Only four hours out from our staging point in Pond Inlet, northern Baffin Island, we heard Joannie Muktar, our Inuit guide, cut the engine of his snowmobile.
Lennart, my traveling companion, and I got out from under the caribou pelts in the komatik (sled) and scanned the scene. Joannie had stopped on a snow-covered beach on Bylot Island, across Eclipse Sound from Pond Inlet.
"Any polar bear?" Lennart shouted into the wind for the third or fourth time that day.
The windchill factor burned our faces, making it difficult to sit up and admire the landscape for more than a few minutes at a time. Although it was May, we were more than 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle and temperatures hovered around minus 15 C, not including the windchill factor.
Joannie casually strolled over to the sled and leaned against the wooden sideboards. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it. He didn't even bother wearing gloves. "Caribou," he said. "Up there on the ridge."
I sat up, pulled out a pair of binoculars and pointed it in the direction he indicated. Sure enough, in the distance a caribou herd stood silhouetted against the northern sunset. Joannie had complained that his eyesight was poor and yet he was able to see with the naked eye what I could barely make out with binoculars.
"Still worried about going hungry?" he asked me with a broad grin. Earlier, I'd expressed concern that we did not have enough food to last us the six days we planned to be out on the ice. Our supplies, which included dried fruit, peanut butter and canned pasta, would last three days at the most if it was our sole source.
"There's lots of caribou and seal out there," he'd said before we set out for Bylot Island across frozen Eclipse Sound from Pond Inlet. "And if there's no caribou or seal, we might catch a hare. And if there's no hare, we can always cut a hole through the ice and fish for Arctic char. And if there's no char, then we can think about starving."
Untying his new Bombardier 500 cc snowmobile from the sledge, Joannie and I headed inland toward the herd at a slow, steady angle. At 200 meters from the herd, he stopped and aimed his rifle. The herd, as if sensing danger, moved off. The same thing happened on the next ridge. On the third ridge, Joannie quickly aimed and fired. The herd moved on but it was obvious that one was hurt. Running him down, Joannie quickly ended his misery with a couple of well-aimed shots.
Using a small, sharp knife, Joannie skinned and then butchered the steaming animal in about 30 minutes. This caribou catch would turn out to be our main staple for the next six days.
I asked him how he could tell it was a male caribou from such a distance. He'd told me he only shot male caribou, sparing the female for breeding.
"The shape, the size, the way they move," he said.
Joannie wrapped the caribou limbs with the hide and tied the bundle to the back of the sledge, the head gruesomely atop. Caribou is his people's main source of food in the winter, he explained, and his own family will eat the eyes, tongue and brain of the animal.
"For the price of one bullet you can have a caribou that lasts your family up to two weeks," he explained. "Compare that to $10 to $15 dollars for one 10-14 kilogram steak. And it's very lean. Besides, you don't have to worry about mad cow disease."
With Joannie and his 16-year-old son Kenny, who sat unbothered by the cold on the komatik's wooden runners, the four of us clocked more than 360 miles on the frozen channels between Baffin and Bylot Islands in early May, hoping to catch a glimpse of a polar bear. From Pond Inlet, we traveled west along Eclipse Sound and Navy Board Inlet to Lancaster Sound, and then back to the mouth of Eclipse Sound, east of Pond Inlet.
Lancaster Sound was a special attraction. It had served as the entrance to the Northwest Passage, for years the holy grail of Arctic explorers. It was also one of the best places in the area to see polar bears, especially if the floe edge - where the ice pack meets the open waters - was open.
Polar bears are most often sighted in the spring near the floe edge because seal and fish are easier to catch in open water. But since it was early May, it was more than likely that we were a couple weeks early. If the floe edge was frozen, we would at least have had a chance to experience a few days in the life of an Inuit hunter.
Our staging point was Pond Inlet, an Intuit village of some 1,100 noted for its traditional Inuit character and spectacular setting. The village overlooks Eclipse Sound and Bylot Island, a noted bird sanctuary.
The first night we stayed in Joannie's modest, four-bedroom plywood-built home with his wife Mary and their five children, ranging in ages 3 to 16. The atmosphere was warm and playful, with the youngest children climbing up on our laps as though we were old friends or relatives. The house, overlooking Eclipse Sound, was equipped with electricity, running water and a TV.
Since early morning the next day, Joannie was busy zipping around in his snowmobile, arranging to borrow a sledge from his brother-in-law, a HAM radio from his sister, a portable gas burner from a brother, and caribou clothing from the local Hunters and Tappers Association. It took all day to pack the pine box tied to the sledge, including a 207-liter barrel of gasoline - all vital to our survival out in the cold.
We didn't leave until that evening. Joannie said it was easier for his Bombardier to pull a sledge when the sun was lower on the horizon and the temperatures had dropped, making the snow harder.
But the sun was always in the sky, and night turned into day, day into night, seamlessly.
Within an hour of leaving Pond Inlet, I signaled Joannie from the sledge to stop. He was only going about 40 kph, but the wind had picked up and I was feeling numb in my hands and toes. We'd purchased Sorel boots and the latest Gortex and Thinsulate clothing available, but they were not holding up against the Arctic cold.
From the bottom of the pine box, Joannie pulled out a caribou parka and boots. They were the warmest clothing I've ever worn. With hairs that are hollow in the center, the hide traps air next to the animal's skin to maintain a layer of insulation. A marvel of nature, the hide protects against the cold better than any man-made material.
