Unlike the Norse, the Inuit represented the climax of thousands of years of cultural development by Arctic peoples learning to master Arctic conditions. So, Greenland has little wood available for building, heating, or illuminating houses during the months of Arctic winter darkness? That was no problem for the Inuit: they built igloos for winter housing out of snow, and they burned whale and seal blubber both for fuel and for lighting lamps. Little wood available to build boats? Again, that was no problem for the Inuit: they stretched sealskins over frameworks to build kayaks, as well as to make their boats called umiaqs big enough to take into unprotected waters for hunting whales.

Despite having read about what exquisite watercraft Inuit kayaks were, and despite having used the modern recreational kayaks now made of plastic and widely available in the First World, I was still astonished when I first saw a traditional Inuit kayak in Greenland. ... Nineteen feel long ... much longer than I had ever imagined, the deck of the slim kayak was packed with ... weaponry: a harpoon shaft, with a spear-thrower extension at the grip end; a separate harpoon head about six inches long, attachable to the shaft by a toggle connection; a dart to throw at birds, with not only an arrow point at the tip but three forward-facing sharp barbs lower on the dart shaft to hit the bird in case the tip just missed; several sealskin bladders to act as drags on harpooned whales or seals; and a lance for delivering the death blow to the harpooned animal. Unlike ... any other watercraft known to me, the kayak was individually tailored to its paddler's size, weight, and arm strength. It was actually "worn" by its owner, and its seat was a sewn garment joined to the owner's parka and guaranteeing a waterproof seal so that ice-cold water splashing over the decks could not wet him. ...

... Not even an Inuit can stab to death at one blow a healthy whale, so the whale hunt began with a hunter harpooning the whale from an umiaq rowed by other men. This is not an easy task ... [--] an untrained man no matter how strong cannot drive a harpoon deeply. Two things made that possible for the Inuit: the harpoon's spear-thrower grip that extended the throwing arc and hence increased the hunter's throwing force and the impact; and ... long practice. For the Inuit ... that practice began already in childhood, resulting in Inuit men developing a condition called hyperextension of the throwing arm: in effect, an additional built-in spear-thrower.

Once the harpoon head became embedded in the whale, the cleverly designed toggle connection released, allowing the hunters to retrieve the harpoon shaft now separated from the harpoon head embedded in the whale. Otherwise, if the harpooner had continued to hold a rope tied to the harpoon head and shaft, the angry whale would have dragged underwater the umiaq and all its Inuit occupants. Left attached to the harpoon head was an air-filled bladder of sealskin, whose bouyancy forced the whale to work harder against the bladder's resistance and to grow tired as it dived. When the whale surfaced to breathe, the Inuit launched another harpoon with yet another bladder attached, to tire the whale even more. Only when the whale had thus become exhausted did the hunters dare bring the umiaq alongside the beast to lance it to death.

Diamond goes on to describe the similarly clever techniques the Inuit used to hunt ringed seals.

I am not a hunter, I'm personally repelled by the idea of killing animals for sport, and I'm the type of over-civilized guy who really doesn't want to know the details about how chickens or cows or pigs are slaughtered to provide food for my table. I even avert my eye from scenes in movies in which fish are cleaned or game is gutted to be cooked.

I admit it, I'm a wuss -- but I'm a meat-eating wuss.

But, as I said, the cleverness of these hunting techniques is so terribly profound that it all but takes my breath away. I can imagine the tens or hundreds of hunters lost to drowning before the toggled harpoon-head was developed, or the numerous whales who outlasted their pursuers and got away before someone came up with the idea of attaching air-filled sealskins to the whales to slow them down and tire them out. It's a whale-hunting system that took many, many years to develop, and which could easily stand for the intelligence and cleverness of humanity in any alien interstellar court of inquiry.

It's one of those things I occasionally come across which really makes me proud to be human -- and I say that in full understanding that what I've described is a technique for systematized killing, killing that is necessary for the survival of a people living in harsh circumstances. (That it really was necessary is one of Diamond's points -- the Norse didn't hunt whales or ringed seals because they couldn't, and their colony ultimately failed.)