Arctic Memories: Living with the Inuit

The Inuit's cold-adapted culture did not reach a state of near- perfection until the arrival of the Thule-culture people, who moved eastward from Alaska about A.D. 800, and within less than 200 years spread across most of the North American Arctic, displacing or absorbing the Dorset people. 

Superb sea-mammal hunters, Thule-culture Inuit pursued and killed everything, from the small ringed seal to the giant bowhead whale, and, according to archaeologist Robert McGhee of the Canadian Museum of Civilization, they had evolved "a technology more complex than that of any other preindustrial society, which allowed not only an economically efficient but also comfortable way of life throughout arctic North America."

 The Thule Inuit invented, perfected, and passed on to Inuit of historic times such a plethora of specialized tools and hunting equipment that the late James A. Ford of the American Museum of Natural History described them as "gadget burdened. 

The tool kit, for instance, used by Inuit not long ago to hunt seals at their agloos, the snow-covered breathing holes through the ice, consisted of about forty items, from the thin, slightly curved bone probe to determine the shape of the agloo, to tutereark, the piece of thick caribou winter fur on which the hunter stood so that no sound would warn the seal of his presence. 

The Inuit achieved this broad-ranging yet highly specialized Arctic material culture against what seem insuperable odds. Not only was their land exceedingly cold, hostile, and barren, it was also poor in those raw materials most societies have found essential. Metal was rare: meteoric iron, brittle and hard to work, was found in the Cape York region of northwest Greenland, and native copper in a few areas of the central Canadian Arctic. Driftwood was abundant along Alaska's coast and east past the Mackenzie River delta; it was rare in the eastern Arctic and virtually nonexistent in the central Arctic. That left stone, ice, snow, and sod as the most readily available and most widely used materials that the land and the sea provided. Infinitely more important were the materials they obtained from the animals they killed: bone, horn, baleen, antlers, teeth, ivory, furs, skins, sinews, and intestinal tissues.

From Arctic Memories there is this quote:

As Dionyse Settle, the Elizabethan chronicler of explorer Martin Frobisher's second expedition to Baffin Island, so shrewdly observed in 1577: "Those beastes, flesh, fishes, and fowles, which they kil, they are meate, drinke, apparel, houses, bedding, hose, shooes, thred, saile for their boates... and almost all their riches."

I looked up the full text of Settle's work and copied the following, since it was written in 1577, it seems like very broken English but I think it's not worth editing.

They are men of a large corpora∣ture, and good proportion: their colour is not much vnlike the Sunne burnte Countrie man, who laboureth daily in the Sunne for his liuing.

They weare their haire somethinge long, and cut before, either with stone or knife, very disorderly. Their women weare their haire long, and knit vp with two loupes, shewing forth on either side of their faces, and the rest foltred vp on a knot. Also, some of their women race their faces proportionally, as chinne, chéekes, and forehead, and the wristes of their handes, wherevpon they lay a co∣lour, which continueth darke azurine.

They eate their meate all rawe, both fleshe, fishe, and foule, or something per∣boyled with bloud & a little water, whi∣che they drinke. For lacke of water, they wil eate yce, that is hard frosen, as plea∣santly as we will doe Sugar Candie, or other Sugar.

If they, for necessities sake, stand in néede of the premisses, such grasse as the countrie yéeldeth they plucke vppe, and eate, not deintily, or salletwise, to allure their stomaches to appetite: but for ne∣cessities sake, without either salt, oyles, or washing, like brutish beasts deuoure the same. They neither vse table, stoole, or table cloth for comelinesse: but when they are imbrued with bloud, knuckle déepe, and their kniues in like sort, they vse their tongues as apt instruments to licke them cleane: in doeing whereof, they are assured to loose none of their victuals.

They franck or kéep certeine doggs, not much vnlike Wolues, whiche they yoke together, as we do oxen and horses, to a sled or traile: and so carrie their ne∣cessaries ouer the yce and snowe, from place to place: as the captiue, whom we haue, made perfecte signes. And when those Dogges are not apt for the same vse: or when with hunger they are con∣streyned, for lacke of other victuals, they eate them: so that they are as néedefull for them, in respect of their bignesse, as our oxen are for vs.

They apparell themselues in the skinnes of such beastes as they kill, se∣wed together with the sinewes of them. All the fowle which they kill, they skin, and make thereof one kinde of garment or other, to defend them from the cold.

They make their apparell with hoods and tailes, which tailes they giue, when they thinke to gratifie any friendshippe shewed vnto them: a great signe of friendshippe with them. The men haue them not so syde as the women.

The men and women weare their hose close to their legges, from the wast to the knée, without any open before, as well the one kinde as the other. Uppon their legges, they weare hose of lether, with the furre side inward, two or thrée paire on at once, and especially the wo∣men. In those hose, they put their kni∣ues, néedles, and other thinges néedefull to beare about. They put a bone with∣in their hose, whiche reacheth from the foote to the knée, wherevpon they drawe their said hose, and so in place of garters, they are holden from falling downe a∣bout their féete.

They dresse their skinnes very softe and souple with the haire on. In cold weather or Winter, they weare ye furre side inward: and in Summer outward. Other apparell they haue none, but the said skinnes.

Those beastes, flesh, fishes, and fow∣les, which they kil, they are both meate, drinke, apparel, houses, bedding, hose, shooes, thred, saile for their boates, with many other necessaries, whereof they stande in néede, and almost all their ri∣ches.

Their houses are tentes, made of Seale skinns, pitched with foure Firre quarters, foure square, méeting at the toppe, and the skinnes sewed together with sinowes, and layd therevppon: so pitched they are, that the entraunce in∣to them, is alwayes South, or against the Sunne.

They haue other sortes of houses, whiche wée found, not to be inhabited, which are raised with stones and What bones, and a skinne layd ouer them, to withstand the raine, or other weather: the entraunce of them béeing not much vnlike an Quens mouth, whereto, I thincke, they resort for a time, to fishe, hunt, and fowle, and so leaue them for the next time they come thether againe.

Their weapons are Bowes, Ar∣rowes, Dartes, and Slinges. Their Bowes are of a yard long of wood, si∣newed on the back with strong veines, not glued too, but fast girded and tyed on. Their Bowe stringes are likewise sinewes. Their arrowes are thrée pée∣ces, nocked with bone, and ended with bone, with those two ends, and the wood in the middst, they passe not in lengthe halfe a yard or little more. They are f•∣thered with two fethers, the penne end being cutte away, and the fethers layd vppon the arrowe with the broad side to the woode: in somuch that they séeme, when they are tyed on, to haue foure fe∣thers. They haue likewise thrée sortes of heades to those arrowes: one sort of stone or yron, proportioned like to a heart: the second sort of bone, much like vnto a stopte head, with a hooke on the same: the thirde sort of bone likewise, made sharpe at both sides, and sharpe pointed. They are not made very fast, but lightly tyed to, or else set in a nocke, that vppon small occasion, the arrowe leaueth these heades behinde them: and they are of small force, except they be ve∣ry néere, when they shoote.

Their Darts are made of two sorts: the one with many forkes of bone in the fore ende, and likewise in the mid∣dest: their proportions are not muche vnlike our toasting yrons, but longer: these they cast out of an instrument of wood, very readily. The other sorte is greater then the first aforesayde, with a long bone made sharp on both sides, not much vnlike a Rapier, which I take to be their most hurtfull weapon.

They haue two sorts of boates, made of Lether, set out on the inner side with quarters of wood, artificially tyed toge∣ther with thongs of the same: the grea∣ter sort are not much vnlike our Wher∣ries, wherein sixtéene or twentie men may fitte: they haue for a sayle, drest the guttes of such beastes as they kyll, very fine and thinne, which they sewe toge∣ther: the other boate is but for one man to sitte and rowe in, with one oare.

Their order of fishing, hunting, and fowling, are with these sayde weapons: but in what sort, or how they vse them, we haue no perfect knowledge as yet.

