With a bomb box at my feet and a 12-pack of Coca-Cola on my lap, I considered my odds. I was in a 16-foot aluminum skiff with four Inupiaq hunters and three rifles. My oversized white parka and the five layers underneath made it feel like summer, but one look at the shore-fast ice of Kivalina that we were pushing off of and the drift ice on the horizon told me otherwise. The skiff had a leak, which Lowell, the captain, found as soon as we were underway. There wasn't a life jacket in sight, only a white buoy wrapped with green line and tied to the darting gun. I imagined the lance buried in a whale and us dragging along behind it. Chances of coming back in one piece were pretty slim, I decided.
The wolverine ruff of my borrowed parka whispered against my face as we slowed down near the edge of the drift ice. The bloodstained parkas of the two men sitting in front of me belonged to Frank the Elder, a quiet wrinkled man whom everyone teased and adored, and Tiny. Tiny, whose real name was Darin, was a tall, commanding figure with a deep tan from days of ocean and snow. His flashing eyes had met mine the day before as I skied up beside the skiff. He invited me to follow, a term used in the villages for going along on a hunt without actually hunting. Those same eyes now squinted over the jumbled ice to see onto the flat ice and open leads that lay just out of sight. We searched for spouts, small circles of calm water that are left when a whale submerges, and the dark, sleeping bodies of seals.
A flurry of excitement went through the boat as Lowell, from his tall vantage point behind the plywood steering console, thought that he caught the flash of belugas against a distant pack of ice. "Sisuaq!" We flew along through narrow paths of open water as he calculated where the whales would pass by us. I leaned forward with wide eyes as Lowell gunned the skiff straight at a large floe. We all leapt out and dragged the skiff up until just the outboard hung above the water. Tiny arranged the grapple hook while Lowell's wife, Mary, kept her binoculars trained on the edges of the lead.
Even though we all did our best to stifle sneezes and tiptoe around, the whales never materialized. Harpoons were re-wrapped in caribou hides, and we pushed the skiff back into the water and started searching for ugruk, or bearded seal.
Tiny spotted a swimming seal (booeeroq) and took one careful shot. They pulled the skiff and the seal up onto the ice and we all watched as Lowell cut a straight line through the rich blubber layer and ribs, pulling the intestines out into a pile. The heat of the heart melted the snow and ice around it. Blood ran off the ice and mixed with the reflection of white clouds. Frank the Elder took the top off the Stanley thermos and poured several cups down the gut rope to rinse it out. Tiny knelt down and made a beautiful, fleshy daisy chain. I asked him why he did that. "Because that's what makes the women happy!" he laughed, eyes twinkling.
This delicacy, called ingalaq, would be boiled, cut into small rings with an ulu and dipped in French's mustard.
A second seal was spotted, and this time it was a qaqimaraq, or a sleeper. We pulled down our white hoods and Lowell kept the outboard at a steady rpm. Tiny crouched low and shot once, followed it with a well-flung harpoon and secured a huge ugruk. Mary looked on as Lowell began the tough job of gutting this much larger seal and started estimating how many gallons of seal oil the blubber would render for their family.
The day had been almost windless, and as Tiny's strong hands squeezed down the length of the intestines, a breeze kicked up, blowing the smoke from his dangling cigarette and shifting the floe we were standing on away from the main ice pack. We were on a piece of sea ice no bigger than 12 feet by 12 feet, with our precious Lund skiff still in the water, bow line held tightly in my hand. Our miniature island moved quickly through the ocean, as did the rest of the ice, closing off previously open passages and pushing a bank of fog toward us. The men wrestled the enormous bulk of the seal with a new sense of urgency. Mary held her phone up into the sky at different angles, trying to get enough service to tell her daughter we were coming home with two ugruk.
It took us hours to get back to the village that night, bearded seals on thin lines twirling in our wake, slowly rinsing free of their thick red blood. Lowell kept busy in the stern bailing water from the leak he had found in the morning. Tiny relaxed in the way that men do after a successful hunt, crawling to the bow with my camera to snap a photo of us all.
Mary dug through her pack for sandwich makings. We balanced pieces of white bread on our knees as she passed around a bag of Kirkland Signature pre-sliced ham. A thermos of "snickerdoodle" coffee kept us warm, and we spread aqutuq, or eskimo ice cream, on miniature pilot bread. Tiny contributed a bag of dried caribou strips to the cramped and happy potluck. Mary gave an approving nod as she noticed Tiny's tiny New Testament in a quart Ziploc. "I always bring it," he said, "so I can have a good hunt."
"I have a Bible app on my phone," she replied, "so it's always with me too. Good hunting."
A yellow snowgo and a giant wooden sled were waiting on the edge of the ice as we arrived. I spent the gold and pink hours of an April Arctic evening skinning and quartering the two ugruk with Mary and Lowell's daughter, Amanda, and her grandmother. We wore plastic gloves and old clothes and chose sharp blades from a big pile of ulus. My ulu wove its way around the ball joints of flippers and through the rich blubber, leaving enormous round seal skins on the ice. Little girls wandered out late into the night to shyly ask if they could help. We stood up often with grimaces and jokingly asked each other where the Motrin was. The largest backbone had to be cut in half at the end and as my blade easily found the disk to cut through, Lowell's mother praised me in a tiny, high voice. "Ah, Megan! You Callie Torres! You bone doctor!"
I crawled into my sleeping bag in the village school that night, the hum and blinking red lights of 20 Internet routers filling the silent darkness. I had grown up gazing at Machetanz paintings and thinking that these scenes only existed in antique stores. Today I had been given the chance to step into that canvas, white parka and all. What I didn't expect to find in that painting was laughter, Coca-Cola, a Bible app or pre-sliced ham. I had definitely not anticipated being given a "Native name" from "Grey's Anatomy." It was everything I had imagined and nothing that I expected. Curling into the tangle of chair legs and extension cords around me, I sobbed out loud. It turned out that I hadn't come back in one piece; my bright red heart was out there on that endless white ice, more alive than it had ever been and beating hard under a deep blue night sky.
Megan Spurkland was born in Homer, Alaska, to an adventuresome set of parents who brought their children along for many months of remote living. She was raised on a trapline in Twin Lakes, in piles of log peelings as they built a scribe-fit cabin on Big River, in tarped-over moose camps and in the sharp tide-rips of Cook Inlet. Megan splits her time between cross-country skiing in the winter and running a salmon seine boat in Prince William Sound during the summer.
This article appeared in the Winter 2015 issue of 61°North. Contact 61°North editor Jamie Gonzales at jgonzales@alaskadispatch.com.