The route from Pond Inlet to Arctic Bay took us from sea ice that was sometimes bare and crystalline, sometimes covered with a layer of hard snow, to wind-packed drifts along the slopes and valleys of mountain passes. The journey was a joy. We made our way up narrow gullies, reaching high passes, then hurtled down the other side, often on to gleaming lakes. At the end of each night's travel, Anaviapik and Muckpah checked for the right quality of snow, cut building blocks and made our snowhouses. We slept through the warmest part of the day. We ate our way through our supplies - tea, sugar, biscuits, soups, caribou and seal for us, frozen seal for the dogs.
On the third day, high in the mountain range, we stopped in a wide pass. In every direction the mountains were huge and jagged; it was hard to believe that we had found such an easy way into their very peaks. But Anaviapik and Muckpah seemed unsure about the next part of the route. They stood and looked around them, peering as if to see some road, some feature that would act as a signpost or beacon. "Naukkut?" said Anaviapik, turning towards different possible passes in the mountains. "Which way?" Then he took a knife from the box on our sledge and began to draw a map in the snow. I could not understand what the lines referred to, but they seemed to lead to a decision. Anaviapik pointed to the snow map, then pointed out the route we should take. We set off again.
Two days later we arrived at a steep coastline with a round and sheltered bay that gives Arctic Bay its Inuktitut [Inuit language] name: Ikpiarjuk, "a pocket". Anaviapik and I were some way in front of Muckpah and the doctor. As we stopped to wait for them, we untangled the dogs' traces, tidied our sledge and spruced ourselves up. We wanted to arrive in Arctic Bay looking our best. Anaviapik was full of excitement. I knew that he had many close relatives there.
"When do you think I last came here?" he asked.
I guessed. Three or four years?
"No," he said. "Not three or four years ago. I was last here in 1938."
"So how did you know your way through the mountains?" I asked.
"Because Inuit cannot get lost in our own land. If we have done a journey once, then we can always do it again.'
In Arctic Bay, Anaviapik arranged for me to stay with his wife's cousin's family. He took me around to visit many households, encouraging me to speak in the ways I had been instructed. During these visits we met two men from Igloolik, the first Inuit community to the south-west of Arctic Bay, though the distance between the two settlements is about 300 miles. These men planned to leave Arctic Bay soon. They would begin their journey back to Igloolik by following the sea ice around the headland, in the Pond Inlet direction, before turning west again towards Igloolik. They were going to hunt for bears. Anaviapik proposed that the five of us should travel in a group for the first two days. Our doctor friend had already taken his plane south. The Igloolik hunters welcomed the idea. A few days later the five of us set out, the four Inuit each with a team of between 12 and 15 dogs and a minimum of supplies.
Igloolik dog teams are famous for their strength and speed, and remarkable for their use of northern rather than imported materials. One of the sledges had long whalebone runners, and both used only sealskin lashings and lines. All toggles for fixing lines to the sledge or the dogs' harnesses were carved from walrus ivory. The harnesses themselves were cut from skins. And the Igloolik men's sleeping bags were made from caribou hides. We, on the other hand, were using nylon ropes, canvas harnesses, metal toggles and down-filled sleeping bags. Whatever the Pond Inlet hunters' reliance on trade goods, though, I was very aware that none of the men I was with spoke English. They took pleasure and pride in their language, as well as in being deep in their land. I was a visitor in a world celebrated, puzzled over and given shape by words, anecdotes and jokes in Inuktitut.
We were going to find a cache of seal meat that would serve as dog food for a day or two, and then we would be hunting. The cache was soon discovered, and three seals were loaded on to the sledges. We travelled fast through that night and stopped, full of joyous confidence, in the morning. The Igloolik men built a snowhouse for us and, alongside, another smaller one for our supplies. Then one of the men cut a seal into chunks with an axe, while another kept the 55 dogs at bay by cracking his whip into the noses of those that pressed too close. They scattered the chunks among the dogs, making sure that each of them got something to eat. As we drifted off to sleep, I can remember thinking that this was the first time on our journey that the dogs had been left un-tethered.
