"When I was a young man," a fisherman named Ole Qvist tells me, as we speak in Uummannaq, Greenland, "I was a champion dog-sled racer. But now," he sighs, "it takes seven dogs to pull me."

I'm unfamiliar with dogs as a measure of weight, but I gather from the way he palms his belly, mounded like his native Greenland's polar ice cap, that seven dogs indicates a serious body-mass index.