Ilatsiak - 2

Ilatsiak did nothing. In fact, things returned to the way they had been before the visitors, before Aupaluk and his family had departed. Just as people began to think about not going at all, old Ilatsiak announced he would call up his favourite spirit. He needed to talk with him. Several of the younger men prepared a special snowhouse out farther on the ice and sealed the old man inside. He sat there on his flooring of caribou skins and waited for his spirit to come to him.
The arctic sun had been down several hours when suddenly, as if transformed into a younger more vigerous man, Ilatsiak burst through the snowhouse walls and ran screaming towards the village. “We leave, we leave, quickly, we must leave at once! Aupaluk needs us, he is in trouble!”
The camp was suddenly transformed. Everyone hurriedly loaded the sleds. People laughed and joked and bumped into each other in their haste to depart. As the loads were tightened on the sleds, lashing made firm, children sought likely spots to ride only to be brushed off by their parents who along with the dogs would have to pull the burdens through the softening snow. It was a joke everyone played each time they travelled, but they never tired of playing it.
After only an hour on the trail down the bay and northward up the west side of Bathurst Inlet, they stopped. It was time to eat and drink and sleep. The rush was over. Everyone knew where they were going and it was exciting again.
It was over two weeks before they received news of Aupaluk. Coming upon fresh sled tracks, the band of Inuit followed them westward until they came upon a small village of perhaps a dozen snow houses. Aupaluk and his family were among them. They had been here a week. Yes they had had some bad luck hunting, but the people of the makeshift village, some of whom were related to his wife had managed to help them. Now many of them were planning to go to see the white trader as well.
As the conditions were now ideal for hunting seals on the ice, the young men of Ilatsiak’s camp decided to hunt rather than travel. This they did with success for several days, but finally, well supplied with meat, a large group began gathering their things once again and moving west.
It would take the rest of the month to reach Bernard Harbour and the white trader’s small house. The pattern of moving, stopping a new snow-house village and hunting for seals on the ice repeated itself along the way. Two small ships lay frozen in the bay. One belonged to Captain Klengenberg, the other to some scientists spending the winter in the area. Ilatsiak saw the ships and small as they were, he immediately recognized them. He knew ships, his ancient memory told him. He knew ships, bigger ships than these ones. As the days passed and he looked at the two ships frozen in the ice, he knew that he had seen ships like these before. Memories began to come to him in his sleep and when he would drift off during the day sitting, daydreaming outside the newly made snowhouse, basking in the Spring sunshine looking out over the Harbour. Yes, images were coming back to him at last in bigger and bigger bits and pieces. He knew ships, big ships and white people... He was a boy in those days, a boy like his own sons had been. Young and adventurous. But then, how could that be. Perhaps the images were coming from his connections with the spirit world he had so often conjoured up over the years to help his people.
On occasion, the trader would come and visit him. He could speak a different dialect of Inuktitut, but it was possible to catch enough common words to understand each other. The scientist could hardly speak at all, but at least the words he knew were pronounced the same. The trader’s son Patsy was the best. He was the easiest to understand and so it was to him than Ilatsiak talked the most. Ilatsiak used to listen to his father, the old trader and Captain and the scientists talking together in English and that too caused fleeting moments of something which would tingle faint emories in his head. It was as if he could understand. It was like the memory of the ships which he could almost see in the ice and yet not see. How could he see? What ships could he have seen? He was just an old man whose time was nearly done.
There were many thing to be sampled at the traders. There was tea and most amazing of all, there was sugar which tasted of magic it so delighted the tongue. The Inuit visitors, could not believe something could taste so good, but the trader was willing to give out only so much. They had not come prepared to trade. Many people gave away in trade things which they would soon need. Well, they would just make new, as best they could.
The scientists became very interested in Ilatsiak. He thought at first it was because of his age, he being quite a bit older than the others visiting at that time. In fact, it was well known that no one was older than Ilatsiak was. He also was remarkable because of his blading head and white beard, something most of his companions did not have. Their were those who called him Omingmuk because of this beard, but this was seldom done to his face. He was too much respected as an shaman to make an object of familiar talk. The scientists were curious about his shaman role and pleaded with him on several occasions to talk about this role. They seemed hungry to learn from him.
For his part, Ilatsiak preferred to sit and talk with Patsy, the trader’s son. He was full of information. Patsy was also a good listener and slowly over the weeks spent in Bernard Harbour, he began to learn the secret of who Ilatsiak was. It was an amazing tale. So incredible in fact, that he never told anyone until as an old man living far to the east, he was able to make enough connections between Ilatsiak’s story and other stories now almost lost with the elders, that what he had told here in Bernard’s Harbour slowly emerged into the picture of a man who held many secrets and had survived where many had not.