ice at the bottom is jagged and he’s afraid I’ll break my leg.

Down on the ice we hurry. The dogs are hooked up, sleds are righted, whips are brandished. The dogs move fast despite their fear. Some broken ice is knife sharp, some is gray slush. Ahead, pancake ice tips and twirls as the dogs leap fearfully over moats of open water. The hunters yell commands. The urgency in their voices tells their dogs that this is serious and they must behave.