Ice Ghosts

by Paul Watson

  Old wounds, forgotten long ago, hurt again.

  In just over four minutes, Arctic air can turn exposed skin from blush pink to itchy patches of pale white, quickly chilling it down to grayish-yellow as bodily fluids begin to freeze and ice crystals form in cells. By now, those cells are dying fast. For you, it is too late. Warming the skin at this point just produces throbbing red blisters. Frostbitten body parts swell up like dark red balloons. The excruciatingly painful bubbles eventually deflate, but if final-stage frostbite grabs hold, the damaged skin turns as hard and black as cooling tar. Without urgent treatment, infection can seep in. What started as a shivering chill is now gangrene. By that point, the cold has won. Your best hope is probably amputation.

  But in those first steps outdoors, nothing feels better. Your heart races with the thrill of an Arctic high. The rush comes from crystal-clear quiet, pure beauty, and the exhilarating freshness of air that, on a whim, might just suck the life out of you. So you walk, feeling warm and cozy, like there’s no better place to be on the planet. With each step in all those layers of thermal protection, a sweat builds. Soon the scarf covering your face, and the edge of the wool cap pulled down tight, are as stiff as brittle wood and covered with frost and tiny icicles. They grow from each breath as the warm air from your lungs instantly freezes, turning eyebrows into ice sculptures. The long polar night is over, yet the sun only manages to climb above the horizon for some six hours a day. Just barely. It ekes out a pale yellow glow, cutting a low arc across the skyline, straight from sunrise to sunset. In midafternoon, it sinks again, drawing a curtain of frigid darkness behind it. The range between the day’s lowest and highest temperatures is only a few degrees. Some days the mercury doesn’t move at all. Light or dark, up or down, it’s pretty much the same: fiercely cold.

  On this morning, wind that rattled walls in the night has dropped to a breeze out of the northwest, enough to send feathers of snow crystals dancing along the ice, like wisps of sand skittering across the desert. The wind is mercifully light, yet it still lands a heavy punch to the chest. The first, untested breath zaps the nerves in your teeth, sending pulses across the top row like mild jolts of electricity. Your nostril hairs instantly freeze in clumps, and as the cold air invades warm lungs, they stop in a midbreath shock. The fluid in your eyes is getting gluey. It’s a fight just to keep your eyelids from freezing shut.

  That is a hint of winter in Gjoa Haven, a hamlet of around thirteen hundred people on the southern coast of King William Island. It’s the only settlement on the world’s sixty-first largest island. Most who live here are Inuit who know well how to brave the cold. They have been doing it for centuries, long before foreign explorers sailed in to a world they saw as barren and threatening. In one of the planet’s most hostile environments, adaptation is survival. For humans, that hasn’t been easy. We, and the modern comforts we crave, aren’t built for this place. It’s a constant struggle to keep everything, including our bodies, from breaking down.

  Cars and trucks sit empty, with engines idling, for hours each day so they aren’t seized up when someone steps out to drive a short distance across the settlement, which is all most people dare try in a car or truck. There are no roads linking Gjoa Haven to anywhere else. Most residents walk through the hamlet on snow-packed gravel roads or buzz around on snowmobiles. Layered in wool, nylon, fur, and down-filled parkas, they glide silently on kamiik boots hand-sewn from sealskin, or clomp around in heavy moon boots with rubber soles as flexible as frozen tire treads. With each step, the wind-hardened snow squeaks and pops, as if they were walking on slippery Styrofoam. Yet passing eyes seem to smile as people peer out from the cone-shaped tunnels of hoods drawn tightly round their heads. Inuit not only have learned how to live with lethal cold, they’ve also come to love it.

  That affection for our world’s northern extremes is something most visitors have to learn. Many give up trying. It’s not just the cold that gets to them, but the weeks of constant darkness with flickers of twilight, and the gnawing sense of isolation. At first, the High Arctic is exhilarating. But it can quickly wear down a newcomer. People who need each other to succeed, even to survive, can turn on each other, inviting failure, courting death. Inuit have always known that the Arctic demands collaboration and respect, not only among people but also with the environment that sustains humans, and the spirit world that can destroy them. Few Franklin Expedition searchers heeded that lesson in the nineteenth century. Others repeated their mistakes into the twenty-first. Then lines of fate converged, a potent alliance of Inuit traditional knowledge and modern science triumphed, and the Arctic couldn’t conceal one of her best-held secrets any longer.