I can not suppose their abode or ha∣bitation to be here, for that neither their houses, or apparell, are of no such force to withstand the extremitie of colde, that the countrie séemeth to be infected with all: neyther doe I sée any signe likely to performe the same.

Those houses, or rather dennes, which stand there, haue no signe of foot∣way, or any thing else troden, whiche is one of the chiefest tokens of habitation. And those tents, which they bring with them, when they haue sufficiently hun∣ted and fished, they remoue to other places: and when they haue sufficient∣ly stored them of suche victuals, as the countrie yeldeth, or bringeth foorth, they returne to their Winter stations or ha∣bitations. This coniecture do I make, for the infertilitie, whiche I perceiue to be in that countrie.

They haue some yron, whereof they make arrowe heades, kniues, and other little instrumentes, to woorke their boa∣tes, bowes, arrowes, and dartes withal, whiche are very vnapt to doe any thing withall, but with great labour.

It seemeth, that they haue conuersa∣tion with some other people, of whome, for exchaunge, they should receiue the same. They are greatly delighted with any thinge that is brighte, or giueth a sound.

What knowledge they haue of God, or what Idol they adore, wée haue no perfect intelligence. I thincke them ra∣ther Anthropophagi, or deuourers of mans fleshe, then otherwise: for that there is no flesh or fishe, which they finde dead, (smell it neuer so filthily) but they will eate it, as they finde it, without any other dressing. A loathsome spectacle, ei∣ther to the beholders, or hearers.

There is no maner of créeping beast hurtful, except some Spiders (which, as many affirme, are signes of great store of Golde:) and also certeine stinging Gnattes, which bite so fiercely, that the place where they bite, shortly after swelleth, and itcheth very sore.

They make signes of certeine peo∣ple, that weare bright plates of Gold in their forheads, and other places of their bodies.

The Countries, on both sides the streightes, lye very highe with roughe stonie mounteynes, and great quantitie of snowe thereon. There is very little plaine ground, and no grasse, except a li∣tle, whiche is much like vnto mosse that groweth on soft ground, such as we gett Turfes in. There is no wood at all. To be briefe, there is nothing fitte, or profi∣table for ye vse of man, which that Coun∣trie with roote yéeldeth, or bringeth forth: Howbeit, there is great quantitie of Deere, whose skinnes are like vnto Asses, their heads or hornes doe farre ex∣ceed, as wel in length as also in breadth, any in these oure partes or Countrie: their féete likewise, are as great as oure oxens, whiche we measured to be seuen or eight ynches in breadth. There are also Hares, Wolues, fishing Beares, and Sea foule of sundrie sortes.

As the Countrie is barren and vn∣fertile, so are they rude and of no capa∣citie to culture the same, to any perfec∣tion: but are contented by their hun∣ting, fishing, and fowling, with rawe flesh and warme bloud, to satisfie their gréedie panches, whiche is their onely glorie.

After two hours, I had run out of poetry and patience. After three hours, I felt stiff, cold, and exhausted. The total lack of movement, the absence of any stimuli, grated on my nerves. After six hours, I gave up. I was cold, creaky, cranky, and intensely annoyed with myself, but that was about as much as I could take. Yet the Inuit did this nearly every day for ten to fifteen hours, and sometimes they got a seal and often they did not. Their concentration was total, their patience endless, for to Inuit (and polar bears) the seal was everything. I once asked Inuterssuaq of the Polar Inuit, "What is the most important thing in life?" He reflected for a while, then smiled and said: "Seals, for without them we could not live." 

George Best, captain and chronicler of Martin Frobisher's 1578 expedition to Baffin Island, said of the Inuit: "These people hunte for their dinners... even as the Beare." Inuit and polar bear do, in fact, use similar seal-hunting methods. Both wait with infinite patience at agloos, hoping for seals to surface. 

In late spring and early summer, seals bask upon the ice, and Inuit and polar bears synchronize their patient stalk with the sleep- wake rhythm of the seals. Typically, a seal sleeps for a minute or so, wakes, looks carefully all around to make certain no enemy is near, and then, satisfied that all is safe, falls asleep for another minute or two. The moment the seal slumps in sleep, the bear advances. The instant the seal looks up, the bear freezes into immobility, camouflaged by its yellowish-white fur. At 20 yards (18 m) the bear pounces, a deadly blur across the ice, and grabs and kills the seal. 

In the eastern Arctic, Inuit stalk a seal on the ice hidden behind a portable hunting screen, now of white cloth, formerly of bleached seal or caribou skin. In the central Arctic, Inuit do not use the screen. Instead they employ a method known to Inuit from Siberia to Greenland: they approach the seal by pretending to be a seal. They slither across the snow while the seal sleeps. When it wakes, the hunter stops and makes seal-like movements. To successfully impersonate a seal, a hunter told me, "you have to think like a seal." It is a hunt that requires great skill and endurance. They hunted seals at their agloos, they stalked them with screens on the ice. They waited for them at the floe edge and they harpooned them from kayaks. 

They hunted seals in fall on ice so thin it bent beneath the hunter's weight. They hunted them in the bluish darkness of the winter night, and they invented and perfected an entire arsenal of ingenious weapons and devices to hunt the seal. For, to Inuit, the seal was life, and their greatest goddess was Sedna, mother of seals and whales. 

A few inland groups lived nearly exclusively on caribou. The Mackenzie Delta Inuit are beluga hunters. Many Inuit of the Bering Sea and Bering Strait region live primarily on walrus. In Greenland and Labrador, Inuit hunted harp seals and hooded seals (the Polar Inuit drum Masautsiaq made for me as a farewell present is covered with the throat membrane of a hooded seal). But, for most Inuit, two seal species were of truly vital importance: the large bearded seal that weighs up to 600 pounds (270 kg), and the smaller - up to 180 pounds (81 kg) - but numerous ringed seal. These two seals were the basis of human life in the Arctic. 

I spent the spring of 1975 with the walrus hunters of Little Diomede Island in Bering Strait, between Alaska and Siberia. Among our crew was Tom, Jr., or Junior as everyone called him, the eleven-year-old son of Tom Menadelook, captain of the large walrus-skin-covered umiak, the traditional hunting boat of the Diomeders. On one of our trips into the pack ice, Junior shot his first seal. His father was typically gruff and curt, but we could see that he was pleased and proud. The crew made much of the boy and he glowed in their praise. That night, his mother, Mary Menadelook, cut the seal into many pieces, and following ancient custom, the boy took meat to all the households in the village, including to my shack, thus symbolically feeding us all. He was a man now, a provider, who shared in traditional Inuit fashion. 

Seal meat and fat, raw or cooked, was the main food of most Inuit and their sled dogs. The high-calorie blubber gave strength, warmth, and endurance to the people; it heated them from within. Rendered into seal oil, it burned in their semicircular soapstone lamps, cooked their meals, heated their homes, and, most importantly, melted fresh-water ice or snow into drinking water. Lack of blubber meant hunger, icy, dark homes, and excruciating thirst. Although Inuit were hardy and inured to cold, and dressed in superb fur clothing, their high-calorie, high-protein meat-fat diet also helped them to withstand the rigors of winter, for it raised their basal metabolic rate by 20 to 40 percent. Fortunately for the Inuit, blubber is a beneficial fat. Scientists were fascinated that Inuit who, a recent study says, "traditionally obtained about 40 percent of their calories from fat," had, in the past, no heart disease because their diet "although high in fat, is low in saturated fat.. and that presumably explains their freedom from disease." 

Seal oil, in the past, was stored in sealskin pokes and kept in stone caches, safe from arctic foxes, for spring and summer use. At Bathurst Inlet, Ekalun once showed me a great, solitary stone pillar, too sheer and high for bears or foxes to climb, upon which, in the past, Inuit had stored pokes of oil (they used a sled as a ladder to climb to the top). Even now, after decades of disuse, the distinctive, cloying smell of ancient seal oil clung to the pillar. 

