Never underestimate the persuasive power of an Inuit story.


Where I come from, the challenges are quite different. There are no drug dealers, or pimps, few thieves to bother with; there's only the environment, and surviving in the face of it is the challenge of the Inuit. A mother gives birth somewhere out on a glacial field, hundredths of miles from the nearest outpost; and she knows that the odds are stacked against her son even living to see the spring disease or lack of food, the elements. And even if they should survive, and if he should grow to be a boy, she knows very well that all he need to do is lose his footing on the smooth surface of a glacier and that will be that. In other words, she should know that her son can not live. So, why should she try? Well, I know this woman. I helped her deliver her son. She was weak and undernourished. But, the next morning she stood up and she picked her child up into her arms, and she set out again into the blinding snow, and I think that is the most single most courageous act I've ever seen.

According to the textbooks a wolf is a hunter an animal of prey. But the Inuit, the people of the north, they take a different view of it. They have their own idea of why the wolf was created. In the beginning, so goes the legend says, there was a man and a woman, nothing else on the Earth walked or swam or flew. And so the woman dug a big hole in the ground and she started fishing in it. And she pulled out all of the animals. The last animal she pulled out was the caribou And so the woman set the caribou free and ordered it to multiply. And soon the land was full of them. And the people lived well and they were happy. But the hunters, the hunters only killed those caribou that were big and strong. And soon all that was left were the weak and the sick. And the people began to starve. And so the woman had to make magic again, and this time she called Amorak, the spirit of the wolf, to winnow out the weak and the sick, so that the herd would once again be strong. The people realized that the caribou and the wolf were one, for although the caribou feeds the wolf, it is the wolf that keeps the caribou strong.


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