National icons
Shortly after breakfast, Danielsen and Tuko started loading our supplies. As I watched, they expertly transformed the empty dog sleds into containers on skates filled with bags, cooler boxes, camera cases, dog food and more. They skillfully tied the goods on with ropes, demonstrating skills that they explained were passed down from father to son.
We sat two to a sled with a guide at the front driving the dogs. For the next six days, 12 Greenland sled dogs assigned to each sled carried loads of more than 450kg and ran their hearts out for up to 25km a day. These beloved animals (called qimmiit in Greenland’s Inuit language, Kalaallisut), which are a large husky-type breed, are believed to have been brought from Siberia to Greenland some 1,000 years ago by the Inuit’s direct ancestors, the Thule people, and are something of a national icon in Greenland. Not only do they represent an important part of Inuit culture and their connection to the land, but as we’d soon find, they also had the advantage of being much quieter than snowmobiles, therefore improving our chances of photographing wildlife – or, in Danielsen and Tuko’s case, when they weren’t guiding us, hunting wildlife.
Kevin Hall(Credit: Kevin Hall)Prehistoric beasts
One morning, after eating toast heated by spearing it with a knife and holding it over a burner, Danielsen pointed up towards the mountains as the dogs carried us 10km west of Ittoqqortoormiit. We looked up and saw four musk oxen standing on a distant ridge.
Weighing up to 400kg, these prehistoric-looking beasts, with short horns protruding from their cheeks and long-flowing black and tan fur overcoats blowing in the strong wind, were as photogenic as they were imposing. We disembarked from the sleds and proceeded with great caution, as Holko warned us that these Ice Age relics can be skittish and aggressive: move too quickly and they will run off; get too close and they will charge. After an hour of shooting these goliaths, they started climbing higher into the mountain passes, perhaps knowing that they are regarded as a local delicacy in Ittoqqortoormiit.