gin 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 represents a more intensive sit-and-wait foraging activity than mauliqpuq and one of the most intensive sit-and-wait foraging behaviours displayed by Pond Inlet Inuit today. It is interesting to note that the advent of the snowmobile led to the shift from a sit-and-wait mode of foraging to an active one in the case of mauliqpuq hunting, but not in the case of narwhal hunting.
B) Basking Seal Hunting (uuttuq)
Uuttuq commences when two changes occur in the North Baffin sea ice environment. The first is that daylight is lengthening and daytime temperatures begin to melt the snow cover. The other is that this warming collapses the ice domes that cover the seals’ agluit, exposing these openings and also widening them. As these conditions begin to be dominant, virtually any bright-hazy and near windless conditions will elicit ringed seals to come out through these exposed breathing holes onto the surface of the ice. Similarly, as pressure and tidal cracks widen, seals will use these openings to gain the ice.
By mid to late May, these physical conditions mitigate an almost complete end to mauliqpuq sealing and a shift to uuttuq. With respect to the amount of active searching as opposed to sit-and-wait foraging involved in modern breathing hole hunting, uuttuq sealing could be perceived as a perfect example of the active mode of foraging; indeed, it is only when a hunter sights a seal that the pace slows.
The most basic element in this mode of foraging, whether done by dog team or snowmobile, is near-constant movement. As seals can be seen at distances up to two kilometres, hunters are always scanning the area around them as they move. Dog team hunters frequently stood on their sleds to gain a better view as the dogs moved along, while snowmobilers will kneel on the seats of their machines as they drive. The only interruption from searching in basking seal hunting is when an animal is spotted and a stalk is begun. When dog teams were in use, the actual approach segment of the hunt required that the hunter dismount and either