The three of us were peering out of the windshield. "Do you see the trail?" Richard asked. "Is it white?" I asked. "Yes." "Then I see it."

That was a joke, and Nick nearly busted a gut over it. He actually fell off the seat and rolled on the floor, still laughing.

It was funny because we were in an arctic whiteout, and looking into a whiteout is like looking into the inside of a cloud. Everything is - well, white. The air is clear and you could see a truck, or anything that was dark-colored, half a mile away - but there wasn't much dark outside the cab besides a few rocks poking through the snow and occasional patches of ice.

We'd hauled a load of lumber to a mining exploration camp near Meliadine Lake, in Canada's Nunavut Territory, and we were heading back to our own base in the village of Rankin Inlet. There's no road and, because there aren't many landmarks on the arctic tundra, the easy way to get back and forth was by following our own tracks.

Even a GPS won't help in a whiteout because the tundra is covered by low snowdrifts. Most of them are about a foot or so high, and some are higher. The wind packs the drifts solid, and they can bounce even a 30,000-pound Delta3 - like the one we're riding in - around like a rubber ball. There is a trail, because the Delta tows three big loader tires behind it to smooth things out. But still there were a couple of times when all three of us hit the roof of the cab.

A normal truck would not last long in this kind of work, but a Delta is not a normal truck. It's an off-road freight hauler that would not be allowed on any normal road. It's a 6-by-6, about 40 feet long and more than 10 feet wide, with a hinge in the middle so it articulates like a loader.

Power comes from a 318 Detroit two-stroker - the engine that truckers used to call the "screamin' demon" - mounted behind the cab. The transmission is a Clarke power-shift with four speeds forward and reverse and no clutch. Between the differentials and planetary hubs, the final drive ratio is 26:1 and with the demon screaming, the Delta can make about 20 mph.

The tires are 66-by-43, on 25-inch rims, and road clearance is nearly 2 feet. Because it's articulated, we can lock the differentials and the Delta can wriggle like a snake if it gets stuck. We got stuck a couple of times while we were pulling a sled, but we always got out.

The driver was Richard Nattar, 26, and his helper was Nick Tattuinee, 25. They're both Inuit - if they lived in Alaska they would call themselves Eskimo, but the people of the Eastern Arctic don't like that word - and they both live in Rankin Inlet.

That's a village of about 2,300 people on the west shore of Hudson Bay, on Canada's north coast. It's about 200 miles south of the Arctic Circle and maybe 400 miles north of the nearest road that connects to "the outside." There's a railroad to Churchill, Manitoba, about 300 miles to the south, and most of the freight to Rankin Inlet comes by barge, in summer.

A lot of the land around Rankin is swampy. In summer, the only way to move freight inland is by helicopter. But in winter, the swamps and the lakes - and even part of Hudson Bay, which is salt water - freeze solid, and you can go anywhere by snowmobile and sled. You can also get around with a cross-country machine like the Delta, but the sea ice is too rough for any normal truck.

As the tide rises and falls, the ice around the edge of the sea breaks up into a series of ridges that look like miniature mountain ranges. Farther out, a falling tide may drop the ice onto a shoal or boulder that breaks it and forms hummocks that may be about the size of a house.

It's not an easy place to travel, but there's money to be made in the freight business because there is gold - and other minerals - in the area, and some big companies are looking for mines. They dig their test holes in the summer, but they ship their supplies in the winter. Around Rankin Inlet they mostly hire Yvo Airut to haul them.

Yvo is an Inuit who worked in mining and heavy equipment to the south when he was young, and came back to live in Rankin Inlet when he got married. He started out buying and selling fish, then got a snowmobile dealership, and got into heavy equipment about 20 years ago.

Now he has six dump trucks, four Cats, two loaders and a grader, but they're just for summer work around the village. In winter he hauls freight with two Deltas and a Bombardier R12.

The Bombardier is another Canadian machine you won't see in city traffic. It's a half-track with skis on the front, and it was the mainstay of Canada's off-road traffic in the '40s and '50s. It's about the size of a standard American van and doesn't carry much, but it can pull a 4- or 5-ton load on a sled.