  LOUIE KAMOOKAK was born on the tundra to a mother whom missionaries had christened Mary. She wanted him to grow up strong, become a good hunter. When Louie outgrew crawling, and stood upright on the land, his Inuk father noticed something different. George was sure Louie walked like a qalunaaq. Irish genes, inherited from a legendary fur trader, might explain that. But there was something more special passed down to the child through his Inuit ancestry. His great-grandfather was a very respected shaman, an angakkuq, who played an important role in educating Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen about Inuit culture and the lay of the land during his historic first transit of the Northwest Passage in the early years of the twentieth century.

  The child was also the great-grandson of a renowned storyteller named Hummahuk. In a slightly creased snapshot, she is an elder happily sitting on the floor with family. A spark lights up her eyes. The dark lines of tattoos fan out across her cheeks, like the whiskers of a cat. Thicker markings stripe her chin and forehead. They are an ancient form of body art that archaeologists have found on centuries-old, mummified remains of Inuit. In Hummahuk’s day, the facial tattoos were made with very basic tools. Netsilingmiut women were tattooed with an initial prick from a large metal needle. Then a second, smaller needle made of wood, and dipped in soot from a cooking pot or an oil lamp, was inserted in the hole. The press of a fingertip sealed it. In another technique, said to be more common, an Inuk had to endure a kind of facial sewing as a needle and thread made from caribou sinew, blackened with soot, pierced her skin to be tugged and drawn through, over and over again, as if she were a doll embroidered by a seamstress’s hand. A girl was usually tattooed on her chin at puberty, and then more markings were added at marriage. They also served a spiritual purpose: to show she was good when her soul entered the next life.

  Hummahuk knew what many have long forgotten: A story well told is eternal. Generations of listeners revered her as a captivating narrator of Inuit tradition and oral history. Louie Kamookak heard her magical stories as a child, lying in a caribou-hide tent in the soft, dancing light of the soapstone qulliq, a seal-oil lamp. She was helping a boy live up to his inheritance as a modern shaman, with the strengths of a wise storyteller, a leader’s close ear to the spirits, and a drive to search for answers from the past. One night, as Hummahuk lay dying, and the rest of Louie’s family hunted caribou far away, he listened to his great-grandmother speak quietly in the glow of a day when she was a girl and stumbled upon strange metal objects scattered on the ground. The story took hold of Louie and wouldn’t let go.

  He grew up to be a round-faced bear of a man, with the deep, entrancing baritone of a born raconteur. His hands are broad and leathered from a lifetime in a tough, unforgiving land. In the gray twilight of a High Arctic afternoon, his eyes sparkle, as if from some inner light. Warm and welcoming one minute, they seem wary the next. By Inuit tradition, when an extended family welcomes a newborn, elders often look to nature for the traits they hope the child will emulate. A polar bear must have come to mind when the Kamookak family considered baby Louie: powerful but stealthy, even elusive. He cautiously feels out a newcomer, making sure any knowledge he chooses to share will be safe. He guards his emotions just as carefully.

  In Hummahuk’s stories, the boy picked up the scent of people and events that continue to reshape his pe
ople’s Arctic homeland. Kamookak has been following it, even when the hunt threatened to kill him, his whole life. His meticulous work gathering Inuit oral history proved a crucial point, which took well over a century for the outside world to accept without challenge: The Netsilingmiut knew what happened to the Franklin Expedition. That truth was lost for generations in the cultural haze between qalunaaq and Inuit, as thick as the banks of icy mist that roll in off a cold sea on a warm day. Relying on translators, whose own precision and accuracy were questionable, only clouded things more. For decades, outsiders were terrible at sorting out good information from bad. In some cases, what sounded like encounters with survivors desperately trying to reach the mainland were actually descriptions of men searching for them. Many would try to untangle false or broken leads from fact. No one worked harder at it, spent more time listening to elders, coaxing out more details, cross-referencing local names with foreign ones, puzzling out locations from vague descriptions, than Louie Kamookak.

