I was in a hurry one day to get to the door, while living in Tuktoyaktuk for 15 months, slid in some half-melted snow in the porch and slammed my little toe into a wooden platform that held our boots. It was very swollen and I think I broke it. The next day I had plans to go on a week long hunting trip with my Inuit friend Emmanuel. He came by to pick me up in the morning and I limped along with him to his boat, wearing an oversized boot. We traveled along the coast of the Arctic Ocean for about eight kilometers and set up camp on a small peninsula. Emanuel set up his traditional cotton duck tent with driftwood poles and I set up my geodesic expedition tent. When we were done he came by and smirked and shook his head, making some remark about my stupid white man tent.
We had a quick lunch and then headed out by boat again. He wanted to kill a few seals to feed his dog team. We came across a few ducks and I shot one, planning to make a curried duck soup that night back in camp. As we came near the duck, floating in the water, he suddenly turned the boat around and opened the throttle. "What are you doing?" I demanded. "We never picked up my duck." He told me a storm was coming in and that we must head back to land immediately or we would be in serious trouble. I looked at the sky and back at him. Everything looked fine to me and I shook my head, puzzled. Within minutes, our tiny aluminum boat was bouncing up and down in high breakers and I was frantically bailing with a large coffee can. We made it safely to shore, but nowhere near our camp. We began walking across the rough tundra, and came upon a camp of tents. Within minutes we were warm and hung up our soaked parkas to dry. Six or seven hours passed and as suddenly as it had come, the storm left. I thought we would now take the boat back to camp. Our boat had vanished in the storm, floating somewhere in the ocean. Emmanuel told me that the peninsula would be inaccessible until the waters went down, so we would have to hike back the eight kilometers to town. Needless to say, it was an excruciating ordeal with my damaged toe. Three days later we were ready to hike back to camp. A friend had come across his boat and had tied it up near our camp.
I hobbled across the eight kilometers of very rough tundra back to camp. To Emmanuel's dismay, his tent had blown down and the contents were spread across the peninsula, some items were floating in the ocean nearby and some gear and supplies had been swallowed up by the storm entirely. I was delighted that my expedition tent had lived up to the brochure's claims of extreme weather resistance. I zipped open the front door and crawled inside. My sleeping bag was perfectly dry. My food was still in the bag, completely dry. "So how's your tent?" Emmanuel snorted. "Oh, just fine," I grinned. "Would you like a cup of tea and some lunch? He took a seat on my dry sleeping bag and Thermarest mattress." As he took a sip of the warm tea, comfortably seated on my dry camp bed I inquired with a wink, "Stupid white man tent, eh?"