point, a mother polar bear appeared near camp
with two cubs, which made the act of heading off
alone to relieve oneself—already dismal enough
in the puckering cold—an even uglier prospect.
During the mission I shared a tent with Mar-
vin Atqittuq and his father, Jacob, who at 74 was
one of Gjoa Haven’s most celebrated hunters.
Jacob Atqittuq had been born in an igloo and
spoke only enough English to make occasional
jokes. Over his lifetime
he’d survived brutal
winters and hungry
bears, searing frostbite,
boat accidents, even a
season of famine that
had killed many Inuit.
Each morning he woke
before us, and at the
foot of the broad mattress we all shared, he cooked
bannock, a sweet, doughy bread, and softly sang
old church hymns in Inuktitut.
One evening, as we lay in our sleeping bags,
Marvin told me he’d once tried to leave the Arc-
tic. He’d found a vocational school in southern
Canada that offered classes in small engine
repair. But years before, Jacob had watched
another son taken from home and forced to
attend one of Canada’s notorious residential
schools, where indigenous knowledge and tradi-
tions were cruelly repressed. He asked Marvin to
stay. Learn the old ways. Keep the family whole.
Marvin didn’t regret his decision. He was a
father himself and a volunteer fireman in Gjoa
Haven. He’d found a job with a company main-
taining telephone lines, and he was slowly
learning all he could from Jacob. But Jacob also
seemed to inhabit a simpler, older Arctic.
The one Marvin knew was complicated. There
were fewer opportunities, more drugs. There were
social media and the internet. Marvin understood
his Arctic was becoming something new. He’d
read that the ice was melting, that another war
might come north. He knew the weather was
different from what he’d known as a child—not
necessarily warmer but more unpredictable.
As for the gold rush he kept hearing about, he
couldn’t see it. “All these things are supposed to
be happening,” he told me, referring to the predic-
tions of new infrastructure and jobs to harvest the
region’s hidden riches. “I don’t really feel much
change. I definitely don’t feel like I’m part of it.”
The next morning I left camp to scout for car-
ibou with the Atqittuqs and a few others. When
a blizzard blew in and swallowed our hunting
party, it was Jacob who led us back to camp,
using a combination of GPS and some other,
inner map. I drove my snowmobile slowly
behind Marvin’s, nearly blinded by a skin of ice
that formed inside my goggles. Soon the world
became so intensely white that I could no longer
tell where the earth ended and the storm began.
At some point, the balaclava covering my faceslipped out of place, exposing an inch of skin. I
felt a burning sensation, as though someone had
pressed a hot coin to my cheek, but I was busy
keeping up. Hours later, in our tent, Jacob saw the
burn. He pressed his thumb to it. “Good,” he said.HE OPENING OF THE NEW
frontier can be traced to a
calm morning in August
2007, when a pair of Rus-
sian submersibles dropped
14,000 feet to the bottom
of the Arctic Ocean and
planted a flag made of tita-
nium at the North Pole. Images broadcast around
the world of the Russian tricolor on the seabed
drew quick condemnation in the West.
It had been one of the hottest years on record,
and just a month later scientists monitoring the
ocean by satellite announced that sea ice had
shrunk to the lowest extent ever witnessed. “It
was the largest Arctic ice loss in human history
and was not predicted by even the most aggres-
sive climate models,” said Jonathan Markowitz,
a professor of international relations at the Uni-
versity of Southern California. “This shock led
everyone to suddenly understand that the ice
was rapidly disappearing, and some nations
decided to start making moves.”
Today Russia has become, by most mea-
sures, the dominant power in the Arctic. It has
the world’s largest fleet capable of operating
year-round in extreme northern waters and
maintains dozens of military bases above the
Arctic Circle. The U.S. maintains one base inCANADA AND THE U.S. CONTROL NEARLY
HALF THE ARCTIC COAST, BUT UNTIL NOW THEY
HAVE VIRTUALLY IGNORED THE NORTH.
THE NEW COLD WAR 69