  “I’m like a detective,” he told me, and his eyes flashed with a mystical glint.

  Kamookak’s grandfather was another great shaman who helped Knud Rasmussen, the Greenland-born Danish anthropologist who carried out the most respected early study of Inuit, to understand a culture deeply rooted in the spirit world. The first European to cross the Canadian Arctic on a dogsled, Rasmussen spoke an Inuit dialect and traveled with two Inuit hunters. Starting off from Greenland in 1921, he mushed a team of a dozen dogs some twenty thousand miles to Nome, Alaska. Rasmussen spent more than three years living off the land, and nearly dying on it, to trace the origins and development of the Inuit, their culture, and the spiritualism born of one of the cruelest places on Earth. Mass death was not unique to the Franklin Expedition, he learned. The Inuit, too, had suffered similar horrors.

  Elders spoke of the Ukjulingmiut, the People of the Great Bearded Seal, an Inuit group who spent their summers on King William Island and the Adelaide Peninsula. When sea ice covered Queen Maud Gulf, they moved there to hunt seals. One winter was so severe, with constant blizzards howling across the gulf, that their suffering was legendary, told and retold down the generations as a warning of what could happen when the spirits were enraged and the hunt failed. Once numerous, the Ukjulingmiut were nearly wiped out by famine: “Some froze to death, others starved, and the bodies of the dead were eaten by the living—in fact many were killed to provide food, for these poor people were driven almost mad by their sufferings that winter,” Rasmussen wrote. The few survivors fled south to the Back River, the same place Franklin’s men tried to reach after he died and they surrendered Erebus and Terror to the ice.

  In his ten-volume account of the Fifth Thule Expedition, Rasmussen wrote that Netsilingmiut survived by spending most of their lives in small family groups and making brutally hard sacrifices. Their hunting bands could grow to dozens of people until the return of winter, and the inevitable shortage of food, dispersed them again. Getting by on the little that the Arctic grudgingly conceded left no room for the complications of larger social groups. So they had no permanent settlements, no rigid clans, no institutionalized chiefs, and no formal government. In winters, when the sea ice froze up to seven feet thick, and temperatures plummeted to –40 degrees Fahrenheit or lower, they hunkered down in igloos. Summer gave them more freedom to move with their animal-skin shelters to follow their preferred prey, mainly seal, caribou, musk ox, and polar bear. There is also evidence that they were drawn by discoveries of driftwood, pieces of iron, or other items brought by the outsiders in large ships. The Inuit shaped them into tools or hunting weapons. Driftwood was hard to find in the eastern heart of their territory, so the arrival of qalunaaq explorers, and the wrecked ships they left behind, were a magnet attracting the Netsilingmiut to the western shores of King William Island, where Inuit witnessed dying survivors of the Franklin Expedition struggling to make their escape. When survival left no other choice, they, like the Inuit, resorted to cannibalism.

  The qalunaaq still judged Inuit as savages who needed to be civilized. But the Netsilingmiut already had an ancient social code, a value system that is their source of individual and community strength in an environment where no one can stand completely alone and survive for long. They call it Quajimajatuqangit, which comprises eight basic, guiding principles: respect and caring for others; consensus decision-making; leadership and commitment to serving the common good; being open, welcoming, and inclusive; working together for a common purpose; solving problems through innovation and resourcefulness and respect; and care for the land, the animals, and the environment. The eighth element, known as Pilimmaksarniq, calls on each person to build the capacity to acquire skills and knowledge.

  Living constantly on the edge often required hard choices. Infanticide had to be one of the hardest for any heart to bear. Like other Inuit groups, the Netsilingmiut often killed newborn babies or let them die. They were usually girls. Fathers normally made the decision, soon after birth, but it fell to the babies’ mothers to make all the preparations. The Arctic usually did the actual killing. In winter, the baby could be left by the short, narrow tunnel of an igloo’s entrance, where she quickly froze to death. In summer, a mother could dig a shallow grave in the permafrost and leave the newborn there to die a slower death, normally within hours. Or the mother could suffocate her child by covering its face with the thick fur of an animal skin. It shocks the modern mind, but for centuries in the Arctic, infanticide was a necessity of life in the High Arctic: Some had to die so that others might live.

