One of the Greatest Polar-Bear Hunters Confronts a Vanishing World
In early 1993, the Icelandic photographer Ragnar Axelsson arrived at the most remote settlement in Greenland, a lonely town in the east that is tucked away in the world’s largest fjord system, which is usually locked in by ice. The temperature was minus forty degrees, in both Fahrenheit and Celsius—right where the scales converge. Sled dogs howled through the night, a warning against polar bears. The dogs smelled the bears. The bears smelled the children.
The only other humans who had settled on that side of Greenland were five hundred miles to the south, separated by impassable mountains and glaciers. To the north was nine hundred miles of frozen wilderness, inhabited only by animals and a dozen or so Danish soldiers who were doing two-year shifts on the world’s most arduous patrol. To the west was the Greenlandic ice sheet—up to two miles thick and filled with perilous crevasses. The town was supplied by a ship from Denmark, fourteen hundred miles to the east: once in late summer and once in early autumn, before the pack ice re-formed, rendering passage impossible. Amid this isolation, the town’s name rang out as a riddle: Ittoqqortoormiit, the “place of the large houses.” Large houses? Compared with what?
Growing up in Reykjavík, Axelsson had always wondered what it would be like to experience genuine Arctic extremity. Now, at thirty-five, he flew to a small gravel airfield, built by an oil-prospecting company, about forty kilometres northwest of Ittoqqortoormiit. From there, he boarded a helicopter and flew over the fjord and the mountains to a small heliport above the town—its only access point in or out for most of the year. He had been told about an Inuit hunter, Hjelmer Hammeken, and hoped to accompany him far onto the sea ice, to photograph, as he later put it, “people who live way beyond the edge of what we might consider the habitable world.”
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One morning, Axelsson sat on a rock, eating a tin of cod liver by a graveyard overlooking the town. A man about his age walked up to him—calm, alert, utterly confident in his environment and yet also cautious and reserved, a little shy. He had a trim mustache and wore a black woollen hat. “I am Hjelmer,” he said.
They set out north on Hammeken’s dogsled, into the uninhabited wilds, but after some hours the snow got too deep and wet for the dogs to forge ahead. So they turned south, toward the pack ice on the sea. Another hunter in his mid-thirties, Isak Pike, joined them. The two sled teams kept just far enough apart that the dogs wouldn’t fight.
After several hours on the ice, the dogs needed to rest. The late-winter sun had brought some warmth, “but when it went down it was like hitting a wall,” Axelsson recalled. “It was like a claw, just squeezing all the life out of you.”
The three men strung an old sailcloth between the two sleds and pitched tents beneath it. The dogs curled up and jammed their snouts into their haunches, to defend against the wind. Axelsson shook himself inside his sleeping bag, desperately trying to generate heat.
At dawn, Hammeken and Pike searched for holes in the ice where they could shoot seals coming up for breath. Each dog team required a seal per day—natural-world math. After the dogs had eaten, the teams rounded the southeastern tip of the fjord and set off down the coast, running on frozen ocean. There was an island near the edge of the ice, where polar bears hunted seals and Hammeken hunted polar bears. Such hunts could last weeks, sometimes more than a month. There was no radio contact, no point in signalling with flares. Hammeken’s wife, Condine, would find out what had happened when he came back—if he came back.
There was a constant risk of attack by polar bears. Even as Hammeken hunted them, he feared them. They are incredibly cunning and dangerous; when hungry, they have been known to prey upon humans.
Hammeken seemed to notice things that no one else did—not even other Inuit hunters. He was so attuned to his surroundings that he sometimes spotted a seal poking its head through the ice from a quarter mile away. “I know my world,” he said. When he stalked an animal on foot, his entire body moved as if only in service of his eyes and the rifle that he raised up to them.
One night, the men played cards in a tent. Axelsson bet his woollen long johns and his cold-weather gear, and lost it all; Pike lost his socks. “Hjelmer was just laughing,” Axelsson recalled. They agreed that each man would keep his clothes until they were safely back in town.
A gale blew in. They had been out on the ice for more than two weeks. “I’m freezing,” Axelsson said. Each time he took off his mittens to change rolls of film, his fingers turned white.
“You’re not going to die,” Hammeken told him.
In time, Axelsson learned to relax by drawing on the advice of another Inuit hunter: “If you focus on being cold and frightened, then nature will not be kind to you.”
After three weeks on the ice, they had caught no bears—only seals. On returning to town, Axelsson left his winter gear with Hammeken before flying back to Iceland. A bet was a bet, and he didn’t necessarily expect to return. “I thought of it as a once-in-a-lifetime adventure,” he told me. “But that ice fjord is the most beautiful gallery in the whole world. It’s like a magnet. It draws you back, over and over again.”
From Alaska to Greenland, traditions that sustained the Inuits for many generations in some of the world’s most hostile conditions are vanishing along with the ice. The Inuits lived by the rhythms of seasons and wildlife, temperature and light. The Vikings brought their own sheep to Greenland, and died out; the Inuits adapted to the world as it was. But, in the past several decades, policies and behaviors in other parts of the world have inflicted themselves on small Arctic settlements so rapidly that towns like Ittoqqortoormiit are left unable to continue as they have in the past, yet also unable to meaningfully shape their own futures. Ittoqqortoormiit was a place that did not affect anywhere beyond itself. But the world started happening to Ittoqqortoormiit.
In June, I travelled to eastern Greenland with Axelsson. We took a Twin Otter utility aircraft from the northern Icelandic town of Akureyri. About a hundred kilometres from the coast, we started to see icebergs and floes. Then came the pack ice—millions of jagged pieces, breaking up in the late Arctic spring, a sea of brilliant white fragments against the deep, dark blue.
