During the past twenty-five years he has been among the two hundred golf players fighting for the last fifty Eurocards. He lives with a ballet dancer who is thirteen years younger than me and who walks around looking at him as if the only thing she lives for is the hope that he will strip the tulle tutu and toe shoes off her.

So my father is a man who possesses everything he can get his hands on. And that's what he thinks he's showing me here on the golf course. That he has everything his heart could desire. Even the beta-blockers, which he's been taking for the past ten years to steady his hands, are largely without side effects.

We walk around the house, along the raked gravel paths; in the summer Sorensen, the gardener, takes a pair of shears to the edges, so you could cut your feet on them if you don't watch out. I'm wearing a sealskin coat over a jumpsuit of embroidered wool with a zipper. Seen from a distance, we are a father and daughter with a plethora of wealth and vitality. On closer examination, we are simply a banal tragedy spread over two generations.

The living room has a floor of bog oak and borders of stainless steel around a wall of glass facing the birdbath and rosebushes and the drop in social status toward Strand Drive. Benja is standing at the fireplace wearing a leotard and woolen socks, stretching the muscles in her feet and ignoring me. She looks pale and lovely and naughty, like an elf maiden turned stripper.

"Brentan," I say.

"I beg your pardon?"

She enunciates every syllable, the way she learned at the Royal Theater school.

"For bad feet, dear. Brentan for fungus between your toes. You can get it without a prescription now."

"It's not fungus," she says coldly. "I don't think people get that until they reach your age."

"Juveniles do too, dear. Especially people who work out a lot. And it spreads to the crotch quite easily."

Snarling, Benja retreats backward into the adjoining chambers. She has an abundance of raw energy, but she had a protected childhood and a skyrocketing career. She hasn't yet experienced the adversity necessary to develop a psyche that can keep fighting back.

Senora Gonzales arranges the tea things on the coffee table, which is a three-inch-thick glass plate on top of a polished marble block.

"It's been a long time, Smilla."

He talks about his new paintings for a while, about the memoirs he's writing, and about what he's practicing on the piano. He's stalling. Preparing himself for the impact from the blow that will come when I state my business, which has nothing to do with him. He's grateful that I let him talk. But in reality neither of us has any illusions. "Tell me about Johannes Loyen," I say.

My father was in his early thirties when he came to Greenland and met my mother.

The Inuit Aisivak told Knud Rasmussen that in the beginning the world was inhabited only by two men, who were both great sorcerers. Since they wanted to multiply, one of them transformed his body in such a way that he could give birth; and then the two of them created many children.

In the 1860s the Greenland catechist Hanseeraq recorded in the diary of the Brethren Congregation, Diarium Friedrichstal, many examples of women who hunted as men did. There are examples in Rink's collection of legends, and in Reports from Greenland. It has certainly never been commonplace, but it has happened. Caused by the excessive number of women, by death and necessity, and by the natural acceptance in Greenland that each of the sexes contains the potential to become its opposite.

As a rule, however, women have then had to dress like men, and they have had to renounce any sort of family life. The collective could tolerate a change in sex, but not a fluid transition state.

It was different with my mother. She laughed and gave birth to her children and gossiped about her friends and cleaned skins like a woman. But she shot and paddled a kayak and dragged meat home like a man.

When she was about twelve years old, she went out on the ice with her father in April, and there he shot at an uuttoq, a seal sunning itself on the ice. He missed. For other men there might be various reasons why they would miss. For my grandfather there was only one. Something irreversible was about to happen. Calcification of the optic nerve. A year later he was totally blind. On that day in April my mother stayed behind while her father walked on to check a long line. There she had time to ponder the various possibilities for her future. Such as the welfare assistance which even today is below subsistence level in Greenland and at that time was a kind of unintentional joke. Or death by starvation, which was not uncommon, or a life of depending on kinfolk who didn't even have enough for themselves.

When the seal popped up again, she shot it.

Before, she had jigged for sea scorpions and Greenland halibut, and hunted for grouse. With this seal she became a hunter.

I think it was rare for her to step outside herself and take an objective look at her role. But it happened once when we were living in tents at the summer encampment near Atikerluk, a mountain that is invaded by auks in the summertime, by so many black, white-breasted birds that only someone who has seen it can fully grasp the vast numbers. They defy measurement.

We had come from the north, where we were fishing for narwhals from small, diesel-powered cutters. One day we caught eight animals. Partly because the ice had trapped them in a restricted area, partly because the three boats lost contact with each other. Eight narwhals are far too much meat, even for dog food. Far too much meat.

One of them was a pregnant female. The nipple is located right above the genital opening. When my mother opened the abdominal cavity with a single cut to remove the intestines, an angel-white, perfectly formed pup two and a half feet long slid out onto the ice.

For close to four hours the hunters stood around in virtual silence, gazing out at the midnight sun, which at that time of year brings perpetual light, and ate mattak, narwhal skin. I couldn't eat a single bite.

One week later we are camping out near the bird mountain, and we haven't eaten for twenty-four hours. The technique is to melt into the landscape, waiting, and take the bird with a large net. On the second try I get three.

They were females, on their way to their young. They nest on ledges on the steep slopes, where the young make an infernal racket. The mothers hide the worms they find in a kind of pouch in their beaks. You kill them by pressing on their heart. I had three birds.

There had been so many before these. So many birds killed, cooked in clay, and eaten; so many that I couldn't remember them all. And yet I suddenly see their eyes as tunnels, at the end of which their young are waiting, and the babies' eyes are in turn tunnels, at the end of which is the narwhal pup, whose gaze in turn leads inward and away. Ever so slowly I turn over the net, and with a great explosion of sound, the birds rise into the air.

My mother is sitting next to me, quite still. And she looks at me as if seeing something for the first time.

I don't know what it was that stopped me. Compassion is not a virtue in the Arctic. It amounts to a kind of insensitivity: a lack of feeling for the animals, the environment, and the nature of necessity.

"Smilla," she says, "I have carried you in amaat." It's the month of May, and her skin has a deep brown sheen, like a dozen layers of varnish. She is wearing gold earrings and a chain with two crosses and an anchor around her neck. Her hair is pulled into a bun at the nape of her neck, and she is big and beautiful. Even now, when I think of her, she is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.

I must have been around five years old. I don't know exactly what she means, but this is the first time I understand that we are of the same sex.