It was the start of a long weekend in Canada and the air hummed with outboards as hunting parties roared off in boats across Frobisher Bay - formerly frozen solid at this time of the year. Pitseolak Alainga, 38, a full-time hunter, had decided not to take his boat out because he didn't like the dark snow clouds looming over the bay and the hills on Baffin Island where he goes to shoot caribou and to fish for Arctic char.
A tragic accident in the 1990s has made him much more cautious of the weather, which Inuits say became more unpredictable 10 to 15 years ago. "We had killed 12 walrus and we were coming back," said Mr Alainga. "We saw from the clouds there would be gale-force winds from the south-east. Then the boat sprang a leak." He was three nights and four days on the wreckage, half submerged in near-freezing water, and was one of only two survivors. Ten men died, including his father, three uncles and three cousins.
Last year four experienced hunters were travelling back to Cape Dorset on a long-established route across the sea ice in February, when the floes should have been set hard. They were travelling fast on skidoos when they ran into open water covered by slush in poor visibility. All died. The pace of climate change in the Arctic is a story not just being played out in the pages of scientific journals but in the lives of its inhabitants.
Akaka Sata, 87, a pensioner who used to earn a living as a hunter, did not need last month's satellite pictures of the shrinkage of sea ice to tell him the climate had changed. He says he used to go out hunting on the ice on Frobisher Bay at this time of year. Now it is navigable until December. Inuit elders used to make long-term forecasts by looking at the clouds. Now they say the weather is too unpredictable to try. Leading citizens of Nunavut, Canada's largest and newest territory, created for the Inuit in 1999, have decided to make a concerted effort to tell world leaders that when it comes to climate change, the Inuit are the canary in the mine. As the poles are the first to feel the effect of any warming, the Inuit say they are seeing changes faster than anyone else. Ann Meekitjuk Hanson, the Commissioner of Nunavut, who represents the Queen, said: "In the spring the ice used to melt gradually, now it is fast. We used to have eight seasons, now it is only four." All eight seasons have a name in Inuktitut, a language shaped by the Inuits' nomadic past. This is the season the caribou are getting ready to breed. Country food - ringed seal, char, whale and sea birds - is still a vital source of nutrition in Nunavut, where air travel and supplies from the south are expensive.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/10/17/winuit17.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/10/17/ixworld.html
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