For at least half a millennium, David's people lived off the land…hunting and fishing near the northern tip of what we now call Labrador.

May 22, 1999: the Victoria Day weekend's sweet Saturday. All across Canada barbecues are rolled onto decks, sleeves hiked up, bodies draped in lawn chairs with cold beers. In Nain, Labrador (a town where you can't buy a beer until the ice breaks up and the summer boat pulls in), the last caribou have passed through town, the migrating Canada Geese have just arrived, and 17-year-old David Merkuratsuk is "going off" to find some. I'll follow him for 13 hours across melting ocean ice-this Inuk who has not only survived the staggering despair of his community, but who remains utterly at home in his place and in the world.

We pull kamiks on our feet and set off early, sun streaming over blinding ice. "Can't wait to go to St. John's, eh?" David graduates in a few weeks and heads to Memorial University in the fall. One of a handful of graduates in this town of 1,200, he'll live "south" for the first time. He'll experience the warmest winter of his life, along with such exotics as a bus ride, a laundromat, a cinema, a bowling alley, city streets full of faces he's never seen. "Can't wait!"

For at least half a millennium, David's people lived off the land, moving between summer and winter camps, hunting and fishing near the northern tip of what we now call Labrador. The 19th-century settlements at Okak and Hebron rose and fell as Moravian missionaries came and, in the 1950s, went. As part of a bungled government relocation project, a handful of Merkuratsuks-including David's father-were pushed south and ended up in Nain, a town that is locked in eight months of the year by the frozen Labrador Sea.

As David and I walk out of town, this hard history is strung along the road: the Moravian Church; the Labrador Inuit Association; the Voisey's Bay Nickel Company; the government store; Jenkin's Take-Out, where you can pick up a caribou burger and a Pepsi-whole worlds crashed together. Not everyone survives a pile-up. Sometimes you see people in pain, bodies stumbling in the street. And sometimes, for who knows what reason, there are those who seem to walk away unscathed.

David, wading through an icy spring stream, is one of these. He disappears below the treeline into the woods and I clumsily plunge after him. I find him pushing a branch into deep drifts, looking for the entrance to a bear den he found last fall.

"So, uh, where was the hole?" He points the stick two inches from my left boot. I jump back while he pokes the snow, quiet and alert in a way you could mistake for absentmindedness, his sharp, shiny, hunter eyes darting over my shoulder.

"Bear!" he shouts, "Go!" and I'm running blindly, sinking and falling in thigh-deep snow, hearing nothing but my own blood thrumming in my ears and a distant...giggling? 

To an outsider like myself, in a town where I have no place to be, his gentle goofiness is a gift. I can't trace the source. The youngest of nine children, David lost his mother when he was 12. Many of those closest to him have struggled through Nain's particular brand of despair. This, too, is part of his story: his proximity to violence, alcoholism, early death, a chaos he tries to steer away from.

In winter and spring he "goes off" when he can get away from high school and a part-time job at Dawe's corner store. Alone or with friends, he'll walk for days after caribou, seals, ducks, eggs, char. Summers pull him back to the Hebron and Saglek coasts, fishing the home waters of his ancestors.

Juggling town and land like this can split a person in half. Everyone here knows Nainimiut who seem almost two people, so different leading a fishing trip up a frozen river than when they are stuck in town on an angry Friday night.

Even for David, there are two photographs. In the first, his gun is slung over a shoulder in some wild place, his back draped with dead ducks, the hint of a grin. In the second, he's tucked inside a black suit borrowed for his high school graduation. His comfort with both worlds, and the ease with which he moves between them, almost vapourizes the gap, repairing something deeply broken; small wonder Inuit place so much hope in their young.

Hope, at the moment, is munching his way through a tin of Vienna sausages and sipping on a can of Orange Crush. No sign of geese yet. "Gee, wish my Ski-Doo wasn't broken…" We sit on an icy rock near Blowhole, a deep pond at the bottom of a narrow valley. Wrapped in layers of wool, my legs throb after the trek out of town, past the dam and Anainaks' pond, up and over a low mountain before wading through deep snow to the valley floor. Rock and snow and stubby spruce, endless horizons of mountains-it all looks the same to me. But David knows the shape of this place, the curves of its pre-Cambrian stone, sees paths in blank unbroken snow, and finds a way through.

Today the search is for geese and he's alert to any flying thing. When a flock finally passes overhead and settles on the far shore, he's on his belly, aiming at what look to me like distant blobs, like sunspots. Seconds pass. Minutes. The wind picks up and dies. My toes go numb. "Too far," he sighs, lowering the gun in disappointment.

Four months later he'll write home about the strange St. John's parks with their fat, sitting ducks that can't be shot.  His first year at university is, in many ways, typical: he goes to classes, gets annoyed with roommates, gets homesick. He finds a cliff and piles stones in the shape of a human. "I made an inukshuk on the side of Signal Hill on Friday, looks really nice, hope it's still standing."

By the end of the year he aches for Nain. "It's getting harder every day," he writes. "There's always a reason to think you want to stay here... should I hang around with friends here as much as possible, or just act like I wanna go home?" 

After eight months away, his last days in St. John's are excruciatingly slow. "Just six more sleeps to go," he writes in mid-April, "and I can't wait. I'll be home 7:30 in the morning and gone to the gas station first thing when it opens, and gone off by the afternoon."

But the Nain David returns to in the spring of 2000 is even more changed than himself, devastated by a stream of suicides, most of them young people his own age. "I've learned something that I can't explain. I've been talking with friends, and I learned how they reacted to problems they went through, and solved them by being closer to people, and I'm gonna try that…" He'll spend more time with his nieces and nephews, he says, "and make them appreciate life and not alcohol and family problems."

After all his anticipation, what was it like, going back after life in the city? "Quiet," says David. "Boring. But good, too-knowing where I am, knowing where I'm going."

This summer he'll fish up north or take an office job in town. At last word he was doing both. That slippery contradiction is pure David, like the call to say that he has a Hotmail address. "Funny," he says, and you can hear his grin sliding open, slowly, down the phone, "hardly any Merkuratsuks there at all."