 along with their own preliminary scans, hunters also frequently benefited from information provided by other hunters already on or returning from the floe-edge through direct contact and radio. Approaching the floe-edge from Button Point (see Figure 2) aided this scanning as Button Point not only provided hunters with shelter if poor or violent weather developed or floe-edge conditions deteriorated, but also allowed an extended view of the floe-edge.
Foraging mode for other species
The hunt for narwhals at the floe-edge represents the most intensive example of the sit-and-wait method employed by Inuit for any species and differs markedly from virtually every other Inuit foraging activity, except for spring and autumn arctic char fishing. For instance, caribou hunting today involves a large component of active search and pursuit. Notably, this is a recent change, as ethnographic studies in the 19th and early 20th century described caribou hunting as a more passive activity in which interception or ambush at water bodies was the dominant hunt form. Other types of Inuit large game hunting, such as polar bear, walrus or large and small whales in certain open-water environments also follow an active foraging mode and pursuit mode in which the active search mode is critical to locating the prey species.
Although, there is an important sit-and-wait foraging component with respect to winter breathing hole sealing, it is still unique from the sit-and-wait mode executed in the floe-edge environment with respect to narwhal. We will discuss both the foraging mode of breathing hole seal hunting and basking seal hunting to elucidate the unique behaviour Inuit currently employ for narwhal in the spring floe-edge season.
A) Breathing hole seal hunting (mauliqpuq)
Mauliqpuq sealing is conducted in virtually every community in Nunavut from the onset of the ocean freezing (for most areas by December) until roughly late May or early June when the snow and ice that cover the seals’ agluit (breathing holes) melt. Thereafter, seals begin to haul out onto the ice surface. Ethnographic accounts of this type of sealing from the last two centuries (Boas 1888; Jenness 1922; Rasmussen 1929, 1931) are notable for their emphasis on the patience of hunters and the extended duration of some hunts, indicating that a hunter might wait up to several hours at an active aglu. Even in the early 1970s, it was recorded that hunters from the village of Arviqtuuq, north of Clyde River on average spent approximately 50 minutes at an aglu (Wenzel 1991). It was not extraordinary for a hunter to wait beyond an hour: the longest wait recorded by Wenzel was 94 minutes.
More recently, Wenzel (1991) has pointed out that the rifle has had a negligible impact in terms of overall efficiency relative to the traditional use of the harpoon. However, this is not to deny that the traditional mode of breathing hole hunting has not undergone modification due to introduced technology. Rather, the search phase of mauliqpuq has been significantly affected by the replacement of the dog team with the snowmobile. Traditionally, once a suitable sealing area was located (in this dogs proved themselves superior to snowmobiles due to their keen sense of smell), there was only a very limited amount of time expended in search and travel between active holes (see Wenzel 1981, 1991). By the mid-1980s, the advent of the snowmobile significantly increased time spent searching and travelling between seal breathing holes. Data recorded by Wenzel (1991) for 14 winter seal hunts at Clyde River indicated that this active search element of such hunts consumed, on average, 30% of total hunt. A hunter would usually wait at a hole for no more than 30 minutes and then return to his snowmobile to search for other breathing holes. This pattern was confirmed in 2000 (Wenzel n.d.b.). Far from the exemplar sit-and-wait foraging that breathing hole hunting once was, hunters now invest more time searching and travelling between holes. Significantly, this means that narwhal hunting at the floe-edge currently repr