MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Fall Winter 2018

56 MLCM FALL/WINTER 2018 T he four-year-old Inuit kid rolls up to us on an adult-sized snowmobile, his hands high up on the bars like he’s riding a Harley Davidson chopper. Twenty minutes earlier, my buddy John and I had been speaking with the kid’s grandfather at their house in the hamlet of Qikiqtarjuaq. We were picking up a parcel of food we’d sent ahead and the boy had pointed at a Skidoo in front of their home and said, “Mine.” We gave a patronizing laugh, but soon enough learned it was indeed his as he rolled into our camp on the sea ice to show off his ride. They raise their children differently in ‘Qik’. The advances of science and technology have radically changed the North. Adaptation is key to the success of any species, human or otherwise, and the Inuit have had to adapt to the advances of our modern world perhaps more quickly than any group of people on earth. As recently as the 1970s, they lived nomadically in skin tents and igloos, completely in rhythm with the land. Everything they needed to feed, clothe and equip themselves in order to survive the rigours of the Arctic came from seals and other prey. It was a hard life, so the enticements of living in a permanent settlement with easy access to food and medical aid were too great to resist. Today the Inuit straddle the ancient and themodern, isolated by geography in fly-in communities like Qik, while at the same time connected to the outside world by technology. You can see kids here head-down in their cellphones like Vancouver hipsters, but also find yourself in someone’s kitchen as they butcher a beluga and divvy up the muktuk (blubber) to members of their family with everyone speaking the traditional Inuktitut language. Most northerners may no longer be able to build a kayak and spear a walrus like their forefathers could, but why should they when a motorboat and rifle make the task so much easier? The next morning, Dave (the third member of our party) flies into Qik, the three of us finally uniting after a milk run of plane connections from Vancouver and Calgary. Our mission here is a 230-kilometre town-to-town, sea-to-sea crossing of Baffin Island via the Coronation Glacier, Penny Ice Cap, and Akshayuk Pass. Most of our time will be spent in Auyuittuq National Park. Auyuittuq means “The Land that Never Melts,” and this frozen world will be our home for the next two weeks. N a n o o k We notice fresh tracks in the snow, passing only 100 metres from where we slept on the sea ice the second night of our traverse. The monstrous polar bear tracks come out from Coronation Fjord, which is exactly where we’re headed to gain access to the glaciers of Auyuittuq. The end of April is an active time of year for the bears, as females emerge from their inland dens and head out to the frozen sea with their cubs to hunt for the abundant ringed seals in the area. The tracks of this particular polar bear — nanook in Inuktitut — is most likely a lone male as there are no cub tracks to be seen. Back in Qik, days earlier, I’d walked by a young boy joyfully swinging on a beam beside a gigantic white hide hung to dry. The sight would likely elicit a PETA protest anywhere else but here in the North a strung-up pelt is as common as laundry on a clothesline. The Inuit have been harvesting polar bears for millennia, although nowadays each community has a limited quota of bears they can hunt. They still use every part of the animal for food while also bringing in crucial money to the community by selling the fur to folks in the south. In any case, global warming and melting polar ice is a far greater threat to polar bear populations than the Inuit are. Dave is a bear biologist who works in Banff National Park. He also moonlights as an interpreter during the November polar bear-watching season ABOVE Four-year old Lucas on his new ride in Qikiqtarjuaq. TOP RIGHT Bilingual street signs in Pangnirtung. BOTTOM RIGHT A boy swings on a beam beside the drying hide of a polar bear, Qikiqtarjuaq.