Overcoming Adversity

[Dusen]

The Inuit traveled lightly on the land and no better story exemplifies that than an anecdote I secured from a man named Orliac, a village elder from a place called Arctic Bay, whom I went narwhal hunting with several years ago at the very tip of Baffin Island.

He told me the story of his grandfather. During the 1950s, in order to establish Canadian sovereignty over an archipelago that could easily have gone back to the British or to another European power, the Canadian government forced the Inuit into settlements. This man's grandfather categorically refused to go. Fearful for his life, the family took away all of his tools and weapons, thinking that would force him into the settlement. Did it? No.

In the middle of an Arctic night, the blackness outside and a blizzard raging, this old man simply stepped outside of the igloo and pulled down his caribou hide trousers and defecated into his hand. As the feces began to freeze he shaped it into the form of a blade. As the knife took shape he put a spray of saliva along the edge to create a sharp edge. Firmly frozen, the shit knife became the implement that allowed him to butcher a dog. He skinned the dog, improvised a harness from the skin and a sled from the ribcage, harnessed up an adjacent dog and disappeared over the ice flows.

Now talk about getting by with nothing.

[Dusen]

I wish I had a Shit-Knife.

What a wicked weapon.

[JD]

shit knife huh? KEWL!

[Jakke PNG]

I like pie