That first
foray into new territory ended in failure. For reasons of tradition
and necessity, hunters and anglers have always made use of guides.
But the aim of these new recreationalists, Webb discovered,
was to be self-directed, and self-sufficient. “Canoeists,
fine, they’re lovely people,” says Webb. “Cross-country
skiers—we went through five years of that. Met some real
nice people. But they’re all do-it-yourselfers. Their
goddamn fetish is, ‘How can I go as cheap as possible?’
They bring one goddamn bologna sandwich and stay out there for
a week.” And, as Webb found out, folks with the skills
to stay out for a week with one goddamn bologna sandwich don’t
have much need for high-priced guiding.
Webb’s hunting operations,
at least, continued to do a roaring business. In the meantime,
however, the outside world had begun to draw a bead on New Brunswick.
Hydro dams blocked off most of the best salmon streams. Clear-cut
logging mowed down the bush. One year, on the first day of deer
season, Martin brought a hunter to the Webb property on the
Tobique River. He told him to swing away from the river, then
sneak back along a trail through the woods. A short time later
the guy came back. “What woods?” he asked.
“Jesus,” recalls Webb.
“When you came to our [lot] line you could see from there
flippin’ right to the north shore. They’d come in
and clear-cut everything.” It was time, Webb decided,
to go to the North. He was already familiar with the Arctic
thanks to his radioman days, and he’d been to Quebec’s
Ungava in the early 1980s to help set up a hunting camp for
the Cree. So beginning around 1985, Webb began moving his guiding
operations up to what was then called Coppermine (since renamed
Kuglugtuk), a coastal town of about 1,300 Inuit at the northwestern
edge of what is now mainland Nunavut.
There was game aplenty in the
area: Arctic and barren ground caribou, barren ground grizzly
and muskox. But there were also challenges working in the North—distance,
cost and, above all, gaining the cooperation of the local Inuit.
Webb, after all, was not exactly the most skilled of cross-
cultural diplomats, and dealing with Native groups can sometimes
be tricky. In fact, companies that do business in the North
have taken to hiring trained professionals.
Anthropologist Chris Hanks, for
example, is employed full-time by the Ekati diamond mine, just
south of Kuglugtuk, to smooth relations with the local Inuit.
His professional qualifications aside, Hanks says dealing with
the people of Coppermine is not that difficult. “The Inuit
are amazingly forgiving of other people’s foibles,”
he says. Still, while getting things done is straightforward,
it’s not quick. “You’ve got to spend a lot
of time,” says Hanks. “You’ve got to sit down
and talk to people, tell them what you’re interested in,
why you’re there, and then work to see if there are some
synergies.”
The synergies in Webb’s
case were obvious. The Inuit controlled shooting rights to the
local wildlife, and they needed work. Webb could bring in clients
willing to pay thousands for a single barren ground caribou
hunt—the high price simply the result of the high cost
of everything in the North. A black bear hunt in New Brunswick
would cost only a few hundred dollars, for example, whereas
the caribou hunts would run in the thousands.
Even at that price, the hunts
were a success, and business soon expanded to include muskox
and barren ground grizzly. Polar bear hunts, when Webb eventually
got around to setting them up, came in at a whopping U.S.$25,000.
These, too, were soon fully booked, and Webb found himself needing
more guides, Inuit who still knew how to travel on frozen seas
and navigate the seemingly featureless Barrens. 
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