The Inuit of Little Diomede eat seal oil with nearly all their meals. When they have to go to hospital in Nome or Anchorage, they take a bottle of seal oil along, because without it, they say, "food just doesn't taste right." Seal oil is their main preservative: they store in it the thousands of murre eggs they collect in summer, and bags of greens - and both keep reasonably fresh for about a year. They even had a type of chewing gum made of solidified seal oil and willow catkins, and a mixture of whipped blubber and cloudberries is known in Alaska as "Eskimo ice cream."

In 1967, I lived some months at Coral Harbour on Southampton Island in northern Hudson Bay and often traveled with Tommy Nakoolak, then, at sixty-two, patriarch of the island's sizable Nakoolak clan. Of Knud Rasmussen, the great Danish ethnologist, it was said that he was the only man known who collected old women. They, of course, were the repositories of the ancient tales he loved and recorded. Similarly, whenever possible, I lived and traveled with older Inuit who told and taught me many things the lore, the legends, the skills of their people. 

Tommy Nakoolak was small and wiry, kind and considerate, and he owned a Peterhead boat, the Tereglu (the word for a baby bearded seal), which he handled as if it were a racing yawl. One day along Coats Island, south of Southampton Island, he spotted a herd of walruses on a rocky promontory. "You want pictures?" he asked, and when I said yes, he swung the boat around and headed full speed for the rocks. He sheered past them so closely, I tensed instinctively for the coming crash, but Tommy only smiled. Like many old-time Inuit, he had an astounding geographical memory and knew every rock and ridge along hundreds of miles of coast. 

One day while his sons were hunting caribou on Coats Island, Tommy said: "Come, I'll show you something." He took the Tereglu to a secluded bay near Cape Pembroke. Ashore were ancient stone houses, man-high cairns, box-like graves built of large flat stones, and everywhere masses of bleached bones of caribou, walrus, bowhead whale, and seal. "This is where the Sadlermiut lived," said Tommy. A mysterious, long-isolated Stone Age people, the Sadlermiut were briefly known to the outside world and then all were killed by a whaler-brought disease in the winter of 1902. They may even have been Tunit, the powerful Dorset-culture people. Extinct everywhere else for 800 years, they had found a final refuge on these isolated islands. (The people who now live on Southampton Island are descendants of mainland Inuit brought by whalers and traders to the island to replace the extinct Sadlermiut.) 

The Sadlermiut were "discovered" in the summer of 1824 by the explorer Captain G.F. Lyon of the Royal Navy. He anchored his ship, HMS Griper, off Cape Pembroke. From the camp which Tommy Nakoolak was showing me, a man approached the Griper, riding on a most peculiar craft. It consisted of "three inflated seal- skins, connected most ingeniously by blown intestines, so that his vessel was extremely buoyant." The man's legs dangled in the water while he propelled this strange float toward the ship with a narrow- bladed paddle made of whale bone. The poor man had never seen other humans before and he was afraid: "his teeth chattered and himself and seal-skins trembled in unison. 

Lyon went ashore. The people were shy but friendly, of "mild manners, quiet speech, and as grateful for kindness, as they were anxious to return it." The men wore pants of polar-bear fur; their mittens were the skins of murres, feathers inside. The women were slightly tattooed, and "their hair was twisted into a short club, which hung over each temple." The men's topknots were even more impressive: "Each man had an immense mass of hair as large as the head of a child, rolled into the form of a ball, and projecting from the rise of the forehead." 

Once the Sadlermiut had been numerous. At Native Point on Southampton Island, the archaeologist Henry B. Collins of the Smithsonian Institution found, in 1954, "the largest aggregation of old Eskimo house ruins in the Canadian Arctic." But whalers began to stop at the islands and contact with another world was fatal to the long-isolated people. When the whaling captain George Comer visited Southampton Island in 1896, only seventy Sadlermiut were left. Comer admired the strength and courage of these "fearless people" who had only stone-tipped harpoons and spears: "For an Eskimo in his frail kayak to attempt to capture a [50-ton/ 45-tonne] whale with the primitive implements which they manufactured meant great courage. 

In the fall of 1902, the whaler Active stopped at Southampton Island. One sailor was sick; he may have had typhus or typhoid. Sadlermiut visited the ship and took the disease back to their village. That winter the last Sadlermiut died in lonely agony upon their island. Collins studied their house ruins and graves in 1954 and 1955 and "found evidence that the Sadlermiut descended from the Dorsets - that they were in fact the last survivors of the Dorset culture."

This is, perhaps, too rosy a view of early Inuit life. It was hard, precarious, and in some regions haunted by recurring famines. But it did have that saving grace of contentment known only when a people are secure within their society and in harmony with their natural environment. That ancient balance was broken when Europeans came to the Arctic - the whalers who took from the North much of its wildlife, the basis of the Inuit's existence, and who brought to the North diseases to which the long-isolated Natives had no immunity. 

Between 1850 and 1885, the Inuit population of coastal arctic Alaska declined by 50 percent. In two generations, the Mackenzie Delta Inuit were reduced from about 1,000, to fewer than 100. Labrador's Inuit numbered about 3,000 in 1750. In 1946, 750 were left. With the whales nearly exterminated, the whalers departed, leaving a people wracked by disease and accustomed to, and dependent upon, many southern goods. Into the vacuum created by the whalers' departure stepped the fur traders, and to pay for the southern goods they had come to regard as essential, the Inuit became trappers. Where once they had been poor but independent, they were now dependent and still poor, their ancient autarky destroyed beyond redemption.

THE BELUGA HUNTERS IN PREHISTORIC TIMES - A MERE 200 YEARS AGO - THE MACKENZIE River delta and adjacent coasts were the richest, most populous region in what is now the Canadian Arctic. About 30,000 bowhead whales summered in the shallow Beaufort Sea, 50-ton (45-tonne) feasts for hunters skillful and daring enough to kill them. There were Dall's sheep in the mountains, moose in the valleys, musk-oxen on the tundra, and in summer vast herds of caribou on the wind-swept coastal plains. 

Seals were common. Great polar bears patrolled the ice, and fat Barren Ground grizzlies patrolled the land. Here were the breeding grounds of much of North America's waterfowl: the myriad tundra lakes were speckled with ducks and geese, loons and swans. Rivers and lakes were rich in fish: char and inconnu, and immense shoals of herring and fat whitefish. 

Most important to the Inuit of this region were the milky-white beluga whales that arrived each year in large pods in late June at the edge of the Mackenzie estuary and remained for six to seven weeks in its shallow, sun-warmed bays and inlets, where they were relatively easy to hunt. The people were the Mackenzie Inuit, the "Beluga Hunters," as archaeologist Robert McGhee of the Canadian Museum of Civilization has called them. When he dug trenches through the thick refuse layers at Kittigazuit, the main village of the Mackenzie Inuit, "87 percent [of all bones] were of beluga." These Inuit took all that a bounteous nature offered, but the beluga large, easily killed, and abundant - was their favorite prey. 

While in other parts of the Canadian North the average population density was one person to every 250 square miles (648 km2), 2,500 to 4,000 Mackenzie Inuit lived in settlements near the river mouth. Inuit camps, specks of humanity scattered across the vastness of the Arctic, were usually home to a few families, perhaps 50 people. Kittigazuit, the main village of the Beluga Hunters, had a summer population of 800 to 1,000 people. 

Among the Inuit at Kittigazuit at the turn of this century was an orphan boy named Nuligak who lived with his crippled grandmother. "Because I was an orphan and a poor one at that, my mind was always alert to the happenings around me. Once my eyes had seen something, it was never forgotten." He became a famous hunter and, in old age, wrote I, Nuligak, the story of his life, wonderfully vivid glimpses of a long-vanished world. 