  “These murders of newborn girls are not at all committed as the outcome of crudeness of mind nor because they underrate the importance of the female to the community; they are quite well aware that she is indispensable,” Rasmussen wrote. “When it happens, it is only because the struggle for existence is so hard, because the experience of generations is that the individual provider is unable to feed more than the most necessary members of the family.”

  When Rasmussen did his census of the Netsilingmiut in 1923, he reported a total population of 259, of whom 42 percent were female. To do a detailed study of infanticide, the Danish anthropologist visited a settlement at Malerualik Lake, on the south coast of King William Island. He visited every tent and “asked all the women how many children they had borne and how many girls they had put out of the way,” and he recorded thirty-eight girls killed out of ninety-six total births. A shaman named Samik gave Rasmussen an example of how starvation forced a grisly sacrifice, a choice meant to spare the child from prolonged suffering while giving its mother a better chance of living.

  “Once when there was a famine Nagtok gave birth to a child, while people lay around about her dying of hunger,” Rasmussen quoted him. “What did that child want here? How could it live, when its mother, who should give it life, was herself dried up and starving? So she strangled it and allowed it to freeze and later on ate it.”

  In a place of great suffering, which constantly tests the extremes of what a human being can endure, spirits are a source of both strength and great fear. Inuit rely on shamans and their helper spirits to mediate with the malevolent forces that punish through powerful storms, failed hunts, long famines, or other calamities all too common to King William Island. When Rasmussen reached its southeast coast, he was so close to the North Magnetic Pole that his compass was useless. A blinding blizzard left him even more disoriented. His sled made little headway, and often slid ahead of the dogs, which “were creeping timidly forward over the ice, fearing to be blown away. Face, eyes, nose, mouth and hair were so encrusted with fine snow that we could barely see. Now and then we could find the trail by lying flat down and scraping the snow away.”

  The sled dogs eventually sniffed out a camp of igloos that Rasmussen and his Inuit guide had spent days trying to find. The anthropologist was eager to get started building his large collection of amulets, a delicate task under the circumstances because he wanted to ensure that, “when I was gone, they would have no occasion for
blaming me for the misfortunes that might visit the settlement.” To persuade people to trade the talismans that protected them from evil spirits, he went from home to home, accepting Inuit hospitality, eating “as many festive meals of frozen salmon, the contents of caribou stomachs and seal meat as I could manage at all.” His aim was to build trust without betraying any ulterior motive. Then he brought out the trinkets: “Shining sewing needles—removed from the packets to look more imposing in bulk; there were knives, files, thimbles, nails, tobacco, matches—all of those trifles that are so natural to us, but of great value to people out of touch with civilization.”

  That night, Rasmussen went to work on the group’s oldest man, a shaman whose face glistened with blubber that he smeared on his skin for the occasion. Talk turned to religion, and Rasmussen tried to impress the old man with knowledge of the amulets’ power. When a crowd later showed up with various furs to trade, the anthropologist quoted what he called the local oracle to convince them that giving up their charms would not leave them defenseless.

  “I emphasized as strongly as I could that, in the opinion of their own shaman, the owner was not deprived of the protection of his amulet even if he lost it. The power of an amulet was magically attached to the person who wore it since he was a child.”

  The next morning, a girl named Kuseq arrived with a small animal-skin bag. Its moldy contents included a long, black swan’s beak, which the girl shyly explained that she kept “so that the first child I have may be a boy.” Next was the head of a ptarmigan tied to its foot, to make sure her future son could run fast, and not tire easily, while hunting caribou. There was also a bear’s tooth to guarantee a good bite and healthy digestion, and the skin of an ermine, its skull attached to the head, for strength and adroitness. A small flounder amulet was meant to protect the girl against the dangers of meeting strange tribes. Rasmussen took all of those and more. He skillfully got what he wanted. But he had effectively tricked vulnerable Inuit, in the depths of a threatening winter, into surrendering objects that gave them hope against the vicious Arctic. And more than any white man bearing gifts, he knew it.