We landed at the gravel airfield, then boarded a helicopter to Ittoqqortoormiit. The helicopter pilot noted that he sometimes flew low over polar bears, hoping to scare them away from the town. Last summer, a bear crossed over the mountains and approached a small AstroTurf field where children were playing soccer. A hunter shot it dead when it was about a hundred metres from them.
Axelsson has returned to the area at least twenty-five times, to document the vanishing world of Indigenous Greenlandic hunters. He has worked mostly with Hammeken, who became one of the greatest hunters in Arctic history. Hammeken has less hair than he did when the two men met, thirty-two years ago, and more of it is gray; otherwise, he looks almost the same. But, in the span of Hammeken’s career, his way of life has transformed from something that worked for thousands of years to something that will hardly exist after him.
“There used to be many hunters,” Hammeken told me. “Now we are ten.”
Greenland is the largest island in the world. It is three times the size of Texas but home to fewer than fifty-seven thousand people, scattered among seventy-two towns and settlements, none of which are connected by roads. Ninety-six per cent of the population lives on the west coast, which has milder weather, ample fish stocks, and year-round ice-free ports. The remaining four per cent, in the east, are subjected to a current of sea ice from the Arctic Ocean and to violent winds that roar down the slopes of the ice sheet into the fjords. The conditions are so hostile that the Kingdom of Denmark—which established a colonial administration in what is now Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, in the seventeen-twenties—believed that no one lived there, until a settlement of four hundred and thirteen people was accidentally discovered during a mapping expedition in 1884. The area became known as Ammassalik. Its people spoke their own language, developed in the course of a few centuries in isolation, and are known today as Tunumiit—“people of the back side.”
The Inuits of Ammassalik survived the polar winters in semi-subterranean homes of stone and earth. In warmer months, they ventured out to live among their quarry in sealskin tents. They fed themselves by hunting and fishing with tools made of stone, bone, and driftwood—tools that were unchanged since the Stone Age. After a person died, his or her name was not spoken again until a new child was born to receive it. The Inuits believed that times of hunting scarcity reflected their own spiritual failings toward the Mother of the Sea: their poor behavior on the surface of the ice caused her hair to become matted below, trapping the animals. In response, shamans held ceremonies in which they entered a trance and symbolically journeyed into the frozen underworld to comb her hair. In years of abundance, there were surges in births; in years of famine, infanticides. Those people who weren’t central to the survival of the community—the elderly, the sick, widows, orphans—often disappeared out onto the ice.
The Danes introduced new pathogens, then colonial administration, Christianity, money, metal, midwifery, schooling, and a rapid dependence on imported rifles and food. By 1894, Ammassalik had a fur-trading post; by the early nineteen-twenties, the Inuit population had almost doubled, and was exceeding the capacity of the local hunting yield. Danish administrators began to worry about overpopulation.
But, in a single generation, major aspects of Ammassalik Inuit culture had been obliterated. By 1901, just seventeen years after contact with the outside world, shamans were cutting their hair, getting baptized, and taking Danish Christian names. “We had many customs and various habits which we thought we could not abandon—that by forsaking them, we would have destroyed ourselves,” a shaman in training named Qio, who became Georg in 1915, reported. By 1921, the naming practice that had connected each person in the community to his or her ancestors was officially over. Everyone was a Lutheran.
Meanwhile, a thousand kilometres away, a handful of Norwegian fur trappers started building hunting cabins in the vast, empty territory of northeastern Greenland, hoping to eventually incorporate it into Norway. The Danish government set out to solve this problem by establishing a new settlement in the northeast, near the mouth of the Scoresby Sound fjord. A small team of Danes started building houses there in 1924; the following summer, seventy Ammassalik Inuits volunteered to board a ship and head northeast along the coast to the place that became Ittoqqortoormiit. It is unclear whether they knew where they were going, or that they would never return.
Five of them died during the first winter. But the hunting was plentiful, and the settlement soon flourished, spreading among six locations, including Ittoqqortoormiit and two satellite villages, Cape Tobin and Cape Hope, at strategic hunting points on either side of it. A confluence of ocean currents and winds at the entry to the fjord system creates a polynya, a patch of open water. The polynya attracts narwhals, whales, walruses, birds, and seals, which in turn attract polar bears.
The practice of subsistence hunting continued for decades, little changed. The men went out onto the sea ice to feed themselves, their families, their dogs, and their neighbors; women cooked, raised children, and prepared seal and polar-bear skins. The person who first saw a bear kept the skin, no matter who fired the fatal shot. When there was ice, the hunting was done by dogsled; when there was open water, it was done by kayak. The weeks when the ice was too thin or rotten to walk on, and yet too present for the use of boats, were a time of patience, of comfort with uncertainty, of rest.
The new settlement soon had its own municipal administration and regular wage-earning jobs. There was a school, a hospital, a police station, an old-people’s home, and a general store. But the Danish administrators imported people from western Greenland to occupy the highest positions after their own, and the Ammassalik Inuits, lacking any formal qualifications, were given menial, practically interchangeable roles. At school, children were forced to learn in the Danish and western-Greenlandic languages and were sometimes punished for speaking their own.
By the mid-fifties, “the trend in Danish policy was to concentrate the Greenlandic population as much as possible around three services deemed essential: the hospital, the school, and the church,” the demographer Joëlle Robert-Lamblin wrote, in a study published by the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, in 1971. “This policy had disastrous economic and social effects.” Where there is a high concentration of people, there is too low a concentration of wild animals to feed them. “Food, becoming insufficient, is then supplemented with imported European products, poorly suited to the climate,” she noted. The diffuse world of Scoresby Sound collapsed into the administrative center. Everything was in Ittoqqortoormiit.
