During springtime in the far, far north—when the sun breaches the horizon, after months of total darkness—indigenous Greenlandic hunters head out to frozen inlets and get lost in ice and time. By day, the hunters might move miles in one direction, while the ice under their feet floats gently in another. By night, detached floes drift about, shifting the landmarks as the hunters sleep. For many of the past thirty-five years, Ragnar Axelsson, an Icelandic photographer, has joined these expeditions, clutching his Leica against the Arctic winds. “In the vastness of Greenland there are places to be found where one gets the distinct impression of being alone in the world, places few people have ever reached,” Axelsson says. “The stillness is overwhelming. The emptiness seems boundless.”
Dawn after frigid dawn, Axelsson has awoken to a chorus of howling sled dogs. In many Arctic towns, locals have swapped animal-skin outfits for layered Gore-Tex, harpoons for rifles, and sleds for snowmobiles. But, in the least accessible areas, sled dogs are irreplaceable. “Unlike a snowmobile, a good trained dog can lead you home in a storm,” Axelsson told me. “Engines fail. But the dogs never fail.” Loyal, strong, selfless, uncomplaining—step after frozen step, sled dogs have hauled people to the limits of the earth, at both poles. They are, in Axelsson’s estimation, “the greatest heroes the North has ever known.”
This is the premise of “Arctic Heroes,” Axelsson’s ode to Greenlandic dogs and the life style that they have sustained for millennia. Out in the sea ice, the dogs are “the only companion you want by your side in your moment of need,” Axelsson writes, in an essay accompanying his photographs. His human subjects agree. “There would be no Inuit without the Greenlandic dog,” an elderly indigenous woman told him. “It has kept us alive for four thousand years.”
The crack of a rifle, the grunt of a polar bear, the spout of an orca, the bone-on-bone clash of narwhal tusks. Ropes snap, skiffs break, fingers get exposed to the wind and frostbite quickly takes over. The eyes and ears become tuned to the sounds of survival—creaking sleds, calving glaciers, groaning sea ice, and the pattering footfalls of paws in the snow. To move slowly on thin ice is to allow time for the weight of the sled to crash into the water; to fall in is to risk death, not only from hypothermia but from the crushing force of colliding ice floes, which move slowly but can weigh millions of tons.
“These are people who live way beyond the edge of what we might consider the habitable world,” Axelsson writes, of the northernmost indigenous hunters. Theirs is a world of subtraction: of limbs lost to frostbite; of friends lost to depression, violence, and weather; of dogs lost to fights with polar bears; of ice lost to warming waters; of a way of life lost increasingly to technology, globalism, and the effects of carbon consumption far from their tiny Arctic villages. Ten years ago, according to Axelsson, there were some thirty thousand sled dogs in Greenland; now there are hardly twelve thousand. “With the demise of Greenlandic storytellers, the risk now is that a great deal of this history will be swallowed by the darkness of time,” he writes.
During some of Axelsson’s Arctic ventures, his gear became so cold that the batteries drained and the cameras could not function. Last winter, after he briefly removed a glove to adjust his camera settings, his right thumb froze stiff, turned black, and was nearly lost; the nerves remain damaged to this day. He has fallen into the water, and walked for miles through epic storms. Axelsson recently opened his first retrospective show, “Where the World Is Melting,” at the Versicherungskammer Kulturstiftung, in Munich. Gaze into the expression of a dog in a blizzard and you might involuntarily shiver. Another dog falls into the icy waters, and you want to reach in and yank him out. “A good dog could mean the difference between life and death,” Axelsson writes. A good hunter reciprocates.
In the early nineties, an aging Greenlandic hunter sniffed the air and told Axelsson, who is known by friends as “Rax,” that the “big ice is sick.” In February, 2020—during the twenty-four-hour darkness of polar winter—another hunter wrote to him with an update on the coming season. “Hi, there is no ice, the new layer is very thin, no one has walked on it yet,” the man wrote. “No catch for a long time, Raxi, I miss the old Greenland.”