"The Inuit of those days [about 1900, when Nuligak was five years old lived on game and fish only, and fished and hunted on a grand scale." The 200-yard (823-m)-long Kittigazuit beach was hardly large enough for all the kayaks drawn up there," and the moment belugas were spotted "a swarm of kayaks was launched. At the great whale hunts I remember there was such a large number of kayaks that when the first had long disappeared from view, more and more were just setting out... Clever hunters killed five, seven belugas, and after the hunt the shore was covered with whale carcasses... Once I heard elders say that three hundred whales had been taken. 

The great driftwood racks and stages were packed with drying meat, sealskin pokes were filled with fat, ample food for "kaivitivik, the time of dancing and rejoicing which began with the departure of the sun and ended with its return," Nuligak recalled. "In those days the Inuit could make marvelous things": puppets and toy animals, activated by baleen strings and springs, that hopped and danced across the floor of their great winter meeting hall, while Nuligak and the other children watched in wonder. "There was such an abundance of meals, games, and things to admire that these sunless weeks sped by as if they had been only a few days. 

Until 1888, the Mackenzie Inuit had little contact with the outside world. That year the southern whalers came and the ancient, unchanging world of the Beluga Hunters collapsed in agony, despair, disease, and death. "Aboriginal Mackenzie Eskimo culture could probably be considered to have become extinct between 1900 and 1910," Robert McGhee noted with scientific detachment. 

In 1888, whalers reached the Beaufort Sea, last sanctuary of the rapidly declining bowhead whales. Six years later, 2,000 people wintered at Herschel Island, west of the Delta, soon known as the "Sodom of the North." It was the largest "town' in northwestern Canada, inhabited, according to a Nome, Alaska, newspaper report, "by demons of debauchery and cruelty," the scene, according to horrified missionaries, of "bacchanalian orgies."

Nuligak's memories are less lurid. He remembered the whalers more as friends than as fiends. "White men and Inuit played games together, as well as hunting side by side. We played baseball and wrestled. We danced in the Eskimo fashion to the sound of many drums. 

Unintentionally, though, the whalers brought death to the long-isolated Inuit. They needed great amounts of fresh meat. Musk-oxen vanished from the land. Few bowhead whales remained. In 1914, the Royal North-West Mounted Police reported that caribou were virtually extinct in the Mackenzie region. By then, the Beluga Hunters, too, were nearing extinction. 

As the plague had ravaged medieval Europe, measles and smallpox epidemics wiped out the Beluga Hunters, who lacked immunity to southern diseases. Of 3,000 people, fewer than 100 survived. In 1900, nearly 1,000 Inuit camped at Kittigazuit. In 1906, a single family remained in this village of death and decay. 

Into the vacuum created by the demise of the Mackenzie people flowed Inuit from as far west as Alaska's Seward Peninsula, and even Yuit and Chukchi from Siberia. Traders and trappers came from the south. And whalers from all over the world and from every social stratum - the dregs of San Francisco's slums and a Count Bülow, a remote cousin of the chancellor of the German Reich; Spanish- speaking Africans; Chinese coolies; and people from the Polynesian Islands - - settled in the region and "went native." One day in the town of Inuvik an Inuk girl, a sociology student, asked me: "Where are you from originally?" I told her I was Baltic German, born in Riga, Latvia. "Well, for heaven's sake!" she exclaimed. "My grandfather came from Riga. 

These people, then, part Inuit, part everyone, became the new Beluga Hunters, following, to some extent, the millennial customs and traditions of the nearly extinct Mackenzie Inuit. The changes wrought through the coming of the whalers were enormous, but some things had not changed: the coming of the belugas, the need for food, the ancient rhythm of camp life through the seasons. 

Even the remnants of this ancient whaling culture seemed fated to fade away. Professor Vagn Flyger of the University of Maryland, who studied the Beluga Hunters in 1961 and 1962, predicted confidently that "Eskimo whale camps will soon be no more," and Nuligak wrote in the 1950s that "the Inuit eat white man's food nowadays." In the late 1970s, the oil companies came, their made- in-Japan module headquarters, with gleaming offices and dining rooms, with swimming pools and cinemas, squatting on the tundra, with their spacecraft-like drilling rigs far out in the Beaufort Sea, all backed by multibillion-dollar exploration budgets. Yet, "the old way of life" persisted. When I went to join the Beluga Hunters in the summer of 1985, twenty-five families from the towns of Tuktoyaktuk, Inuvik, and Aklavik had "returned to the land," to ancient camps along the coast where Inuit had lived and hunted belugas for thousands of years. "From time immemorial this has been our life," said Nuligak. 

WE TRAVELED FROM NOWHERE TO NOWHERE IN A WORLD ALL WHITE, eleven dogs, a long sled, a fur-clad Inuk and I. We had spent a week at the floe edge, the limit of landfast ice, and the hunting had been good. Jes had shot and harpooned eight seals. We had eaten well and our sled was heavy with meat - food for his family and dogs - and with seal pelts he would sell at the store. 

We felt the coming of the storm. The air was still and oppressive. Gulls, screaming, flew toward the distant land. The sky turned leaden black. We should have left hours ago. But a pod of narwhals was feeding close to the floe edge; the eerie stillness was filled with the plosive "pooff," "pooff," "pooff" of their breathing. Small plumes of exhaled breath hung briefly in the icy air, and a few times we saw the gleaming ivory tusks of the males. 

Jes wanted a whale. His entire hunter's spirit was focused on those whales, wishing them closer, closer. He was the perfect predator, quietly poised in total concentration, the ultimate Arctic hunter, as his people had been since the dawn of time. The whale meant food and life and glory, the primal thrill of being, and at that moment nothing else mattered. 

While Jes's soul was in that strange mystic sphere that links the hunter to his prey, I sat apart and nursed my white man's worries. I had spent far too many years in the Arctic not to know that the coming storm would be hell, the trip home utter misery and, if the ice broke up, exceedingly dangerous. It was 60 miles (96 km) back to the village. 

The storm struck, and Jes did not get his whale. He rose slowly, reluctantly. The tension seeped out of him and then he smiled a marvelously boyish smile, shrugged, and said: "Ayornamat. (It can't be helped.)" An Inuk does not rant and rave; his language has no swearwords. He does not rail against God or Nature, but simply accepts adversity. He does his best; the rest is fate. 

We lashed the load upon the long pliant sled with utmost care, passing the bearded-seal thong back and forth, pulling it tight with all our strength. Jes called to the dogs. Normally they would have leapt into a joyous gallop. Now they moved without enthusiasm, their tails, usually cockily curled, drooping sadly. Like me, they feared the storm. 

At first, brief lulls alternated with vicious gusts. Then the storm became steady and we traveled into a hissing, roaring avalanche of snow. The dogs hated it. The wind-lashed ice spicules hurt their eyes, and they tried to veer away from the wind. Jes beat them, coaxed them, directed them. There was only snow, the screaming wind, and nothingness; we seemed suspended in time and space. But Jes was guided by sastrugi, snow ripples created by prevailing winds, and by the knowledge of a thousand trips since he had first gone to the floe edge as a small boy with his father. 

We traveled for hours, our faces seared by the wind, our fur clothing plastered with snow. The ice changed, became rugged, hummocky. We were in a tidal zone, close to a coast. For a moment I saw a cliff and then it vanished again in the whirling white. Jes walked ahead now, leading the dogs through a maze of ice blocks. Near the base of the cliff he tied the dogs securely to a stone upon the ice. "Come," he said. We clambered up an incline, perhaps a beach in summertime, walked past a house-high rock, squeezed through a triangular hole between the rock and the cliff, and were suddenly in a spacious cave. Jes laughed, delighted by my amazement, the magician who has performed the perfect trick. 

