The very last of the few - Wegenercom

Under the Pole Star
The hardest time
But the feeling of uncertainty never left you. It always
travelled along, especially on the months-long hunting
trips. You never knew what to expect... abundance or
scarcity. It is no secret, that more than once I was forced
to resort to the sledge driver’s hardest time – to kill
one of your own dogs in order to use it as food for its
stronger companions, or for yourself. Tough food, as it
was always the old and worn-out ones that were
selected first.
No wonder that the uncertainty and the fear of famine
lie as a dark and threatening undertone in much Inuit
poetry and their myths.
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One time, some friends and I barely managed to push
our dog sleds onto an iceberg in the middle of Smith
Sound before a heavy snowstorm broke, which totally
eradicated our highway on the sea ice around us in a
total “white-out”. Just imagine what would happen if
the iceberg broke! My travelling companions took the
situation in fatalistic composure, but not I. Why the
devil did I not choose a secure job as an engineer in a
Danish engineering company with a fixed salary and a
pension plan?
As it turned out, we were more frightened than hurt.
The storm blew us across to the coastal ice along
Inglefield Land. The same route that Inuit clans had
followed through millenniums from Canada in their
search for new hunting grounds in Greenland.
I could tell stories about dramatic hunts for Arctic big
game like polar bears, narwhals, muskoxen, and caribou.
Or about the incident where a walrus inadvertently
became my swimming toy – very inadvertently.
When I look back, however, there is one animal that has
fascinated me more than any other, the ringed seal. It
was and is the Inuit hunters’ daily bread. Without it, the
ancestors of present-day Greenlanders could not have
survived.
The first time one drives out across a high-arctic
fiord landscape covered in snow and ice, it is hard to
believe that any animal can survive in these barren
surroundings. But the ringed seal can. Even in the
middle of the darkest polar night it hunts polar cod