Winston Churchill was wrong. Or at the very least, he wasn’t completely correct. Churchill once said that courage is the most important quality because it makes all the other qualities possible. That’s wrong though, I found out.
After snowmobiling nearly 1,500 kilometres across the Arctic with the Canadian Forces, led by the remarkable Inuit of the 1st Canadian Ranger Patrol Group, I learned courage is not the most necessary quality; it is the second.
Surviving in the Arctic winter for days or even hours without highly specialized skills and equipment is just impossible.
In fact, the odds against any life succeeding there are extremely high—never mind the predatory polar bears or appalling cold—what gets to you after a while is the enormity of the place, the vastness, the seemingly unlimited variety of ice and snow, the strange and bewildering light, the unmistakeable hostility of an environment so powerful that it makes humans seem pointless.
After watching the military and their Ranger guides struggle through 11 days of patrolling across the Arctic, sleeping in tents, it became clear that the most important characteristic is not courage, it is resilience—the ability to bend without breaking, to endure the stress and hardship and relentless hazards of travel in the high Arctic and keep bouncing back to carry on. Courage doesn’t much matter if the Arctic has deformed your spirit so badly that all you can think about is escape or mutiny or dark rum.
That’s not a joke. There is a long, disastrous tradition of various explorers and adventurers travelling into the Arctic and proving their lack of resilience by freaking out completely.
In one way, this was actually kind of the purpose of Operation Nunalivut 2012, the Canadian Forces now-annual northern expedition—for the military to prove to themselves and others that they have the capability to actually operate up there, north of everything, that they can keep going when it’s minus 50 and the patrol is lost and flat-light blind, and running low on supplies and the bears are circling. Resilience.
The Thawing Of A New Frontier
There is a struggle going on to control the top of the world. Despite the presence of camouflage and guns and even the occasional fly-by general, this is not a military struggle, not really. Or not yet, anyway.
While the struggle to control Arctic lands and exploit its resources predates the colonization of Canada, it’s now more a legal and political battle than anything else. It’s an issue of sovereign authority—who gets to decide which ships can transit which waters, which companies can drill for resources and, ultimately, who owns the Arctic.
Despite its complexity and, frankly, its difficulty, the intention of Op Nunalivut was simple. To get a sense of what that intention is you just have to hear the meaning of the operation’s name: Nunalivut. It’s an Inuk word that means “land that is ours.” Our Land.
That’s a fairly emphatic message.
Meanwhile, at this point, it’s not so much an issue of ownership of the land as it is control of the waterways and the resources beneath them.
The big question is whether Canada can maintain control over the Northwest Passage, a still mostly frozen strait connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans which provides a time- and cost-saving shortcut between Europe and Asia.
The U.S., China, India, the European Union, OK, most of the rest of the world, all want the Northwest Passage to be labelled an international strait, whereas Canada wants it labelled as internal waters. The difference is mainly an issue of control: if we get our way, we get to say which ships transit those waters. If we don’t get our way, pretty much any ship can transit.
Now, that’s not to say that Canadian ownership of the huge mass of Arctic islands up there is in any way flawlessly perfect, because it’s not.
Sovereign ownership of land is traditionally legally based on discovery of the land and effective occupation of the land by the country that claims to own it. In the case of the Arctic, we have a rough time claiming either.
Canadians were hardly involved in the exploration of the Far North. Instead, the British gave us much of the Arctic as a gift in 1880—a move that was legally unprecedented—and we bought the rest from the Hudson’s Bay Company. Here’s a little known fact: one of Canada’s largest Arctic islands is named Axel Heiberg after the Norwegian beer company that sponsored the expedition that discovered it.
As for effective occupation, well, our efforts there have been contentious, to say the least. The 1953 strategic re-location of Inuit to create the High Arctic communities of Resolute and Grise Fiord was supposed to help cement Canadian land claims and while it may have done that, it was also a human rights fiasco.
Regardless of all these complicated issues, the whole endeavour is wildly significant. If Dutch or Danish or Norwegian claims to sovereign possession of these lands were pressed, if they, instead of the French and English, had been able to achieve effective occupation of North America, well, it would be a very different world (and not an English-speaking world).
Securing sovereign rights to land is a game with potentially vast consequences. That phrase doesn’t quite cut it, however. The Arctic wasn’t always frozen, and it may not always be frozen. Who controls the Arctic could be the most important thing in the world, in the future. It is potentially that crucial, which makes it imperative now, to try.
