Lawrence Millman - Marooned in the Arctic

In the Canadian Arctic, ice is the final arbiter of human affairs. From Sanirajak on the Melville Peninsula, Id planned to travel by boat across Foxe Basin to Prince Charles Island, an uninhabited, virtually unknown chunk of land almost as large as the state of Connecticut. But Foxe Basin turned out to be choked with sea-ice, so I was stuck in Sanirajak, an Inuit hunting community, until a gale came along and whisked the ice away.

Sanirajak isnt the sort of place where most people would want to spend more than a few hours, maybe not even more than a few minutes. Imagine Appalachia crossbred with a gypsy encampment, then struck by an earthquake. Likewise imagine residential landscaping that consists of discarded snow-machine treads, ragged fuel drums, cast-off Pampers, beer bottles, slops, and the bones of animals. The towns chief attraction, or perhaps its chief distraction, is a several-hundred-year-old whale carcass whose odor is still pungent enough to upset the nostrils.

But at least it hadnt been Wal-Marted, Taco Belled, Gapped, Star-bucked, or CNNd. And at least it didnt have an armada of Urban Assault Vehicles (a.k.a., SUVs) piloted by somewhat human beings with cell phones surgically attached to their heads. This, for me, automatically made Sanirajak more civilized than almost every other town in North America. Still, I couldnt wait to exchange it for the wilds of Foxe Basin.

Each morning, my guide Qungujuq would study the ice with the seriousness of a scholar gazing at a palimpsest, then come to my tent and say, Nagga. Not today. After that, hed join me for coffee. He got his caffeine fix by sticking the grounds directly into his mouth like a wad of tobacco, thus avoiding the bland intercession of water. When I tried to imitate him, I accidentally swallowed the grounds and ended up with very bad heartburn.

Sometimes Qungujuq would bring along his father, a barrel-chested elder whose face resembled the contour lines on a topo map. Like a number of other people Id met in Sanirajak, the old man, Sivulliq, knew only one expression in English: Youre a better man than I am, Gunga Din. Some years ago, the towns Hudson Bay Company trader would perform the occasional interment and, instead of reciting the proper burial service, hed solemnly intone Kiplings Gunga Din. The poems famous line entered the local vernacular as a sort of vaguely reverential sentiment, although no one had the slightest idea what it meant.

Sivulliq said there were Tunit on Prince Charles Island, and he warned me to be careful of them. They would attempt to unravel my intestines - a popular Tunit form of entertainment - if I gave them the opportunity.

The Tunit, otherwise known as the Dorset People, were early Eskimoans, who, according to most archaeologists, died out before 1200 A.D. Yet, if there was one place in the Arctic where a small band of them might have survived, that place would be Prince Charles Island. It was discovered as recently as 1948, when a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot was taking a series of aerial photographs of Foxe Basin and a large unknown island showed up in one of the pictures. Being low-lying as well as surrounded by ice for most of the year, the island had escaped detection ever since the first European explorers came this way en route to not finding the Northwest Passage. And even though its now been detected, its never been fully mapped.

One other thing the old man told me: that the weather on Prince Charles Island is awful, and thus its very easy to get marooned there.

Then came the morning when Qungujuq woke me up by shouting Tuavi! Ice blown away by big wind. Groggily, I lifted the tent flap, and at once saw open water where the evening before Id seen only an uncompromising sheet of ice.

Within an hour, wed piled our supplies into his twenty-four-foot motorized freighter canoe and were heading east across Foxe Basin. Rather, we were trying to head east, but the wind that had blown away the ice kept shoving us in a more northerly direction. Finally, we decided to wait out the wind, so we put ashore in a cove on the northern part of Melville Peninsula. Here, we encountered some walrus hunters from Iglulik, one of whom told me that the wind would die down during the night. I asked him how he knew this. Was he observing the flight patterns of certain birds or perhaps using some time-honored Native technique to read the weather?

No, he said, I heard it on the radio.

The following day the wind did die down, but it left in its wake a strong lateral swell. Qungujuq and his brother-in-law Zacharias, the other member of our expedition, took turns trying to keep the boat from being bashed by waves, and despite both of them being expert helmsmen, we still got wet. At one point, a wave rushed our gunwales and dumped a jellyfish into the boat. Zacharias found this vastly amusing, even though Arctic jellyfish can deliver a very nasty sting. But he seemed to find everything vastly amusing, even the albino walrus whoofling at us from an ice pan. An albino walrus, he informed me, means death.

Death to whom? I asked.

Us, he grinned.

Zacharias also happened to be his own grandfather. Heres how this highly unusual phenomenon occurred: His actual grandfather died when an avalanche came tumbling down on his snowhouse. Evidently, the poor fellow had tried to claw his way out, because when he was found, his right arm was protruding from the snow, gnawed to the bone by foxes and ravens. When Zacharias was born several months later, he had a birthmark that extended all the way from his fingers to his shoulder, exactly where his grandfather had been gnawed upon. There was only one explanation for this - the grandfathers isuma (soul) had migrated to the boys body.

Zacharias rolled up his sleeve and showed me the birthmark. It was so much bigger than an ordinary birthmark that I did, in fact, wonder if something other than the vagaries of capillary action might have been responsible for it.

In spite of the swell, we were making good progress. We spent the night on Rowley Island, pitching our tent not far from an abandoned Distant Early Warning radar site - strange to think of a Soviet nuclear attack being monitored from a place so remote that it wasnt even thought to exist until shortly before the so-called Cold War began.

Earlier in the day, Qungujuq had shot a ringed seal, and after caching most of the meat for our return trip, we cooked the flippers and liver. I couldnt help remembering the first time Id eaten seal liver in Greenland. It was not only raw but still steaming, having been plucked from a recently killed animal. Whatever hesitation I might have felt about eating it was quickly dispelled by a tangy, iron-rich flavor compared to which the equivalent organ from cows tastes like its been manufactured in a generic foods laboratory.

Nattiup tingua mamarijara, I said. (I like seal liver.)

Uvanga ijingit mamarniqsaujakka, Qungujuq told me. (Myself, I prefer the eyes.) Later he dissected one of the seals eyes and showed me how the inner clear spheroid can be used as a magnifying glass - a useful tidbit of information if you happen to have a seal eye handy.

The next day the sea was as smooth as blue glass. By early afternoon, I estimated we were no more than twenty-five miles northwest of Prince Charles Island. I was, to put it mildly, excited, since I knew of only one other non-Inuk - the English explorer Tom Manning - whod ever set foot on the island.

All morning, the boats motor had been making curious burbling noises, as if there was a newborn trapped somewhere inside it. I hadnt thought anything of this, probably because I was engrossed in conversation with my companions. Wed been talking about, of all things, blow jobs. The concept was unknown to the Inuit, and Zacharias wanted to know what possible pleasure could be derived from a woman blowing on a mans penis. I tried to convince him that it was only a figure of speech, but hed already made up his mind