BROUGHTON ISLAND, Canada — There are no factory whistles splitting the air here in Broughton Island, 70 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Indeed, there are no factories at all, no time clocks to punch, no smokestacks silhouetted against the enormous, empty skies of Canada's far north.

The largest "industry" in town is a sewing circle, housed in a one-room, pre-fab building where women fashion hand-made parkas out of the glossy gray pelts of caribou.

Here, about 450 Eskimos--they call themselves Inuit, or "the people"--live by hunting and fishing, much as their ancestors have done for thousands of years. Their language, Inuktitut, fittingly has no word for \o7 contamination. \f7 Fittingly, but perhaps not for much longer.

Broughton Island is the last place on Earth one would associate with chemical hazards. Yet this remote, hardscrabble village is paying the price of the comfortable, industrialized lives lived far away in the south, even many thousands of miles distant. In 1989, the villagers learned that they have higher levels of PCBs in their blood than any known population on Earth, excluding the victims of industrial accidents. Scientists found one Broughton Islander with a PCB intake five times the maximum acceptable dose.

"They said it was dangerous, but how dangerous?" asks Broughton Island Mayor Lootie Toomasie, who has been waiting in vain for an answer to his question. Two years after the researchers brought their bad news to his village and then departed, Toomasie complains that no one has been able to tell him conclusively about the long-term effects of PCBs on his people's health.

The worried villagers of Broughton Island aren't alone in their plight. All across the vast, barren Arctic, scientists are turning up surprising concentrations of pesticides, herbicides and industrial compounds used in the south, some of them banned years ago in Canada and the United States.

The chemicals migrate here on the Earth's long-range air and water currents, some from as far off as Southeast Asia. The laborious process of pinpointing their sources--and eventually putting a stop to their spread--is only now beginning.

In Canada and some of the other countries whose dominion stretches northward toward the Pole, contamination in the Arctic has begun to move from esoteric concern to environmental insult. In Ottawa, the government this year earmarked $87 million for Arctic environmental research and cleanup.