By the late sixties, men under forty were killing fewer seals on average than their elders were. “They are increasingly losing interest in hunting,” Robert-Lamblin observed. “The new game sought by contemporary Greenlandic society is no longer an animal but purchasing power.” People had difficulty, however, adapting to the artificial daily rhythm of salaried work: “Many of them suddenly quit their jobs and return to hunting. Then, some time later, they take on another job and abandon it again.”
Hjelmer Hammeken was born in 1957. His father, who worked as the schoolteacher in Cape Hope, hunted recreationally—as almost everyone did. But the family relied more on his salary than on what he shot.
When Hjelmer was about seven years old, he threw a rock at an Arctic bird called a little auk. It was a clean hit—his first kill. In the years that followed, a hunter named Jakob took him deep into the fjord and taught him how to live and hunt on the ice. Jakob stored some of his meat, narwhal tusks, and seal and polar-bear skins and sold the rest, both privately and to the store. These goods were exported out of the village when the supply ship arrived from Denmark late in the summer. Hunting was a viable profession: hunters’ earnings easily met and usually surpassed those of unskilled workers.
At eighteen, Hammeken killed his first polar bear. When Axelsson arrived, he had killed eighty-two. But the economy had already inverted. The animal-rights movement of the seventies had driven down demand for sealskin, cratering prices. By the late eighties, even the best hunters could barely make half of what people earned working in the store.
The devolution of the traditional life style coincided with a surge in social problems. Crimes had been “so rare in this region that when they do occur, the individuals responsible are sent to Denmark for a psychopathological examination,” Robert-Lamblin reported. Then alcohol became the leading cause of violence in Ittoqqortoormiit, and violence and horrific accidents became the leading causes of death. According to the Danish social scientist Finn Breinholt Larsen, from 1975 to 1989—a period when the population of the village hovered around four hundred—there was an average of more than one homicide and more than one suicide per year.
The ice started forming later in the winter season and melting earlier in the summer. It became less reliable, less knowable, more prone to causing accidental deaths. “The big ice is sick,” a hunter told Axelsson.
Hammeken married Jakob’s daughter, Condine, and became best friends with her brother, Konrad. He and Konrad spent weeks out on the ice, travelling hundreds of kilometres to hunt bears. One day, Konrad was crossing the fjord on his dogsled when a layer of snow obscured the transition from solid ice to weak ice. He went through, with his sled, and drowned.
Snowmobiles largely replaced dog teams; cruise ships disturbed the narwhal population in the fjord. Atmospheric pollutants poisoned the marine-mammal food chain in Scoresby Sound, from fish to seals to bears to people. By the turn of the millennium, only a few people were living in Cape Tobin or Cape Hope; by 2008, both had been formally closed. Axelsson and Hammeken picked up the last man living in Cape Hope, a former hunter who, in his solitude, had started seeing tiny ghosts running through the settlement, taunting him. The man now drifts around Ittoqqortoormiit, sleeping in the houses of those who will have him. Each year, more young people venture out and never return; it’s not clear what kind of life is left for them.
In the past fifty years, the Greenlandic people have, through two referenda, taken control from Denmark of most aspects of internal governance. The nation is at a pivotal moment in its history, determining its future in business and in geopolitics, and it has never been of so much interest to the international community. Denmark is investing billions in Arctic sovereignty and defense, and recently staged the largest international military exercise in Greenlandic history. Foreign leaders have flocked to Nuuk, pledging partnerships in security and trade, and businessmen have taken a sudden interest in exploiting Greenland’s rare-earth minerals. Meanwhile, the melting of the polar ice cap is opening up potential trade routes that could reshape global shipping. Greenland finds itself at the center of a geostrategic race for the Arctic, and its politicians are newly aware of their leverage.
But the small places—especially those in the disconnected east—feel forgotten. Settlements that never required or had an economy that extended beyond their own survival are unmoored. People still hunt as a matter of cultural identity but are unable to sustain themselves by it. The primary employer in many such places is the municipal government. “It would be cheaper for society to send everyone in those towns off to a five-star hotel in Gran Canaria with three meals a day, all-inclusive, but that’s not how we measure the value of a society,” the director of the Greenland Business Association told me. A particularly remote settlement was recently down to three inhabitants—two of whom were brothers—and cost the government the equivalent of some half a million dollars a year, in salaries, groceries, fuel, subsidized travel connections, and electricity. Then one brother killed the other, and only the third man remained. The municipality kept the lights on for several more months.
In the coming centuries, what the world inflicts on Greenland will be reflected back on it; the melting of the Greenlandic ice sheet will inundate coastal areas from Dhaka to Mar-a-Lago. But, for now, the ill effects are going in just one direction. In 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported that Donald Trump coveted Greenland for purchase or annexation. Days later, Trump posted to Twitter an image of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas in front of the Ittoqqortoormiit school. “I promise not to do this to Greenland!” he joked. The building stood directly on top of Hjelmer Hammeken’s house.
This past June, there was an enormous iceberg locked in the pack ice in the middle of Scoresby Sound; Hammeken suggested one evening that we head out there with the dogs—Axelsson on Hammeken’s sled, me on Isak Pike’s. Thirty years ago, there were almost a thousand dogs in the town, and just about everybody travelled on sleds. Now there were some hundred and fifty, and they were chained up at the periphery, or out on the sea ice, their world reduced for much of the year to a five-foot radius. As Ittoqqortoormiit became more disconnected from traditional hunting practices, the municipality introduced new rules to keep dogs out of town. Many of them looked thin. Most were caked in feces. The ice they had lived on all winter was turning into slush. They didn’t go out much, and they are fed less when they’re not running.