Jes unharnessed and tethered the dogs, then cut up a seal and fed them. They rolled into balls, noses tucked under bushy tails, and soon the snow covered them with an insulating blanket. I lugged our sled load into the cave, shook the snow out of the bedding furs and my clothing, and made supper: a big pot of seal meat boiled on a Primus stove. 

After the elemental chaos of the storm, the cave felt calm and secure. It had obviously served as sanctuary to other Arctic hunters for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. In the back were low sleeping platforms of pebbles and flat stones. Soot streaks along the walls and roof showed where seal-oil lamps had burned and flared. The cave floor was scattered with bones, remnants of past meals. Bone, stone, and ivory shavings and splinters marked places where men had sat and made or repaired tools or hunting weapons, and broken toys spoke of children who had once played in the cave. 

We ate the steaming seal meat; drank the fat, scalding broth; and glowed with marvelous warmth. Jes made tea, boiled it until it was coffee-black, and we drank it syrupy-thick with sugar. We were safe, warm, full of food, relaxed and utterly content. Long, long ago, said Jes, Tunit had lived in this cave, a giant people but stupid, and the Inuit had killed them. His stories - part myths, part ancient oral history - - spanned the ages. The Primus hissed, and outside roared the storm. 

We spread our furs on the ancient sleeping platforms and, minutes later, his deep, even breathing told me that Jes was sound asleep. Cozy in my furry cocoon, I looked at the soot patterns on the cave wall, listened to the eldritch screeching of the storm, and thought sleepily about my other life: our pleasant, book-filled home in Montreal; my wife; our children. It was early May. Maud would be working in the garden. The boys should be home from school. The first tulips would be blooming. As I drifted off to sleep, it seemed part of a dream.

Noises and voices drifted through the fog; the creak and groan of tide-moved ice; the honking of Canada geese; the plaintive calling of red-throated loons; the lilting song of snow buntings; the haunting, mellow woodwind crooning of courting eider drakes. 

Early next morning, the fog lifted. We climbed a hill topped by an inukshuk, an ancient, roughly man-shaped Inuit stone marker, and gazed across the sea dotted with dark granite islands bathed in the golden light of dawn. 

Our boats full of pots, pails, zinc and plastic wash basins, and large wooden crates, we set out to raid the holms, the rocky islets that are the eiders' favorite nesting places. Men, women, and children stumbled across the algae-slippery coastal rocks of each islet, scrambled up the sheer ice foot, and then spread, screaming with glee, across the island as dozens of eiders, sometimes hundreds, rushed and clattered off their nests. Each nest was lined with a thick, soft layer of brownish gray-flecked eiderdown and contained, on the average, four large olive eggs. The Inuit took the eggs but left the down; traditionally they dressed in furs and had no use for down. Since it was early in the season, most ducks had just laid their eggs. 

We rushed from island to island and collected eggs all day, and at night we feasted on them. The children, impatient, pricked many and sucked them dry. The adults preferred them hard-boiled. They made a filling meal; each egg, in volume, equals nearly two hen's eggs, and many Inuit ate six to ten at each meal. The albumen of the hard-boiled eider egg is a smooth, gleaming white, the yolk a vivid orange. The taste is rich and rather oily. 

In a week we visited dozens of islets and amassed thousands of eggs. The Inuit also shot at least a hundred ducks and several seals. It seemed amazing that these yearly raids had not decimated the ducks. But they were made so early in the season that most of the robbed ducks probably laid another clutch of eggs. 

Killiktee explained to me that in earlier days a taboo forbade the Inuit to camp on eider islands. They visited the islets and took the eggs, but they camped, as we did, only on the largest islands, where few ducks nest, thus avoiding prolonged disturbances in the breeding areas. The ducks, Killiktee said, seemed just as numerous now as sixty years ago when he had first visited the Savage Islands as a boy. Polar bears sometimes swim to the islands, kill all the ducks they can, and eat the eggs. One year, Killiktee said, while the Inuit were on holms, collecting eggs, a polar bear came to camp and robbed their stores. He ate at least a thousand eggs and crushed the rest, leaving a gooey mess upon the beach. Killiktee laughed, amused and without rancor. "Happy bear!" he said. 

Less lucky was a gosling caught on an islet by one of the girls. She kept it in a Danish cookie tin and tried to make a pet of it. The fluffy yellow bird peeped pathetically and, inevitably, died after a few days. The girl cried, heartbroken, over her dead pet, and then she skinned it and ate it. 

All crates were full of eggs, and ducks, seals, and whale meat filled the boats. The fog rolled in again and our boats traveled through a clammy, grayish, eerie emptiness. Killiktee led, the two other boats followed closely. Dark rocks appeared for moments and vanished into the gloomy gray; ice floes loomed up abruptly. Killiktee never hesitated. "How do you know where to go?" I asked. He smiled. "I know," he said. He had traveled along this coast a long lifetime; he had seen it, memorized it, knew every current, every shoal, every danger spot. He stood in the stern like a graven image and guided our boats through the weird gray void of the fog. 

In the evening he veered into a bay, a good place, he said, to catch char on the rising tide. The men set nets, the women boiled pots of meat and tea, the children played. Killiktee, tired, lay down on the shore, and moments later he was sound asleep. A dark shape upon the dark, ice-carved granite, he seemed to meld with rock and land. 

Back home at Kiijuak, all eggs were carefully examined. The cracked ones we ate soon. The others were placed in large crates and stored in a cool shady cleft among the rocks. They would last the people in our camp well into the winter. 

In fall, an Inuk from Lake Harbour passed our camp and took me along to Aberdeen Bay where the people quarry the jade-green soapstone for their carvings. While he had tea and talked with Killiktee, I packed and carried my things to his boat. Killiktee came to the beach. We both felt awkward. Inuit traditionally joyfully greet visitors, but visitors leave in silence and alone with none to see them off. Their language has many words of wisdom, but none for good-bye.

THE ALL-PURPOSE CARIBOU 

Glorious it is to see 

The caribou flocking down from the forests 

And beginning 

Their wandering to the north.

 Timidly they watch 

For the pitfalls of man. 

Glorious it is to see 

The great herds from the forests 

Spreading out over plains of white. 

Glorious to see. 

- INUIT POEM RECORDED BY KNUD RASMUSSEN IN THE EARLY 1920s

Once they flowed like a living and life-giving tide across the tundra plains of the North. When the caribou came, an old Inuk told Knud Rasmussen in the 1920s, "the whole country is alive, and one can see neither the beginning of them nor the end - the whole earth seems to be moving. 

Two animals were vital to human survival in the Arctic: seal and caribou. Seals provided food for humans and their sled dogs, strong, durable skins for boots and tents, and, above all, blubber that could be rendered into oil for the stone lamps of the Inuit, to cook their food, melt snow or ice into drinking water, dry their clothes, and warm their winter homes. 

Caribou gave Inuit food and, through bones, hoofs, and antlers, a multitude of tools, toys, and weapons. Above all, from caribou skins Inuit women made the best Arctic clothing ever designed: light, durable, and so warm it made the wearer nearly impervious to any Arctic weather. 

To kill caribou, Inuit used bows and arrows, lances, ambushes, traps, and a multitude of ingenious stratagems, many of them based on the hunters' knowledge of animal behavior and the quirks and weaknesses of their prey. Caribou are curious and myopic, and Inuit used these failings to get within shooting range - and that, before guns, was very close. The Inuit bow, made of pieces of driftwood, brittle and fragile, laboriously carved and pegged together, backed with plaited sinew cord to give it spring, and lashed with caribou or seal leather to give it strength, was a marvel of skill and ingenuity, but it was still a very weak weapon compared to bows of other regions where suitable wood was available. The longbow made of yew used by English archers to win the battle of Crécy in 1346 was deadly at 200 yards (180 m) and more. The Inuk bow, said Ekalun of Bathurst Inlet, who used it as a young hunter, killed only at thirty paces and less. 

