At the Floe Edge

Igloolik—Ku-nuk, ku-nuk, ku-nuk. Waves of ice. This is the sensation of riding in a wooden sledge across the frozen Arctic sea. My head is bobbing like a dashboard doll. My brain is reeling with regret. Kun-uk, kun-uk, kun-uk. It’s not too cold (-20), but my feet, stuffed into sub-sub-zero boots, are nonetheless congealing against the wind-chilling pace of the snowmobile towing us. There are eight of us in this equipment sledge, a box on two skis, and I’m riding hard on the plywood floor. Ku-nuk, ku-nuk.

The day before, I was in the workroom of Zacharias Kunuk, the Inuit filmmaker whose film set I was visiting in Igloolik, a village of 1,300 souls in Nunavut. We had just finished an interview covering his life, his art, and his hopes for the future when he said, “Tomorrow is an off-day. I’m going to the floidj.” He rubbed his palms in anticipation.

I asked if this place, this floidj, held some spiritual significance for him. He looked at me pityingly. Floe edge. Where the ice pack meets the open water. “It’s where the seals are.”

“You’re going seal hunting?”

“Yeah. Want to come?”

My knowledge of seals is limited to the slick-furred torpedoes at the Toronto zoo—clever, cavorting creatures, the role model for mermaids. The idea of watching one being killed and butchered was not instantly appealing. Then again, it wasn’t an invitation one receives every day. Kunuk, whom his creative collaborator, Norman Cohn, describes as a “hunter who happens to make movies,” has an intimate relationship with Arctic fauna. His boots, his pants, his mittens—oh, to have those on the sledge— are an amalgam of the life-preserving qualities of many animals: sealskin and gut, caribou hide.

Kunuk and Cohn’s first feature film, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, was an art-house sensation in 2001, when it won the Camera d’Or, the debut-film prize of the Cannes festival, and went on to dazzle international audiences. A beautifully shot murder-romance suffused with elements of Inuit legend, the movie was the first Canadian feature to be written, produced, directed, and acted by Inuit. The follow-up, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, which Kunuk and Cohn are working on here in Igloolik, looks at the near-extinction of Inuit culture through the eyes of elders speaking to Knud Rasmussen, an ethnologist from Greenland who travelled through this area in the 1920s.

Ku-nuk, ku-nuk. I’m cursing the sound, if not the name, when suddenly we stop. I peer over the plywood edge. A massive, million-faceted sapphire, thirty feet high. An iceberg, a sudden mountain in this plane of white. Kunuk hacks off chips into a bucket to melt for the coming stew. Engines roar back to life. Ku-nuk, ku-nuk.

More hypertrophied minutes. Cohn roars by on his own Ski-Doo, like a Battle of Britain pilot in a sheepskin jacket and flying helmet. Easy for him, with those marvellous suspension springs. My tailbone is raw from pounding the sledge’s floor, and my toes no longer believe in my existence. It’s time to say something. The nearest person is a smiling woman in full Michelin; her smile is all I can see. An envious gaze at her footwear: giant bulbs of foam within foam within Gore-Tex.

“I can’t feel my feet,” I say conversationally.