When we woke, we found that the dogs had broken into the supply house. Everything was eaten or destroyed. Bits of packaging, cigarettes, chocolate and biscuits were scattered all over the ice. Nothing could be salvaged of either the dogs' or our own food. We had with us, in the snowhouse, a large piece of seal meat and packets of tea, sugar and biscuits - enough to keep us going for a day or so. We divided it among us.
No one seemed to be worried. We would be hunting later that day, and we had enough tea and sugar to go with the seals we would kill. I felt a flutter of excitement: now we were living as hunters must often have lived, reliant on judgments about place, weather, animals, with minimal margins of safety. Our decisions about where to hunt would have to be made with great care and accuracy.
Towards the end of the first night's shared travel, the Igloolik men, seeing no sign of bears, decided to turn farther to the north and see if they might do better closer to the floe edge. Anaviapik and Muckpah thought we should keep to a route that followed the shoreline; this was the direction, they said, in which we would find the best seal-hunting places. They based this on a knowledge of leads in the icefields that spread out from the tip of the headland in front of us. These leads formed each year in the same places and created concentrations of seals. At this time of year the leads would still be frozen and covered with some snow. But there would be many breathing holes; we would spread out and have a good chance of making some kills.
But in this direction the ice was rough. The force of tides and currents around the headland, along with autumn storms, had broken the sea ice as it formed. Huge slabs and fractured ice boulders had then been heaped on to one another, to be frozen solid, as winter came, into a vast obstacle course. For as far as we could see, the surface of the ice was a litter of jagged hillocks of ice. Many of these rose 10 or 15 feet into the air; in places they created miniature mountain ranges with steep, sharp peaks. We climbed and fell and lurched, the sledges again and again becoming trapped, and often capsizing, as the dogs tugged sideways around some tight corner. Traces snagged on jagged ice, causing the sledges to skew and then to stop. We struggled up steep places and jarred shockingly down the other side. Progress was slow and hard. Within a few hours, only a few miles into this crazy field of ice, we were exhausted, Several slats on one of the sledges were broken and had to be repaired. Anaviapik found a stretch of snow that would be good for a snowhouse; he decided that we should stop.
We ate the last of our seal meat, tied the dogs in a circle around the snowhouse to ensure that any approach by bears would be barred by snarls and howls, and went to sleep.
We woke to the sounds of a storm. Outside, the snow swirled around us, and the dogs were already partially covered by small individual drifts. We could see that the weather was going to get worse. We set off, continuing to push our way through the pressure ice. As the combination of wind and icefield made our journey harder and harder, Anaviapik and Muckpah agreed that we should change direction and head towards land. From there, we would be able to use the ice when it was passable and travel on the snow along the shoreline when it was not. By the time we reached the shore, the wind was howling, and we stopped as soon as we found a drift that would provide blocks for another snowhouse. We built in haste: the weather was becoming ferocious. Inside, we were warmed by the Coleman stove and sugary tea. There was no meat.
The storm continued for another day. We stayed inside the snowhouse. Muckpah scraped all the bits and pieces of spilled soups and grease from around the burners of the Coleman stove and made them into a stew. We were surprised by its sweetness; no doubt many pans of tea had been sugared without much care. We ate the last biscuits.
The next day the storm subsided enough for us to continue the journey. There was still a wind that moved the surface of the snow. The Inuktitut word for this is pirqsirtuq, from pirqsirq, the powdery snow that carries in the wind. When pirqsirtualuq - "it pirqsirqs a great deal" - the result is maujualuq, a thick deposit of mau, soft snow that makes it difficult to travel. The storm had caused a layer of snow some six or seven inches deep to be spread everywhere.
Our first task was to find the dogs. Anaviapik and Muckpah walked around thwacking each high undulation in the snow with their whips. The dogs did not seem eager to resume hauling our sledges, but one by one they were discovered and harnessed; the sledges were loaded, and we set off.
