In the Empire of Ice (26 page)

Sophie stands and sings. With bent knees, she taps the small drum made of seal intestine, her body dipping and swaying as if she were at sea, tilting from side to side and up and down in a wavelike motion. Maybe
she
is Sedna, I think, with her long hair, gray now, threaded with seals and narwhal.

She sings songs about her dead husband and his ghost. Songs about the seals and the weather that is to come. She says it will be a hot place here. Another kind of desert. She tells me she has seen ghosts walk by her little house, legless and floating, that she knew when someone was “about to be dead.”

On another morning she recalls the blustery September day when the residents of Dundas were moved to Qaanaaq, after the secret Cold War treaty was made between the United States and Denmark to protect Europe and North America from the Russians. “No one had lived on this site before,” she says. She wasn’t allowed to sing when outsiders could hear her. “The foreign religion forbid it. Now I can sing all I want, but there’s no one to hear.”

We eat Danish pastries from the local bakery in the grocery store and drink coffee. I listen as she sings a song about the love of her life. She had fallen in love with a Dane from the air base, but she was not allowed to marry him. Another storm comes in and the candle flickers. “Ghosts are floating by, can you see them?” she asks. Snow-filled wind rattles the windows. She looks at me and says, “Sometimes everything is clear when there is nothing to see.”

The next year when I visit Qaanaaq, Hans tells me, “Sophie’s mind has reversed.” The following year when I return, Sophie is dead.

THE ICE IS A LAMP. With it I’m learning to see: how new ice in the autumn can look like water; how calm water can be mistaken for ice; how in the dark time,
silanigtalersarput
—working to obtain wisdom—is a possibility. I walk the village. At this time of year it is dark or darkness going to twilight. The “ice lamp” allows Sila to be the guide. Head tilted back, I see fluted cliffs that hold ice like candles and the ice sheet breaking over the edge of the island in falling cliffs of white.

I wander around the fringes of Qaanaaq and try to see what was, what is going to be. It’s afternoon, and the icebergs cast long shadows. Mist breaks over emptiness as if trying to make it into something; it rises from open water, protecting it, and causing the ice around it to decay.

Mythical giants called the Timersit lived on the ice cap, but who lives inside sea smoke? At night the cold comes on, dropping to minus 20 before the windchill. Even in summer, when the light is continuous, it is possible to tell it is night without looking. The sun cools and the world looks hollow, as if nothing remained after the ceremonial life was driven away.

“I am a collector of shadows and darkness,” an old woman told Peter Freuchen and Knud Rasmussen during their Fifth Thule Expedition in the 1920s. “I keep them all locked up here in these boxes, so the world will get light again.” The East Greenlanders said that on the day after the shortest day in the year, water had to be scooped from the sea into a wooden vessel and poured over a mountaintop as quickly as possible. Doing so would make the sun rise quickly.

I make my annual visit to Qaanaaq’s small museum. Moved here in 1997, it’s the modest white house built by Rasmussen and Freuchen as a base for their seven Arctic expeditions. The museum’s collection is a constant reminder that not much has changed in a thousand years in the lives of these boreal hunters. “We still do things the way our ancestors did them because we haven’t found a better way. Why change it? Some of the materials are new, but the techniques are the same,” Jens tells me. Because they have maintained their traditional hunting culture they are not reenacting retrieved memories of how it was, complicated by how it is now. Blessedly, there has been a continuum.

In the glass cases, among early Dorset and Thule artifacts, is a walrus penis bone used as a snow scraper, a washrag made from the hide of a little auk, a gull’s hide used to wash dishes, thread made from the narwhal dorsal tendon, bearded-seal thimbles, a blubber lamp, a bird-skin undershirt, a guillemot jacket, all kinds of harpoons, an old sled made of narwhal tusks and whalebone, a newer one made of driftwood, and a snow knife carved from bone.

“We didn’t have very much compared to other cultures, but we used everything we had,” David Kiviok, the new curator, said. Greenland hunters observed natural phenomena closely. Then they turned them on their back or side to reveal more meanings. Direct observation did not preclude spiritual inquiry, and a taboo-filled society fearful of losing its social order in what now might seem to be a Darwinian world. The imagined and the real were not thought to be separate.

What ethnographer Wade Davis calls the ethnosphere was a place where seasons moved humans and dogs and the animals they hunted. March was brutally cold; late spring was glorious, with the ice edge shimmering and seals hauled out in warm sun. Summers were brief. Thirty days or so, limited to the month of July. By mid-August, winter weather began, and winters were, as they said, “most of the time.”
Ukioq
—winter—was the glue that bound society together.
Hiku
—sea ice, in the northern dialect—was a dynamic habitat, a blue world of impermanence that looked solid but wasn’t. It mirrored the outward calm of the hunter but lit the fluid, inward flint of the Inuit imagination.

The spirit world enclosed the human world in ritual circuits. Together, people, animals, and spirits moved seasonally, following the ice. Before calendars and watches, meetings and conferences, time was told by the arrival and departure of birds and animals. Belugas and walruses at the ice edge in March, little auks around May 10, narwhal in the fjord by June. “We are following the universe,” they said. “We watch the stars. They are always moving. So is the ice. Every day our ice-world is new.”

In such an environment transformations between animals and humans were understandable. Here, spirit beings were always driving into the actual. As ice shifted from hour to hour, so consciousness shifted, rendering species boundaries irrelevant. Narratives animated what, in winter, was a still place. The biological and metaphysical were understood as wholes within wholes, the one never precluding the other.

In the dark time, winter dances were accompanied by a hand drum made of seal intestine stretched on an elliptical bone frame and beaten with a walrus rib. Villagers sang,
“Aja, aja, aja.”
In Greenland, unlike Arctic Alaska, where everyone composed songs, only the shamans’ songs had words.

