Neil Shea was once told there was no such place as the Arctic. This is a vast area, with ‘dozens of languages, dozens of tribes and nations and homelands, all of them scattered across… eight modern states’. There is not one Arctic but many and this remarkable book recounts Shea’s journeys through them.

A writer for the National Geo-graphic, he first visited the region 20 years ago. He recalls with wonder his experiences in Canada’s Admiralty Inlet, watching narwhals in the behaviour known as ‘tusking’. The whales thrust their heads above water and bring their long tusks together. Several would ‘gently collide, tusks held aloft in a kind of slippery Musketeer salute’. As Shea informs us, narwhal tusks were mistaken for the horns of unicorns when seen in the courts of medieval Europe.

On guard: Shea with an arctic wolf

His recent travels begin on Ellesmere Island in the high Arctic and involve encounters with a very different animal. Ellesmere is slightly smaller than Great Britain. Its human population is about 200. 

This leaves plenty of room for the wolves that Shea comes to see. The pack he meets prove unusually tolerant of a human presence. At one point, he is so close to them that he can hear their stomachs rumbling.

In another extraordinary moment, the adult wolves go hunting, leaving Shea, like some strange babysitter, watching over their pups. ‘The pups look at one another, then at me, several rounds of nervous glances.’ Then they begin to howl ‘like the lost children they are’ and continue to do so until their parents return.

From Ellesmere, Shea journeys to King William, another Canadian island, famed for its connection with the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, who stayed for winters here in 1903 and 1904. 

He was searching for the Northwest Passage, the ice-free route across the top of the world of which Europeans had been dreaming for centuries. The Inuit he met called him ‘Amusi with the big nose’, intrigued by this facial characteristic. ‘Amusi’ learned much from the Inuit about survival in extreme conditions, knowledge that served him well in his later, triumphant journey to the South Pole.  

Gjoa Haven, the tiny settlement in which Shea stays during his visit, is named after Amundsen’s ship.

Young Master: An Inuit boy with huskies in Canada

Relic: Shea with the skull and antlers of a reindeer

The Inuit peoples in the Arctic now hunt on snowmobiles and possess mobile phones but their lives are still intertwined with the natural world. Shea witnesses the continuing importance to the inhabitants of the caribou, left (called reindeer in Europe). The Tlicho, a people whose home is in Canada’s Northwest Territories, ‘live at the edge of the greatest wildlife mystery in North America’. All across the top of the continent, caribou numbers are declining and nobody knows why. 

Climate change doesn’t fully explain it. To the Tlicho, the dwindling herds are a matter of great concern. ‘Caribou and people, they always like to see each other,’ an elder named Joe tells Shea.

 Shea is present when a group of Tlicho, after a long search, come across a small herd. ‘I had never seen the Tlicho happier,’ he remarks. Joe raises his arms wide over, fingers splayed, playfully mimicking antlers. They are near enough that they can hear the caribou’s hooves clicking on the ground, ‘a sound like castanets’.

In Alaska, he spends time with another people to whom the caribou is central. The small township in which he stays is home to the Nunamiut, Arctic nomads until as recently as 1950. 

The settlement’s name, Anaktuvuk, translates as ‘place of many caribou droppings’. When Shea visits a chapel in the town, he sees a religious mural unlike any other – an image of Jesus riding through an Arctic landscape on the back of a caribou. 

Christ is wearing caribou-skin pants and parka and holding a qilaun, a traditional drum.

Greenland has been much in the news recently, thanks to Donald Trump’s stated intention of making it American. Shea, on his visit, is intrigued by the long history of the Norse on the world’s largest island.

They arrived in the late tenth century, under the leadership of the Viking Erik the Red. How did they survive? And what happened to them? The Norse settlements lasted until the 15th century, when they disappeared. 

Welcome sight: Shea is present when a group of Tlicho, after a long search, come across a small herd. ‘I had never seen the Tlicho happier.’

After they were gone, the land was left to the Inuit for centuries before the Danish turned up in the 1720s. Shea reports on the latest theory about the Norse collapse.

Surprisingly, it involves walruses and elephants. Historians speculate that trade in walrus tusks with Europe was essential to their economy. In the late Middle Ages, elephant ivory from Africa became more available and slowly the number of ships sailing from Europe to Greenland to trade in walrus tusks declined. 

More and more isolated, the Norse settlements literally died out. 

Shea describes an eerie visit to a ruined cathedral in a place called Hvalsey. Camping amidst its fallen walls, he hears what sounds like a scream. Is someone else or something present? Come morning, he realises that what he heard was a whale in the fjord below the church. Hvalsey, in old Norse, means ‘Whale Island’.

Shea ends his Arctic journeys in Norway, homeland of those historic settlers in Greenland. The town of Kirkenes is only six miles from Russia. 

Frostlines is available now from the Mail Bookshop

Here, he learns of the rising tension as he joins forces with a Russian journalist, exiled in the town, to tour the border. They encounter teenage soldiers stationed at Norwegian checkpoints and learn why even reindeer are unable to cross freely from one country to the other.

Early in his book, Shea quotes the words of the Inuit activist and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Sheila Watt-Cloutier. ‘What is happening today in the Arctic,’ she writes, ‘is the future of the rest of the world.’ 

This thought accompanies him throughout his travels. There can be few better or more enjoyable ways of learning about the many Arctics – their history, peoples, wildlife and possible futures – than reading Frostlines.