The Bearded One

He is Ummingmak, or "bearded one." He lives where there are no trees and August winds can bring sleet. He is notoriously easy to approach but sometimes hard to find. Nunavut, a matrix of ocean, river and tundra, boasts less than 100 miles of roads but in area dwarfs British Columbia. So you look for musk ox on foot and with boats. The Arctic Ocean can empty your main tank in one crossing between islands--and, on some days, send whitecaps tall enough to bury a trawler. Come winter, you hunt the shaggy ox by sled, ranging far in cold so deep it freezes your breath instantly into tiny ice crystals.

Nunavut encompasses the Northwest Passage, a tortuous sea alley that more than a century ago eluded the most capable and courageous explorers. It killed some of them. Roald Amundsen is one who survived. In his ship, the Queen Maud, he sailed west from Baffin Island, a landmass that, superimposed on Montana, would stretch from Seattle to Spearfish. He braved the treacherous ice and confusing labyrinth of inlets and channels, never able to tell before committing which beach belonged to an island and which to an extension of mainland Canada. Rounding the southern shoulder of Victoria Island, he passed through Coronation Gulf to present-day Amundsen Gulf, which opens to the Beaufort Sea.

We had easier going, on a First Air jet that left Edmonton 1,000 miles to the south. We flew across the 66th and 67th parallel, which straddle the Arctic Circle. Here, the sun never sets during summer solstice and never rises in the dead of winter.

The town of Cambridge Bay hangs on the southern edge of Victoria Island, second largest in Canada. We're in the middle of Nunavut, cleaved from the Northwest Territories during the 1990s, in part to settle native land claims. It is an Inuit-governed territory with roughly 30,000 people. To achieve the same population density in Texas, you would have to evacuate the entire state save a modest cowtown with a couple of traffic lights. A commercial jet logs nearly four hours spanning Nunavut, east to west or north to south.

Weather kept us two days in the village. It is only sixty years old, established in part to service the DEW line, a series of defense stations with early-warning devices that were built during the Cold War. We walked the streets--half-frozen mud--and learned of its heritage at a library. The Thule people had arrived first, migrating from the Bering Strait 4,000 years ago. A second wave of people, the Dorset, came 3,000 years later, during a warm spell. After the "little ice age," circa 1300, Thules abandoned their subterranean homes for igloos on sea ice. There they hunted bowhead whales with toggle-head harpoons from sealskin boats. They survived by taking every advantage offered by their environment--and by wasting nothing. On seal hunts they carried tuputaqs, or wound plugs that they inserted right after a kill so as not to lose any of the animal's blood. Thules, ancestors of modern Inuit, spoke the Inuinnaqtun language, now all but dead. Children are taught Inuktutuk, along with English and French, in local schools.