It was almost the summer solstice; the sun hadn’t set in three weeks. But most people now keep to the municipal wage-earning schedule, so we decided to set out the next morning. I walked down to the sea ice at 9 A.M., and met Pike as he was harnessing six dogs to his sled. He was hunched over, his hair white, his teeth mostly gone. Although he is just a year older than Hammeken, their appearances and capacities seemed decades apart. He struggled with the dogs, and smacked those who defied him. Two of them became so entangled that they started choking, and he had to cut them loose with a knife. A third was limping. When we started moving, trailing a hundred metres behind Hammeken’s sled, I noticed that with each stride the dog left blood in the snow.
Pike’s dogs rarely heeded his commands, and they didn’t know what to do when he whipped them. His daughter drove a snowmobile behind the sled, and often rammed up against it, pushing and steering from behind. You could hear the ice fizzing as it melted, deteriorating fast. There were moments when the dogs were up to their chests in water and the sled was partially submerged. But, after about half an hour, we had travelled five kilometres, mostly following in the safe path left by Hammeken’s sled.
It is difficult to approximate the scale of an iceberg until you are right in front of it. The one in the middle of the fjord towered over us, larger than any building for hundreds of miles, carved by the dynamics of the glacier it once fell from and, later, by the wind. There were deep vertical lines where it appeared ready to calve into something new. The pack ice that had locked it in place all winter was turning to slush beneath our feet, and it was impossible to know whether the berg was stable.
Axelsson and I switched sleds for the journey home. Hammeken’s dogs knew how to spread out on thin ice, and they navigated the worst puddles and crevasses largely on their own. Where they needed guidance, he steered them with commands and occasional snaps of his braided sealskin whip. “Hiri hiri hiri,” he called out, and they turned right; “Yoh yoh yoh,” and they turned left. They were strong, attentive, well fed, and clean.
On the other sled, Pike told Axelsson that this was the last run for the season. The dog whose paw was bleeding was lame, effectively useless to him. So was another of them. Both were six years old, and he had two puppies to replace them. He intended to shoot them when we got back to land.
“Snowmobiles have been terrible for the dogs,” Hammeken told me. When snowmobiles arrived in Ittoqqortoormiit, some forty years ago, they were used only for travelling between the town and the neighboring settlements. The engines scared off polar bears and other animals, so people were prohibited from using them in hunting. But that rule has gradually eroded, and with it the capacity of most hunters to run a dogsled team for more than a short jaunt. “I have very stupid dogs now,” Hammeken said. He blamed himself: “I used to have good dogs, back when I used them for everything. I miss them a lot. I think about them every time I’m driving my sled.”
Hammeken’s best dog was Qerndurmior, a black dog he had in the nineties. Qerndurmior learned to follow polar-bear tracks, and, during hunts, Hammeken sometimes cut him loose to attack bears before he got close enough to shoot them. One day, a bear clawed Qerndurmior’s head, scalping him. “He was breathing very heavily, he was so badly wounded,” Hammeken recalled. “I had to sew his face back on with nylon. He looked a bit strange after that.” The two hunted together for several more years, with Qerndurmior as the leader of the sled team. “He understood me,” Hammeken recalled. “We relied on each other.”
Dogs have kept the Inuits alive for thousands of years. Once, after a particularly frigid night, one of Hammeken’s dogs stood abruptly and left behind its tail, which had frozen into the ice. The dog yelped in pain for a few seconds, then carried on as before.
When Qerndurmior grew old and feeble and could no longer keep up, Hammeken told him that they were going out on one last hunt. “I took him to the edge of the ice, with my rifle, and said, ‘There’s a polar bear—get him!’ He was so curious, and he tried to look for the bear,” Hammeken said. “That was the final moment of his life.”
That afternoon, Hammeken hitched a sled to the back of his snowmobile, and drove Axelsson and me to the abandoned village of Cape Tobin. The ice was rotting from above and below, and I spent much of the journey eying the shoreline for polar bears. When we reached Cape Tobin, I asked if the ice was in such a state that, had we stopped in certain areas, we might have fallen through.
“We didn’t stop,” Hammeken replied.
Fog covered the settlement. A polar-bear skin was stretched over an A-frame scaffolding, its snout and feet tied to poles. For almost twenty years, it has been illegal to export polar-bear hides, but hunters can still sell them within Greenland. The going rate is around fifteen hundred dollars. Hammeken uses one as a cushion on his sled.
The fog occluded vision beyond a hundred metres—a distance that polar bears can cover in about ten seconds. Hammeken clutched his rifle and crept up the rocks, stepping carefully over decades’ worth of hunters’ detritus: cans, utensils, oil drums, animal bones.
Hammeken has killed three hundred and twenty-six bears in the past half century—by far the most of anyone in the history of Greenland. It is not the fault of Greenlandic subsistence hunters that the polar bears face a high risk of extinction in the wild; the sea ice they depend on is melting faster than they can adapt to life without it. But there is an obvious tension between bear hunting and environmentalist campaigns. Hammeken sighed. “Those who don’t want to understand how our world is—they only have their little world,” he said. “And we have our big world.
The days of the multi-week hunt by dogsled are over. By 2006, the Greenlandic government had introduced quotas for polar bears, narwhals, and musk oxen. The hunters of Ittoqqortoormiit are collectively allowed thirty-five bears a year. Hammeken said that, when he started hunting, “the bears rarely ever came here.” But in recent years the warming of the Arctic has shortened the window during which bears can hunt seals out on the sea ice. Unable to catch prey in open water, they now follow their noses in the direction of Ittoqqortoormiit. “They are all caught around here,” Hammeken said.
