In the Empire of Ice

by Gretel Ehrlich

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.

  Crossing the ice to Kiatak Island a storm lowers down on us. What had been flowing mist is now flying snow. We camp at the nearest hut as the blizzard comes on. Jens says the ice we just crossed is called tinumisaartoq, meaning, “ice getting a hump in its back.” It’s 10 p.m., and Mamarut’s lead dog is dying. I ask why. No one knows, but Gedeon says, “They die very quickly here.” They’ve all been vaccinated for distemper, but sometimes the vaccine is old. “My dog had diarrhea today and threw up, but still he screwed the female in heat,” Mamarut says. “He’s trying to make a new lead dog for me.”

  Mamarut has tied the sick dog away from the others, next to a frozen dog carcass. Sadness fills the hut. There is no joking. Two small lanterns are lit, and on the wall is a cross. It’s said a ghost lives in here.

  Last year Gedeon had 16 dogs. Nine died. Now everyone is worried about the disease spreading, but there’s nothing to be done. After dinner we get in our sleeping bags, lying nose to nose on the illeq. Quietly Mamarut stands on his toes and stares at his sick dog through the tiny window. Thinking no one is watching, he wipes away tears. The dogs howl mournfully.

  Day comes. It’s eight above zero and the dog is still alive. Just before leaving, Mamarut runs up on the hill and shoots his favorite dog. Later he says, “Now there will be a fight among them to see who the new leader is. Already, they are thinking of the future.”

  As we set off in the sleds, water splashes up on us. We hold our legs up high. The sled tips sideways, and I grab caribou skins. As I slide, Jens clamps his leg over mine and hangs on to me by the tops of my polar bear pants. The gold in the sky fades, and the air is mild. There’s no good ice anywhere. Today, no one is laughing.

  JULY 2004. Following the failed walrus hunt, I return to camp with the families of Jens, Gedeon, and Mamarut as they hunt for narwhal.

  It’s night and it’s light. Instead of summer sun and quiet water, which is normal in an Arctic summer, the weather is blustery, more like northern Scotland than the polar desert of northern Greenland. Today the temperature is just below freezing. We are traveling on Jens’s old red boat toward the Kangerlussuaq Fjord for a summer-long narwhal hunt. There are kayaks lashed to the deck and duffle bags with kamiks and warm clothing, despite the fact that it’s July.

  When the rain stops, fog drops over us like a hood. We weave blindly between moving icebergs and fight a hard southerly wind. “At this time of year the ice floes are swimming with us,” Jens says. They are all melting stripes and softened craters like pelts made from mottled narwhal skins stuck to the moon.

  There’s a gunshot. I drop to the deck and everyone laughs. “I’ve been shot at a few times,” I tell them with an embarrassed smile. Jens says, “It’s just Gedeon telling us where to find him.” He steers toward the fading sound on the far side of the fjord. We are almost at the cliff when the fog clears enough for us to see those waiting for us: Gedeon, Mamarut, another Inuit hunter named Hans Kristiensen, and their families.

  The sun swings north but stays high in the sky. Mamarut and Tecummeq climb aboard and sail with us up the 50-mile-long fjord. “The narwhal come up this fjord to mate, calve, and feed,” they tell me. “It’s their ‘cantina.’ They eat the small polar cod in here. Last August some Danish biologists put a big net across the mouth of the fjord to put radio transmitters on narwhal. So far they haven’t caught one,” Mamarut says gleefully. “Those whales are smarter than we are, or at least, smarter than the Danes.”

  The narwhal was once thought to be a mythical creature. Its spiral tusk inspired the concept of the unicorn, but few had seen the animal from which the tusks came. Cups and eating utensils for royalty were made from these “horns” they were crushed into medicinal powders thought to cure epilepsy and heart palpitations, to neutralize poisons, and to prevent fainting, rickets, and melancholy.

  The “unicorn” turned out to be a small, deepwater cetacean 13 to 20 feet long that lives in frigid Arctic waters in open leads and under the ice. It is hunted from a Greenland kayak with harpoons and is the source of summer meat and mataaq for subsistence villagers in northwestern Greenland.

  Jens’s wooden, high-prowed boat putt-putts slowly up the fjord. We sit on deck, legs stretched out, our backs against the wheelhouse, and watch the world scroll by: black cliffs, white tidewater glaciers tumbling down to the water.

