 
Family Sewing and Building a Kayak A family was moving north in a sealskin umiak. When the wind and tide caught them between heavy floes of moving ice and crushed their boat, they had to jump onto the ice. When the tide turned, they were carried far out onto Hudson Bay. They had little food and would soon starve. The men went to the edges of the ice floe and waited. A large bearded seal appeared, and one of the hunters harpooned it. Now they had food for themselves and their wives and children, but still they were pushed westward by the wind. The next day, the men harpooned two more bearded seals, which gave them enough skin to cover a kayak. But they had no wood. "We will make a kayak by splitting the seal's bones and bending them, while the women scrape the skins and draw the long sinews out of the seal to sew the boat." "Hurry!" whispered the hunters, "We can hardly see the shore ice now." The women sewed as quickly as they could, and the men tied the seal's two shoulder blades to a harpoon, one on each end. "I'll paddle," said the strongest hunter, "Some woman with a baby can lie on the back of this kayak, and one child can crawl inside." He paddled them onto the main ice that was still connected to the shore, then returned to get the others. All the hunters and their families were saved. This is an Inuit record of an event that is said to have occurred on the east coast of Hudson Bay early in the twentieth century. Legend translated by Joni POV.    |