If the name "Bombardier" rings a bell, that's probably because the company also invented the Skidoo, which was the first of the light snowmobiles. It also makes jet planes, locomotives, sailboats and things like those.

But the R12 was the core of the business and, even though it's been out of production for nearly 20 years, it's still the most popular light freight hauler in the North. Yvo's is a 1973 model which he bought and rebuilt six years ago.

Yvo's Deltas are recycled too. They have to be, because the new ones sell for about $450,000 each, and Yvo can use them only four or five months of the year. The one he calls "Baby Blue" is a 1973 model that worked on Canada's west coast until someone rolled it down a mountainside about six years ago. A wrecker bought the remains and patched them up, and Yvo bought the machine from him.

Yvo also has a '75 model that he calls "Big Red" and a '78 model called "Turtle" that broke through the ice of Hudson Bay five years ago, and is now parked. Yvo plans to fix the Turtle some day, but for now he needs only the two Deltas.

Just one of them is a lot of machine. Baby Blue has what they call a "seven-passenger" cab, which is a box about 9-by-9 feet and maybe 4 feet high. The driver rides on an air seat in the left front, and the right side of the cab has two three-seater benches, which can fold together into a single double bed. The space behind the driver's seat holds ropes and straps, toolboxes, a tiger torch, spare parts and other necessities.

You can carry about 1,000 pounds of freight on the cab roof and on some jobs they carry a light snowmobile up there, like a lifeboat. Behind the cab is a 5-ton Fassi hydraulic crane, and behind that is an 18-foot flat-deck. Dry weight is about 30,000 pounds, and the official load capacity is 30,000 pounds. But there are no scales on the tundra.

A Delta pulls about as well as a D6 Cat, and Yvo's machines also pull sleds when they have to. I rode to Meliadine Lake with Richard and Nick a half-dozen times. We hauled lumber and bags of the calcium chloride they use to lubricate drills and pulled containers on sleds. On each trip, we ran up the coast of Hudson Bay on the ice, then across an island and inland over frozen lakes and swamps. The camp is about 20 miles from town, and most times we made the run in two or three hours each way.

The ice is mostly smooth, except where the tide has messed things up, but the rows of snowdrifts look almost like waves on a lake. There's open water in the bay a ways out, but we didn't go near it.

Ashore there are some low hills, some rocks, sometimes grass and low bushes poking through the snow. There are no trees because this is a couple of hundred miles north of the tree line.

But at night I always had the feeling that there were trees just beyond the beam of our headlights. By day you can't fool yourself — it's white all the way to the horizon, and if there's anything sticking up it's probably a caribou or a polar bear. But I'm used to trees, and at night I often had the feeling that they must be out there somewhere.

It's cold too - 40-below is average - and there is always a wind. I froze my buns while we were loading and unloading, and Richard and Nick said they felt cold too, but they didn't show it.

Because of the wind the snow is always drifting, and the drifts pack so hard that most places you don't even leave footprints. The snow packs so hard that a traditional "igloo" snow house is made of blocks of snow that modern Inuit cut with a saw.

When the sun is out you can see the snow drifting, and it sometimes looks as though the land is steaming. When the sky clouds over, you get a whiteout. There are no shadows, and you literally can't see the snow you're walking on. It's weird walking in a whiteout because most of the time you're either climbing one side of a snowdrift or going down the other; but you can't see the snow, and you have to feel where to put your feet.

If it's very bad you might have to shut down and wait it out, but usually you can get going again after dark. This trip we didn't have to wait, but we did get lost a couple of times. One time Nick had to get out and search for the trail on foot while we doubled back in our tracks and another time Nick had to lead us on foot, feeling for the trail with his feet and sometimes digging for it with his hands.

That's not an easy job in the cold with the wind howling, but Nick doesn't seem to mind. Like most Inuit he's tough as nails, does not mind the cold and has a good sense of humor. I like a man who laughs at a joke - especially when he laughs at my joke.