In the Empire of Ice

by Gretel Ehrlich

  The men have been sharpening their knives. Everyone helps. The head is cut off and the long tusk removed. Gedeon washes it in the fjord, and it comes out white. The narwhal was female, and she was lactating. That means her calf will probably die unless another whale adopts it. When Jens sees that I’m upset he says, “We cannot see in the water who is male and female, who has a calf and who doesn’t. Now we know that’s why she struggled so hard.” There’s a pause and he begins smiling: “Are you going to cry again?” He’s not being irreverent, he’s teasing me, remembering the time I cried during a polar bear hunt. “You are still like my grandson was eight years ago!”

  After a dinner of rice and narwhal Jens sits pensively. Two years ago his kayak flipped over, trapping him underwater, and he almost drowned. He says he feels fear now, whenever he gets into his boat. “Sometimes I just sit in it and hang onto the side. I can’t go any further.” The others listen quietly. Fear and failure are treated with as much respect as bravery and hunting success. He continues: “The elders tell us not to cross danger, to respect our fear, because it may be the thing that saves our lives. Even this morning I felt it in my chest when we went out. I get dizzy and can’t tell where I am.”

  SUNDAY. We pile into Jens’s skiff and motor over to Qeqertat, a tiny subsistence village perched on a mound of rock ten miles across the fjord. It’s the only village for 50 miles. At the small inlet where we tie up, there’s a stone-and-turf house, its roof studded with caribou antlers and narwhal skulls. Seal blood stains the boat ramp. Kayaks are stacked on drying racks hung with a fringe of narwhal jerky and walrus meat gone dark from the sun.

  Jens takes me over the crest of a hill to see something. I look down: Hundreds of sled dogs are tethered in a small valley. Jens smiles and makes the motion for going out on the ice with them. “Soon, it will be winter again,” he says, “And then you and I will be on the ice, where we are happy.”

  Later we join the others and stroll through the tiny village. It’s here that they still remember how to make traditional string figures of Greenland’s animals—a wintertime activity that has delighted Inuit children for thousands of years. Narwhal skulls crown every roof. An elegant older woman in black sealskin kamiks greets us. I’d met her the year before in the village of Siorapaluk, north of Qaanaaq. She’s tiny and alert, with sparkling eyes. “I’m here in the summer and there in the winter,” she tells me. Her name, Pallunuaq, means “a polar bear crawling on all fours to keep from going through thin ice.”

  We sit down with her at the shore in the sun. She says that at 73 her eyes are going, but when she was young she could manage anything. She was born here and says it was always a place of good hunting. “But all the people I grew up with are dead. They’re all gone. Missing them makes me feel I want to go with them. It’s hard.”

  When I ask how it was here when she was growing up, she says that the animals were fatter then and didn’t have to swim as far because there was nothing to scare them, no motorboat noise.

  “Our houses were made of stone and turf and heated with narwhal oil. They were warm and nice. We built the walls thick. We were never cold. Everyone had a blubber lamp burning. Ours was a foot wide, and we’d make the flame go high. If my lamp went out, I took the light from a neighbor. There was always someone taking care of the lamps.”

  Her father hunted every day. When he came back, she’d scrape and dry the skins, so they were ready to use for clothing. From early spring until late September they lived in tents, then they built their winter sod houses. “Our walls were lined with sealskins—not that crap we have today. Life was very nice then.

  “We traveled by dogsled or kayak. My mother and I sewed the tents. That way we always had a place to live. Life was portable. Everyone had a task. Even the children. It was all skins. No cloth. There was a lot to do. I’ve sewed skins so much that my fingers are shaped funny. See, they are tapered. They hurt, and sometimes I wish I could cut them off. I started sewing when I was five, and I still sew all my clothes, mittens, and kamiks.”

  She remembers that her father was a good hunter and they always had meat. “But sometimes the tents fell over in storms. If a whiteout lasted for days, it was not easy, but it was always worth living. We had a good life.”

  She had never seen a shop until the small one was built here in Qeqertat. “We had only what we caught or could find. We liked best the mataaq. It is the best food I know. I’m not keen on things we get in the shops. There have been many changes in my life. That’s OK. But the worst one was alcohol. It’s the worst thing that was brought to our world. We could do nicely without it.”

