The scars healed slowly, and some people mocked her as they passed her window, ‘It is time the ice broke up!’ She ignored them.
One day a black cloud appeared in the south. By evening there was a gale, and the storm did not abate until it began to grow light again. When people woke up, the sea was open and reflected the blue sky. A great number of birds were flying above the water, and there were seals everywhere.
I’m writing this chapter backwards, working in reverse like a wood engraver. I’d been to Ilulissat twice before my summer visit to the art museum. During my original journey to Upernavik, the weather had been so bad the plane was grounded in Ilulissat for a few days. I was put up in the five-star Hotel Arctic by Greenland Air. This brief and stormy encounter was enough to lure me back to the town. Within a few years I’d saved enough for the flight to Greenland but I had nothing to spare for accommodation, so I messaged friends in Upernavik, asking if they knew any work I could do in exchange for a place to stay. I needed someone who would invite me, tell me I was welcome. To my surprise it turned out that there was something useful I could do. A hunter who was working as a tour guide in Ilulissat wanted some improvements to the English text on his website.
I look up Inuit Tours. One of the activities Malik offers is ‘Feeding the sled dogs’:
The Greenland dogs are an ancient breed that we use north of the Arctic Circle. They live outdoors and can withstand cold temperatures. They are perfectly suited to pulling a sled and they will never be substituted by motor vehicles. The feeding ritual, with the commentary by the tour guide, shows the characteristics of the dogs and their relationship with the owners.
As Malik knows, there are a few grammatical slips which should be corrected, as they will not inspire confidence. And some parts of the website read more like a lobbyist’s brief than backpacker blurb. Will tourists want a guide who comes fully equipped with his own soapbox? I email Malik and we agree that I will visit soon to give his website a spring-clean.
The hero Kiviuq is the Ulysses of Arctic legend, a man whose travels are so unrelenting that they mark him out, even in a society of nomads. No one knows when he was born, but it is common knowledge that he is still alive and travelling the world. When Kiviuq was a baby his grandmother cleaned his body with the skin of a sandpiper, whispering a charm, ‘You will always be able to come home, no matter what the obstacles.’ When he grew older and his first kayak was made for him, sandpiper skins were used to pad the kayak frame.
In one version of Kiviuq’s tale, he is imprisoned in the dwelling of an Ikpik. This Ikpik – the spirit of the sandy place where the water folds over the land – has taken the form of a woman, who offers him a night’s hospitality. However, the next morning, when Kiviuq tries to leave her hovel, the doorway grows narrower, so that he cannot pass through it. In the end, he has to call on the help of spirits to escape. He runs down to the sandy shore and scrambles into his kayak.
As he paddles away, the Ikpik emerges from her hovel and threatens him. In response to her voice the sea becomes rougher. She is holding her ulu (a crescent-shaped knife never far from a woman’s hand) and she waves it to cause Kiviuq to capsize and drown – but he is able to right his kayak. Then she raises the ulu high, and calls out: ‘I could have sliced you with this.’ And he gestures back as if to throw his harpoon, shouting, ‘I could have harpooned you!’ The woman almost falls over with shock. She drops her ulu and it shatters with a tinkling sound. At once ice forms on the sea.
And so ice and sound are linked in early Arctic legend. Ice is not created by the cold, it is formed by the noise made when a woman drops her knife. Ice is where the water overcomes, or becomes, the land.
The seats of the plastic chairs in the airport lounge are embellished with sealskin. All the other travellers have dispersed, some collected by relatives, others taking taxis to their hotels. No one has come to meet me. Eventually I ask a Greenland Air assistant to phone Malik’s number. No answer. Could they redial? No answer. The assistant offers to call me a taxi, as there’ll be none waiting outside the airport until the next plane arrives, possibly tomorrow. I should learn a more Greenlandic approach to time. If a plane might be delayed for several days, why rush to meet your guest?
The taxi weaves through the snow-covered landscape I have just flown over, into the centre of Ilulissat with its pretty wooden houses, and across to the other side of town. The apartment block outside which the driver drops me is bigger than the airport terminal.