So, more or less, that’s why Op Nunalivut happens every year, as a demonstration of Canadian will. And that’s how you should imagine the patrol, as a sovereign procession of human flagpoles trekking across the ice proclaiming to all those who might be interested (even our southern brothers) that despite the possibly dubious legality of all the things we claim about the Arctic and its navigable waters, that we are the rulers of this place, us and no one else.
North From Resolute Bay
The Inuit word for white people is Kabluunak, which means someone with big eyebrows and a fat, protruding stomach.
By the end of the operation, I would become known among the Inuit as one of the clumsiest of the many clumsy Kabluunaks.
The mission was to set off from Resolute—one of the world’s northernmost communities—and head north across Cornwallis Island, across the Wellington Strait, north to the edge of Devon Island and there search for a lost patrol. We’d travel by snowmobile, camping every night, moving fast to try and go as far as possible.
Two patrols of 12 people would leave Resolute to take part in the search. Each would have a large group of Canadian Rangers—reservists, mostly Inuit, known as the northern eyes and ears of the Canadian military—a couple of regular force CF trainers, a Search and Rescue survival expert and a medic.
Each of us was required to drag all our own food and supplies behind our snowmobiles on a huge and heavy wooden sled called a qamutiq.
The qamutiq is a very old, very well-tested Inuit invention that has proven durable enough to survive weeks and months of being dragged over rough ice and snow at fairly high speeds.
I destroyed my first one in minutes.
Sergeant Billy Cornish was the patrol leader. He is a straight-talking veteran of two Afghan deployments with the Royal Canadian Regiment (see: Ghosts In The Hills, January/February 2007) and it was his unfortunate job to give me a brief introduction into snowmobiling across rough mountainous terrain while towing a sled at the end of long rope.
Cornish wasted no time getting to the difficult stuff. He led me up a small mountain outside of Resolute and then darted down. As I was about to learn, there are some very interesting physics involved with towing a heavy sled down a steep hill. And by interesting, I really mean terrifying.
The faster you go, the faster the sled goes. But there is no slowing down, because you can’t let the sled pass you. It turns into a weird kind of race.
I was racing, then I crashed.
I looked back up the hill, the qamutiq was scorching towards me, 400 pounds of furiously careening wood and supplies. It flew off the same drift that foundered me and went past my right shoulder. I watched as the 20-foot tow rope tightened faster than I wanted to see.
There are a few peaceful moments between when you become absolutely sure something bad is about to happen, and when the bad thing happens. I thought of nothing.
The rope snapped tight and the snowmobile’s seat turned into a catapult and I launched headfirst down the mountain.
It was a giant mess. I looked back up the mountain to see a debris field worthy of a plane crash—snowmobile upside down, qamutiq upside down, broken, its contents spilled out.
Eventually, Billy managed to right both me and my snowmobile, managed to get everything stuck back together.
When we finally made it back to Resolute, Cornish looked me over and then, his own nose bloodied and skin whitening with frostbite, pointed at my face and said, matter-of-factly, “That’s going to hurt later.”
Race To Snowblind Bay
“My qamutiq is trying to kill me, I am certain.”
That is the only thing I wrote in my notebook after our first day of patrolling, which saw us run at high speed from Resolute northwest across Cornwallis Island, about 100 kilometres across rough land to our first night camping site at Snowblind Bay on the edge of Wellington Strait.
The patrol’s guide and pathfinder was Sergeant Debbie Iqaluk, a joyful, mischievous and slightly fierce Ranger from Resolute. She’s lived her whole life on the land, and even now, as a grandmother, she still prefers to be out there than in her house.
After Debbie led us safely to Snowblind Bay we wasted no time in building our tent. It’s probably not a tent like you’re picturing. It has wooden beams and draped canvas walls. It’s tied down to the qamutiqs, which we arrange in a square around the campsite, both as a windbreak and to ward off bears.
Not that the windbreak really helped, because, at a certain point, it really doesn’t matter how cold it is.
No one talks about temperature. It is cold or somewhat beyond cold—minus 40? Minus 50 or 60? It doesn’t really matter because there’s nothing that anyone can really do about it other than keep all their skin covered up and try to get the tent’s stove going as soon as possible after we stop.
As I would find out, the only genuinely important measure of the cold was the length of time it took boiling coffee to become icy slush.
