It turns out that raw Caribou liver is not as good as the cooked variety, and that niether of these is as good as a Caribou Steak Sandwich, which, when taken in a warm cabin, in the middle of the featureless sub-arctic tundra, and washed down with Rye Whisky, is nothing short of sublime. Add to these culinary delights the conversation topics of snowmobiles, guns, and hunting, and you have the perfect northern bloke’s night in.
Manesy provided a constant source of interest for Ben and I, keen as we were to study the Inuit hunter and his tradititional ways. Before long, the subject of our anthropologial facination produced a satellite phone and called his wife, just to explain that a pair of crazed Australians had shown up at the cabin claiming to have sailed there from Rankin inlet. Our interest was further peaked when he plugged his ipod into some miniture speakers, explaining as he turned up “Funky Town” (by that 70s disco band) that he was a “civilised Eskimo”.
The civilisation of the Inuit was something we had dicovered a few days previously in Rankin Inlet. Despite being 1200km from the nearest road, in a town besieged by ice and acessable only by air 9 months of the year, we had found ourselves in a supermarket indistinguishable from Bondi Junction Coles. As we waited in 25C comfort for our Pizza Hut pizza, I managed to photograph an Inuit family dispensing themselves rasberry and cola Slushies from the frozen drink machine.

Anyway, back at the cabin, the morning after the Caribou feast, Manesy gratified us with a more traditional display of inuit technology by butchering half a frozen Caribou outside in the snow, before loading up his snowmobile and komatik and roaring off with the others. This left Ben and I to inspect the sled and the damage incurred during the previous day’s thrashing over countless razor sharp granite boulders. I’d been dreading this all night. We found the underside in amazingly good condition, utterly scraped and gouged, but still totally sound, however, as I had feared, the main steering post, which bears all the weight of the pilot during high speed collisions with sastrugi (or more specifically, rocks), had snapped. This means that we cant steer, so we decided to return to Rankin Inlet for repairs. unfortunately the wind was against us, se we spent the day lashing the steering straight and breaking the sled down into it’s “plan B” configuration, whereby each half of the sled can be towed individually by a kiteskier. So the 130 km back to Rankin will be on skis, towing half a sled, and half our gear each.

Today the wind was too light to travel, so we slept in, and then tested our new Flysurfer Speed kites, which we hope to use on the trip back to Rankin. They performed brilliantly, and if you’ll excuse some geekery for the kiters reading this, we found we could ski up to 35 degrees off the wind even in 5-8 knots! A big thanks to Trevor Jack of Moreton Bay Kiting for his expert 1.5 conversion to the Speed 13.

So all’s set for a 2-3 day ski back to Rankin in the morning. Tonight I’m cooking blueberry pankakes in some leftover Caribou fat that I found in an old pan lying around the hut. Ben is unsure about this plan, but he’s just jealous because he didnt think of it himself.

Dave