Greenland is full of interesting characters and P is one of them – a Greenlander who has worked with my husband on and off on mineral exploration projects for many years. P is one of those rare guys who, with limited formal qualifications of any kind, is nonetheless utterly indispensible. Like toornaarsuk – a Greenlandic helper spirit.
In April, the cold in Kangerlussuaq is biting. The freezing air stings the back of your throat and creeps through every seam, winding its cold tendrils around exposed wrists and freezing ones breath before it can even escape from under a warm scarf. Here, in the mountains above Kangerlussuaq, my husband and a team of North American colleagues were laboriously digging deep trenches in the snow, laying out cables, and fixing detonators to TNT. They were making bombs for a seismic survey project. Working with the wires was almost impossible with gloved hands in the sub-minus twenty degree celsius weather. So while the others watched, P simply took off his gloves and nimbly spliced the wires with his broad fingers, bare hands steaming in the frozen air, apparently impervious to the cold.
On the same project, P was working with a team of drillers, a half dozen burly men working a drill rig on a remote frozen lake, in search of diamonds. The team were based in the town overnight, flying in and out each day to the drill site by helicopter. On this particular day, fog closed in and the helicopter couldn’t return to pick up the team at the end of the day. My husband paced up and down through the evening, worried about them, crammed into a tiny canvas shelter for the evening in double-digit freezing temperatures with only a few emergency snacks. In the morning, he flew with the helicopter to retrieve them after the freezing night. Outside the tent, it appeared there was laundry hanging on a line, which on closer inspection proved to be strips of meat. Opening the tent door, instead of shivering disgruntled drillers, he found them warm and jovial, eating a hot breakfast of reindeer steak. Earlier that morning, to the bewilderment of the drillers, P had headed out with his rifle saying, “I’m just going to get breakfast,” as if he was just off to the supermarket. Very shortly afterward, he returned carrying a reindeer.
P is a qualified skipper. But more importantly, he is very experienced one, having spent years working as a fisherman and hunting in fjords along the west coast. On one such hunting trip, south of Nuuk in Ameralik fjord, he spent an unsuccessful October day alone hunting reindeer. On returning to his boat in the late afternoon, he found an unwanted visitor on board – a polar bear. The bear had climbed onto his boat and was now tearing it to pieces. As he watched, the bear sank his boat before returning to shore. Armed only with his rifle and now with no means of contacting anyone, he started the long walk around the meandering coastline back toward Nuuk – a distance of about 150 km – through the now cold and dark nights and into the next days, all the time barely stopping to rest, convinced that the bear was somewhere not far behind, stalking him.
My first encounter with P was many years after my husband had started working with him. At that point he was living in Sisimiut. He texted to say that he was in Nuuk. My husband showed me the text.
“I’m in Nuuk. In hospital. Make heart attack Saturday… I’m ok. Sitting in intensive.”
It turned out he was in town for treatment after a massive heart attack – a result of damage to his heart after a car accident months earlier. The doctors were stunned that he had lived through it, arriving in hospital as he did with a heart rate beyond that they considered survivable. Two days after having a pacemaker fitted, and restless at the hospital, he’d contacted my husband to pop over for to visit. When he arrived, aside from the cannula still afixed to his hand, one would hardly have know that he had just about died, as he sat smiling and relating recent endeavours in his Greenlandic pidgen English, learned informally as an adult. As it happened, he’d been busy in his outings from the hospital. The previous day he’d called up about and gone for an interview for a skippers’ job he was interested in – not mentioning of course that he’d just had a massive heart attack and was on day release from the hospital. He got the job. Still restless and discontent in the hospital, the following day we took him out fishing. Not having much luck, P took a scrap of white plastic from a bag, wrapped it around the hooks, and pulled in a couple of cod on the next cast. As the wind picked up, we sailed back the short distance in growing seas and, in Nuuk, approached the harbour at low tide in a churning swell.
“Just drop me at the wall,” said P, pointing to a long line of metal rungs at the towering harbour wall. We approached cautiously and – as the boat heaved up and down on erratic waves reflected from the harbour – P, smiling broadly, stepped deftly from the lurching deck onto a metal rung, climbed ashore and strode away back toward the hospital without so much as a glance behind him.
