Even today, though, hardly anyone from the rest of Canada goes there – only 400 visitors passed through any of the national parks north of the Arctic Circle last year. We can’t understand the evolution of the North if we don’t visit it, can’t grasp the people and places that are changing and the others that are just as fiercely resisting change. Sometimes the two are the same. Because whatever else it is, the Arctic is a rebuke to anyone who thinks he can control the future. That might be the very reason some people call it home.

Climate change, along with the emergence of a generation of educated northerners who have seen the outside world and have come back with new ambitions for their homeland – to say nothing of the Western world’s inability to resist any frontier not yet fully exploited – have radically reorganized the apparatus of the Arctic. As Greg Missal, a vice-president of Baffinland Iron Mines Corp., says, “You’re literally dealing with a culture up here that’s evolving so quickly that it’s happening before our eyes.”

They have a point. For southern Canadians, the North can seem like an unchanging myth, the vague, comforting but necessary background to the nation’s existence. But both the world and the North have shifted and changed. “Up there” is no longer a place entirely apart, protected from outsiders by cold and distance.

Photo: The caribou in this area east of the northern Nunavut community of Cambridge Bay have migrated south to the mainland now that the sea ice has frozen. But this animal, found on the barrens, did not make the journey and was likely killed by a wolf, say local guides.

Many northerners will expect you to fail anyway – or at least to exoticize their world. Journalists are greeted with steady skepticism: “Is this another story about suicide and polar bears?” Sometimes the locals call you kabloona , which technically means “white person” but in common parlance can mean asshole ; they might wave their hands in front of their noses as you pass. Sometimes they sound like flag-waving secessionists (“don’t come up here for you”), at others like a nation of Venetian waiters, resentful of the same people they depend on for a living (“come here for us”). No one but a northerner can possibly understand their North, they think.

Still. It might be useful to make our way across the Arctic, along the famous Northwest Passage: If it’s the future, we should see what the future will be like. The answer is (admittedly from the point of view of a month-long visitor, and a puling, soft southerner at that): huge, empty, inhospitable, really cold, ineffably strange, oddly beautiful but thoroughly unromantic, mulishly unmanageable but incessantly optimistic, possibly separatist, and nothing like anything I expected. There is no place on Earth remotely like it. It has its own sense of time and space. Southerners can go there to make money, sometimes a lot of it, but you will do so on the North’s terms, or you will fail.

But that’s the way it is in the Arctic: What is supposed to be there and what is actually there are rarely the same. The Canadian North is touted endlessly these days as a bottomless source of oil and gas and minerals, as a trove of scientific information about climate and weather, as the arena of an international race for sovereignty and ownership of the North Pole. “The story of the North is the story of Canada,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper told Canadians last fall, explaining why we must be up there. The Arctic is in its ascendancy, he says, our last frontier, and thus our future. He must be out of his mind.

“Mainly the rocks have snow on ’em,” Clarence, the guide, says. “But once you see a muskox, they barely have any snow on ’em.”

The journalist interrupts. “How can you tell the difference between the big rocks and a muskox?” I am scanning the horizon with a pair of binoculars.

Photo (clockwise from left): Gavin Greenley, 17, looks for signs of muskox on a hunt with his father, two guides and Globe journalists, east of Cambridge Bay, Nunavut; Gavin adjusts his hood over his Knicks cap – he captains his high-school basketball team; rifles and wolf mittens are key hunting equipment.

The Inuit think otherwise. “Hunting’s the best adrenaline,” Gavin says, sucking a cigarette. He's wearing a Knicks tuque. His mitts are polar-bear fur and huge, each the size of first base.

Every 20 minutes, the hunters pull up on a rise for a smoke and a chat. It’s hard to discern their tracking strategy because the tundra – the holy land the Inuit revere – is, to my eyes, indistinguishable from one place to the next. A rise here. A declivity there. The odd summer shack. Some ice fog. Otherwise, it’s snow and rock and white and snow and rock and white, forever. Like a dream, not a good one.

Oh, and the temperature is -25 C – mild for Cambridge Bay, 500 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle and roughly halfway between Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, and Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, all of which together form the vast entity and state of mind known reverentially as the North. It’s late November, the first day of the annual darkness, when the sun does not make it entirely above the horizon. Instead, it peeks over at noon, a semi-depressed Kilroy of the North, oozing pink and orange like a large, cold and, alas, inaccessible tropical drink. Fifty-nine minutes of formal daylight later, the pink begins to bleed away to darkness again. At this time of year, it always feels later than it is.