  Pallunuaq met her husband when he came to Qeqertat after his forced relocation when Thule Air Base was being built in 1953. “The Americans wanted our land and they threw us out. We had nothing to say about it. My husband’s mother arrived here with three small children in September when winter had already begun. No one was given a house. They made it through to summer in a tent. They were strong.”

  Her father told her she would make a good wife and to choose the best man around. “I was happy with the one I chose. We had eight children. The first ones, I gave birth to them alone in a tent. The rest were born with a midwife. They nursed me until I had no breasts left.” She points to her flat chest. “I nursed each one of them until they were two.”

  Winters were spent sewing and dancing. “We had a gramophone, and we sharpened the needle like we do an ulu [woman’s knife]. We went to Imina’s house because it was biggest. There we danced the polka until we were dizzy; we danced the dark time away.”

  She says she heard many stories of shamans from her father. The white men forbade them to tell the stories, but the families told them anyway. “Once, my father was on a frozen lake looking for a snowy owl when he felt something near him. He turned and saw a polar bear down on his elbows like a human. He couldn’t shoot it, and the bear didn’t attack him. My father said the bear had just wanted to come near.”

  Pallunuaq’s sons all grew up to be hunters, except one. They go north of Siorapaluk to hunt polar bears. “Things have changed a lot, but if you want to live up here, you can’t manage without being a hunter. That’s why I don’t think hunting traditions will disappear. But I know humans are changing the world. They don’t respect things as they should. When things go bad, that’s the reason why. I heard they are even changing the weather.”

  MID-AUGUST. Ravens tumble, churning the air into a cooler season. For the first time since we arrived in July, the all-night light has begun to dim. I’m huddled on the deck of Jens’s red boat coming down from the head of the long fjord. It’s well below freezing. We thread our way between icebergs. I tap Jens on the shoulder and point. The sky has already begun to grow dark, and for the first time since April, we can see a new moon.

  All week, Jens has been moody, worried about his dogs, which have summered on Herbert Island. “I don’t think anyone has fed them this week,” he says. As we round the corner and head north, we can see a red ship anchored in front of Qaanaaq’s warehouses. It is the once-a-year supply ship from Denmark.

  “Some years the ice was too thick and they had to turn around,” Jens tells me. “Now the ice is not coming in early anymore, so we get things for the store, but we need ice more.”

  Town seems ridiculously large and noisy. We’ve been gone a long time. I notice that some people are drunk. Why? I ask Hans, who also works as one of the town’s policemen. “People are drinking more than they used to here. Before, we had more murders and suicides. Now, it is not about anything. Maybe just forgetting,” he says.

  After a short sleep and something to eat, we head to Herbert Island. It’s time to bring Jens’s sled dogs home. Gedeon passes us in his kayak. He’s seen orcas at the mouth of the fjord. “They scare the narwhal toward shore, so maybe I can get another one there,” he says. Jens smiles. He’s happy just to be seeing his dogs again. “In six weeks or so the ice will spread out between Qaanaaq and Herbert Island and up north to Siora
paluk,” he says. Despite the bad ice last spring, he’s still hopeful. We putt-putt toward the island. The sea is choppy and the empty dinghy towed behind his boat bounces hard.

  Green meadows with hummocky grass and small ponds greet us. This is Herbert Island, also known as Qeqertarsuaq. Once it had a thriving village. Now the houses are deserted, except for one still used in summer by a Qaanaaq couple. We clamber up ice-clad rocks. Jens calls to the dogs. He’s laughing now because he can see them lunging and leaping, yowling with joy. There’s a calm happiness in his eyes.

  Four at a time, he leads them down to the skiff. Or rather, they pull him. They know the routine and jump into the small boat. “Be good now, please don’t embarrass me,” he says, going back up the hill to get four more, leaving me to mind them.

  When the skiff is crammed full with not an inch to spare, we head out. All 15 dogs ride happily. This isn’t their first time crossing a rough channel. After a while all fall asleep but one, and he rests his chin on the gunwale, watching the water.