The stairwell is sprayed with graffiti – FUCK YOU – FUCK OFF – BLACK SABBATH – JACKASS – insults punctuated by a storm of question marks. Toys are scattered on the balconies. I know when I’ve come to the right one, without checking the number: a pair of caribou antlers hang on the wall, and beneath them are rusting secateurs, a tangle of string. A few clean bones. An empty clothes airer is suspended from the balcony railing with green twine.
The door is ajar. I can hear the TV. I muster my confidence and call inside, ‘Hi! Hae . . . Aluu?’
‘I am sleeping,’ explains a man, emerging from the gloom.
I have never been in a house with so many family photographs. Framed photographs are arranged around the clock on the wall and more are propped on the shelves. Sometimes one or two photographs are stacked in front of a frame which is already filled, as if they are awaiting their turn. Photographs stuck on the fridge, of course. I try to piece together Malik’s family from the images, but it’s impossible – the shots are from so many different decades and the older ones have faded. Several commemorate graduations, confirmations or weddings, with those being feted wearing national dress. It seems you have to stand straight in stiff kamiks (sealskin boots that reach high up the leg) and beaded collars.
Having let me in, Malik lies back down on the sofa and resumes his nap. I feel I should leave him in peace, so I dump my stuff and head out to the Pisiffik to buy some biscuits.
Grethe had told me that Malik began to learn to hunt when he was twelve years old. His father was the manager of a small store and hoped that Malik would go on to be a manager like him. But Malik was determined to be a hunter, and so, as such knowledge is always handed on direct, he learnt from his uncle. And he married Sarah, a hunter’s daughter. Like many others, he mixes hunting with other activities to make ends meet. Climate change has turned him into an entrepreneur. While he hunts, and hunts for tourists, Sarah works in the hotel.
When I get back, Sarah is preparing Greenlandic ‘country food’. The familiar term encompasses all meat caught by hunting, as opposed to imported food sold by the supermarket, which (as I have just discovered) is prohibitively expensive. It is also unreliable – the stock depends on the supply ship being able to get through the ice. Sarah’s latex gloves are covered in blood. She removes the sinew from a lump of dark meat which is bigger than the chopping board it rests on.
I am awed by her butchery. ‘Who taught you to do this?’ I ask.
‘No one taught me,’ she says. ‘I just watched.’
She explains the dietary calendar. During the winter seals, narwhal and walrus are hunted along the ice edge. Hunters in north-western Greenland still rely largely on dog sleds and kayaks as they have always done. Sarah is looking forward to next month, when dovekies and ptarmigans are back in season and the summer, when they will go fishing for small halibut and capelin in the fjords. Although, she adds, she may not have enough leave from the hotel to accompany Malik on a fishing trip this year.
She continues to chop at the joint, throwing the rejected scraps into a plastic bag in the sink, and slowly the forms of ribs emerge. Sarah is frustrated at the perception of hunters, ‘We are not just killing because we want to, but because we need to – and we use everything. We are part of this land.’ It’s true. Greenlanders are one of the few nations that don’t worry about eating fruit and vegetables as all the vitamins a person needs come from the narwhal’s skin. She’s upset that fewer boys are learning to be hunters, though it’s scarcely surprising, when
those that do face economic hardship – due to a loss of hunting grounds as well as fewer animals. Most teenage boys want status, not self-denial. Her own son, Niels, is no exception. And while keeping dogs represents the promise of hunting, the cost of feeding and maintaining working animals is leading many to reconsider doing so.
‘So it’s tourism instead?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ Sarah is excited about the idea, but an overseas company holds the monopoly, and it’s hard for local operations to spread the word about their services.
Over seal soup we discuss Inuit Tours and how to tell their story on the website. I get overexcited and recommend Malik registers for eco-tourism credentials. ‘Maybe,’ he says, evasively. He doesn’t want to commit to a definite plan.
The next morning, Sarah throws a bunch of furs onto the floor. From it she extracts a pair of black sealskin trousers. ‘You can wear these, Nancy. They are mine, and they’ll fit you.’ Then she pulls out an enormous pair of white bearskin trousers. These are for Malik. Despite everyone’s concerns about the ice vanishing, winter temperatures still reach -20°C, and we will need to keep warm.