But you still have to find one. That’s why a writer and a photojournalist from Toronto find ourselves driving southwest across the frozen ice of the Beaufort Sea with our Inuit guides, Clarence Kaiyogana and Roland Eningak, and two Inuit hunters, Bobby Greenley and his 17-year-old son Gavin, ahead of us on snowmobiles. We, the southerners (not always a term of endearment in the North), jolt along behind the snowmobiles on komatiks , low wooden sleds, inhaling exhaust. The noise of the snow machines is a nag, an incessant enormous mechanical drill in the ear. The komatiks catch air off every single rock-knob, tussock and sastruga … and hammer down on the frozen, back-breaking, head-pounding, eye-blurring brick of the tundra five times a minute. I admit there are moments when I think the Inuit are driving this way on purpose.

T he trick to hunting muskox is to find one. Beyond that, the process is quite simple. At 400 kilograms and 150 centimetres tall, with its sweeping body hair and centre-parted horns, ovibos moschatus looks like a rich cow on its way to opening night at the opera, and is no match for a good shot, a snowmobile and a .308. Under duress, they form an outward-facing circle, as if the next step is dialogue and negotiation.

Editor's note: This is part of The North , a Globe investigation of unprecedented change to the climate, culture and politics of Canada’s last frontier. Join the conversation at #GlobeNorth

There are no sidewalks in any of the towns, at least in winter, and, as befits a people who were nomadic hunters of no fixed address until 60 years ago, no prescribed paths: Everyone walks where they need to walk, across schoolyards, through empty lots, between houses, along culverts. You see them heading home alone at night in the cold in Arctic hamlets, making their way through shortcuts. With the hoods of their parkas up, their arms held straight out by their winter clothes, they look like monks – an entire people that has taken a vow of harsh, permanent, proving winter.

It has quirks, this future. Because of the permafrost, houses in a lot of towns sport individual outdoor water tanks and above-ground septic blocks. The tanks have lights, red and white, and when the tanks need emptying or filling and the lights go on, the water and sewage trucks come round. “There’s no long showers in this world,” a schoolteacher named Patti Bligh explains one evening in Cambridge Bay, “and everyone shares the same bath.” Resolute and Inuvik, on the other hand, are famous for their “utilidors,” a network of above-ground water and sewage pipes enclosed in a continuous cabinet that runs all over town, like a rumour. Subliminally you know you’re never far from a tube of water and human waste. It’s a bracing sensation.

Later, he sat on the commissions that in 1999 officially created the territory of Nunavut, making him a living founding father. “In 1960, our culture started evolving into another culture,” he says. “I’m guessing, but I think it takes a few generations to build another culture.” He has no doubt it will happen eventually.

Whenever Mr. Qulaut changed his job – from translating to research, from research to working for Inuit organizations to government – he went out on the land. After his mother died, he went out and taught his granddaughter to fish. When his daughter committed suicide and he found her body on the porch of his home, he went out again. He has been making the trek since he was a teenager. The first time, he stayed four months.

We’re sitting in the kitchen of his airy house by the water. He tells me the story of his life, from being born in an igloo to being elected as the MLA for Amittuq region and named speaker of the Nunavut Legislature last fall. The conversation has a pleasantly timeless feel – the Inuit do not use talking points. He remembers his first residential school (he insists it gave him a better education), the year Inuit were allowed to buy liquor (1959), the year federal ballot boxes finally arrived in the Arctic (1962), the year he saw his first Christmas tree (1961, “and it smelled bad ”). Like every Inuk over 40 (he’s 60, but looks 15 years younger), he remembers the identification number the Canadian government made him wear on a leather thong (E51285). But the world still felt like it belonged to the Inuit and the Inuit alone. As late as 1971, he remembers his father asking him, “What is Canada? And what is a Canadian?”

I n Arctic hamlets, everyone knows everyone else, and everyone knows whom everyone is related to. The towns spill haphazardly along the shores of bays and inlets, as if a giant packing case had fallen out of the sky, hit the ground and burst open – whereupon people began using the contents where they landed. “Architecture,” in the southern sense of the world, is confined to the odd research building and churches shaped like igloos. Some hamlets don’t have street names; houses have numbers instead. When you do find the house you’re looking for, you never knock: “The only people who do that are the RCMP,” George Qulaut, an MLA in Nunavut, tells me one afternoon in Igloolik. “Everyone else just walks in and shouts hello.”