  Though the distance appears short, the trip takes four hours. As we approach Qaanaaq, the dogs sit up and begin howling. Ilaitsuk, Jens’s wife, waits at the shore. “By the time the ice begins to come back, their coats will be thick,” Jens says, looking at the dogs with a calm happiness in his eyes. The kayak, the open sea, and lunging pods of narwhal are Gedeon’s realm. For Jens, it’s these dogs and traveling on the sea ice. A wing of spray flies over the animals’ heads as we approach. They know that winter is on the way. Jens makes the gesture of snapping the whip, then moves his hands laterally, indicating the spread of ice.

  When Jens whistles, the dogs look around expectantly. Ilaitsuk is waiting at water’s edge. It’s almost dark and the moon is out. We drop anchor and row the dinghy full of dogs ashore.

  2007. It’s late February and I’m in Qaanaaq. I climb the hill behind Hans and Birthe’s guesthouse in the evening. Lagoons of open water are threaded with melting sea ice. I see water sky—mist unfurling like incoming waves from areas of open water and lifting into the sky. Farther south there’s open water all the way to Moriusaq and Savissivik, and looking north toward Siorapaluk, open leads are like black sores.

  I’m trying to take in the losses, but I can’t. I’m filled with rage. Perhaps the term climate change should be changed to climate care, since it is carelessness that is bringing so many changes to life as we know it and most likely will bring much of the life of humans and megafauna on this planet to what may be the end.

  The Arctic is carrying the deep wounds of the world. Wounds that aren’t healing. Bands of ice and tundra that protected Inuit people for thousands of years, ensuring a continuity of language and lifeways and a meta-stable climate, have been assaulted from above and below, inside and out. Pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, the crushing demands of sovereignty and capitalism, war and religion have severed the strong embrace of ice.

  Positive feedback mechanisms are piling up. Once, albedo was king. Now open water exhales mist and draws in heat that melts more ice. The Arctic traps 25 percent of Earth’s CO2. The equilibrium of Greenland’s ice cap is skewed: ablation giving way to ablation with no more snow gain. The polar amplification effect goes against cultural survival: Poleward of 70° N, the temperature can be two or more degrees higher than the global average.

  Water begets water. Absorbing solar heat, open oceans stay open; open leads in winter ice exhale mist that shelters the ice from cold, causing the open water to expand. Near the coast water undercuts the sole of a glacier’s foot until it slides.

  The Arctic marine ecosystem co-evolved with ice. Seasonal sea ice functions much like the Amazon canopy. It is a ceiling and a shelter; it gives nourishment and creates its own weather. Ice is a presence in the ocean. It keeps things calm and cool; it is home to 90 percent of the animals in the Arctic ecosystem.

  Reductions in sea ice thickness change the mixing and upwelling of nutrients in seawater. They alter the open water ecosystem, the migration patterns of marine mammals whose corridors are being invaded by ships carrying iron ore in Nunavut; oil and natural gas in Alaska, Russia, and Greenland; radioactive waste in Russia’s Barents Sea. The ecosystem’s fragility is hard to see, since so much of the life occurs under the ice. But open that lid and you have ruined the lives of polar bears, walruses, seals, fish, birds, Arctic people, and whales.

  The natural cycle of a tidewater glacier, even without global warming, is full of complexity. More than melting and snowfall accumulation affect a glacier’s life. Having a toe in the water gives it more vulnerability. Where the glacier enters the water, it is licked by tides, driven by the shape of the coastline and water depth. The thickness and topography of the moraine can alter a glacier’s stability.

  So much about a glacier is true of human society. After too forceful an advance, the toe snaps and the terminus of a glacier can become grounded on its own debris.

  Water is an awful duality. Water means birth and loss, it being the origin and final death of sea ice and glacier. Once ice loses its skin, texture, temperature, and shape, there’s no getting it back. La mer de glace shatters, and the glacier’s face, its toe and snout, and the storytelling tongue.

  MORNING. Gedeon comes early to tell me it’s time to leave. The shore ice has firmed up, and we’re going by dogsled north to Siorapaluk, the northernmost subsistence village in the world. At an average of six miles an hour by dogsled, it should take six hours to get there—an easy, straight shot up the coast made so often no one gives it much thought. But this morning, because of the warmth, the snow is wet and the ice under it is mushy.