In 1967, I joined two Inuit hunters, Akpaleeapik and his brother Akceagok from Grise Fiord on Ellesmere Island, and their oldest sons on the last of the great polar-bear hunts made by Canadian inuie. We left the village in April and returned in June, five people, two sleds and twenty-nine dogs, and never again in my life have I known such freedom. (The diaries I kept became the basis of my first book, The Long Hunt) The rest of the world just ceased to be; time lost all meaning. We lived only for the here and now; it was a primal life, with primal joys - the endless travel through a pristine land; the great hardships of the trip; the satisfaction of being able to cope, endure, and overcome; and, although I do not hunt and never use a gun, the undeniable thrill of the hunt. And since we and our sled dogs were invariably famished after ten to twenty hours of travel every day, we looked forward with keen anticipation to our daily meal of seal or polar bear. 

To hungry people every meal is a feast. A change of menu, however, is always welcome and when we crossed northern Devon Island in June and spotted caribou on a distant plain, Akeeagok / took me along to hunt them. We sledged in a valley to the edge of the plain and then we played an ancient Inuit game of deception. We advanced across the white, open plain, pretending to be a caribou: Akeeagok with arms and gun held high was the antlered torepart; I, bent at right angles, my head in the small of his back, was the rear end of the caribou. The caribou, of course, spotted us. instantly and were both curious and uneasy. Something, they realized, was not quite right. Whenever fear outweighed curiosity and they seemed ready to flee, we turned in profile to them, showing the rough outline of a caribou, and Akecagok grunted exactly like a caribou. Reassured, the caribou continued to stand and stare; once they even trotted toward us. When we were 30 yards (27 m) away, they finally panicked. But it was too late: Akeeagok shot and killed two animals. The others fled; he let them go. Both brothers were old-time hunters; they never killed more than we needed for food. 

Another ruse Inuit hunters used also relied on the caribou's curiosity and shortsightedness. Two men walked past a herd. As they passed a boulder, one hid behind it and the other continued, waving, perhaps, a piece of white caribou belly skin to attract the curious animals. They followed him at a safe distance - and were shot by the hidden hunter. 

In winter, Inuit cut pitfalls into drifts, covered them with thin sheets of hard Arctic snow, and baited them with urine, which caribou like for its saltiness. In spring and fall, they lay in wait with their kayaks where migrating caribou crossed rivers and lakes, and speared the swimming animals. And they built elaborate alignments of inukshuit, man-shaped cairns, on strategic ridges, which scared caribou herds toward hidden hunters. Women and children, crouched behind ridges and boulders, supplemented the line of stone men and, at a signal, rose and screamed. ("Hoo-hoo- hoo, they yelled, just like wolves," Ekalun recalled.) 

Caribou meat was eaten fresh, or cut into strips and air-dried for future use. Fat fall caribou, often killed far from camp, were cut up and cached, food for the coming winter. Skins were made into clothing, bed robes, and tents. 

Caribou sinew was the Inuit's thread. Plaited sinew cord was used to back the bow and give it elasticity and spring. It was used as fishing lines, and as guy lines for the tent. Depilated caribou skin was made into containers and packsacks, and covered the kayaks of inland Inuit. Toggles for dog-team harnesses were carved of caribou bone, as were the prongs of leisters (where musk-ox horn was not available), spear blades and arrowheads, and a diabolically ingenious wolf killer. Sharpened splinters of caribou shin bone were set into ice and covered with blood and fat. When a wolf came along and licked the blood, it lacerated its tongue on the frozen-in bone knife and, excited by the taste of fresh blood, licked and bled and licked and bled until it died; its skin was used for clothing. 

Caribou antlers were boiled and immersed in hot water and then straightened with a qatersionfik, a big bone or palmate piece of antler into which a large hole had been worked. (Identical implements were made by reindeer hunters of the Aurignacian and Magdalenian periods in Europe, 15,000 to 30,000 years ago. Under the delusion that these were symbols of ancient authority, archaeologists have given them the grandiloquent name batons de commandment.) Straightened antler sections were scarfed, glued (with caribou blood), pegged (with pegs of caribou bone), and lashed (with strips of moist caribou skin), and made into spear shafts, tent poles, leister handles, and sled sections. 

All was used, nothing was wasted. What humans did not eat, their sled dogs did. Caribou provided Inuit with food, clothing, shelter, and many tools and weapons. It was essential to life and lived in their legends and myths. The newborn Inuit baby was wiped clean with a piece of caribou fur, and when an Inuk died his shroud was made of caribou skins. 

Caribou were in their thoughts and caribou marched through their dreams. In spring at Bathurst Inlet, as we waited for caribou to come to our far-northern coast, Ekalun on the sleeping platform next to me often mumbled in his sleep, and it was "tuktu, always "tuktu," endless herds of caribou, migrating through the sleeping mind of the old hunter.

In May, the weather turned mild and muggy. Agloo hunting was finished. Our thoughts turned southward, to the land. It, now, must give us food. The caribou must come, on their annual migration from the taiga, the northern forest belt, over the vastness of the Barren Ground tundra, to the Arctic Sea. 

Each day Ekalun and his sons climbed the mountain behind our camp to scan the land and sea patiently with their telescopes. And each day they came down from the mountain and shrugged. «Tuktu nauk. (No caribou.)" Our stores of seal meat and blubber dwindled rapidly. The children fished for tomcod at fissures in the ice. 

Rosie went inland, with a big bag of traps, to the sandy ridges where perky ground squirrels were emerging from their long winter's sleep to bask in the spring sun. She walked fast, her small, work-worn body bent forward, set a series of traps and rushed off to the next siksik (squirrel) colony, while I trotted behind through the mushy spring snow, out of breath and oozing sweat. At night, the squirrels boiled in a big pot, pink little paws poking pathetically out of the bubbling broth. They tasted like chicken. Squirrels and the little fish the children brought home were now our main food. 

Ekalun's automatic Swiss watch had stopped. "Here, Kabloo, you fix it," he said. I recoiled at the idea, and Ekalun laughed derisively. "I thought white men were supposed to be so clever," he gibed and began to take it apart. The tools he lacked he made, a few out of Rosie's darning needles. He remembered the days when the only tools his people had were of stone, bone, horn, and native copper. He had shown me how to make a stone adze, and it was similar to the ones I had seen in Paris's Musée de l'Homme made by Magdalenian hunters 20,000 years ago. Now he nonchalantly took the watch apart. Before evening he had assembled the watch again and it worked. 

Our camp was nearly out of food; one cannot live long on lean spring squirrels and small fish. The families dispersed, traveling far inland to intercept the vanguard of migrating caribou. The talk in camp was of tuktu - caribou - always tuktu, the quail and manna of the Barrens. 

Ekalun remained. He was carving a chess set: the board superbly inlaid with polished stones of many colors; the rooks were igloos, the knights polar bears, the bishops dogs, the pawns a little army of obese owls. King and queen were Inuit in full fur regalia. "My wife and I," he said, and smiled. The carved stone king did, in fact, look like Ekalun. It would take weeks to finish the set. And food? "The caribou will come," he said confidently. 

I left with George Hakungak; his beautiful wife, Jessie; their two small children; and John Akana, George's bachelor brother. The dogs pulled eagerly, although they had fallen upon hard times. We only had a bit of blubber along, and old caribou skins for roughage. 

We snaked our way up the great Hood River valley. After winter's long dormancy, the tundra throbbed with resurrection, with renewal, with life. Elegant horned larks spiraled toward the sky until they were but specks in the blue, then drifted gently downward on set wings, filling the air with their jubilant, lilting song. Ptarmigan flew up, their plumage piebald like the land, part wintry white, part summer's brown. From its nest of sticks and dry grasses on a ledge above the ice-bound river, a rough-legged hawk rose to circle high above us with wild and urgent cries. The day was warm and brilliant, the dogs ran fast, the long sled slid silently through the wet snow. We joked and laughed. It was wonderful to be alive. 