Chapter Three

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Megaprojects and mega-paradoxes T iny hamlets aren’t the only way to live in the Far North. If you want to make more money, you live in a camp. The first thing you notice as you fly over the boiled-skull whiteness of Baffin Island toward Mary River is that there are no trees, which is why you can’t tell how high you are or how big the terrain is. The second thing you notice is that it doesn’t get any easier on the ground. Baffin Island is as big as California, plus a quarter more. From the air, Baffinland Iron Mines’ Mary River project looks like a paring of fingernail lost on a white carpet. Still, the $750-million enterprise at Mary River is the biggest thing in the Arctic. The second-biggest thing is the new $300-million road to Tuktoyaktuk from Inuvik, whose construction Mr. Harper inaugurated last week at the western end of the Northwest Passage. Everything’s relative: $300-million is also the size of the subsidy the U.S. government paid to sugar producers from March to mid-October last year. I’ve seen the Inuvik end of the Tuk road. So far, it’s a snowmobile trail. In the artificial economy of the Arctic, however, both projects are bonanzas. The originally planned $4-billion Baffinland project was pulverized by the financial collapse, but what remains is no piker: 3.5 million tonnes of ore a year, blasted out of the purest iron-ore deposit on Earth, hauled by truck over what is now the longest road on Baffin Island (148 kilometres) to Milne Inlet, and shipped in the three ice-free months of the year to Europe and the blast furnaces of ArcelorMittal, the global steelmaker that helped create Baffinland as a joint venture with a private equity group. It’s an absurdly ambitious undertaking. The mining camp sits on a bleak plateau so far north the Northern Lights are in the south. It consists of dozens of neatly rowed red, white and tan Weatherhaven Quonset tents, a central island of hard-sided Atco dwellings, and a bazillion sea cans, the steel shipping containers used across the Arctic as outdoor warehouses. The sea-can should be on the Arctic coat of arms. It took nine freighters loaded with supplies last summer to get the camp this far: Three of them carried nothing but 34 million litres of diesel, which run the five dragon-like generators (two running, one backup, two spares) that keep everyone alive. A 737 out of Kitchener has been flying crews in and out at least twice a week via Iqaluit, and the plane is always full. “They come from a completely different place than we do. Their values are still their families and the land, in ways we still don’t understand.” Progress is slow. Machines don’t like -40 weather. People wear face warmers, parkas, boots the size of fire hydrants, but no one’s allowed to work outside at that temperature for more than 40 minutes without taking a break. Frostbite is a constant concern. Trucks and loaders are often left running 24 hours a day, to avoid the Goldbergian effort of restarting them (ducts, pipes, batteries, blowers). Employees driving the two-and-a-half-hour road to Milne Inlet require a survival kit and four days’ worth of diesel, in the event of a breakdown in a blizzard. An Arctic blizzard is defined as “extreme” when you can’t see your hand at arm’s length in front of your face. The hearth of the camp is the kitchen-dining room and the adjacent rec room – long, half-pipe-shaped rooms lined with white vinyl and fluorescent lights. It’s like living inside a fridge, except that the freezing’s on the outside. The bedroom tents sleep four but they’re noisy: The ultra-dry snow squeaks like a team of cheerleaders when anyone walks by.

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Photo: The temporary camp at the Baffinland Mary River mine site is full of Quonset-style, soft-shell tents that keep out the cold but not the noise. A permanent hard-walled camp is under construction nearby, which will eventually hold 500 workers doing two-week rotations.

People come for the money. A couple working the camp together can pull $250,000 a year (a fifth of the campers are women). On the other hand, a return flight from Cambridge Bay to Toronto is $2,300. Very soon, there will be 500 people here. Five hundred jobs for $750-million is not the most efficient job-creation ratio, but that is the megaproject way: 12-hour shifts on a two-weeks-in, two-weeks-out rotation. Because 85 per cent of the people in Nunavut are Inuit, the Nunavut government wants 85 per cent of jobs to be held by Inuit. Only 30 per cent of Baffinland’s spots are, the company admits. “A lot of people up here don’t have a lot of education or skills,” says Mr. Missal, the Baffinland vice-president. “You take a lot of trouble to develop it.” Baffinland introduces its Inuit employees to the basics of contemporary capitalism via a two-week program, teaching them how to open a bank account and use an ATM and direct deposit (instead of cashing cheques for exorbitant fees at the North Mart or the Co-op, the only two stores that service most Arctic hamlets). Tony Woodfine, the mine manager, had doubts the program would be embraced, but an Inuit woman recently told him that learning to budget saved her marriage. Cynthia Panipak is one of Baffinland’s newly minted capitalists, just about to turn 29 and recently certified to haul rock in an articulated dump truck for $62,000 a year. Shy, precise, dark-haired, she’s the model modern Inuk: takes the job seriously, shows up for work on time (not something that can be said of all her fellow Inuit), never talks while she’s driving – a blown tire on one of the biggest loaders can run $20,000 to replace, and needs to be ordered a year-and-a-half ahead of time.