  Instead of the usual wild ride out of town, we move cautiously. The sky is almost dark, almost light. Mikele and Mamarut join us. We are lacking only Jens, because, at the last minute, he was too busy in the mayor’s office to come.

  We pass a half-melted iceberg stranded close to shore. The air temperature is warm, but so much open water makes the wind feel cold. There’s a jag on the coast. We stop and look: The ice is all mush and water. The men talk. Gedeon and Mikele shorten the trace lines and we lunge straight up a wall of ice onto the ice foot, suspended at the edge of the coast at low tide. The sleds are heavy and the dogs struggle. A line gets caught, and as three dogs fall backward, Gedeon leaps into the middle of them up and hacks at the ice with a harpoon until the lines come free. The dogs leap; the sled slams down hard. We are on the path of ice once again.

  The way is littered with frozen humps, and the ride is so brain shattering that we get off and trot behind the sleds. Trace lines tangle, dogs fall and are dragged, get up, keep running. Near the entrance to Siorapaluk, we jump down again onto the fjord ice. It’s taken ten hours, a ridiculously long travel time. We arrive just as darkness descends.

  A village of about 50 people, Siorapaluk sits on a hill on the northern shore of a small fjord. Five glaciers tumble down at the head. Just around the bend, on the way north, are the bird cliffs of Neqe and Pitoravik. Beyond is the historic village site of Etah, the staging ground for many North Pole attempts over the years. Siorapaluk has a small store, a tiny elementary school (grades one through eight), a chapel, and a skinning house where animal skins are prepared, tanned, and sewn.

  We’ve rented a house where we can cook and sleep. Its windows overlook the broken shore-fast ice. “This is the second ice of the winter,” Otto Simiqaq, tells me. He and his wife, Pauline, both in their 40s, are fine traditional hunters here. “In the fall we usually go north by dogsled to hunt walrus, but now we have to sail. The water is so rough, when the ice tried to come in, it came up broken by the waves. Then the ice came in and lay down flat, but after last week’s storm, it broke up again.”

  Talk of the blizzard that almost killed Gedeon is still on people’s minds here. Just before the storm hit, a hunter tied his dogs to the ice, ran up to his house to get a drink of water, and came back out to find that the fjord ice had broken up completely. He never saw his dogs again.

  Eva, a Norwegian schoolteach
er who has lived in Siorapaluk for 15 years, recalled it as a terrible night when no one slept. “We could not get to each other. A dog’s house flew against my front door and the dog inside died. Snow filled the schoolhouse and blew into the small doghouses where females with pups find shelter. Every window was blanked out by snow. The whole of the fjord ice broke up.”

  After getting the snow out of the schoolhouse, Eva resumed teaching. “I teach ages 6 to 14. The population of this town varies between 62 and 50, depending on who goes down to Qaanaaq in the winter. I was hoping we could get mobile telephones, but it turns out you need 70 people to get the service. We may never have that many here. Now with the ice so bad it becomes quite isolated up here. I haven’t been to Qaanaaq all year.”

  From the schoolhouse we walk up the hill to visit Otto and Pauline again. Pauline is sewing a pair of mittens out of sealskin bleached pale tan; the dog-hair ruff is white. “In a normal year, Otto would be up the coast hunting nanoq,” she says. “But not now.”

  Otto comes in and pours a cup of coffee. He stirs sugar in and keeps stirring. He’s tall, strongly built, and restless. “Seven years ago we could travel on safe ice all winter and get animals. We didn’t worry about food then. Now it’s different.” He looks out at the fjord. “This is the second ice of the winter. In the fall we now have to sail to get walrus. The seas are very rough and it’s dangerous. We always went to the ice edge west of Kiatak Island. Lots of walrus out there. But the ice doesn’t go that far out now. The walrus are still there, but we can’t get to them.”

  He tells me that when the moon is half full, the ocean current is safer and they can travel then. “Before, it didn’t matter,” he says. “Seven or eight dog teams from here would go to Kiatak together twice a month. We could get three to five walrus each time. Last year, in February 2006, I got one walrus. That was the last walrus I got from the ice.”