The softness and depth of the windblown snow was a sort of torture. The sledges tended to stick, and every footstep was an effort. For the first few hours, the sticking of the runners and the effort of walking were relatively small problems. The dogs had energy enough to keep us moving, and we had strength enough to walk or jogtrot alongside. But as the night wore on, and the wind continued, we slowed and then began to stop altogether. The dogs would give up pulling, and then the inertia of the sledges, sunk deep in the soft snow, had to be overcome. The trick was for one of us to catch hold of all the dogs' traces and then haul as hard as possible, dragging the dogs backwards. In their intense resistance to this pulling, the dogs strained forwards. As the man holding the traces felt this energy building to a peak, he would let go of the traces and jump out of the way. Thus the dogs found themselves rushing ahead with enough momentum to get the sledge moving. The job then was to keep it moving - with urging, use of the whip, and even a glove thrown ahead of the dogs, leading them to believe that they could, if they hurried, grab an illicit mouthful of caribou skin. Their dismay when the glove was snatched away from in front of their noses no doubt gave them some further impetus.
At the beginning of that night's travel, we headed out from the shore and across the sea ice again. We had now travelled beyond the worst of the pressure ice and could find routes along a level, if snow-covered, surface. Anaviapik and Muckpah often ran out to the sides of our route, searching for breathing holes, looking for signs of one of the predicted leads. But the depth of the blowing snow frustrated them: no breathing holes were found. From time to time we paused to brew tea.
After moving in this way for eight or nine hours, we stopped and built another snowhouse. The dogs were again tied in a ring around us. Muckpah took all the caribou skins we had with us as floor-covers and mattresses and proceeded to dig small pieces of fat from the ears. We ate these, with much laughter. There were jokes about whose clothes we would boil up first.
When we woke, the wind had dropped, and Muckpah proposed that we change direction and head out towards some islands to the north. We would be heading away from Pond Inlet, but it was an area that could be relied on for its seal hunting. Anaviapik agreed. So we swung left, moving towards a horizon that was without mountains. We were looking out to the open sea, which must have been some 15 or 20 miles ahead of us. The going was hard - the snow soft, the dogs weary. We moved for a mile or so, then stopped. The dogs had to be tricked and forced to move again. Three of them collapsed in their traces, no longer able to pull. They were set loose and left behind, lying in the snow. We found no breathing holes, no seals. We made another snowhouse, had another sleep, then turned back towards Pond Inlet.
Anaviapik said that we must ration our sugar. We were careful to have only one spoon each per cup of tea, instead of the usual two or three. During one pause for a drink and a rest, Anaviapik, standing very close to me, looked into my face and said, in a tone of slight surprise: "Saluttualuvutit." "You're so thin." I looked at him and noticed that his face had become all cheekbones and jawline. His eyes seemed very large. Then he said: "But our companion [meaning Muckpah] is not thin at all. He must be eating something we don't know about."
And he laughed. This was a joke Anaviapik had made to me before, comparing his own strength teasingly with the strength of young Inuit men.
We passed a difficult few hours. By now the dogs were weak, and conditions did not improve. The new cover of snow had not been wind-packed enough to make a firm surface on which we could travel well. We struggled on, making our way across the fjord. We kept going for 17 hours, covering what must have been no more than 20 miles. (By comparison, on a good day, we were able to travel 30 or 40 miles in 10 hours.) During one of many tea breaks, Anaviapik turned to me and said, in a matter-of-fact way: "Mitimatalingmut tikijjajunirpugutqai." "Probably we'll never make it back to Pond Inlet." I have a vivid memory of the shock of fear that went through me. Although I had known this was a journey full of difficulty, and while some of the dogs were starving and we were very hungry, I had never for a moment supposed that we were at risk.
