top dogs

The Polar Inuit's ancient bond with the sled dog remains intact, thanks in part to a ban on snowmobiles. But the lure of technology threatens these "sturdy, magnificent animals"

My dog sled races along the frozen polar sea of Greenland's northwestern coast, weaving through a maze of hummocks. I sit wedged against the fur-covered form of a quiet, middle-aged Inuit hunter named Ilanguaq Qaerngaq, who directs the dozen dogs fanned out before us with deft snaps of a 15-foot-long whip. From out of nowhere, a dog from another team—its trace cut or broken—veers in front of us and falls beneath our left runner. Our 11-foot wooden sled, loaded with several hundred pounds of seal and walrus meat, rides over the creature and continues on. Behind us, the dazed dog struggles to its feet, limping badly. I catch Qaerngaq's eye, but he shakes his head. In a minute, the dog has become a dark speck on the ice behind us.

As we set up tents on the sea ice a couple of hours later, I keep a lookout for the injured dog, but it doesn't appear. I fear it has become a meal for a polar bear or an arctic fox.

It's day two of a nine-day dog-sledding trip from Qaanaaq, a town of a hundred or so brightly painted frame houses perched on a gently sloping hillside overlooking Murchison Sound, south about 200 miles to the smaller Inuit village of Savissivik, and I've just been given another lesson about the relationship between the Polar Inuit and their dogs in the high Arctic. It's all business; on the ice, the Inuit have neither the inclination nor the means to care for badly injured or sick canines. And yet the Inuit's connection to their dogs is one of the world's oldest and most complex human-animal partnerships, a relationship "as close as a marriage," as the French Arctic explorer Jean Malaurie noted in the 1950s.

The Inuit dog, known as qimmiq in the Inuit language Inuktitut, has soft, dense insulating under fur and an outer coat of longer, coarser hairs, which shed water and snow. Petting the animal's muscular chest is akin to touching a brick. I'm surprised the dogs aren't bigger: males reach only 77 pounds, females about 60. Unlike the Inuit people in Canada and Alaska, who have largely traded dog sleds for snowmobiles, Polar Inuit have maintained their age-old skills of hunting with sled dogs for subsistence, the only circumpolar culture to do so. And because by law no other breeds may be brought to northern Greenland, this remote area and the small enclave that inhabits it have become a sanctuary for the Inuit dog (Canis familiaris borealis), thought to be North America's only remaining pure aboriginal canine.