A few years later, in Inukjuak, I learned that SFU is the Inuit texting acronym for "snowmobile fucked up," and that POOS is the acronym for "passed out on snowmobile.

Another day I walked out of town to do a bit of climbing in the mountains behind the airport. I scrambled up and down slopes that contained some of the oldest rocks in the world, isotope-dated at 3,800 billion years, remnants, so the geological rumor goes, of the earth's earliest terrestrial crust.

Kangeraatisaaq was one of dozens of small villages along the coast which the notorious G60 Policy in the 1950s and 1960s had rendered obsolete. It was too difficult to provide these villages with the services they hadn't asked for in the first place, and too much of a drain on the Danish taxpayer to keep them afloat even though they'd already been afloat, without Danish kroner, for centuries. Besides, joked the Danes, their names were too hard to pronounce.

You are what you inhabit.

The republic they fashioned was a fine mix of parity and ruthlessness. On the one hand, it was the site of the world's first democratic parliament, the Althing, established in 930; on the other, those first democrats used to salt the heads of their enemies and carry them around to show off to each other.

Once when I looked up, I happened to see a sea eagle poised on magisterial wings above the knurled summit of the mountain behind my tent. It was a scene of peerless tranquility, tossed out in Nature's devil-may-care way, which says: Just open your eyes, my friend, and I'll astonish you every minute of your life.

...there were only fifteen thousand polar bears in the world, and five billion of me. To let one of them devour my all-too-common flesh would, if only slightly, help adjust the grievous imbalance.

The last wendigo died in 1962, or so the story goes. Reputedly, he (it?) stood in front of the train to Churchill, Manitoba, believing that the train would stop for him, a supernatural being, and then he would be able to eat the passengers. The train ran him over. Sic transit gloria mundi.