In order that I understand their business, Malik and Sarah have decided I ought to do some of the activities. A dog-sled ride is certainly more appealing than desk work on a crisp spring day. The dogs are tethered on the outskirts of Ilulissat. A new law has ordained that they must be kept away from inhabited areas and any dog seen loose in town will be shot. Dogs will eat anything, including children, and so it is advisable to keep them out of the way of people – especially tourists, who want to pet them. On the way to the dogs we pass more shipping containers with spray-can graffiti, its message more ambitious than that in the flats: ‘Live Fast Die Young’.
I can hear the dogs howling from a long way off. In many Greenlandic settlements north of the Arctic Circle, there are more dogs than people, and Ilulissat has around 6,000 dogs to 4,000 inhabitants. The dog-city occupies land out by the helicopter pad, where each hunter’s pack has its own territory centred around a haphazard kennel. In winter, Malik makes some extra cash by selling dog food (fresh seal meat) to his fellow hunters. Today, his own dogs are getting frozen meat. In silence he takes an axe from his bag and begins to hack at a giant lump of seal. It has come straight out the freezer and ice crystals cover the surface of the muscle. The adult dogs squeal and fight for the chunks Malik hurls in their direction, straining on their chains. Their puppies are loose; they tumble in and out of old fish crates and scamper perilously close to the axe, until Malik bats them away.
While Malik attends to the dogs, Sarah untangles the traces and ties them to the pituq, a long looped rope which will be attached to the sled. The thirteen dogs will run side by side in a fan hitch, as sled dogs have always done. The design of the sled has changed little over the centuries, although wooden boards have replaced driftwood and the green nylon twine – so common in Greenland that it seems to knit the landscape together – ties down our equipment instead of sealskin thongs. The sled’s joints are loosely bound to allow it to move flexibly over uneven snow and ice. It is strong enough to withstand a crash, yet light enough to travel around 10 miles per hour.
At a shout from Malik, the dogs plunge forwards and we rip away from the dog area, leaving the ordure and chicken wire behind. The dry snow flies into my face as we race cross-country towards the mountains, where the route gets precipitous. When we capsize down a ravine it is only our counterweight that prevents the sled from overturning. Malik calls to the dogs, egging them on with his voice rather than using his whip. He tells me every hunter has his own commands, which he will only share with his dogs. Their names are not a secret: Aaqqati, the gloved one; Kammak, comrade; Kunngi, the king; Rudolfi, Rudolf; Ipeq, the smelly one. The dogs say VaaVaa, not ‘woof woof’. When we reach Nalluarsuk, they drop to the ground, panting. We sit on the sled, and Malik offers me a draught of coffee from his flask. I turn to him and see only the icebergs reflected in his aviator glasses. From the rocky summit you will view nature at its most awe-inspiring. A huge ice-sheet lies before you and the air is charged with the dramatic sounds of a fast-moving glacial ice-stream calving into a fjord full of icebergs. I am thinking about getting out my camera, when hup! Malik hoiks me up like his fourteenth dog – it is time to return.
Malik and Sarah have spent the last two summers building a traditional turf hut down the fjord, not far from the ancient ruined settlement known as Sermermiut. They lend me shoe chains for my boots, and we hike to a bluff where turf sods and rocks have been stacked up against plywood walls to make a squat, snug home. They plan to accommodate tourists here. While it’s sparsely furnished, there’s a bookshelf: on snow days campers could amuse themselves with Danish translations of Ian Fleming, Jack London or John Steinbeck. Sarah has hung a little paper cut-out of a teapot in the tiny window, and wrapped red lace around the plastic beakers which contain the white plastic cutlery. There’s no room for such whimsy outside: the handles of shovels and other tools stick out from the snow that has drifted up around the building. From the doorway of the hut I can see a few metres of rock and beyond, the tips of icebergs lately calved from the glacier. It’s a steep drop to the bay. I catch the whine of a dinghy’s engine as it returns to the harbour.
‘Iminnarpoq,’ Sarah sighs, and smiles at me. ‘It means “the air is clear, so sounds can be heard from far away”.’