According to Erling Madsen, the local hunting-control officer, polar bears are the only animals that still must be “hunted in the traditional way.” Musk oxen can be shot from snowmobiles, narwhals and minke whales from speedboats. But polar-bear hunts are supposed to involve dogs, to align with Inuit subsistence-hunting practices that go back thousands of years.
For the past decade, however, “maybe five per cent they get from the dogsleds,” Madsen told me. Each January, when the quota resets, hunters hitch speedboats to their snowmobiles and drive to the ice edge near Cape Tobin. They patrol the ice coast in boats, dodging floes, searching for bears. By early May, the quota has usually been filled.
Hammeken led us through the remains of the village, past a radio antenna from an abandoned weather station and street lamps that hadn’t been switched on for some twenty years. At the far side of the village, near the water, he pointed out a small, dilapidated house on stilts, and said that it had once been his home. We went inside. The floor was strewn with batteries and broken furniture, the corners filled with snow. But the layout was just as Axelsson remembered it from when he’d stayed there, some thirty years ago.
“Will you hunt when you’re a hundred?” Axelsson asked.
“I want to,” Hammeken said. But his shoulder hurts, and each year the ice edge moves closer to the shoreline. “When I think back to the old days, I always miss them,” he said. “I miss the old Greenland. I miss it, always.”
Hungry bears begin to arrive in Ittoqqortoormiit in mid-August, right as the children are starting school. Since the hunters’ quota has already been filled, Madsen, who is sixty-six, tries to scare the bears away from the town. In 2015, the World Wildlife Fund bought him an A.T.V., a snowmobile, and other equipment to establish a polar-bear patrol. The idea was to reduce the number of instances in which bears needed to be killed for public safety. Madsen estimates that he has scared off about a hundred and twenty bears in the past decade, and killed eight that refused to go away. “Every morning, I get up at four o’clock, five o’clock. I open my window, and listen: What can the dogs tell me?” he said. The handful of remaining dogsled teams are chained up at strategic points to warn of incoming bears. If a dog team is going nuts, Madsen heads to it.
Most houses in Ittoqqortoormiit have no running water. For toilets, people use buckets lined with thick plastic bags. Filled bags go to the dump, where garbage is burned in an open pit. The smell attracts hungry bears from vast distances; they can smell a seal through three feet of solid ice.
This July, I rode with Madsen on his A.T.V. from the dump, in the east, to Walrus Bay, the site of a whale-butchering beach, in the west. Another place that draws in hungry bears is the glacial-runoff river, from whose source the town gets fresh water. A dog team is stationed there, and this means there are usually seal remains scattered around. The river runs close to the town’s locus of activity, the store. People go there for everything from frozen fruit to fishing line, underwear to bullets. Hunting rifles dangle over the meat freezers; a few feet away, there are handbags, fishing anchors, and birthday balloons.
The hunters provide the only fresh meat in the village. Occasionally, in summer, a cruise ship will drop off fresh fruit and vegetables, a rare—and, to some, unfamiliar—luxury; during one such delivery, in late July, I saw small children chewing on raw Brussels sprouts as if they were apples. The supply ship hadn’t come since October. There is no restaurant, no bar, no café; the nearest of each is in Iceland, across a five-hundred-kilometre stretch of freezing ocean.
In 1983, Denmark and Greenland started coöperating in an international effort to study polar-bear populations. Since then, Hammeken and other hunters in Ittoqqortoormiit have been collecting biological samples from bears they kill: a skull, adrenal glands, a slice of muscle, of liver, of reproductive organs, of fat, of fur. I asked Hammeken what happens to these samples. “They go to Denmark,” he said. And then what? “I don’t know.”
Six other hunters said much the same thing. Mona Danielsen—the only female hunter in Ittoqqortoormiit—told me that they give the samples to a guy who works at the Polaroil station. I found him the next morning; he told me that he mails the samples to a scientist from Denmark who last visited the town ten years ago.
Scientific papers based on these samples have been coming out for decades, and have been presented at numerous international conferences. “East Greenland polar bears are among the most polluted species, not just in the Arctic but globally,” one of the papers reads. Pollutants travel up the food chain, getting magnified at every stage. PFAS, the so-called forever chemicals that accumulate in the liver, blood, and kidneys, have been found in polar bears in concentrations approaching thirty million times those in mollusks, which are near the base of the Arctic food web. There are twenty subpopulations of polar bears; the ones caught near Ittoqqortoormiit are thought to be the most severely affected. They have lesions on their internal organs; impaired endocrine and immunologic systems; high levels of mercury; bone-density loss; and impaired reproductive organs.
The marine mammals of Scoresby Sound are so contaminated that, in order not to exceed the European Food Safety Authority’s “tolerable weekly intake” of PFAS, locals should not consume more than ten grams of meat a week—a portion that is roughly the size of a grape. But the only alternatives are canned, frozen, or junk. In late July, I found frozen meat for sale that had been packaged more than two years earlier and had expired in 2024.
There is no factory in Ittoqqortoormiit, no lab producing Teflon or plastic or raincoats. The population is not responsible for any generation of PFAS. Nevertheless, samples of blood and urine, collected at the village hospital in 2015, revealed that the people of Ittoqqortoormiit have “the highest blood serum concentrations of PFASs in the circumpolar Arctic, as well as the highest concentrations in any non-occupationally exposed population worldwide,” according to The Lancet Planetary Health. The overwhelming majority of them consume thirteen times the level considered hazardous to human health, and have blood concentrations that exceed by several multiples the “severe risk” threshold for damage to their immune systems.
At the ends of the scientific papers, there is a line thanking the hunters of Ittoqqortoormiit for their samples. But several of them told me that they’d heard of PFAS only from the press. None of them seem to have been directly informed that they are the source of the data that they hear about in the news.
