In the Empire of Ice Read Online Free PDF

dump when the ice was bad. No one’s caught nothing. No whales off Gambell [St. Lawrence Island] this year. They usually get one or two. And we saw some strange lookin’ seals with long snouts and bluish skin and big eyes.” She shakes her head in dismay.
    “Senungetuk, huh? I know your brother,” she says to Joe. “Welcome to Wales.”
    As she heads out the door, she turns back, “Oh yeah, you can walk around, but no one is doing it now because it’s pretty much always a whiteout and in December there was a polar bear right behind here. And we’re keeping our dogs tied up because there are rabid foxes everywhere.”
    The door slams, but not before a small mountain of snow has blown in. Ronnie hadn’t even been born at the time Joe and his family left this village. She steps onto her snowmobile and roars away.
    Joe wanders around the rooms of the “multi” in a daze. He is tall and wide jawed, with inquiring eyes and a growing gut. A painting by his brother Ron hangs on the wall. Joe’s wife, Catherine, also an artist, has just been diagnosed with lung cancer and he’s reverberating from the shock. Coming “home” to Wales is even more poignant now.
    The name Kingetkin, once Cape Prince of Wales and now simply Wales, means “an elevated area.” “But not very,” Joe mumbles, since the front row of houses are not more than a few feet above sea level. The village is also the westernmost on the North American continent. Houses are spread along an arm of sand, bent at the elbow, facing the Bering Sea. Two protective bulbs of rock resembling two whales’ heads enclose it. “That’s how passing whales know this is a place where they are welcome,” Joe tells me.
    Behind the gravelly coast rise a rocky upland and the mountains that divide Wales from Nome. A small river cuts the village in half. Wales was once two separate villages. A sizable lagoon is a welcome resting place for migrating geese, birds, and eider ducks in the spring. The cemetery is on the mountainside, far above the wave-battered beach.
    On a clear day Little Diomede Island is visible from the village, and Big Diomede, across the invisible boundary line with Russia, lies just beyond. They are stepping stones that lead to the eastern tip of the Chukchi Peninsula.
    Geologically, Alaska is part of Asia. Beringia, the thousand-mile-wide grassland steppe that, in the last ice age, connected North America and Asia between latitudes 64° and 70° N, was the bridge by which the first “colonists” came to America, bringing plants and animals, diseases and languages, food and watercraft. These were the origin points of the Inuit people on their transpolar drift across Arctic America all the way to Greenland.
    Now the watery strait that divides what is now Alaska and Chukotka is only 50 miles wide but remains a passageway for marine mammals and hunting people. What’s left of the Bering Land Bridge is a submerged shallow shelf that reaches all the way up the coast and across to Siberia: perfect habitat for walruses, as long as there is ice.
    Arctic culture is marked by continuity and subtle, precise differences: A single language, Inuktitut, spans more than half the Arctic world, from the north coast of Siberia to the east coast of Greenland, and with it go the same legends and the ice-driven culture. The hunters in today’s Greenland still harpoon narwhal from kayaks as they did off King Island thousands of years ago. And each evening, in a tent on the ice or under a rocky cliff, an Inuit hunter in, say, Siorapaluk, Greenland, tells his grandchild the same orphan story of a mistreated boy who becomes a shaman as the hunter in Wales, Alaska. Yet there are many distinct dialects; hundreds of variations in the traditional tools for hunting, shelter, and cooking; and ceremonial differences. A shaman’s drum in Greenland is a small oval covered in bearded seal intestine, while the same kind of drum in Wales, Alaska, is a large round covered with the