A taste of the wild

Research for my book The Long Exile took me to the Arctic twice, once to Inukjuak and once on a more complicated journey first to the Nunavut capital, Iqaluit, then to Resolute Bay on Cornwallis Island, from where most of the North Pole expeditions now begin. From Resolute I flew on a tiny Twin Otter cargo plane to the world’s most northerly permanently inhabited settlement, Grise Fiord on Ellesmere Island, where Josephie Flaherty and his family were exiled half a century ago.

The trip to Inukjuak began in July. The summer birds had arrived and there were tiny cloudberries and cranberries ripening among the Arctic willow. With a misplaced sense of romanticism I took myself off alone for a day or two, making my way up and down the muskeg, following the path of the nearby river so I could find my way back easily. The stretch of the tundra pouring out on either side of the water was both thrilling and disorientating to me. But there was something wonderfully delicate and elegant about it too. It didn’t take long to be out of ear and eye shot of Inukjuak.

After six or seven hours’ walking I felt more alone than ever before. I was not alone, though, as I soon saw. On the other side of the river bank a wolf bitch and her cub were following my progress. Alarmed and unprepared, I crouched down and practised heaving rocks along the shoreline, in case the wolf decided to approach and I had to defend myself against her, but she and her cub continued to watch my antics with nothing more than mild curiosity. I realised then that even if the rocks discouraged the wolf they could not, in any more profound sense, protect me from what was all around.

For the first time in my life, I was in a wilderness, one of the last genuine wildernesses on earth. The thought made me feel vulnerable and a little frightened but at the same time I’d never felt more alive or more master of my own destiny. I had tasted what it felt like to be wild, a taste as routinely familiar to Inuit as the taste of beer and takeaway pizza is to me.

The landscape around Grise Fiord had none of Inukjuak’s elegance or delicacy. What it did have was otherworldliness. When I arrived on a Twin Otter in late March, the sea was still frozen but the land wasn’t white and snowy, as I’d assumed it would be, but the colour of a tin can left out in the rain, matt and lustreless, with spots of rust, and scrunched into beautiful but indomitably bleak cliffs and crags.

The extreme cold brought on a brain-freezing headache similar to, but much more intense than, the kind you get when you eat icecream too quickly. The air scoured my lungs. Ice pulled on my nose hairs as I breathed and my tear ducts collected tiny icy boulders. Even if the tundra around Inukjuak was frightening, the settlement itself felt safe and substantial. In Grise nothing did.

As if the freezing air and the eye-blinding dazzle of the light were not enough, the place was constantly troubled by the tremendous churn of the ice pack, the growl of floes grinding one upon another, the shriek of the wind and the roar of the sea ice cracking. Mountains rise up directly behind the heated cabins of the modern settlement, blocking the view into the interior. On the eastern side a huge glacier slides centimetre by centimetre into the sea, and on the western side there are the ethereally beautiful but terrible crags of the fiord. More than half a century after Josephie Flaherty and his family were first moved there, Grise Fiord still seemed unsurvivable. And yet, as I knew, it was not.

While in Grise I ventured out on the sea ice one time with Tom Kiguktok and his dog team. By then, I’d got used to the idea that it was perfectly reasonable to light the barbecue in -28C temperatures, as my host Ken Powder had done to celebrate my arrival. But everywhere beyond the settlement still seemed quite terrifying and otherworldly.

As we sledged out onto the sea, I tried to put on a brave show but my heart was clinging to Tom as fiercely as a toddler clutching her safety blanket. And yet, as we travelled, instead of feeling ever more disquieted as I had on my own in Inukjuak, I began to relax. I knew we were in danger. What with the ice conditions, the extreme cold and the presence of polar bears, we were almost certainly more vulnerable than I had been the previous summer, but neither Tom nor I were fighting our vulnerability. Tom’s competence and confidence in his skills, born of a deep understanding of the land, allowed me to be something of my usual self. In fact, the further we went, the more I felt expanded, both outwards towards Tom and internally.

In Inukjuak the wolf and I had been separate selves, but here in Grise, Tom, the dogs and I were a team, each of us dependent on the others. Tom and the dogs understood the land so well that in a real sense it inhabited them as much as they inhabited it and so I too felt connected and, for all the dangers, strangely at peace. My solo experiment in Inukjuak was never going to be more than a means to survive in the Arctic for a short while. This, on the other hand, was a way to live.