How could I have felt so little apprehension? We had gone for five days with little or no food, and had seen the chances of killing a seal fade to hopelessness; several of the dogs were too weak to be harnessed, and the distance to Pond Inlet stretched far away ahead of us. Yet until that startling remark about not making it home, neither Anaviapik nor Muckpah had given a hint of worry. Despite exhaustion, hunger and disappointments, they had expressed neither disingenuous optimism nor disgruntled pessimism. The mood never changed. The same balance of quiet conversation, jokes and friendly silence had continued each day.
Inuit elders are remarkable for their equanimity. Smiles and laughter are used to deal with many forms of disquiet, and a judicious withdrawal is the proper way of responding to conflict. Anger was understandable in children but quite unacceptable in adults. In my language lessons, the question "Ningngarpit?" - "Are you angry?" - was somewhere between a tease and a reproach. If I was a little withdrawn on a particular day, or chose to go for a walk on my own on the tundra, my lessons would be sure to include words for "depressed" or "unhappy", often with an affectionate or consoling set of infixes: some such question as "Numasuktukulungul itainnarpit?": "Are you at last a wee unhappy one?"
To laugh, to be happy, to feel welcome or welcoming, to experience shyness, to be nervous about dangers in the world or society, and to feel ilira, the mix of apprehension and fear that causes a suppression of opinion and voice: all these states of mind are spoken of and exhibited with real freedom. They have helped to shape the stereotype of the Inuit as a people of unfailing goodwill, good humour and generosity. Yet the intensity of feeling that can exist within this restraint and dignified self-control, breaking through at times of extreme difficulty, is also remarkable. When one of Anaviapik's grandchildren was killed in a fire, the family's grief was fierce. The boy's father spoke to me of having been insane with grief - meaning that he had not been able to check outbursts of crying or periods of open despair. By European standards, this would appear to be moderate; by Inuit standards, it was extreme. Similarly, expressions of real anger have a smouldering, sharp quality that gives them more menace than mere shouting and yelling would convey.
Our hardships on the journey from Arctic Bay to Pond Inlet would not have warranted any extremes of emotion. I am sure that neither Anaviapik nor Muckpah anticipated catastrophe. Also, no one was blamed for things that had gone wrong. The real source of problems was ice and weather, not the break-in by the dogs. So there was no reason, in their terms, for expressions of fear or dismay or anger. Yet we had gone for a long time without adequate food, walking and pushing and working in cold weather for many, many hours each day. And it was not at all clear how we would escape without worse problems. In which other societies would circumstances of this sort have been met with such equanimity?
As we continued to struggle towards Pond, Muckpah suggested that we make a detour to the south and head for a campsite where he and others had spent part of the previous summer. He knew that a bearded seal had been cached there, in a stone-covered depression on the beach. It could well still be there, if no one else had needed it and bears had not managed to pull away the stones of the cache. We turned towards the shore again.
As we came, at last, to the beach, the dogs got the scent of something they could eat, and for the first time in several days they rushed ahead of their own accord. We hurtled into a line of rough ice, where the traces tangled and the sledge runners jammed. The dogs were held there, straining forwards. We left them and walked up on to the land. And there, sure enough, lying on top of an empty 40-gallon oil drum, was a large piece of muttuk: the skin, with a thin layer of subcutaneous fat, of a narwhal. The muttuk must have been there for several months, probably since the open-water hunting of the previous fall, and it was no doubt all that remained of a much larger pile of narwhal skin and meat that would have been devoured by passing foxes, gulls and ravens. This muttuk was now what is categorised in Inuktitut as igunaaq, meaning meat that has been transformed by slow decomposition. This is the strong cheese of the Inuit diet, and a great delicacy. Anaviapik and Muckpah pulled out knives, cut off chunks, offered some to me, and ate.
I had not had a solid meal of any kind for five days. Yet when I took a bite of the igunaaq I was instantly without appetite. I swallowed a tiny amount, then pinned my hopes on the cached seal, which was in due course discovered. Its meat carried the strong flavour of several months in cold storage under rocks on the beach. Cut into small chunks and boiled, however, it was tasty and meant an end to being hungry.