That night the storm struck. Wind-driven snow wreathed the mountains like smoke. It shrieked around our small traveling tent and whistled cerily in the taut guy ropes. Jessie washed diapers. John carved. George played with the baby. While the storm raged, life went on quietly and harmoniously within the walls of our little tent. 

It was night when the storm faltered. Dark clouds still scudded across the sky; the land and a nearby frozen lake lay in an ominous blue-gray El Greco light. And then the caribou came, and in their wake the wolves. 

Far out on the lake ice, dark and phantom-like, the herd stood. The men harnessed the huskies and drove fast, right into the herd, the dogs frenzied with excitement, the sled slewing wildly, the caribou scattering, stopping, galloping frantically back and forth, fear forcing them to flee, the herd instinct bunching them. George and John stopped and shot, raced on and shot again, then turned the dogs loose to pull down wounded caribou. 

We camped for days to feed the famished, emaciated dogs, to eat huge meals ourselves, our first in weeks, and then, the sled loaded high with caribou meat, we walked the 100 miles (160 km) back to camp. Thaw and rain had ravaged the snow; meltwater rushed to the rivers. The broad, tussocky meadows were bare and brown, and George and John harnessed themselves to the sled to help the panting huskies. 

Before breakup, the planes arrived. The doctor from Cambridge Bay on medical inspection found us well, but left us germs, and soon we all came down with colds. The area administrator arrived to buy the men's stock of carvings, the fur clothes the women had made for sale, and one of our caribou-skin tents for a museum in the United States. 

On the first good day, we left for Baychimo at the northeast coast of Bathurst Inlet to buy supplies at the lonely Hudson's Bay Company store. It then served the eighty-nine people of Bathurst Inlet, who lived in eleven widely scattered camps in a region as large as Belgium. 

People from other camps had preceded us, or arrived during the day. Ekalun, one of the best carvers of the area, had the most money. With a fine sense of drama, he waited until the store was crowded. Every inch the grand seigneur, he strode in and handed Jimmy Stevenson, the manager, his checks. Then he started buying, and the Queen shopping at Fortnum and Mason would not have been nearly as grand. "Twenty pounds of tobacco! Twenty pounds of tea! A new gun! A new net! A carton of cigarettes for my Kabloona" - and, aside, in a not-too-sotto voce stage whisper - "His pipe stinks!" to convulse his audience. 

From time to time, as the pile of goods on the floor rose, he'd ask: "How much?" meaning, how much money had he left? "Ah yes, thread for the wife. And needles. And a new pressure stove. Rosie trailed behind her master, meek and quiet. It was a perfect example of male dominance in Inuit society. But since I shared their tent, I happened to know that this was merely a front. For days prior to the trip, Rosie had carefully programmed Ekalun to buy precisely what she needed and wanted. 

When he was down to five dollars, he said: "That I'll take in cash! One might need it," and all laughed. That would be his initial stake for the all-night poker game. Ekalun was sleepy and sour when we returned home next day. "How did the game go?" I asked, not too tactfully. The five dollars were gone. And his lighter. And the recently repaired Swiss watch. "Ayornamat. (It can't be helped.)" He shrugged. 

We lacked fat. The spring caribou were thin after their long migration and our main food, mipku, dried caribou meat, was leathery and lean. We ate pounds of it each day, yet were forever hungry. Living on an exclusive protein, fatless diet took its toll. We tired easily, and after a month developed the first signs of protein poisoning: diarrhea and swollen feet. As soon as we could supplement our lean-meat diet with fat fish, we felt fine again. 

Camp life in summer was quiet and relaxed. Our nets gave us plenty of whitefish and the odd char. Short trips by canoe provided a few seals. In the past, the Bathurst Inlet people had hunted seals only in winter and spring; they used kayaks primarily to kill migrating caribou at river crossings. Ancient patterns persisted; summer simply was not their seal-hunting season and we lived very well on fish alone. 

We moved outdoors. The women cooked on open fires, surrounded by a mass of dwarf willow and heather, serving as both fuel and windbreak, and when the food was ready we'd all sit together, eat, chat, and swat mosquitoes. Weeks merged into months; season followed season; my other life seemed remote, unreal. Ekalun had unobtrusively but expertly remodeled me. I now conformed, and early problems and frictions did not recur. 

At first my curiosity and my questions had riled him, for in his culture questions were considered intrusive. Nor did they ask me questions, including the most obvious ones: Why had I come? What was I doing? How long would I stay? At first I assumed they simply didn't care. Later I found that they were intensely interested, but much too polite to ask. Then I talked about myself, my family, my life, and since I had broached it, they then could ask questions and asked them eagerly. 

To some questions there were no intelligible answers. Ekalun asked me once about Montreal and how many people live there and I said: "Three million." How much is three million? Ekalun wanted to know. He had never seen more than perhaps a hundred people. More than all the caribou in the world, more than all the pebbles on our beach, I said. He thought that over for a while and then he smiled one of his sardonic smiles and said: "Too many!" 

At an old campsite, I found a foot (30-cm)-long stick, the spindle of a fire drill. I showed it to Ekalun. He told me what it was, I pretended ignorance and, rather than waste time explaining, Ekalun made a simple version of the fire drill and showed me how it worked. This put him into a reminiscent mood; he told of travels long ago to a remote valley to pick up "fire stones," the iron pyrite that, struck together, produced sparks that caught on lightly oiled willow catkin fluff or arctic cotton tinder and were blown into a flame. It took about five minutes to produce fire by friction with a fire drill, Ekalun said, and only moments with the "fire stones. From then on, rather than ask questions and annoy, I brought back from my long walks all artifacts I found - broken tools, worked bone, thimbles made of leather, a broken blubber pounder of musk-ox horn - and if I judged the moment and the mood propitious, I showed my finds to Rosie and Ekalun, like a child showing treasures to its parents. 

It often worked. The small bone tube, brown with age and cracked, made of the leg bone of a goose was used, long ago, to suck fresh water off spring ice. That brought back memories of a trip on spring ice nearly half a century ago, when both were starving and their few dogs were near death. Ekalun had spotted a seal far out on the flooded ice and had crawled toward it through the icy water, imitating seal movements and behavior with such perfection that the seal thought he was a seal. It took more than an hour. His body went numb with cold; he dared not throw the harpoon. He crawled right up to the seal and killed it. Rosie, then about fifteen years old and just married, rushed up with the dogs. They ate the seal and lived. 

Fall came, but no fat caribou for winter food, for clothing. We walked far inland. No caribou. We ascended the Hood River. No caribou. And suddenly Ekalun knew. The caribou, he said, are on the islands. We drove to the islands and the caribou were there. How had he known? Experience? Intuition? A good guess? I asked and got no answer. He simply knew. The men hunted. We took several boatloads of meat, fat, and skins back to camp. The rest we cached under heavy stones, to be picked up by dog team in winter. The racks at camp were full of drying meat; slabs of back fat filled the caches. The char were returning to the rivers; our nets were heavy with fish. This was the vital harvest season of fall, to gather supplies until seal hunting began again in winter.

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ARCTIC MEAT

When I first went to stay with Inuit, for weeks and often for months, I had misgivings about living on meat alone. It was not what my culture considered a "balanced diet." Yet common sense told me that since the Inuit were healthy I, too, would be healthy if I ate the meat in their fashion, some cooked, some raw. This turned out to be true, and hunger quickly took care of my ingrained cultural aversion to eating raw meat. 

Explorers died in droves of scurvy in regions where Inuit had prospered for thousands of years. The reason was diet: the Europeans lived on salt beef, and its lack of vitamins eventually killed them. The Inuit thrived on fresh meat. Many of their favorite animal parts are rich in vitamins: liver contains high amounts of vitamins A and D (polar-bear liver is so rich in vitamin A it is poisonous; if one eats it, one can die of hypervitaminosis); muktuk, the skin of whales, is very rich in vitamin C, richer per unit of weight than oranges. 