“I’ve eaten many, many kilos of polar bear—it’s the best meat,” Hammeken said. “Seal can be nice for a day, but not the day after. Musk ox is good for two or three days in a row. But polar-bear meat is good all the time. I could eat it every day of every month.”
“We can do wildlife research, and we can talk about all the results as much as we want—but, as soon as it has to do with human culture and the hunting quota and human health, we are not allowed to say anything,” a Danish scientist who was involved in these studies told me. “It has to come from the authorities in Nuuk.” The Greenlandic government released an informational document on PFAS in 2023 which amounts to a plea for the rest of the world to stop polluting the atmosphere and an invitation for Greenlanders mostly to carry on eating as they wish. “They’re not telling us the research,” Erling Madsen said. I asked why there was such a poor flow of information to the most affected population. “Who should they contact?” he said. The mayor is in Nuuk.
Ittoqqortoormiit used to have its own municipal government; Madsen was the last local mayor. But in 2009 Greenland’s government consolidated a number of economically challenged municipalities, and Nuuk absorbed the ones in the east. “The idea was to minimize the bureaucracy and the administrative costs, but it hasn’t helped,” the current mayor, Avaaraq Olsen, told me, at her office in Nuuk. The result is a district that is larger than the northeastern United States plus Delaware and Maryland and has twenty-four thousand residents, more than eighty per cent of whom live in Nuuk. No mayor since the consolidation has been able to speak the language of eastern Greenland. “I’m from a small town in south Greenland, so I have also, as a citizen, witnessed what happens when you centralize everything,” Olsen told me. “As a citizen, you feel like you are being degraded.”
In the first two years after the consolidation, “many people moved from here, because we lost a lot of jobs,” Madsen told me. Most went to Nuuk or to Denmark, leaving their wooden houses abandoned to the snow. There used to be a bar and a hot-dog stand, but they closed. The population collapsed—rapidly at first, then at a steady rate of a few per cent a year, to some three hundred and twenty people. “When I was mayor, we had around a hundred and sixty schoolchildren,” Madsen said. “Now we have fifty or sixty.”
One afternoon this spring, I came across a man who goes by Nunda sitting on a slab of concrete in front of his house, drinking soda and playing cards with his cousin, betting pennies per hand. Nunda called me over. He struggled to speak. Shortly before my trip, Ittoqqortoormiit had received its annual visit from a dentist, who had determined that Nunda’s teeth were “kind of melting,” as Nunda’s daughter later put it, and removed what was left of them.
Nunda was born in Ittoqqortoormiit in 1967, and has lived there more or less since then. “My home sweet home,” he said, bitterly. “My father was a great hunter, but that world is gone.” I strained to hear him. He speaks in a husky whisper; his larynx was destroyed by alcohol and cigarettes, though he no longer drinks. Like many people in the village, Nunda spoke with mourning for the not so distant past. “To go hunting alone with my dogs, out in the sea ice—that was wonderful,” he said. “It was my culture. Now everything is destroyed.”
Nunda has three children. None of them lives with him. His eldest, Batheba, wanders around the village, crashing with cousins and friends. I met her while walking out on the sea ice. It was midday. She later told me that she had no memory of the encounter, because she’d been drunk.
Nunda still had a rifle. But he had none of the equipment required to go out on the water, in summer, or on the ice, during the rest of the year. In any event, he could move only with the help of a walker; he had heart and circulation issues, and his legs and feet were so swollen that he had difficulty putting on shoes. “I go to the hospital every day now,” he said. Some years ago, he had a heart attack. “I am ill in my legs, my body, my brain.”
Nunda lives about fifty metres from the hospital. But there is no doctor there—only one or two Danish nurses, depending on their rotations. Nunda said that a nurse had recently taken a sample of his blood and sent it to Denmark; the chain of custody had involved a helicopter and at least two planes. “My illness is killing me slowly,” Nunda said. “I am getting worse and worse and worse every day.”
A few days after I spoke to Nunda, he had another heart attack, and was evacuated to Nuuk. Days earlier, he would have traded anything to visit the capital; now he worried that he might never see his family or his village again.
A month later, I found Nunda pushing his walker along Ittoqqortoormiit’s dusty road, on his way to the store. He told me that he was on a new heart medicine and that his legs had been drained of most of their excess fluid. He invited me to join him for a hunt that evening. We would go to a spot a little west of the village, overlooking Walrus Bay, where he could aim at seals. “I’m a good shooter,” he said. It was unclear how he intended to retrieve any dead or wounded animals before they sank.
A few hours later, Nunda, Batheba, and I set off. Nunda shuffled along with his walker—a half-dozen empty soda cans rattling in its tray—and clung to me when he slipped on sloping ground. I carried his rifle.
“I haven’t been here for two years,” Nunda said. “The ice is melting too fast now. And the weather is changing. A long time ago, we would know what was going to happen tomorrow or tonight. Not anymore. Now, with no warning, a storm can come.”
Batheba seemed eager to get away. She offered to take me to another seal-hunting spot, a little way down the road.
“I have never hunted a seal,” Batheba told me.
I asked if she had ever hunted anything.
She shrugged. “Mosquitoes?”