This was not the last of our troubles. After 24 hours at the camp and cache site, Anaviapik announced that he wanted to begin the last leg of our journey back to Pond Inlet. Muckpah demurred, saying that the dogs needed time to recover their strength, and that they would be gorged with overeating (they had been devouring large amounts of the cached bearded seal). But Anaviapik insisted. There was adamance on both sides, resolved in Inuit fashion by each doing what he thought best. So Anaviapik and I set off alone, to cross the fjord yet again. We planned to reach Bylot Island, where there was an old cabin we had stayed in before, and which marked an approximate halfway point between us and Pond.
But Muckpah had been right about the dogs. Once again we had to take turns to catch the traces in our hands, haul backwards, and wait for the dogs to pull with some real energy in the direction we wanted to move. We spent much time throwing gloves or pieces of seal meat in front of them to cause some bursts of determination.
There was still a cover of soft snow - no longer so deep, but enough to cause the sledge runners to sink and stick. As we came to the Bylot Island shore, Anaviapik declared that we could go no farther. It had taken us 12 hours to get to where we were. I was relieved. "So we'll build a snowhouse," I said.
"No," said Anaviapik. "There is no good snow. We can sleep here, out in the open."
I was alarmed. The temperature was no more than -10 Fahrenheit. We would have been able to lie side by side, in our sleeping bags, on some caribou hides. But I urged a final effort to get on to Bylot and then push our way along those last few miles to the hut.
Anaviapik indulged me and agreed.
It must have taken us two hours to cover those last six or seven miles. The snow was deep and soft. We struggled to keep going. Chunk after chunk of bearded seal meat was thrown over the dogs' heads, causing them to dash forward as Anaviapik and I pushed and tugged the sledge. It was the one time on the long journey from Arctic Bay that exhaustion felt like a threat, a dangerous obscuring and distorting of the world. I remember that Anaviapik did not talk at all for the last stretch; no sharing of words for things we saw around us, no teaching, no banter. Yet there was nothing of what English speakers refer to as bad mood or strain, no sense of hostility or explosive frustration. Just silence. We walked and worked with our eyes always fixed on the snow into which we sank, or on the traces that we clutched and tugged, or on the ridge just ahead of us.
At last, of course, we arrived. We came over - in part through - a bank of snow that lay alongside one wall of the hut. We stopped. For a moment it looked as though the entrance were buried. We walked around the rim of a huge drift and found that there was a space between the snow and the door. We clambered down and let ourselves in.
We were quick to unload everything from the sledge, unharness the dogs, spread caribou skins and sleeping bags on to the sleeping areas inside the hut, and get a pot of meat on to the Coleman stove. Anaviapik found a checkers set some hunters had left in the hut and suggested I set it up for a game. We sat down opposite each other, about to play. He arranged the pieces, then looked at me. I waited for the usual series of jokes about who was sure to win, about why he was so nervous of playing when he knew he'd lose, or perhaps about how I would be very sad if I lost - the ritual joking that acknowledged we were going to compete and defused with laughter any inappropriate competitiveness. Instead of making these jokes and teases, however, Anaviapik was rather serious. He said: "I am going to write to Ottawa, to the government, to the man there who sent you to the north. I want to tell him that now you have learned Inuktitut. You have seen how we lived, in the old days. Journeys were often hard."
I had learned some Inuktitut. But these past few days had not been about words and language. I had not been making vocabulary lists and working out new pieces of grammar. I could see now that there had been a misunderstanding, something I had sensed but never named. Again and again a lesson that I had expected to be about language had also been, or become, a lesson about other things - how to hunt, how to behave when talking, how to use the telephone, how to walk, how to sit, how to make jokes, how not to make jokes, how to play checkers. When I had asked Anaviapik to teach me Inuktitut, and when he had said he was eager to do so, I had thought we were talking about words and grammar, about speaking, while he had supposed we were talking about a way of being. He had embarked upon the task of teaching me how to do and to be Inuk- titut, "in the manner of an Inuk". Anaviapik had always known what it would mean to learn his language.