By February we had a thin slither of sunlight to marvel at.
 
Dog-training runs were lengthened and payloads increased. I returned from one uneventful run when a hunter just so happened to mention, “Did you realise you were on sea ice with eight bears?” I didn’t because they were miles away. He had the advantage of looking down from a nearby cliff to observe this.
 
Numbers of hunters going out to the ice edge increased. Some days had narwhales breaching. Martin shot a bear between his dogs and his house. It felt like the whole town turned out to watch it being skinned. The bear had been harassing for days and there was a sense of relief. We’re vigilant for polar bears wandering about our houses.  They fear nothing and have a tendency to eat people for food or fun.
 
With light ever increasing by the day, with good visibility and flat ice I can see a good six mile radius to work off my Recta compass or Garmin GPS. If the sun is out I look at my watch and shadow to calculate compass headings.
 
So with several months of conditioning and training my dogs were looking good for a spring season of journeys.

In Ittoqqortoormiit it had been the worst winter in living memory. Storm followed storm, snowfall was over 4 metres dep and some families were dug out and evacuated.

In Greenland the word piteraq describes what science boffins call katabatic, winds of enormous power. High pressure lies over the Greenland Ice Cap all the time. Light winds continually blow outwards and if strong low pressure passes along the coast the huge pressure atmospheric variations triggers this natural wind phenomena.

Wind speeds have been known to top 200 km per hour along our coastline.

Summer grooming had my dogs’ fur get as good as it gets. It was thick, luxurious to the feel and because they were always skilled in getting low into their snow pits out of the way of whatever the Greenland Ice Cap was hurtling our way, my dogs kept warm.

My house was the seventh built here way back in 1923 and this winter I thought about this a lot as the storms battered it. Within those four walls I had the fears I experience sitting out storms in a tent. My house reacted to the violent gusting by creaking when it moved. I felt vulnerable and it made for agitated sleep. I’d boarded up the windows. Sometimes something hit the wooden shutters like a bullet hitting its target. It was a sound that always made me flinch.

At times the only way to feed my dogs was to crawl out on my hands and knees. Once I dared to stand up in a wind so fierce it lifted me off my feet. It was a stupid thing to do because anything airborne would have cut me in half or taken my head off.

My house survived.