SLED TRACKS (danish text)

A man need not own more than can fit on a dog sled. But Ivars Silis likes to move, so that there will also be room for you on the load when he looks back over his shoulder at the sled tracks of his life. A terrific zigzag that rings with icicles and flashes of whimsy and happiness.

Silis's memoirs take place in a refugee camp in Amager and a series of cheerful Copenhagen adventures, before the young man with an engineering degree in his pocket flies to Greenland in 1964. After three years as a geophysicist, he gives up the climate tables, loads his sled with a rifle and camera and joins the Inuit bear hunters. It was the start of a long career as a prisoner, photographer and expedition man in arctic regions, but also with detours to warmer continents and to Latvia, where he has his roots.

In this book, we meet some of his friends: big fishers, passionate biologists, daring pilots, cynical editors, crazy billionaires and snorting walruses.

Greenland has been Silis' homeland for half a century, and he has felt the entire dizzying development firsthand. Which path will Greenland choose now that global warming is melting the ice under the polar bear's paws, and the world's largest island has really come under the spotlight of the great powers?

Hardcover, 304 pages