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Photo: Inuit elder Susan Avingaq, 73, heads back inside a recently completed sod house outside Igloolik to gather some ice to melt for water. In the past the structure would have been made from whale ribs instead of wooden 2x4s.

“I love it,” she tells me one morning. “Working out in the field, not in the office.” It is 8 a.m., pitch black, -30, and we’re five metres in the air in the cab of a giant dump truck, waiting for a massive front-end loader to drop 40 tonnes of rock in the truck bed. I admit this gives me a childish thrill. Back in Clyde River, however, on her fortnight off, Ms. Panipak is the opposite of a capitalist. There she hunts for seals, which means standing stock still on the ice for 10 freezing, freaking hours. She’ll know if the ice is thick enough by jabbing it three times with her harpoon. If she gets a seal, she’ll share the meat with her family and any of Clyde River’s 820 residents who need some, as is the long-standing custom. A big seal is a day or two of food for five families. She’ll give the skin to her grandmother, who’s making someone a pair of kamiks. All this – the modern trucks, the harpooned seal, the new bank account, the handmade boots – happen at the same time in the 21st-century Arctic. The federal subsidy of the NWT in 2013-2014 will amount to $26,773 per person; in Nunavut the number will be $39,377. It’s $1,464 in Ontario. A lot of southerners look at those numbers and say to the Inuit, We own you – you have to decide between a traditional life and the modern world. But in the North that distinction means nothing. The strange thing is that the camp works as an air lock in both directions, both into the thicker atmosphere of the south, and also out of it. One afternoon up on the ore deposit, 100 feet above the camp, the wind is blowing 30 kilometres an hour. (It’s twice as cold as it was anywhere in the south during the recent “polar vortex.”) You can stand it for about three seconds. Then it feels as if rogue bacteria are eating your face alive. The sensation is unbearable. This isn’t a temperature at which you want to be surveying or taking notes or packing explosives or dialling a phone. Drill bits have been snapping in the cold. I mention to Jason Paterson, the project’s materials handling supervisor – a tough, funny guy from Kapuskasing, Ont. who has worked in mines all over the world – something Mr. Woodfine said: “If those generators went out, we’d have to leave in three hours. Or else we’d be dead.” Mr. Paterson nods. “And the Inuit have lived here for what? Four thousand years?” He shakes his head. Many of the southerners who travel up every two weeks consider it a privilege to be working among the northern people, even if they don’t talk about it much. What no one in the camp knows is how long the megaprojects will produce and what lasting benefits they’ll leave behind. Canada’s first mine in the Arctic, the Nanisivik zinc-lead grab, opened in 1976 and closed permanently in 2002 because of low metal prices. Its mess is still being cleaned up, and the federal government’s much-vaunted plans to transform it into a deep-water military port have foundered. The Polaris zinc operation north of Resolute lasted only 20 years. Supporters justify the Tuk road in NWT by saying it will make everything cheaper. We’ll see. The Deh Cho bridge across the Mackenzie was supposed to do the same thing, and hasn’t, and the Dempster Highway hasn’t lowered the price of anything in Inuvik. I’m not trying to be a downer; it’s just that the North always exacts its price, and the price is often unpredictable. Nunavut’s land-claim agreement is supposed to change all that, and train local people to profit from their own mines and exploit their own territory on their own terms. But the Inuit and Inuvialuit of Canada’s North are still hunters, not settlers.

Photos (clockwise from left): Thomas Ungataq, 73, entertains his family in Igloolik by demonstrating how to hold onto a walrus after spearing it with a sakku on a leather lanyard; the sakku in close-up; Josephine Ungataq smiles as she shows her traditionally sewed items to family and visitors.