On the way back we call in on the older generation. Sarah’s parents’ home is covered in paraphernalia: a skin-on-frame kayak, parched as an autumn leaf, hanging from the wall out of reach of hungry dogs; dried fish the length of my arm, spotted like leopards, with grotesque jaws; clear plastic milk containers with green and red caps, slung on a slack rope like outsize beads. A velour beach towel, decorated with lions and baobabs, is draped over an outboard motor.
I follow Sarah and Malik into a narrow hallway, covered in cardboard – a space to take off your boots. It smells of damp fur. Although it’s very dark in the house, Sarah’s mother Karen is wearing tinted glasses. She brings out a soft Arctic fox skin for Sarah and Malik. The little black nose is just the right size for Karen to dangle the whole skin from her plump finger. Behind the sofa on which her husband Jonas sits, several narwhal horns are stacked. Traders once believed these pale twists were the horns of unicorns: they were used to build a monarch’s throne or ground to powder to make aphrodisiacs. Sarah draws out a full-grown horn, and laughs as she waves it at Malik. Jonas looks on, smiling absent-mindedly, and occasionally picking his nose and wiping his fingers on his dungarees. By his feet a pair of the grandchildren’s Action Man toys have rolled out from under the sofa valance, apparently locked in combat.
I wish I could join in the conversation. Karen and Jonas will have seen so many changes come to Greenland: the transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to the job economy and welfare system under a Danish government, and more recently, Home Rule; the additions to the town of schools and hospitals and the flats in which their children live; the growing availability of material goods since the millennium. Karen brings out her box of scraps, and she and Sarah address what is to be done about a scuffed area in her kamiks. A summer of weddings and christenings is approaching. Sarah dips a sugar-cube into her cup and smiles at her mother for as long as it takes for the sweet cube to draw up colour from the coffee. Then she pops it in her mouth.
I walk home with Malik and head for my room, which he jokes is my Greenlandic office. What I’d give for this high-rise view over Disko Bay every day – but we both know I’ve only got it on loan. The room belongs to his teenage son. Niels is away in Nunavut playing ice hockey at the Arctic Winter Games. I am sleeping in a champion’s bed. The Winter Games is a celebration of circumpolar sports and aboriginal culture – contests include dog mushing, snowshoeing and all the sports that can be played indoors in winter, like badminton and hockey, as well as traditional Dene games like snow snake, once used to hunt caribou on ice. However, the posters that are tacked to Niels’s walls feature not
Greenlandic athletes but Manchester United players. I contemplate Ryan Giggs’s beauty while my laptop struggles to connect to the Inuit Tours website.
‘Your tour guide will tell you many stories about the sights and local wildlife,’ runs the Hiking page. ‘The Inuit have lived and hunted in the surrounding areas for many centuries, and understand the wild environment better than anyone else. The tour travels along paths that our ancestors found through the scenic landscape.’ The itinerary begins: ‘Start at the electric power station.’
‘Could we call the start point something else?’ I call to Malik. ‘Something more . . . ancestral?’
Each evening Malik gets the bath first, as head of the household, and I’m offered the water second as honoured guest. I appreciate such frugality: his determination to follow a vocation, despite the hardships that entails. Sarah saves the coffee grounds in the filter paper for the next morning. There’s a word for this practice – kinguneqartarpoq, to make a second brew from old coffee grounds or tea leaves – so she can’t be the only person who does it. She is creative with the resources at her disposal and has a garden on the wide living-room windowsill: a climbing ivy, a shy pair of cacti, a white orchid which may be plastic and two astonishing scarlet gladioli which are definitely not.
Malik is fond of stories which emphasize how his own life differs from that of his ancestors. One night after supper he complains of his loss of freedom: the freedom to follow a traditional way of life, or failing that, to earn a decent livelihood. The TV is tuned to the National Geographic channel; as if on cue, a programme about the Amazon rainforest is playing mutely in the background. Malik gestures triumphantly at the screen, saying: ‘People should stop doing these things. Flying. Cutting down trees in Brazil. Everything. The ice is vanishing. Soon we won’t be able to live here any more.’
The Library of Ice Page 12