As in all Arctic villages,
angakoks
—shamans—were plentiful. Sometimes half the population of a settlement had some kind of power. An apprentice learned from an elder, being sent alone at night to a cave whose entry was then closed. In the dark, the young man or woman acquired power. Then he or she went to the edge of the ice cap, where a helping spirit—a
tornarsuk
—could be called. Such spirits took on all kinds of forms: They were shapeless or tiny or manifested as an immense bear.

2004. Nittaalaaf. It’s snowing for no reason. It’s 35° below zero in mid-March.
“Huughuaq, huughuaq,”
Jens yells to his dogs. “Faster, faster.” Dogs scramble and bark, a few fights break out, bearded-seal–skin whips are snapped over the dogs’ backs until they pick up speed. There are eight of us, four sleds, and 58 dogs. We’re off on a two-month-long hunting trip to look for walrus. The sleds tip and tilt over the rubble of pressure ice at the shore and bump down hard. A line snags, a dog is dragged, Jens leans over, snaps the line, and the dog jumps up, rejoining the others.

Behind us is Qaanaaq, with its rows of brightly painted houses. How quickly it fades behind the blowing snow. Wind drifts lie in long lines north to south. We bump over them and career between thick patches of head-high pressure ice. As we get farther out, the ice flattens. Wind wipes snow off huge plates of ice, and the dogs run fast over a cerulean mirror.

All day we travel in bitter cold. Mamarut passes us, laughing and snapping his whip. The only other sounds are the ones made by the dogs panting and the sled runners creaking over hard-packed snow. The temperature is dropping, and every leading edge of our bodies is nipped by frostbite: middle fingers, feet, nose tips, cheekbones, foreheads. We lurch through patches of jumbled ice, and though it’s hard to stay on the sleds, the effort to do so keeps us warm.

March is one of the two coldest months in the year. There is light in the sky, a few hours of night, and a sun that brings little warmth. Jens holds his mittened hand against his cheek and nose, where frostbite has appeared. (It takes only 60 seconds for exposed flesh to burn at this temperature.) Behind his kind, boyish face is an elegant mind. In his community he’s regarded as a natural leader with a spiritual bent: one who has been called by the polar bear spirit and who, in an earlier era, might have been an angakok.

From time to time Jens looks at me, raises his eyebrows to ask if I’m all right, laughs when I nod yes, and turns back to his beloved dogs. He is my protector, my teacher on the ice, as well as my windbreak (we sit sideways on the sled, legs dangling, ankles crossed), and I’m grateful to him.

Twice we stop to melt ice for water, make tea, eat cookies. While we try to warm ourselves, the dogs roll in the snow to cool down. “Man and dogs go together here,” Jens says. “It’s a good combination. We have great respect and affection for each other. They aren’t pets; they’re half wild; maybe we are too!” The dogs have to be a little hungry to keep working for them, and they have to be hungry to keep going out with them. “They need us and we need them. We belong to each other,” he says.

We cross the mouth of the fjord, where, in summer, the long-toothed narwhal breed and calve, then follow the coast of Steensby Land, named for a Danish ethnographer. No food up there. Why go? The hunters ask.

Looking west toward Canada’s Ellesmere Island, the horizon is no longer a thin line of light but a feathery gray spray of mist—water sky, denoting open water where it should be frozen at this time of year. Little do we know that the sea ice of the entire Arctic is in decline, that abrupt climate change is coming on much faster than anyone expected.

As we bump along, I try to ask why there is open water so early in the spring and how ice can break up in these temperatures, but it’s too cold to talk. We pull the hoods of our fox-fur anoraks over our faces and continue on.

Sun is low in the sky. Light shoots up in the four cardinal directions. At the end of the day we make camp on a rocky beach at the edge of the shore-fast ice. It’s 11 in the evening and the light is fading. But the hunters are in high spirits. The farther from town they get, the happier they are. “Now we are entering some nice country,” Mamarut says, smiling, meaning the ice edge and walrus. Dogs are unhitched and retied by cutting notches in the ice and threading the end of the harness line through it. Sleds are unloaded and pushed together. Two small canvas tents are pitched over the sleds. Harpoon shafts are the tent stakes; the sleds are our beds.

We lay caribou skins down, then our sleeping bags. The floor is ice. A line running the length of the ridgepole is hung with sealskin mittens, kamiks, hats, a loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese, camera batteries, and my pens, because even they need thawing. An old Primus stove is lit. In a battered pot a spangled piece of glacier ice snaps and pops and slowly turns to water.

After dinner the men prepare to hunt walrus. Gear is laid out—harpoon lines and rifles, block and tackle; knives and harpoon points are sharpened. “Yes, yes, yes,” Mamarut chants.
“Aurrit
,
aurrit
,
aurrit.”
Walrus. “There are many out there.” Tonight, we are going to the
hiku hinaa
—the ice edge.

We walk single file for an hour. “The walrus are very alert,” Mamarut warns. “They can hear us moving over the ice, so we must make it sound like we are just one hunter, moving as though we were one man.”

The floor of the world groans as we walk; the ice age procession is solemn. A red sun hangs just above the horizon as if waiting. The temperature has dropped. Now it’s 40 below. Thin ice undulates like rubber. We move in flickering frostfall. “It’s so beautiful. I could walk all night,” Gedeon whispers. The ice shifts as the tide goes out. “Now the ice we were walking on will become unsafe,” he says.

The men climb a stranded iceberg and use it as a lookout. No walrus in sight. Far out gray mist unfurls from an open sea and folds back down around a warehouse-size iceberg. Venus shines in a charcoal sky.
“Issiktuq,”
Jens whispers, rubbing his arms. “It’s cold!” No walrus pass by.