But meat, raw or boiled, is bland. The Inuit found salt disgusting; their words for salt and bitter sea water are synonymous. So, to add Tip to their diet, they fermented meat, a habit that horrified southerners, who reported with disgust that Inuit ate "rotten" meat. Actually the relationship between rotten meat and fermented meat is roughly that between spoiled milk and cheese. And properly ripened meat tastes very much like cheese. A favorite after-dinner delicacy of the Bathurst Inlet people with whom I lived was ingaluawinik, caribou mesentery fat, pressed into a pouch and fermented for months until it tasted like Danish blue cheese - only more so. 

The Inuit of Little Diomede Island in Bering Strait keep most of their food in meat holes - spacious, stone-lined caverns, some of great age, dug deep into the frozen mountainside. Their diet when I first lived with them in 1975 was still largely traditional, and the people were healthy. The main food was boiled seal or walrus meat. Blubber, aged until it was saffron-yellow and then marinated in seal oil, was eaten as a zesty condiment with the bland meat, or with kauk, boiled walrus skin, which is best after it has aged in a meat hole for about a year. 

The real masters in the art of fermenting meat are the Polar Inuit. They use ancient stone caches in which the meat slowly ripens, and they are as finicky and concerned about these caches as the people of Roquefort are about the drafts and temperature in the ancient limestone caves in which their famous cheeses mature. 

The result of this process is such delicacies as iterssorag, year-old narwhal tail, slowly fermented in a blubber-lined rock cache, the skin bright green, the blubber olive green, the meat black and greenishly marbled, with the taste of the different parts ranging roughly from Brie to Roquefort to old Stilton; and, best loved by all, kiviaq, unplucked dovekies placed into blubber-lined sealskin bags and aged under rocks, untouched by direct sunlight, for about a year, until they have the pungent smell and flavor of old Gorgonzola. 

In fall, I moved from Inerssussat up Inglefield Bay to the ancient narwhal hunting camp at Kangerdlugssuaq to live with a famous hunter; Ululik Duneq, and his family. As a gift, I took along from Qaanaaq a big chunk of very potent cheese. "Ah!" exclaimed Ululik as he tasted the cheese, "just like kiviaq!"

The Diomeders are known for belligerence and reckless daring and have been called "the Vikings of the Arctic Sea," " a reputation they rather cherish. One day, two boat crews were in the Alaskan mainland village of Wales and saw a film about Genghis Khan and the Golden Horde, with violence and pillage aplenty. Back on Little Diomede, they were asked by a visiting biologist how they had liked the film. One man grinned and said: "Nothing special. Just a bunch of Diomeders on horseback!" 

The walrus hunters in my boat slept soundly, oblivious to the storm. Slowly the wind abated, the sky cleared, the pack spread out, the morning was pure magic. We launched the boat and purred smoothly along dark lanes among the floes, through a fantasy-land of shimmering, wind-and-wave sculptured ice. The ice glowed in the soft opalescence of morning, in delicate lilac, rose, and cool green, and bone-white icicles hung in grottoes of the deepest blue. Thousands of murres and auklets, like dark toy birds, lay scattered upon the satin sea. 

Far in the pack we heard the walruses, drifting north upon the Aloes from the Bering to the Chukchi Sea, all 200,000 funneling through Bering Strait on their annual spring migration. We approached them slowly, cautiously. Masses of madder-brown walruses lay sound asleep in chummy heaps upon brown, dung- smeared floes. 

Tom throttled the motor back, the men readied rifles and harpoons. They spoke in whispers; excitement and tension filled the boat. We drifted close to a pan loaded with sleeping animals, and suddenly, upon a low command from Tom, the eleven hunters fired, and fired again and again, a rapid, deadly fusillade. One moment it had been very quiet and then came carnage and chaos. 

Dead walruses lay on the floe, fountains of blood spurting and bubbling from the wounds. Others, in fear and fury, poured off the floe like a brown avalanche, rallied and attacked the boat, bellowing with rage, their eyes bloodshot. The men shot onto the water, into the walruses at top speed; most walruses turned and fled. A huge bull, bleeding from many wounds, dived, then shot up and hacked into the boat, and water rushed in through the gash. The hunters were prepared. They stuffed a large piece of blubber into the hole to staunch the leak. Ice and water were red with blood. They shot and killed the wounded walruses and tried to harpoon them before they sank. 

Ten walruses were dead. The men pulled the umiak onto the floe, patched the hole, and with amazing speed and precision cut up the 2-ton (1.8-tonne) carcasses. Blood flowed everywhere; piles of steaming guts lay on the ice; men with axes cut heavy-boned skulls to remove the precious ivory tusks. Ivory and a sea of blood; it seemed the essence of the hunt. We loaded the boat to the gunwales with meat, fat, and ivory, and headed for Diomede. The weather was changing fast. Ragged storm clouds raced across the sky. Gray fog oozed over sea and ice and enwrapped us like a clammy shroud. The wind increased; the heavily laden boat pitched and lurched in the rising waves. They raised the yard-broad waistcloth, furled against the gunwales in calm seas, on paddles and poles around the boat and lashed it securely as a guard against the wind-whipped spray. 

The day dragged on toward a dark and evil night. One man stood in the bow to watch for the ice floes that surged suddenly out of the murk and spume and vanished again into the dark-gray void that surrounded us. Tommy and I sat on the food box, lolling against each other with the wildly yawing motion of the boat, shivering and chilled to the core. Toward midnight, when the storm was at its peak, flinging sheets of spray across the waistcloth, and icy water soaked us to the skin, one of the men crept toward us, from thwart to thwart like a huge dark crab, took off his great parka, wrapped it tightly around the boy, gave us an encouraging grin, and crawled back to his seat, now dressed only in shirt and pullover. 

We reached Diomede in the morning and unloaded the boat. I walked slowly up to my shack, made tea and drank it very hot, and fell exhausted on my cot, blood-spattered and reeking of blood and blubber. Two hours later, Tom banged on my shack, I put on my sea-soaked parka, and we were off again. 

Days and nights merged. We hunted in fair weather and in foul (mostly foul, Bering Strait is notorious for its storms and fogs). The great racks on Diomede were loaded with drying meat; the ancient meat holes, the deep freezers of Diomede, were crammed with walrus meat and fat. The women worked nearly as hard as the men. Mary, Tom's wife, split walrus skins to be used as umiak covers with her razor-sharp ulu. Their daughter, Eva, eighteen years old and just back from a mainland high school, cut blubber off the walrus skins, and sliced meat and hauled it to the meat holes. Her sister, Etta, a charming, round-faced three-year-old, sat on a rock and copied her mother, Mary, pretending to split a piece of walrus skin with a can lid in lieu of an ulu. 

Suddenly, near the end of June, the hunt was over. The last walruses had passed to the north. The four Diomede umiaks had brought back much of the meat and all the ivory of 700 walruses ample food and relative prosperity, though much of that would be spent on liquor. The men caught auklets with long-handled nets, just as the Polar Inuit catch dovekies. I went with Albert Iyahuk to collect greens on the mountainside; he showed me the many roots, corms, and leaves Diomeders preserve in seal oil and eat with meat. 

Tom left to work on the pipeline in northern Alaska. Other men followed, some to the pipeline, some to Anchorage or to "the lower forty-eight." Most went to jobs, some went to jails, usually for brawling in bars. "I spend so much time in the Nome jail, I use it as my home address," one man joked. The Diomeders love to travel, but in fall all flock back to their lonely rock set in an icy sea. 

John lyapana was going with his umiak to the mainland and offered to take me along. Once, in a drunken rage at "whites," he had threatened to kill me. Two days later, sober, he asked me over for supper and was a delightful host, generous, amiable, with an enormous fund of stories about olden times on Diomede. Many villagers were on the beach when we pushed off. "Come back," they called, "come back and bring your family."