Sisimiut / "the people living in a place where there are fox dens” /

Kalaallit Nunaat / West Greenland

Safely inside the taxi I peel off the waterproofs and adjust the louvres til the warm air rushes to my face. Jasmine air freshener. Rain runs in grey rivulets down the windscreen. Stephan says something in Danish and we starting rolling along the gravel road past the grey harbour and up the hill. Blocky apartments light by like lego. Five storeys, squat concrete, primary colours, curved balcony rails - wooden? We go up Aqqusinersuaq past sheets and stuff flapping in the Baffin breeze; black and white murals of muskox and foxes flash by.

Stephan is still talking to the driver as we go past Dog Town and along a nameless road over rain-rounded potholes til the dirt strip widens and the taxi turns around. End of the road. The driver looks at us in the rearview mirror, eyebrows raised.

This boggy flat must be the range, although there’s nothing to distinguish it from the low-lying tundra rolling out in every direction. We look to Keith, the rifle manager, who checked it out on Google Maps last night. He shrugs, then nods.

This is the official Sisimiut rifle range, a flat spot about fifty metres long sandwiched between the dirt road and a rocky, vegetated slope that rises over glacier-polished bluffs to a blunt ridge a few hundred metres overhead.

Petra and I walk down range, flat cardboard boxes stuffed under our arms. After a while she asks “Have you been here before?”

“Nope, first time”. I say.

“Same. Pretty basic.” she observes. I nod as we separate to assemble the targets. The boxes won’t stand on their own so we prop them up with rocks and step back to appraise our work. A scraggly row of deformed squares with concentric circles drawn on in blue permanent marker. They’re all pointing in the right direction. Seems good enough. We head back to the others, huddled now around Keith. Beyond the harbour to the west salt-hazed mountains fade green-misted into the distance.

“Which way is down range?” Keith says as he hands out the ammunition. “North” he says, delivering the punchline like a slap before anyone has a chance.

“Everyone should know this,” he says warningly.

We nod.

“Ear protection”, he continues, handing out earmuffs in fluoro orange and green.

“Here’s how it works. No one loads without my instruction. Ok. When I say ‘load’, you load your magazine.” He pushes five cartridges into the metal box and holds it up.

“When I say safe-load, load the magazine into the rifle.” He jams the magazine into a cavity underneath the barrel and jostles it around. “Give it a good shake to make sure it sticks.” He looks pointedly at Petra for no reason.

Of the eleven people huddled around, I’ve worked with two before. Lisa, a marine biologist from Canada, I’ve known for several years. We’ve done a couple of contracts together in Antarctica. Bill, a Quebecois bird nerd was Ornithologist on these Arctic voyages last year. The rest of us met in Kangerlussuaq on Tuesday, but in a couple of weeks we’ll feel - for better or worse - like family. For now, we’re contractors and strangers. I stand up straighter.

“When I say ‘load’ - not before - you load the rifles. Ok?" Keith looks around the group. I nod, looking down at my hands, knuckles white with cold.

“When I say ‘fire five shots down range’, fire at will. You five,” he gestures to Petra, Pat, Lucinda, Grant and Stephan. “You’re up .”

We do this routine target practice any time we’re near a range. It’s a chance to shoot the ship’s rifles (some of us haven’t used them in a year, others have never shot this model before), get on the same page with company SOPs^, and assure Keith that we can handle a gun. If anything goes wrong it’ll be on him.

“Have you done much shooting lately?” Lisa whispers to me.

I shrug. Depends how you define ‘much’ and ‘lately’. I started shooting about seven years ago. That’s if you count the time in the desert, firing at a floral mattress dumped in a dry riverbed. I remember being terrified - all of it, the cold steel barrel, the deafening crack, the recoil - what if it backfired? It all felt a bit overwhelming but when a colleague came back from town saying a friend of a friend had a rifle, I wanted to give it a go. Maybe I had something to prove, I don’t know. But I remember the heat, the heaviness of the rifle, the rush in my head and the clarifying crack, the world spinning askew for a moment before righting itself, a little clearer than before.

Not long after, I started target shooting at the local club. I think I was intrigued by this shooting thing, slowing time, making lightning, feeling the world spin on its axis. But also - and more practically - I wanted to get a job in the Arctic, and according to the hiring manager I needed a firearms licence.

The local range was less than half an hour from home, tucked away in the bush just a few hundred metres off the highway. Scruffy bearded men with Bundy Rum hats and muddy work pants welcomed the newcomer in her baggy white pinstripe shirt and jeans, all eager to try everything. They dragged me around from target to target, thrusting .22s and .308s and shotguns into my hands, introducing me to centre fire and bench rest and clay target shooting. Have you tried pistol shooting? one asked me. I think you’d be good at it, women usually are.

