T A B L E+T A L K When you're on vacation, do you avoid traditional tourist locations? Take the road less traveled in Table Talk's Wanderlust area R E C E N T L Y Mayan dreaming By Douglas Cruickshank Mind-bending visions in the Yucatan (01/06/98) History and hallucination By Jan Morris Gdánsk stands as a symbol of enduring truth -- and stirring resurrection (01/05/98) Wires and buyers and scares -- oh my! By Don George Some questions about the year in travel (12/24/97) Christmas in Syria By Louis CasaBianca Christmas in Syria: The tale of an unexpected gift (12/23/97) Passages By David Downie "Enchanted Liguria" Mondo pesto: Liguria's green cuisine (12/22/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Wanderlust feature archive - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -		Once you cross the Canadian border, sports start going strange on you. Football has three downs. A town will have a curling club instead of a bowling league. The farther north, the odder it gets. Golf is played on gravel and baseball has two bases. I am 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle, about to watch a sporting event called the Head Pull. It's part of the Baffin Inuit Games, being held in Igloolik, a small town on a small island off the northwest coast of Baffin Island. The Inuit Games are one of six annual Northern Games, held each summer in different regions of the Northwest Territories. (Canada's Eskimos prefer to be called Inuit. "Eskimo" was originally a Cree epithet meaning "eater of raw flesh." The Cree had obviously never tasted caribou sashimi.) The Head Pull is pretty much what it sounds like: big strong men pulling on each other's heads. Two Inuit lie face-to-face on their bellies, heads linked by a loop of canvas cargo webbing. At the signal, they attempt to pull one another, by the head, over the line between them. The Inuit Games guidelines list 12 pulls. Not all of them will be part of the week's events. The Ear Pull, for example, has been omitted owing to health and safety concerns. Ditto the Mouth Pull ("Competitor grabs mouth of opponent ...") and the Ear Lift ("The weight is looped around any ear and the competitor ... walks forward, carrying it with his ear for as far a distance as his ear will allow"). Aside from an occasional tendency toward the gruesome, the main identifying feature of Inuit sport is its compactness. Games are divided as follows: Pulls, pushes, reaches, kicks, twists and rotations. The entire Olympiad could be staged in a large walk-in closet. It's not for want of space. North of the tree line, space is the prevailing -- one might almost say the only -- geographical feature. Baffin is tundra, a scrabbly blanket of moss and shale laid out without a wrinkle. Up here, minute changes of elevation are optimistically dubbed hills. Caribou antlers are nailed up on posts, as though to compensate for the missing trees. (Lest you think it an unalluring locale, imagine a four-hour, 360-degree sunset at midnight.) Inuit Games are compact for the simple reason that they are indoor sports. The Inuit practiced plenty of outdoor athletics -- hunting, sledding, marathon walking -- but this wasn't sport, it was life. The Games were what you did to pass the time when the blizzards hit and you couldn't see to hunt. And igloos were small -- not much larger than the jump circle on a basketball court. That is, in fact, where this week's games are being staged: center court in the Ataguttaaluk School gymnasium. Igloolik has no sports arena or landscaped playing fields. This is less a matter of funding than of geology. North of 60 degrees latitude, the ground is permafrost: rock-hard most of the year, muck the rest of it. Grass won't grow. Buildings have to be set on posts to keep from sinking in the thaw. Architectural diversity is more trouble than it's worth; the town is basically boxes on a flat surface. I saw a picture of it in winter. It looked like inside my freezer. The official motions for quiet. As the crowd numbers fewer than 100, this is not hard to achieve. However, as many are children, it is somewhat hard to maintain. A pair of toddlers are carrying out a competition of their own, the winner being the one who can shriek the loudest while running wind sprints across the gym floor. The athletes barely pay it mind. I remark on this to one of the coaches. "Why would they get mad?" he says. "If something messes you up, oh well. There's other events." Competition runs somewhat counter to the Inuit character. To survive an Arctic winter, communities worked together and everything was shared. A great hunter had no more food than the next guy; he just threw more dinner parties. Why, then, have the games been turned into a competition? Because otherwise there would be no Inuit Games. Left to their own devices, modern Inuit teens prefer to spend their time playing basketball and watching Much TV (Canada's answer to MTV). An impromptu survey of T-shirts and baseball caps in the gym today reveals 17 sports logos and 11 heavy metal bands. This is not to say that the athletes don't care whether they win. The winning team has a chance to compete in the international Arctic Winter Games. Depending on which country is hosting them, this could mean a trip to Russia, Finland, Greenland or Alaska. Down in the ring, the winning head is nodding and grinning. It belongs to a local heart-breaker named Bobby. Someone has written "I love you, Bobby" in ball-point on his arm. Bobby wears a cigarette lighter in a fringed leather pouch around his neck, as though it were an ornament. Given that a pack of Rothmann's costs more than $10, it may well be. N E X T+P A G E+| The Good Woman contest