The quotas are an another source of fascination. Certain key species can only be hunted in limited quantities. These include polar bear (18 for the community, I think), narwhal (about 130), and muskox. Lake char is better than ocean char, but only certain lakes are “open” for fishing. There are no limits on things like seals, but they also don't hunt as many of them as they used to because they no longer need as many because they're not feeding dogs.

Oh, there are dogs. I saw 10 or so teams in the town. They're used for races (the Nunavut Quest is the brainchild of Arctic Bay locals) and are part of the outfitting package for “sport hunters” who come for polar bear. The sport hunting thing is intriguing – the community sells a certain number of their polar bear tags to outsiders, and you buy the package for about $28,000 (the polar bear tags the community uses themselves are allocated by lottery). But hunting, these days, happens on snowmobiles (they call them snowmachines, just like they do in northern Ontario . In Inuktitut, it's “sikitu”) most of the time. Sometimes, it's from boats (but the ice-free season is very, very short) or they use ATVs to get to where the caribou are. Snowmobiles are faster than dogs, but they're also more expensive and they don't fan out on thin ice like dogs do…

Speaking of ice, or sikku (sea ice)… the physical environment fascinated me. There is the tundra, and the ice. When I got there, it was long before breakup, and my first morning I started hopping around on the sea ice. It melts from the top and the bottom – the top is covered in “puddles”, which can be really deep, and they're fresh water. They drive their snowmobiles right through the puddles, they put splash guards on them. There are areas of year-round open water (polynyas), and there are other dangerous spots like leads. To me, the whole travel on ice thing seems dangerous – you have to know where the polynyas are, pay attention to leads, avoid areas of thin or rotten ice (it rots first near shore, especially shore with a southern aspect like Arctic Bay ). Often, you have to cross leads, which they sometimes do by unhooking their sleds (komatik) and hydroplaning across and then pulling the sled over. Or they use an ice floe as a raft.

I kept wanting to know *how* you know when the ice is safe. They kept telling me the same thing – it's no longer safe when “it turns dark”. Puddles are a light blue-ish colour, because there is reflective ice underneath. Open water is almost black. So thin ice looks much darker than thick ice or ice with deep puddles on it. You can see this effect if you look at the picture of the lead (taken from a cliff) from above - there is open water in the bottom left..

The hot spot for hunting in late spring (which is the season it was while I was there – there are six seasons in the Arctic ) is the floe edge. This is where landfast ice meets open water. It's also one of the places narwhal and polar bears hang out. So the hunters load up the komatik with all that they'll need (tent, fuel, supplies…) and peel on out to the floe edge. You can catch up to two narwhal before you have to come back, and then you get to go out again. But the floe edge, it can (and does, and did while I was up there, twice) break off and start floating out to see, at which point it's just a big ice floe. If you're on it when it breaks off, you may not even know it right away (though the Inuit, they know. They know all sorts of things about the environment that we would blithely miss) and start drifting out. Yikes. So they use their VHF radios, and call the search and rescue committee, and they send a boat and somehow they always get them all back. You don't want to be heli-rescued, because you'd have to ditch your gear!

People don't just camp at the floe edge – they also go camping at the good fishing places, and at many other spots. There are a few traditional camping areas very close to Arctic Bay , including Uluksan Point (where you can still see the remains of Inuit sod houses, the semi-permanent shelters in use before the town was built) and Victor Bay . Victor Bay is connected to the hamlet by a road, so it's the preferred camping area and many families clear out of town for most of late spring and summer. The tents are mostly canvas or cotton wall tents, and they're heated with kerosene or diesel-powered space heaters. In them, they have the standard two-burner Coleman stoves, the same kind as the ones we drag along on canoe-camping excursions. I went and visited a couple of times, and loved the tents. One of the reasons Victor Bay is so popular is because it faces north, which means the ice in the Bay is safe later than in Arctic Bay . While I was there, people stopped using Arctic Bay and it became rotten, but continued to travel on the ice from Victor Bay .

Along the sides of Victor Bay (and many other spots) are seal blinds. They're just that – rocks piled up to shelter and hide a hunter. When the seal pops up through the areas of open water, bam! There was also a fox trap, which is a hive-shaped structure that you put bait in. The fox jumps in, but can't get out.