On my second visit Barry the President walked me into the clubhouse and offered me a Fanta from the esky. Have a beer if you want, he added awkwardly, as if he thought I was too young, or maybe too female, then thought better of it. If you’re serious about shooting, he said, solemn now, this is the Bible. Take it home if you want, read it cover to cover. I liked how serious he was. He handed me a hardback tome with a faded dust jacket and the smell of musk. Pale yellow post-its stuck out of the side like echidna quills. This book changed my life he said as I flipped through the ‘Shooter’s Bible: Guide to Cartridges’, page after illustrated page of bullets, cases, specs, loads specifics and velocities. It was pretty boring. Thanks Barry, I said, nodding slowly. I definitely didn’t want to read this book, and pushed it gently towards him. Maybe another time.

If you want to shoot a moving bird and you don’t have a tripod, you need to be completely motionless, Thomas was telling me. But how are you going to do that on a rolling ship? We were somewhere in the South Atlantic and Mangelsen, a wildlife photographer from Wyoming, had some advice for me. You can do it, but you need to make yourself completely still. Plant your feet wide and lock your elbows into your chest like this he said, bringing his elbows together in line with his sternum and pushing the eyepiece into his face. You need to really squash your nose, see? Then - and this is the kicker - breathe in, hold, and touch the shutter, soft as you can. You don’t need to press it. Just touch it, just so. He paused so I could take it in, the perfect posture. A heaving swell rolled under the ship and he staggered. I laughed. Thomas was great, a gentle guy, loved shooting brown bears and herds of migrating elk and other ungulates back home. I often think of him when I’m taking photos, body hunched, hands gripping, nose squashed, body braced against railing and ready for action.

It’s odd to think of him while shooting a rifle, but it is similar. The speed of the projectile is misleading - you may think you’re doing a fast violence to the world, but the sharp point of exit says nothing of what happens on the other side of the gun. First you find your stance, legs wide, hips facing forwards. Then you raise the rifle, working the butt into the fleshy space between clavicle and shoulder to catch the recoil. Find your target, inhale and hold. Then you tap - ever so lightly - the trigger. You can easily forget what you’re doing - that it’s a gun you’re dealing with; a killing machine - and over the years shooting and its potential consequences decoupled for me.

“At what distance would you think about shooting a polar bear?” Keith asks, pulling me out of my reverie.

“A hundred metres.” says Pat, a keen canoeist and our expedition leader.

“Fifty?” his wife Lucinda offers. She’s assistant expedition leader.

“Well, a hundred is the limit of the flare,” says Grant, one of the kayak guides, “so I’d be thinking about shooting, or loading at least.”

“I wouldn’t.” says John, the ship’s historian, shaking his head.

“When would you, John?” says Keith.

“I wouldn’t”, he says again. “We shouldn’t need to. Not if we do our jobs.”

We all know what he’s getting at. None of us wants to shoot a bear, and we’d all probably prefer to think of the firearms team as a polar bear protection team. Shooting is the last resort after a long line of preventative actions we take every time we land. A proper scout should ensure we never land in the presence of a bear. And if we accidentally do, or a bear moves in, we should have evacuated long before shooting’s an option.

“You’re wrong John. Even if we do our jobs perfectly there is no guarantee. We can do things by the book and a bear can pop up from behind an invisible dip, or approach from the water. What then?” Keith, straightening his back, turns towards John and puts his hand on his hips.

“I’ve heard stories,” John shrugs. “You can fend off a bear with metallic noises and flares, with non-violent interventions.” Keith shakes his head as John continues. “I’ve heard of a polar bear passing by within twenty metres of a guided group, completely relaxed. The group huddled together and stayed calm, and had the most amazing encounter. The bear was totally indifferent, just moving from a to b. Would I shoot a polar bear in that situation? I don’t think so”.

“At what point would you shoot then?” asks Petra as Keith motions to Patrick and they step away from the group. Petra cocks her head to one side.

“I’m not sure I would,” said John.

“Look. No one here wants to kill a polar bear, but have you ever seen one flip? I worked in Churchill for years, I’ve seen a bear go from placid to full out predator in an instant with no provocation. You can’t predict it. And they’re so fast. At twenty metres you wouldn’t have a chance. It’s not just you. You’re responsible for the safety of others. If you want to work in the Arctic you have to accept that it could happen, you could have to shoot a bear.”

John shakes his head. “Sorry. We’re in their environment willingly. We take all possible precautions. We know the risks. Passengers should too. It’s not the bear’s fault if they come across us.”

Keith stepped back into the group. “Listen John, Pat and I have had a chat. If that’s how you feel we respect that, but you should sit this one out.”

Sisimiut, 29 July 2023. Shrimp, salmon, halibut and cod fisheries are important cottage industries in Sisimiut.

*Kalaalit: the local name for western Greenlandic Inuit.

^Standard operating procedures.