At 6 a.m., we arrived at an outpost belonging to Joannie's brother, who was away with his family. When we woke the next day, sometime in the afternoon, we could just make out the black dots on the ice signifying seal from the windows of the outpost. Lennart and I got dressed and joined Joannie on the back of his snowmobile.
"My eyes are not so good," repeated Joannie Muktar as he raised his rifle and aimed at a small, dark shape in the snow about 100 meters away. There was a long, tense pause. At the crack of the .223 Browning, the animal vanished in the white landscape.
Slinging the rifle over his shoulder, Joannie gunned his 500 cc Bombardier snowmobile over the snowy ridges of the frozen sound at full speed. There, next to an ice hole, lay a lifeless ringed seal. We dismounted the snowmobile to take a closer look. It had been a clean, painless shot. "You guys hungry?" Joannie asked, brandishing a knife. "The eyeballs are the best part."
Chuckling at our expressions, Joannie put his knife away. A mischievous humor was typical of Joannie. Before setting out, Joanne had advised us "kalonas," as he called us, not to eat raw seal meat, probably too rich for our diets. (In Inuktitut, kalona means one with big eyebrows, the name given the bushy eye-browed Scotsmen, among the first Europeans to live with the Inuits.)
Twelve hours later, we were on the ice again, headed for Lancaster Sound. On the way, we stopped at an outpost consisting of three humble shacks. Joannie led us past a team of barking huskies and, without knocking, into one of the shacks. v An elderly man in a sofa exchanged a few words with Joannie. His full-figured, much younger-looking wife generously served us bannock bread, a dense Inuit bread, and peanut butter. The shed, about 6 by 6 meters, had a single, small window and a small stove at one end with tiny hole in the roof to emit smoke. An adjoining room was the bedroom. The couple lived there with their nine children.
The families who lived here were among the few who'd resisted the government's efforts in the mid 1960s to move the area's Inuits into villages.
When we left the outpost, one of the sledge's runners got stuck under a crack in the ice, dislodging the pine box and throwing us clear. Taking his gloves off in the sub-zero temperatures, Joannie single-handedly pulled the sledge out and swiftly repaired the broken pine box with rope and a couple of nails. There seemed nothing Joannie couldn't do.
Later, passing the glaciers of Navy Board Inlet, we emerged onto Lancaster Sound, a majestic rubble of ice blocks as far as the eye could see. Not far, on top of bluffs to the west, were a clutch of abandoned sheds that once belonged to the Arctic Research Establishment.
All the doors that were not built of steel had been smashed by polar bears searching for food; we selected one shed and dug it free of snow.
Here, we would stay for two days, watching with binoculars for the telltale signs of the polar bears' yellow hide against the white snow. Joannie advised us that it was safer to locate the bear from the bluffs and then pursue him rather than risk a blind encounter. It was clear the floe edge was not open.
Nearby, we found a seal hole and evidence of a bear that had waited without success. Seals have very sensitive ears; once they hear an intruder approaching, they are not likely to return to that hole for a long time. With no bears sighted, we decided to leave.
Several times we thought we saw a polar bear at the edge of glaciers in Navy Board Inlet. Two days later, after overnighting in Pond Inlet, we went to the other floe edge, near Cape Graham Moore, the site of an old whaling outpost. The floe edge was frozen here as well. We'd seen the bears' footprints, and hundreds of seal sunning themselves, but no bears.
A week after my return from Pond Inlet, I received a late-night call from Joannie. "I've got some bad news," he said in his slow, lugubrious tone. My first thought was something had happened to one of his children. I braced myself.
"Two hours after you left the cape, a bear was sighted not more than a mile or two from where we were," he said, his laughter echoing in the receiver.
Sidebar Information
First-time visitors should be prepared for delays of hours or even days. Guides know the area and are alert to the dangers of sudden, if seemingly slight, changes in wind or snowfall and what it might foretell.
When looking for outfitters, the best place to start is the Pond Inlet Hunters and Trappers Association (tel. 819 899 8856; fax. 819 899 8095). They can provide you with advise in terms of conditions, prices and can help organize expeditions with qualified Inuit guides.
Prices range from anywhere from $250 to $350 CDN per person per day, depending on time of the year, how long your expedition, and how much equipment and supplies you provide. For the same price, you can generally choose between a snowmobile or dog team. If the price seems high, consider that it usually includes two guides and at least two snowmobiles (in case one breaks down).
A well-known and reliable outfitter is Eclipse Sound Outfitting (tel. 819 899 8870; fax: 819 899 8817), run by John W. M. Henderson. A seven-day trip on land and two hotel nights will be $2,200 per person. A five-day land package is $1,900.
The only regular commercial airline that flies to Pond Inlet from the south is First Air. From Montreal, the round trip airfare to Pond Inlet costs $1600 CDN.
About Baffin Island
The fifth largest island in the world, Baffin Island covers about 1.9 million square kilometers of mountains, glaciers, tundra and ocean. Roughly 14,000 people live there and about 85 percent are Inuit. Most of the communities in Baffin Island are accessible only by plane, boat, dog teams or snowmobiles, depending on the season. Baffin Island is poised to become part of a new territory in 1999 called Nunavut, which will be created out of the eastern and central regions of what is today known as the Northwest Territories.
Recommended reading:
The Baffin Island Handbook,
published by Nortext Publishing Corporation,
Box 8, Iqaluit, NT X0A 0H0, $14.95 Cdn.
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