I was thinking, is this creature stupid? Why wasn't he afraid? Somehow the 500-pound beast knew we were friends, not foes. And when we finally putt-putted away, the walrus picked up a flipper and waved to us. Really.
"He's saying goodbye," laughed Meeka Mike, one of two Inuit resource people on our trip.
I believed it. It was only day three of our 12-day High Arctic expedition cruise, but I had already learned that anything is possible at latitudes this high. Polar bears can step out of the distant snowy landscape and come charging toward you. That bumpy tundra just ahead can turn out to be a camouflaged herd of musk oxen. Vicious gales can brew up out of nowhere. And walruses wave goodbye.
"The Arctic is running this," cautioned Dutch Willmott, the Australian expedition leader, at the start of the trip. "This place is about snow. It's about ice. It's about wind."
It's also about discovering first-hand precisely where we humans fit on the food chain, which is to say pretty low down. It's a disorienting lesson for an urban "southerner" like me. Detached from the safety and reliability of city life, I encountered a nature unfamiliar. This wasn't New England-style going-for-a hike-in-the-woods nature, where some activewear and a solid pair of boots can meet most of your needs.
No, this was nature raw, combative, uncompromising, and unpredictable, where you dare not travel without guns and flares, where you feel dwarfed in the presence of massive aquamarine icebergs, where a walk on the tundra may turn up a few 1,000-year-old whalebones that once framed a house used by the Thule people, ancestors of today's Inuit.
It is a humbling window into the way of life of a people who survived punishing Arctic winters living in harmony with the land, their environment, and animals. And it convinced me that I wouldn't last a week here on my own.
