The Country Mice

Today after breakfast we walk down to the floating dock to meet our guide Peter Kilabuk at his aluminum fishing boat. Peter has offered to take us deep into the Pangnirtung fjord to hike in Auyuittuq national park.

We’ve paid $12.50 for a permit to enter the park, we’ve watched a disturbing orientation film on polar bear encounters and have packed our granola bars, hazing gun and emergency whistles. Liliana confides, “If we see a polar bear, you shoot the gun and I’ll take pictures.”

As we motor deeper in to the fjord evidence of the glaciers’ carving power is striking. Deep cuts and gouges in the rock, symmetrical and round. The shapes are much different in contrast to the freshly born peaks and ruggedness of the Rockies and Purcells.

Peter has timed our trip to coincide with the tides – easiest for dropoff and pickup. About an hour’s ride in to the fjord he pulls to the shore. It’s the lowest point of low tide. We jump out on to the seaweed-covered rocks, clamber up the shore and watch Peter float away. If he should forget to come back we know there’s a CB radio in a cabin a few kilometres ahead. Of course, as the hamlet’s chief outfitter, he’d be the one to come back for us anyway.

And so we hike, over rocks, sandy stretches, masses of purple saxifrage. We leap over streams coming down from the mountains, fed by glaciers. This is amazing. I tell Liliana as we fill a cup with icy water, she is drinking some of the oldest water on earth. How cool is that? “Well it’s actually kind of gross when you think about it.” It’s all perspective, my friends. All perspective.

After an hour we come upon a blaze orange cabin to be used in case of emergency, such as in pursuit by bear. Yes. We look inside. The CB radio, with a note that the batteries were checked July 9, 2015. There’s also a log book with entries from people beginning or ending their 100km hike to Davis Strait, just over there between us and Greenland. With only five hours to undertake we feel a bit like poseurs so don’t bother adding to the journal.

It’s not the first time this week, but I begin to understand the allure of living in the north. Big, bad, beautiful. The temperature for the most part has hovered around five degrees Celsius. One slightly warmer day and we were besieged by mosquitoes.

I talk to Peter about the weather, about the winters. The coldest they experience is about minus 40. I think, that’s all? That’s Winnipeg in January, and say so to Peter. Ah, but it’s colder in Winnipeg. They have all that humidity that cuts to the bone. It’s a dry cold here.

For those not from the prairies, that big sound you just heard is a Winnipeg guffaw. Winnipeggers love to defend their frigid climes by declaring, “But it’s a dry kind of cold.” So there you go, folks. Winnipeg is colder than Pangnirtung. I’d say a few of us already knew that.

Kidding! Kidding!

Five hours after drop off, the sun has gone behind the mountains, the clouds have moved in and the weather has chilled considerably. Liliana puts her socks and shoes back on, hats and mitts come out and we thank each other, for the thousandth time, for this awe-striking experience.

Peter arrives at the pick-up point – a Nunavut flag stuck in a pile of rocks — precisely three minutes after we do and we sense the finality of our northern experience. Still a few things to do over the next day and a half – pick up some permits so we can bring home a sealskin (shot and skinned by Peter, cleaned and prepared by his wife using her “woman’s knife,” the ulu), return the (unused) hazing gun, and say good-bye Louis, Jason and some of the elders we’ve met – but there’s definitely the feeling that we’ve forgotten something, that feeling I get when I’m leaving Somewhere Wonderful.

Hannah has dinner ready when we return. Boiled potatoes, boiled peas and carrots, and large pieces of meat on a plate. Liliana has never seen a roast before. I haven’t seen one since my mother cooked one. She is so good, my girl. She takes a piece, covers it with potatoes and eats. She tells me later she thinks she’ll eat nothing but raw food and green smoothies for the rest of the summer. “I don’t even think I want toast.”

After dinner Hannah gives a startled Liliana a hug.

“I love you, honey. I want you stay with me. I make you mittens from seal skin, I make you kamik, I make you aumati (a hooded jacket).

“And I teach you cooking.”

We will miss this lovely woman.