ABSTRACT
For the people who live near or within its boundaries and travel, hunt and fish there, Melville Bay is a place of extraordinary happenings and possibilities that go to make up an astonishing, lively, flourishing world of textural beauty and intricacy. When I first travelled in Melville Bay across the sea ice by dog-sledge during winter, I was told by hunters from Savissivik to listen to the ice breathe and to watch small icebergs closely as they could actually be polar bears (nannut; sing. nanoq) instead, having transformed themselves as they wait for seals or in the hope of deceiving a passing hunter. When I once asked whether polar bears really did transform themselves into small icebergs, I was told that if a polar bear found it difficult to do so, the important thing was that it wanted people and seals to think it had. In the previous chapter, I spent some time discussing boundaries and crossings into ice zones in search of whales and passages to the North Pole, or into places beyond the horizon in which travellers and ethnographers would seek traditional Inuit culture. Similarly, conservationist ideas often lead to the construction of boundaries between human worlds and animal habitats. But what, and where, from an indigenous perspective, are these boundaries in northern Greenland, if they exist at all?
