THE BIG ICE IS SICK

One of the greatest polar-bear hunters in Arctic history confronts a vanishing world.

- BY BEN TAUB

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 reformed, 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 Reykjavik, 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.”