Above: Qingaq, seal hunting at the floe edge near Igloolik, Nunavut, Canada, 1990. Below: Hunting seals in spring, Jeremias uses a white linen screen mounted on skis as camouflage. Northwest Greenland, 1997.


male narwhal — because of these, narwhal are sometimes referred to as ‘sea unicorns’. Although inter- national trade in narwhal tusks is now illegal, they were much in demand in Victorian times, and the smaller ones were often made into walking sticks. Narwhal is usually eaten fresh,


but it’s also cut into strips and wind-dried for the winter. In other parts of the Arctic like the Bering


Strait, Inuit and coastal Chukchi peoples hunt larger baleen whales like the bowhead and the grey. An adult bowhead can weigh over 60 tons and provide very large quantities of both muktuk and meat. (Also considered a delicacy in Chukotka, the tongue of a grey whale can weigh up to one ton). Meat and muktuk are shared among a community, with much of it being stored for winter. With Arctic temperatures below freezing for much of the year, preserving food is no


problem. In areas where they use sled dogs, it’s often stored on high meat racks outside, out of the reach of hungry huskies. Elsewhere, it’s buried under rocks or in pits dug in the permafrost, which acts as a freezer. During the summer, fish, whale and caribou can also be wind-dried.


Late summer is also a popular time for hunting caribou, since the animals are normally at their fattest after spending the summer grazing, and their fur is usually in good condition for making clothes. In many areas, the best time is just as autumn approaches, when the caribou gather in large herds before they migrate south to their winter- feeding areas. In north Greenland, by the end of August, the days of the midnight Sun are over. It


sinks lower in the sky, and once again dips below the horizon at night. Each day becomes shorter by 20 minutes. At night, the temperature dips below 0°C, the first dusting of snow falls on the hilltops, and ice begins to form again on lakes and in sheltered bays along the coast. Once the sea starts to freeze, it becomes difficult for the


38 arcticjournal.ca March/April 2012


Inuit to hunt, as there is a period that can last several weeks when there is too much ice for boating, but the ice is not thick enough to support dog sleds or snowmobiles. Once there has been a long-enough period of cold to thicken the sea ice, vast winter-hunting grounds open up. Until the 1980s, local people expected the sea in


Inglefield Bay to freeze during the second week of October. Now, the Arctic’s changing climate has made the timing of freeze-up impossible to predict. In recent years, it has been happening anything from one to two months later than normal, and the sea ice has been breaking up about a month early in the summer – it seems to be a similar story all over the Arctic. What’s more, the winter ice tends to be thinner and more hazardous, and many glaciers in north Greenland have become increasingly dangerous, and in some cases impassable. For hunters who depend on the sea ice as a highway to both their hunting grounds and neighbouring communities, the changing ice conditions have brought many problems, but climate change is not all bad news. In Chukotka, a hunter from Uelen told me that, because the sea was freezing later, grey whales were staying later in the autumn, giving hunters more opportunity. The Arctic’s indigenous peoples have experienced climate change in the past — the key to their survival is adaptation. Providing they keep their traditional culture, hunting peoples like the Inuit and Chukchi are in a far better position to survive climate change than those who live in the world’s great cities.


Editor’s Note: All photos and text published here represent unaltered excerpts from Bryan and Cherry Alexander’s fascinating hard-bound book titled, Forty Below, Traditional Life in the Arctic. The book, first released November 2011, is available for purchase online by visiting: www.arcticapublishing.com


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