IT TOOK ABOUT 45 MINUTES TO ABSORB the sights of eastern Greenland's grandest city—a concentration of concrete-and-plywood cottages clinging for dear life to hillsides so steep that if you lost your footing, you'd roll into the bay. We visited a staggeringly ample grocery store, which sold, among other things, badminton sets, sewing machines, and 18 kinds of rifle and shotgun. Next to the candy in the checkout lane were hardcore Danish nudie books. We roved the cemetery, where graves were marked with heaps of fake flowers, so violent a breach with the surrounding monochrome as to look like pigments splattered across a black-and-white photograph.

Before the afternoon was out, we were in a hotel, our vacation ebbing away. Despairing that we'd not yet found the proper life-affirming exploit to consecrate another year of cheating death, Dad said, "I wonder if we could bribe somebody to take us along on a hunt. Get the blood flowing." Down at the harbor, we'd seen subsistence hunters hauling in the daily catch of seals, which live here in very healthy numbers.

We asked the hotel bartender if he knew of someone who might let us tag along.

"Sure," he said. "Frederic, my father-in-law. He's old. He's been a hunter all his life."

"How old?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said. "I don't ask him things. I am very afraid of him."

We met Frederic at the public dock. He was a stoic man with a face like a dry creekbed. Though he didn't speak a word of English, Frederic made it clear that, for the privilege of accompanying him, he wanted a hundred bucks, a sum surely higher than the blue-book value of his skiff, a craft of equal parts caulk and old plywood. Dad cheerfully paid up.

Under clouds the color of wet concrete, we chuffed out into the icy rubble of the bay. A frigid hour had passed when my father spotted a dark form gliding out from behind a floe.

"Seal! Seal!" he cried.

"Right there!" I said hysterically, fluttering my hands at the aged hunter, who glanced briefly in the direction we were pointing, then went back to scanning the opposite end of the bay. When our seal revealed itself, it had transformed into somebody's skiff.

"Good thing we don't have guns," Dad observed.

Minutes later, Frederic suddenly went rapt. Fifty yards away, the dark avocado shape of a young seal's head registered above the surface of the water. Frederic squeezed off a shot. I won't go any further into the ensuing hamfisted debacle—possibly brought on by my father's proximity to the event—except to say that, before it was over, Dad winced and turned away, I let out a little shriek, and another hunter went home with our bantam quarry.

We'd clearly misguessed our appetite for bloodletting. There was nothing life-affirming about it. Ten minutes later, Dad spotted a gigantic seal turning idle laps in a lagoon between floes, and we felt only relief when it easily escaped Frederic's fusillade.

We needed a drink.