  Tecummeq pours coffee from a big thermos. Squadrons of little auks fly by. A scallop of rain touches the edge of the ice cap and the skies churn gray. A storm is coming, and the first raindrop hits Jens’s head. He looks up from the open wheelhouse: “This isn’t our summer. We never used to have rain here. We don’t know how to call it anymore.”

  The storm hits. Waves wash over the deck as rain comes down hard. Mamarut quickly secures the kayaks while Tecummeq stows pots and pans, cups and thermoses under the bunks below. The engine coughs, then suddenly goes dead. Wind slams the side of the boat, rocking it. I ask where the emergency gear is, just in case we get swamped. Again, the men laugh. There are no survival suits, no life rafts. We try to keep the boat headed up into the wind as Jens works on the dead engine. “Imeq,” he yells up to me, meaning there’s water in the fuel line. He fiddles with something I can’t see and eventually the engine restarts.

  We chug up the fjord in pulsing rainsqualls. Mamarut squeezes in beside Jens at the wheel. They chatter away, their wet cheeks shining, ducking when the spray flies. They were boyhood friends in Moriusaq, and the charm of those early days is still evident. They don’t try to get out of the weather. It’s all the same to them. Jens turns, looks at me, and smiles. He gestures toward the harpoon point hanging on a rope in front of the boat’s tiny windscreen. “For navigation,” he says in Greenlandic, laughing. It swings back and forth in the storm like a metronome.

  A piece of ice floats by. It looks like a long tusk sticking straight up. Tecummeq leans close to me and whispers: “Qilalugaq, qilalugaq.” This is the fjord of the narwhal.

  Qilalugaq, the Greenlandic word for narwhal, means “the one that points to the sky.” Now we know why this name is so apt. An American researcher in dentistry, Martin Nweeia, made an amazing discovery. “The whale is intent on understanding its environment,” Dr. Nweeia said. When electrodes were attached to a captured narwhal’s head, Dr. Nweeia noted that “changes in salinity around the tusk produced signs of altered brain waves, giving preliminary support to the sensor hypothesis.” The eight-foot-long spiral tusk—actually one of two teeth—is a sensory organ with ten million nerve endings that “tunnel from the tusk’s core to the outward surface, communicating with the outside world.” With it, the whale can detect “subtle changes of temperature, barometric pressure, particle gradients, and probably much else, giving the animal unique insights.” And so it turns out that “the one that points to the sky” is reading the weather.

  Four tents go up and the Primus is lit. Our first camp is in an abandoned Thule-era village near the top of the fjord. In earlier times, when this house site was part of a settlement, its shamans functioned as doctors, metaphysicians, and scientists, monitoring the comings and goings of life and death, weather, and the migrations and availability of animals. These turf-and-stone houses were in use here until 1999. We peer into one that, until recently, was inhabited by an old man who refused to live in a modern house. Now it is falling apart. Sitting on a drift log watching the fjord, the men tell stories: “Once when I harpooned a narwhal in Savissivik, it turned around and struck my kayak with its tusk. I had to paddle in fast before I sank,” Jens says. Mamarut tells of a narwhal that stabbed his boat. “We had to stuff our anoraks in the hole to keep from sinking,” he says laughing. Jens tells m
e that sometimes orcas come up the fjord and try to kill narwhal. “We saw an orca that had lost a fight. He was floating with a broken-off narwhal tusk sticking out of the top of his head.”

  Tecummeq is in charge of cooking melt-ice for tea and boiled arctic char, plus rice and soy sauce. How wonderful it is to be camping not just with the men but with whole families: Tecummeq and Gedeon’s wife, Marta, and their seven-year-old boy, Rasmus, plus Marta’s twin sister, her husband and children, and Masuuna, Jens’s grandson by marriage.

  A hunting society is a privileged way of life. “We weren’t made to buy things and sell things,” Jens says, “but to live altogether and bring food home to our families.” Between hunts there’s plenty of do-nothing time, when Gedeon can teach his son how to throw a harpoon, make a kayak, train sled dogs, skin a seal. There are no macho antics in this world. Such behavior would be against all codes of morality and conduct, and anyway, it would be too risky. Hunters learn from each other. “Our hunting tradition survives because we are still living it, and it survives through the stories we tell each other every day,” Jens says.

  THE STORM PASSES, and the sky becomes slate gray with an imprisoned sun trying to break through. “It has been weather like this all June, July, and now August,” Mamarut says. “It is becoming winter already in August, and we haven’t had summer yet.” Climate change means not simply warmer weather but chaotic, intensified, unseasonable, unpredictable weather. Out on the water ice groans. The mountains are white with new snow. A river of glacier ice slides imperceptibly between two cliffs of red scree.