There are young people in Ittoqqortoormiit who have been educated in Denmark and could live and work wherever they like but “want nothing more in the world than to be here,” a visiting Danish social worker told me. The fjord is their home, the living, shifting backdrop to their adventures and shared experiences with family and friends. In winter, they skate on the ice, ride snowmobiles into the mountains, and hunt together as families, butchering and cooking animals, as their ancestors did for hundreds of years before them; in summer, they disappear into the fjord for weeks at a time, entire families crammed into speedboats with fuel, clothes, food, and rifles, to camp in the great vastness, passing glaciers and icebergs that nobody else on earth gets to see. But the town is also home to people with broken families, and to people with no money or access to boats, A.T.V.s, or dogsleds, and no desire or means to go out into the fjord. For them, life consists of unhappy homes and the short walks between them. There is no privacy, no reprieve; it is too dangerous to venture beyond the last line of houses without a rifle, which many people don’t have. I asked Batheba what she wanted for her future. “To leave this place,” she replied.
Batheba’s memories of her childhood are mostly an unhappy blur. Her father beat her mother, and he sometimes hit other people, too. (“Not every month,” Nunda said. “I tried to be a good man.”) When Batheba turned fifteen, she left the village to attend a school in western Greenland, since the one in Ittoqqortoormiit didn’t have a curriculum for anyone older than fourteen. From that point forward, “I never loved this place,” she said. “A lot of young people die here.” She went on, “Some of them die in boat accidents. Some commit suicide, some get murdered.” She frowned. “In a few days, I will be twenty-five.”
When Batheba was eighteen, a boy named Tim said he was in love with her. They had known each other since they were children, and she was also friends with Tim’s cousin, a girl named Nina. “I said, ‘Please, I don’t want to ruin our friendship,’ ” Batheba told me. “He kissed me on the cheek and hugged me, and he started calling me his best friend.”
Batheba’s earliest memory of Tim is of him walking between his parents, holding their hands. “They were very happy, laughing,” she recalled. But when Tim was a bit older his father was arrested, for reasons that Tim never shared with her. Rather than facing time in jail, he died by suicide—the leading cause of death for young Greenlandic men. Soon afterward, Tim and his mother left Ittoqqortoormiit, eventually ending up in Denmark. “Then his mother died in Denmark,” Batheba told me. “I don’t know how. Some people say she was murdered, others say it was suicide. So he ended up alone.”
Tim was put in an orphanage in western Greenland, but he visited Ittoqqortoormiit during summers and at Christmastime, to see Batheba and Nina. When he aged out of the orphanage, he stayed on, because he had nothing to do and nowhere to go.
Nina fell in love with a young hunter named Karl, but in March, 2019, he drowned in the freezing bay. He was twenty-five. Eventually, the grief consumed Nina. In the early hours of New Year’s Day, 2021, she shot herself in the heart with a hunting rifle, pressing the trigger with her big toe.
“Nina’s death was a complete surprise,” Batheba told me. “Mostly, they commit suicide when it’s almost summer or almost winter. The weather, you know—it changes you.”
Batheba’s mother moved to Denmark, and eventually stopped calling. Batheba found solace only in Tim, who continued to return to Ittoqqortoormiit each summer. They drank together, and kicked around a soccer ball. They were in their early twenties, and had endured so much loss and loneliness that, as Tim put it, it felt as if their lives were mostly behind them. As the summer of 2023 came to a close, and Tim was due to return to the orphanage, she walked him up the gravel road, past the soccer field, to the heliport.
“Can you do me a favor?” Batheba said.
“Anything, except one thing,” Tim replied.
“But I think this one thing is the only thing I want from you,” Batheba said.
Tim smiled and hugged her tight, and said goodbye. She pleaded with him to come back to her for Christmas. He walked to the helicopter, and flew away. Two months later, he hanged himself at the orphanage.
Tim’s body was transported back to Ittoqqortoormiit for burial. Batheba couldn’t bear to attend the ceremony. “I still haven’t put flowers on his grave,” she said. It had been two years since his death. “When it comes into my mind, it makes me drink more, and smoke weed to forget, and to not feel,” she said. She gestured toward the graveyard on the hill, which looms over the village. “I can’t find the courage to go up there, to light a candle for him. But someday, maybe.”
I asked Batheba if she had been able to find any help or happiness amid so much compounded grief.
“Sometimes I forget. Sometimes I think he is alive,” she said, quietly. “But then I am reminded during the summer that he’s not gonna come anymore—he’s already here.”
The next day, I met up with Batheba and her cousin Fransisca, and the three of us set off on a long walk in the direction of Walrus Bay. There is no other route beyond the town that is walkable without a rifle; the path is traversed by enough people on A.T.V.s carrying guns, each day, that it’s generally considered safe.
There is a spot where snowmelt pools at the base of the mountains. Many people go there to fill cans with drinking water. Batheba and Fransisca knelt on the rocks, put their lips to the water, and sipped until they were full. They picked up littered bullet casings of various calibres and turned them into whistles, blowing over the holes.
“Want to see him?” Batheba asked. She meant Tim’s grave. We walked back through the village and up the hill, to a small sea of white wooden crosses. She stopped at Lot 324. There was no name—only a photograph in a plastic folder. Tears streamed down her cheeks from behind her sunglasses. Nina was in the lot behind him, Nina’s boyfriend a few feet to the left.
As the town contracts, the graveyard expands. In front of Tim’s row was a line of empty graves, for this year’s expected dead: four full-size plots; two tiny ones, for infants or small children. They overlook the fjord, encroaching on the town as if to someday spill over the edge, like an avalanche, and swallow it.
It was the quiet part of summer, the best time to be a seal. There were still large floes to rest on, but they were too fragile to hold bears or humans.
I accompanied Hjelmer Hammeken’s brother Scoresby and Scoresby’s son in a speedboat to search for seals in open water. The son shot at one but missed; Scoresby raced over to where it had been, steering with one hand and gripping a loaded shotgun in the other, a cigarette between his lips. But they didn’t get another shot at it.
Scoresby scoured the tundra with his binoculars and spotted two musk oxen—hairy hummocks on the hill. He pointed the boat at the shoreline, then killed the engine and floated in.
