In the Empire of Ice by Gretel Ehrlich Page A

as gifts to the people.
    Finally, this extraordinary story told to Joe by his father: “When the whaling people came to Wales, they were bartering with us. The captain was kind of pompous and had a new flintlock pistol that he was showing to the people. They had never seen a gun. He guessed we were warlike, and he was right. We didn’t want outsiders to come and tell us how to live.
    “The captain looked at the Inuks who were greeting him and picked out one guy, brought him up on deck, and said, ‘We come from a place with lots of power. See that seagull up there?’ He pointed the pistol at the bird and shot, and the seagull fell out of the sky.
    “The Inuk watched but didn’t say a word. Instead, he took out his knife and started sawing around his own neck. He pulled his hair up and cut off his own head. Holding it in his hand, he climbed down the rope ladder, dipped the stem of his neck into the sea, climbed back up, lifted his head onto his neck root, rubbed around on his neck with his hand, and healed the wound. Then he said, ‘OK. I saw what you can do. Now you’ve seen what we can do,’ and walked away.”
     
    WHEN THE WIND CALMS, Joe and I walk. “My name, Senungetuk, is really spelled Sinanituq. It means ‘a person who likes to follow the shore.’ My Inupiat name is Inusunaaq —‘one who would like to live longest.’ Maybe you could say that I am a long-lived shore-walker.”
    Across the half frozen lagoon, over the wooden bridge and the Village River that divides the settlement in half, we walk toward the Old Lady of the Mountain in the distance. Most of the buildings are new: a high school, a store, and houses built so close to the water that they are now exposed to the ravages of erosion. Joe is pacing in front of three old houses. They are boarded up and splintered by cold and wind. He’s trying to remember which one was his but is having difficulty.
    A man from St. Lawrence Island described his house: “Summertime we live in just the frame covered with walrus skin. Then, when cold weather come, move into what you call ‘in-the-ground house.’ Three sides place for sleep and one above, just something like a shelf. Then what you call an entrance, way to go in, kind of a narrow hole toward the sea, and build an extra frame of wood and cover on top, cover with sod. Leave just a little hole on the corner for come out, go in. Then we stay there until the month of, sometime January, February. Come out after that.”
    When Joe was born in the 1940s, his family no longer lived in a sod house but in what they called a lumber house. “There were five of us children and two adults living in a house with a single main room 10 by 14 plus two storage rooms tacked on in the front. Lumber was scavenged from the beach. There was a woodstove and a shelf or two for drying mittens and mukluks. The bunk bed where my sister, brothers, and I slept was four feet wide and five feet long. One bed accommodated all five children: three above and two below.”
    In Wales there were four, sometimes five winter qasiit (the plural of qasig)—dance houses. The entry, a long, low passageway, was paved with whale vertebrae, the main room made with whale-rib rafters and roofed with cakes of ice. The room was dark. Six or seven drummers sat on one side beside huge stacks of whale, walrus, and bearded-seal meat, and buckets full of snowballs used to cool children’s faces and to revitalize dried-out drum skins. An elder tended a large seal-oil lamp. The heat was oppressive. Youngsters wore no clothes. Halfway through the six-hour-long ceremony, gifts of seal gut, carved ivory, mukluks, mittens, and trade items were given out. Puppets carved from driftwood provided shadow play. Sometimes a shaman drummed while a masked whaling crew danced, reenacting the hunt. Stickpaths, shaman’s apprentices, were called on for help. A man might be speared, as if he were the whale, and blood was seen pouring from his back, but once the masks