Photo by kiliiiyuyan / High above the Arctic Circle on sea ice a mile from shore, an Inupiat subsistence whaling crew watches from a blind for a passing bowhead whale at 2 a.m. The Inupiat, whose culture centers around the gift of the whale, have hunted bowheads here for 2,000 years, but it wasn’t until the arrival of European whalers that the bowhead population went into free fall. Today, after decades of management by Inupiat, the bowhead population has increased to over 17,000, at least twice the number as when counting began in the 1980s. Follow me, kiliiiyuyan, for more of the human relationship to the wild world. #inupiat #alaska