Onshore, we crept up the hill, as softly as we could. When we were about eighty metres away, Scoresby stopped moving. He raised an old bolt-action rifle and stared at the musk oxen through the scope. The animals just stood there—huge horned beasts, nibbling grass and lichen and moss. For ten minutes, Scoresby kept staring. Then he turned around and frowned. “They are very skinny,” he said. Each hunter was allowed just two musk oxen during this period, and these weren’t worth it in meat. “I will tell all the hunters about them,” he said. “Isak—he is very old. Maybe he can get them.”
The most profitable quarry, these days, is the narwhal. Its skin, an Inuit delicacy known as mattaq, carries significant cultural meaning, and sells in Nuuk for thirty-five dollars a pound. In recent years, the annual narwhal quota for Ittoqqortoormiit has been seventeen. This past May, the hunters shot and butchered all seventeen in a single day.
Scientists estimate that the local narwhal population has fallen by ninety per cent since 1955. They expect that, at this rate, the narwhals of Scoresby Sound will be “near extirpated” by 2030. For the past six years, experts have urged the Greenlandic government to impose a local hunting quota of zero. But that is politically untenable; this year, soon after reaching the quota, hunters and their families held a protest to draw attention to their vanishing way of life. In response, the Greenlandic government allotted them an additional five narwhals—these, too, were killed in a day.
“We had almost a hundred years without a quota,” Erling Madsen, the hunting-control officer, told me. “It’s very, very difficult for a hunter to understand why we need it now, because they see a lot of animals”—hundreds more, they insist, than scientists have detected on monitoring expeditions in the fjord.
Hunters are not the only reason that narwhals are vanishing from Scoresby Sound. The animals are extremely sensitive to noise, and under stress their heart rate can plunge to just three or four beats per minute, even as they swim away as hard as they can.
Scoresby Sound is no longer quiet in the summer. Expedition cruises start entering the fjord in June and continue until it begins to freeze over. Passengers pay tens of thousands of dollars to experience nature at its purest and to observe Ittoqqortoormiit’s “idiosyncratic culture and way of life,” as one tour operator put it—only to scare off narwhals and bring no substantive benefit to the town. Most ships dock a few hundred metres off Ittoqqortoormiit for a night. The next morning, passengers come ashore in Zodiac boats, nearly tripling the population of the village for a few hours—shuffling up and down the gravel streets, still wearing their life jackets. The expedition guides carry rifles as they walk from house to house. Sometimes the police have to intervene, urging guides to get tourists to stop following Inuit children around and taking pictures of them. “They treat it like a zoo,” an officer told me.
When Erling Madsen was mayor, he hoped to save Ittoqqortoormiit through tourism. He understood the risk that this path would lead to the performance of cultural heritage overtaking the real thing. “We could make a polar-bear safari, because we know where they are in the summertime,” he said.
For twenty years, Madsen has been calling for the construction of an airstrip on a relatively flat stretch of land between Ittoqqortoormiit and Cape Tobin—step one of many in making this a reality. But it hasn’t happened. After the consolidation, Greenland’s only domestic airline stopped flying to the gravel airfield forty kilometres northwest of the town. Ittoqqortoormiit was totally cut off from the rest of the country.
Avaaraq Olsen, the current mayor in Nuuk, has been trying to undo some of the worst effects of the consolidation, starting by appointing deputies in far-flung places. “We make all the wrong decisions because we are not aware of local needs,” she told me. “Many of the decisions taking place here, either political or on an administrative level, show that it’s a very long way to Ittoqqortoormiit from Nuuk.” (There is a growing independence movement in eastern Greenland—not just to form a new municipality, of about twenty-three hundred people, but to secede from western Greenland entirely.)
This September, as Ittoqqortoormiit celebrated its centennial, the Greenlandic government announced plans to build the airstrip next to Cape Tobin—a kind of birthday present, with funds from Denmark. But there’s a long, uncertain path between announcement and implementation, and the budget for it doesn’t add up. “If we get our airport, many people are ready to come back,” Madsen told me. An expert on Greenlandic politics in Nuuk wasn’t so sure. “We’ve done the airports in other such places, and it often doesn’t bring anything to the town,” he said. “It just enables people to move out much faster.”
Summer ended; darkness returned. The only police car in Ittoqqortoormiit tested the ice, and fell through. Three hungry polar bears arrived in the village—a mother and her cubs. They wouldn’t leave. Madsen has the skins, and soon they’ll be stretched over scaffolds in town, drying in the late-autumn winds.
A little more than a decade ago, the fjord nearly swallowed Hjelmer Hammeken. He had been out hunting with his dogs for ten days near the southeastern tip of the fjord. The weather was clear: as he set off across the sea ice toward home, he could see for miles in every direction.
The sled moved almost in silence atop a layer of fresh snow. Then, suddenly, it surged up and forward, caught on a powerful swell from below. It was late in the winter season—right when the ice should have been strongest. But through the snow Hammeken had not sensed that it was terrifyingly, abnormally thin. Another swell came and went, cracking the ice into floes. He glanced back; there was a trail of open water.
The dogs were mystified—nothing like this had ever happened to them. Hammeken shouted to spread out, and pushed forward. To stop or turn back would mean death.
The swells beneath the sea ice lifted huge slabs into the air as if they were nothing, wrecking with each undulation the world that Hammeken believed he knew. For more than an hour, the dogs fought against the weight of the sled, stalling on the back slope of each swell, then scrambling down the front. Even thick ice was shattering. Everything was fragile; nothing was safe. But the dogs kept going, carrying their hunter forward—ice before them, water behind, outrunning the inevitable, all the way home. ♦
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