  Hunting means waiting. Tecummeq and I lie on our sleeping bags and thumb through two dictionaries: English to Danish and Danish to Greenlandic, trying to learn new words. The children are never any trouble. They neither demand nor complain but play in the round-the-clock light, sleeping when they’re tired, eating when they’re hungry, playing quietly on the shore in sealskin mittens and canvas anoraks.

  After dinner the hunters get busy with their gear, coiling harpoon lines and sharpening points. Mamarut inflates an avataq—a seal intestine that serves as a float to keep a narwhal from sinking after it’s been harpooned. From now on our diurnal schedules will be reversed. We’ll sleep during the day and hunt all night.

  In preparation the men carry their kayaks to the edge of the water. A Greenlandic kayak is 18 feet long and sits very low in the water. The slender frame, once covered with sealskin, is now more often brightly painted canvas. The art of building this watercraft—so essential where ice travel quickly becomes water travel—was apparently forgotten by earlier Arctic peoples but was re-introduced as the last wave of Inuit hunters began migrating across Smith Sound to Greenland.

  As soon as European explorers started arriving in the far north, the wood they brought from the continent became available to the Inuit people and was later scavenged from wrecked vessels. Now Greenlanders make kayaks from imported Danish wood. Ironically, the Inuit to the west in Nunavut have left the kayak behind and now use motorized skiffs and canoes.

  A black cloud appears, the wind rises, and rain scatters forward like seed. The men look at the sea. “It has to be calm for the kayaks,” Hans says, “because rough water is very dangerous for them. They don’t swim, they don’t do “Eskimo rolls,” and they can easily be overturned.”

  We retreat to the tents and drink tea. Rain softens the hard-edged glacier ice lying on the gray stone beach. Jens and Mamarut doze. Calm water at midnight and bright skies. “This is how a Greenland summer night should be,” Mamarut says on waking. The hunters pull on their kamiks and sealskin spray skirts. The fjord is ribbed with pods of seals; polar cod blacken the water near shore. The women climb to an outcrop of boulders above camp and, always vigilant, glass the water for narwhal. Far out a rainbow sticks straight up, like a tree trunk, from a cloud. Except for me, no one here has ever seen a tree. I doze in the midnight sun. A strange sound wakes me—a muffled gasping. Then Marta cries out: “Qilalugaq!”

  Far down the fjord there’s a slight disturbance in the water. But the women are already running down to the shore. Marta gets there first. She stands knee-deep in the water with the pointed stern of the kayak between her knees, steadying it for Gedeon as he climbs in.

  Narwhal swim in pods of 20 or 30 animals. We can already hear their breathing. Gedeon pushes off and paddles hard, all sinew, stealth, and speed. He’s lithe and feline, and though the narwhal are still far away, he paddles into position quickly.

  An hour passes. Gedeon crouches motionless in his kayak, clinging to a piece of drift ice in the middle of the fjord. His back is to the oncoming animals, his head is bowed, his paddle is held off to one side like a broken wing. The narwhal are breathing and blowing as they come up the long fjord. They have such an acute sense of hearing that if Gedeon so much as shifts his feet in the kayak they will hear him and dive.

  Now we can see them, their mottled backs humped in turbulent water. The breathing, splashing, and gasping is loud. As they approach, Gedeon bends slowly—all the way forward, his face averted so they can’t see his eyes. The water is all chop and gray bodies, diving and deep breathing. A tusk lifts up as if pointing at the sun, then swords back down. Gedeon’s kayak is wobbling. Water and ice splash over the foredeck, running under the harpoon. The narwhal are all around him, under him. How easily they could capsize the kayak. He waits to make his move until they have passed. Just before he begins paddling, a wind out of the north gently pushes the bow of his boat toward the whales. They see Gedeon and dive.

  DAYS AND NIGHTS GO BY, but we remember only the nights. At 1:30 a.m. there is snow at the head of the fjord, a bowl where four glaciers tongue down to water, and by five o’clock every peak around us is white. “Why is bad weather chasing us?” Mamarut asks. Gedeon sits alone in front of his tent staring at the water. Seals swim by but no narwhal. Water-smoothed pieces of ice litter the beach like torsos.

  Our body clocks have adjusted to what Tecummeq calls narwhal time. Bread, cheese, and jam at six in the evening, and dinner at six in the morning. After all, time in Greenland was always told by the arrivals of birds and animals, not numbered days.

  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 f
inally 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.