Hunting Superstar

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Near Clyde River, Nunavut

Weather: … freaking cold!!

For the rest of the afternoon, we travelled all across the frozen sea ice looking for seals.

Seals live under the ice in winter. When sea ice is forming, they take turns swimming to the surface so they punch through the icy crust and create breathing holes.

In order to catch a seal, hunters have to find these breathing holes. Once they’ve noticed one, the stand there and wait…. and wait…. and wait… hoping a seal will come up for air so they can catch it.

At one point this afternoon, Elijah jumped off a moving snowmobile, dropped to his knees and pushed his face into the snow. He brushed the snow with his mittens, and sure enough, there was a breathing hole.

I still have no idea how, from a moving snowmobile, in the middle of nowhere, with white stretching on as far as the eye can see, hunters like Elijah are able to detect something like that.

I ask him later but he just starts laughing. “How can you not notice,” he said giving me a playful punch in the shoulder.

In any case, watching how Elijah and the other hunters work together has been one of the highlights of this trip for me. It’s also been a lot of fun. Elijah is a real jokester and is constantly teasing the other hunters … and me.

Near the end of the day, he came over and asked me how I was doing.

“Amazing,” I said. Maurice, another hunter, translated my answer into Inuktitut for Elijah.

“Good!” Elijah said in English.

Then he grabbed a pen out of my pocket and scribbled his name on my parka in syllabics, the alphabet used to write Inuktitut in the this part of Nunavut. Elijah couldn’t remember how to write his name in the Latin alphabet so he asks one of the younger hunters to help him write the name in English too.

“There,” he said. “Now you can tell people back in Montreal how great it is to hunt with Elijah Palituk!”

Him and the other hunters burst out laughing.