The first day out of Pangnirtung had been just the opposite of the waterfall scenario. On a recent Sunday at dawn it was clear at 30 below zero, revealing a fresh dusting of snow on the mountains across Pangnirtung Fiord. A small knot of onlookers from the village turned out for the team's 10:30 a.m. departure.

Simon Qamanirq, an Inuit team member from Iglulik, had spent much of his time in Pangnirtung rebuilding his sled in the high school shop. Its runners were adorned with the signatures of many students.

The fiord is more than two miles wide at Pangnirtung, and the vast country swallowed up the caravan of dog teams. In the distance, dwarfed by the mountains, they looked like centipedes crawling along the ice. The procession was led by the Inuit teams of Qamanirq, 54, and Lukie Airut, 65, also of Iglulik. Their dogs run in fan-hitch formation, each dog connected by long strands of sealskin to the sled with small rings of caribou antler. Then come the two Minnesota teams of Stetson's dogs, running tandem on their ganglines.

"The pace is intense," Stetson said. "It's the difference between an Outward Bound trip and a professional dogsled expedition."

The day was windless, and the team stopped a couple of times for snacks and hot tea from their Thermoses. The Minnesotans munched energy bars, while the Inuit used snow knives to carve themselves chunks of Arctic char from whole frozen fish. The mushers presented a contradiction in trail clothing as well, the Inuit in their loose-fitting anoraks or parkas, Qamanirq in his caribou pants, the Minnesotans in one-piece insulated suits spangled in red, blue and yellow.

In 15 days on the ice leading to Pangnirtung, the two cultures had already learned from each other, Qamanirq said.

"We learned that computers could function in this kind of climate and that (the dogs) could survive on southern dog food," he said.

But the teams had brought along seals from Pangnirtung to supplement the dog food, and that night in camp each dog got a chunk of it. They pawed and gnawed it until their legs were stained with seal blood.

As the shadows crept up the mountainsides, the four tents were pitched on the ice. They, too, resembled insects, but in larval form. Two people to a tent, a two-burner Coleman in each for heat and cooking. With re-supply at every community along the way, white gas is not a precious commodity.

Steger, his work for the day completed, looked around at the frozen river, the bulwark mountains, the deepening blue sky. The temperature was 17 below zero. The evening was windless. Except for this ephemeral community of dogs and humans, the country was empty for miles and miles.

"It's so nice, it's hard to go inside," Steger said.

Sometime in May, Steger will go back to Minnesota and continue his fight to curb global warming. But his tentmate, Theo Ikummaq, will go back to his home in Iglulik and continue to cope with a changing Arctic.

"We don't know what's to be in 10 years from now," Ikummaq had said in Pangnirtung. "What's our lifestyle to be? We're not certain. We're adapting to change as it comes, which has been the case for 6,000 years. But it hasn't happened this fast in the past."