There were five igloos at Kicertakjuk, each with several "rooms." To enter Amaslak's, you went first through a "hallway," off of which opened three rooms, each with a sleeping platform of snow & a stone lamp burning seal oil. Amaslak, his wife, two children & I had one room; to the left lived his parents & their favorite grandchild; to the right, his sister, her husband & child.

Amaslak was a first-rate hunter. Every moment the weather permitted, sometimes for thirty hours at a stretch, we hunted seal at their breathing holes or along ice cracks or at the floe edge, waiting, waiting, then hitting one, racing out in a kayak to harpoon it before it sank & sometimes eating the meat while it was still warm.

The life of the hunter is a constant adventure. He realizes this & admits it & this element of the lottery attaches him to his calling. In the long run he's always poor, but a tremendous catch makes him rich for a day - opulence unsoured by satiety!

One day we killed a walrus & 32 seal. One seal, captured live, was tortured before being killed. That same day a hunter fell through the ice, but we hauled him out & each donated a piece of dry clothing.

With the returning sun, seal appeared on top of the ice & we concentrated on killing them. By this time, overland travel was difficult, the igloo intolerably damp, our food supply at its lowest & nearly everyone had a cold.

Toward the end of May, when the sun once more circled the horizon day & night, the snow melted on the ridge tops & sealskin tents were erected. Out of the igloos at last! It was still cold outside & inside, too, but after months of igloo life this was forgotten. The children put up a play tent & brewed tea over a tiny stone lamp. The wooden door to their parents' tent went Bang! Bang! as the children ran in & out - those going out meeting those coming in, the tide turning & all coming in, standing there for a moment, then all rushing out; the same runny nose here, gone, then back.

With the lengthening days, birds arrived from the south & their cries filled the air. The snow gradually vanished. Swiftly, miraculously, flowers appeared & the long arctic winter was over.

Amaslak & I set out for Jens Munck Island where we lived in a small camp & hunted with new friends. From there we moved to tiny Kaersuk Island with its twin peaks from which it takes its name. Six people had wintered there. They formed a classic Eskimo family: husband & wife, his mother, their son, daughter & son-in-law. The girl was exceptionally beautiful. Her husband looked like one of Genghis Khan's lieutenants. The old grandmother, her face covered with purple tattoos, put my finger in her mouth to show me how her teeth wobbled. She called her grandson "Not," her pronunciation of Knud, after Knud Rasmussen, the Danish explorer who visited her over thirty years ago. It was the greatest compliment she could pay, for the Eskimo believe in reincarnation, & thought Rasmussen was once more among them.

Then up Jorgensen Fiord, but already the ice was bad & one day Amaslak insisted we turn back. We raced south, toward the middle of the Melville coast, traveling day & night, sleeping a few hours, then on through the barrier ice - a maze of canyons & hills, some rising thirty feet, colored white & silver & turquoise - leaping cracks, throwing dogs over, shooting seal & frightening walrus into open water, all the time pursued by the sun that melted & cracked the narrow highway we followed along the coast.

Flocks of birds swooped down to look us over, often coming up suddenly from behind, without warning. The sled crashed down an ice slope, skidded close to the dark, open water below, then bridged a great crack, the whip constantly exploding & the two of us racing to keep up, leaping from foothold to foothold, marveling that our legs didn't fail.

We replaced three dogs at camps where we ate, cutting chunks of caribou or seal from meat piled just inside each tent - simply taking it, for Eskimos don't offend by offering.

The route back took us past the Hudson's Bay Company post at Igloolik where I stopped to say goodbye to the Scottish trader. He urged me to choose a book from his shelves, for he said the ice on Fury and Hecla Strait was flat, the day calm, the dogs familiar with the trail & there would be nothing to do but sleep or read.

While the dogs pulled & Amaslak dozed, I read Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast. I was completely overwhelmed by the experience. For months I had read nothing. Now print transported me to another ocean, another century, offering experiences which seemed, at that moment, more real, more vivid, than those surrounding me. No book ever before affected me so strongly. I was returning to literacy after a long absence, but I wonder: does print have this same power over those who first encounter it? And in postliteracy; can it be that what really troubles us is not the absence of the experience of print, but the experience of the absence of print?