Land of Feast and Famine

In the late 1920s Helge Ingstad, a young Norwegian barrister made his way by river boat, canoe, and portage to an area north-east of Great Slave Lake where he lived as a trapper in the company of native and white trappers and hunters. When he first arrived in the Canadian Arctic, people in the river communities used to bet on the date of arrival of the riverboats. When he stopped at Fort Resolution on his way out four years later he found everyone talking excitedly about aviation--and the bets were on the arrival-time of planes. After makiing his way into the Canadian Arctic interior, Ingstad spent one winter with a fellow trapper in a log cabin they built themselves, and another living and hunting with a tribe of Inuit known as the Caribou-Eaters. During his final winter in the North, Ingstad lived in a tent in an area called the Barren Lands, hunting caribou and wolves, alone with his five dogs. In 1937, a small river in the Barren Lands was renamed Ingstad Creek. The life Ingstad describes is harsh and full of danger. He recounts many close calls of his own as well as the fates of those far less fortunate. On his way out of the North, Ingstad learned that the colourful adventurer John Hornby and two of his companions had starved to death while on an expedition to the Barren Lands--one of them outliving the others by months. But Ingstad's life in the Canadian Arctic was also full of heart-warming experiences. He describes the native companions and fellow trappers with whom he shared adventures and relates stories of numerous hunts and how he learned first hand about beaver, caribou, wolf, and other wildlife. He also provides a remarkable body of knowledge about native medicine. Thearrival of the age of aviation opened up the North and, as Ingstad prophetically observed in 1931, the way of life of the native people, who were "still pursuing the free nomadic existence of their forefathers, " would be irrevocably changed. At a time when the ways of life of Canad