The spring hunt started promisingly last year for the village of Point Hope, on the Chukchi Sea in northern Alaska: crews harpooned two bowhead whales and pulled them onto the ice for butchering. But then the winds shifted. Out on the pack where the water opened up, the ice at the edge was what is called sikuliaq, too young and unreliable to bear a thirty-ton whale carcass. The hunters could do nothing but watch the shining black backs of bowheads, breathing calmly, almost close enough to touch.

On a trip to the ice edge, Tariek Oviuk, a hunter from Point Hope, felt a strange sensation: the lift of ocean waves beneath his feet. The older men, nervous about the rising wind, hurried back toward shore, but the younger hunters remained, stripping blubber from a few small beluga whales. Then the crack of three warning shots came rolling across the ice, and the hunters scrambled for their snowmobiles. “As soon as we heard those shots, my heart started pounding,” Oviuk recalled.

As Oviuk told me the story, a few months later, we were sitting in the kitchen of his friend Steve Oomittuk, a former village mayor, eating strips of maktaaq—chewy beluga blubber—off a piece of cardboard that quickly grew sodden with whale oil. Oviuk is thirty-five, tall and square-jawed, a former basketball star for the Point Hope high-school team, the Harpooners, and a member of a local troupe that performs traditional storytelling dances. “That was our way of communication,” he told me. “That was our people’s iPhones since time immemorial.”

Oviuk said that when he heard the shots he started running, then jumped into a passing sled filled with slippery blubber. “That’s not a beautiful thing, to be in a sled full of maktaaq,” he said. Another snowmobile driver swung by to rescue him, and Oviuk clambered aboard. Then they stopped: a gap of blue water, a hundred feet across, had opened between them and the shore-fast ice. The driver, in a parka and ski pants, said, “Hold on.” Accelerating, their heavily laden snowmobile leaped off the ice and skipped over the surface of the Chukchi Sea. Others followed, engines screaming, until everyone was across. “I didn’t believe in global warming—I’ll tell you that straight up,” Oviuk said. “But I teared up out there. I was thinking, Every year, we don’t know if it’s the last time we’re going to see the ice.”

Point Hope sits at the northwesternmost corner of North America, on one of the oldest continuously settled sites on the continent. Eight hundred people live near the eroding tip of a fifteen-mile gravel spit thrust into the Chukchi Sea, a peninsula that the Inupiat call Tikigaq, or “index finger.” For two thousand years, the digit, stuck into coastal migration routes, has provided an ideal hunting perch. Tikigaq was a capital of the pre-contact Arctic, whose prosperity depended on a subtle understanding of the restless plains of ice that surrounded the community in winter.

In Paris last December, a hundred and ninety-five nations agreed to limit greenhouse-gas emissions and slow the warming of the planet. President Obama, speaking at the Paris conference, called for the global economy to move toward a low-carbon future, citing his own recent trip to Alaska, where melting glaciers, crumbling villages, and thawing permafrost were “a glimpse of our children’s fate if the climate keeps changing faster than our efforts to address it.” The goal in Paris was to hold the average global increase in temperature to less than two degrees Celsius. The Arctic, which is warming at twice the rate of lower latitudes, has already shot beyond that: average annual air temperatures have increased by about three degrees. If trends continue, northern Alaska is expected to warm another six degrees by the end of the century.

These days, the ice disappears so fast in spring that villagers struggle to catch bearded seals, whose skins are traditionally used in Point Hope to cover hunting boats. Ice cellars in the permafrost, packed with frozen whale meat, are filling with water. People are worried about these changes. Like most families in the village, Oomittuk’s survives on wild game; much of the living space in his small house was taken up by two big chest freezers. Villages in Alaska’s Arctic consume nearly four hundred and fifty pounds of wild game and fish per person each year, according to a recent study. “Without the animals, we wouldn’t be who we are,” Oomittuk said.

With a warm July wind battering the peninsula, Oomittuk took me on a four-wheeler ride for a glimpse of Point Hope’s past glory. Years ago, elders on the tribal council had picked Oomittuk as a kind of tradition bearer. An amiable fifty-four-year-old with a long wisp of chin hair, he had grown rounder and softer since his own whale-hunting days, when he once helped repel a polar bear nosing into his tent by brandishing a cast-iron skillet. He explained that the lumps in the tundra, visible in all directions, were the husks of prehistoric earthen homes.

Along the coast where people hunt and camp, Oomittuk said, there are haunted places where no one ever stops. (In 1981, the ethnographer Ernest Burch identified four such zones, avoided because of “nonempirical phenomena.”) Explorers and whalers in the nineteenth century described Point Hope as an open graveyard, with skeletal remains arrayed for miles atop funerary racks of bleached whalebones—essential building materials in a land without trees. Episcopal missionaries at Point Hope eventually persuaded villagers to bury the human remains—as many as twelve hundred skulls, according to one account—in a single mass grave, surrounded by a picket fence of repurposed bowhead mandibles. At an abandoned village site nearby, we found a line of weathered-gray bones, staked into the tundra by missionaries a century ago to help converts find their way through the blizzards to church.

We drove to the beach overlooking the Chukchi Sea, where the evidence of erosion was plain. The peninsula used to extend considerably farther out. Prehistoric settlements have eroded away, and artifacts wash up after fall storms. “I love my way of life,” Oomittuk said in a soothing baritone. “My grandfather’s life. The cycle of life. The connection to the land, the sea, the sky.”

Few Americans are as bound to the natural world as the whale hunters of the Arctic, or as keenly affected by the warming atmosphere. Yet few Americans are so immediately dependent on the continued expansion of the fossil-fuel economy that science says is causing the change. The underground igloo where Oomittuk was born, in 1962, had earthen walls braced with wood scraps and whalebone, and a single electric light bulb. Point Hope today is a grid of small but comfortable homes, laid out around a new school and a diesel-fired power plant—everything provided by a regional municipality with eight thousand permanent residents and an annual budget of four hundred million dollars. Oil drilling in the Arctic has paid for nearly all of it, and Oomittuk does not want to go back.

There is a cost, though. Over the horizon from the beach where we stood, Shell Oil had assembled a floating city. The project was opening an entirely new part of the Arctic Ocean to oil drilling. The dangers posed to the Tikigaq hunting culture by a massive spill were never far from Oomittuk’s mind. But he worried, too, about how the village would survive if there was no more oil industry. The trade-offs have racked Alaska’s Inupiat communities. For nearly a decade, Point Hope pressed a lawsuit against the offshore leases, becoming a last stronghold of indigenous opposition. Finally, in the spring of 2015, the village dropped the suit. On the day the thin ice nearly carried Tariek Oviuk out to sea, his whaling captain had been in Houston, meeting with Shell officials.