Sitting inside the tent, there’s really nothing to do but talk. Over time, Debbie told the story of how she came to Resolute.
Debbie’s parents were in the original group that moved (or were forcibly moved, if you want to hear it as Debbie tells it) to Resolute Bay in the early 1950s.
Her first memory is of nearly starving to death when she was very young. The relocated Inuit—known as ‘the exiles’—had few supplies and little knowledge of how to find food this far north. “They told us [the game] was plentiful,” says Debbie, “But there was nothing.”
She remembers that her father cut up their dogsled harness and fed it to her. When they finally found food, she was given a fox of her own to eat, but it had to last her a week.
The Canadian government, while never admitting fault or apologizing, did agree to compensate the exiles with a $10-million-dollar payment in 1996. The money means nothing to Debbie, her father drowned when she was five, trying to get out to a rare passing ship to trade for supplies.
Over the next 10 days I would see that Debbie is, frankly, amazing. She’s not perfect, so forget the great myth of the Inuit hunter. She’s normal. She gets grumpy, she gets lost, she tries to avoid blame, but none of that really matters. If resilience was highly-prized, Debbie would be the champion—she just keeps going.
Across Wellington Strait To Devon Island
Devon is one of, if not the, largest uninhabited islands in the world. Portions of its interior are so remote and austere that NASA has set up a camp there to periodically test their space equipment. If you need to test something like a Mars rover, this is the place you’d do it.
As two-thirds of the patrol headed north to continue the search, the four of us left at the base camp had only one thing on our minds—would Debbie receive a polar bear tag in Resolute’s weekly draw.
See, many Inuit communities in the Arctic are allotted a certain number of polar bears, and they decide who gets to go hunting by means of a lottery. Hunting is a way of life for the Inuit, and especially for Debbie. It’s not something she does as a hobby; she does it to eat.
It was already late in the day when Debbie got through on the satellite phone. The conversation was brief—she had a tag and she had only six days left to get a bear or the tag would go back in the pot for someone else to get a chance.
She gave the phone back to Billy and sat for a moment to consider her options.
Tomorrow we would head north, and while it was already late and Ranger Phillip Kringayark was the only other person here to help her on the hunt, he said he would help and that made up Deb’s mind.
Just a few kilometres out of camp, Deb picked up a fresh track on the edge of Wellington Strait. I got off my snowmobile to measure—the bear’s paw was at least 14 inches long, maybe more.
For the next couple of hours, Phillip and Deb chased the bear tracks through the rough ice, never laying sight on the bear, but growing increasingly convinced that they would eventually catch up.
They ran their snowmobiles fast up the edges of the rough ice, in broad arcs, trying to corral the bear and force it into the open.
Though the sky was bright blue and the sun was shining, it was also starting to get late; we’d been out on the ice for four or five or six hours. But the track was lost and the hunt was foundering.
Deb was picking her way through a patch of particularly rough ice—three-foot drop-offs and 10-foot-high chunks of iceberg and impassable ridges—when in the barely visible distance, the bear’s head appeared from behind a block of ice, watching us.
Debbie slammed the gas, but heading in the opposite direction of the bear. She had to go find Phillip to get more gas so she could begin the chase proper.
It was one of those decisions that probably wouldn’t make sense unless you were a seasoned polar bear hunter. But Deb knew the bear would stay where it was if we went in the other direction.
And sure enough, about an hour later, after we’d found Phillip and gassed up and followed our tracks back, there she was, in exactly the same spot.
She was young, a sparkling white beauty of a creature. While not huge by polar bear standards, she was still over six feet long and at least 500 pounds.
To say Debbie is fearless around polar bears is like saying the Arctic is cold—it’s an understatement the size of which only becomes clear once you’ve experienced it.
At one point during the chase, the bear hid in a cluster of jagged ice chunks too rough for a snowmobile. Debbie promptly got off her machine and walked into the rough ice to scare the bear into motion. And she left her rifle behind.
With that ordeal survived, and with the bear once again on the run in the wide open ice, Deb decided it was time to take her shot.
Her snowmobile coasted to a stop.
Debbie reached for her rifle.
Part 2: Find out whether Debbie got the bear and whether our patrol managed to accomplish its mission.
Email the writer at: aday@legion.ca
Email a letter to the editor at: letters@legionmagazine.com
Advertisement
