Down the Primrose Path: Scribbles and Such (primrose) wrote in axial_tilt, @ 2008-03-15 20:23:00 |
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Current mood: | sleepy |
Title: Qilalugaq Tugaalik, or The Unicorn
Author name: primrose (primroseburrows over at LJ)
Fandom: due South
Characters/Pairing: Fraser gen
Rating: PG at most
Word Count: 1673
Warnings: none
Written for starfishchick
Summary: Fraser was eleven when he saw his first unicorn.
Author note: The Inuit story at the beginning is a retelling of a traditional tale, various versions of which are available around the web. Since it's traditional, there's no single author to credit, so I'll thank the Inuit as a people for having such an awesome oral history.
There once was a boy who lived with his stepmother and sister in a small hut by a lake. Although blind from birth, he was strong and bright, and so learned to hunt and trap by using his other four senses. His stepmother hated him for his blindness, even when his hunting brought plenty of food. One day a polar bear attacked the hut. The boy killed him with an arrow and saved his family. The stepmother lied and told the boy that he had killed a dog and not a bear. She fed him dog meat for dinner while she and her stepdaughter feasted on bear. His sister felt guilty and gave him some bear meat when the stepmother was asleep.
In the summer the boy was playing by the shore when suddenly he was picked up by Qaqsauq, the red-throated loon, and taken to the bottom of the lake. The lake water was so clear that it washed the blindness from his eyes. The boy thanked Qaqsauq for his kindness. Qaqsauq warned him not to tell his stepmother what happened.
The next day the boy went with his family to their summer camp by the ocean. The stepmother noticed a small whale not far offshore and told the boy to kill it. She planned to tell the boy he missed and keep the whale for herself. Still believing him to be blind, she told him where to aim and tied a rope around her waist as a brace for the harpoon. The boy then threw the harpoon as hard as he could, aiming at a much larger whale he had spotted farther away. The wounded whale's thrashing and pulling dragged the stepmother out to sea. Soon her long hair caught on the harpoon and twisted into a long horn projecting from her head. Her body and the whale's merged together. This is how qilalugaq tugaalik came to be.
The boy and sister went on to have more adventures and were happy, for a time.
I was eleven when I saw my first unicorn.
For my birthday I had been sent a pair of binoculars by my great aunt Lucie, (who became something of a family legend after leaving the Territories at nineteen to join a travelling Shakespeare company, much to my grandmother's continuing embarrassment), along with a homemade card that read:
My Dear Benton,
It's never too early to start exploring the world around you. It is my hope that this small gift might make the journey even more exciting.
Adventure awaits!
Much love,
Lucie
P.S. Thank you for your lovely letter. So many questions! Expect a lengthy reply post-haste. And never stop questioning, lovey, because that's how you get answers.
P.P.S. Tell that bull-headed sister of mine that I love her and wouldn't mind a bit if she dropped me a line now and again.
Out of respect for my grandmother I never mentioned the last line; however I did leave the letter on the mail table for several days in case she wanted to read it. The binoculars took up residence in my knapsack.
At midsummer my grandparents were asked to speak at a week-long educator's conference in Yellowknife. My father was unavailable, so until they returned (a total of nine days, including travelling time) I would be staying with Eugene and Annie Panikpak and their children, Innusiq and June. To say I was amenable to the idea is an understatement. I had been friends with Innusiq and his sister for some time and often spent weekends at their home; their parents knew me well. Having lived among the Inuit all my life, I was as comfortable with their language and way of life as I was with my own--in some ways even moreso. I was drawn to the boisterous, sometimes chaotic nature of the Panikpaks' daily life, a sharp contrast to the structure and introspective quiet of my own (Although very different culturally, Ray Vecchio's family has often brought back fond memories of my visits with the Panikpaks).
A large portion of my visit was spent outdoors, exploring or fishing with Innusiq (and sometimes June as well). If the wind wasn't too strong we'd build a fire on the beach in the evening and tell stories, either ones we'd heard or ones we invented on the spot (we discovered that fireside storytelling isn't quite as dramatic when the sun doesn't set, but be that as it may). On one occasion we were accompanied by several members of Innusiq's large extended family. Some of the tales told on that occasion are ones I remember even now.
On the final evening of my visit we made one last fire. Neither of us felt much like storytelling; it seemed as if we were all talked out. It was enough to sit quietly and listen to the sea and the shorebirds, to become caught up in the sounds of another arctic summer all around us.
"Benton, look!"
I jerked my head up, startled. My friend was standing at the water's edge, his outstretched arm pointing toward the sea. Curious, I stood and ran to join him, focusing on a spot some distance from shore where I could see something moving, although at this distance I was unable to distinguish what it was. I was positive, however, that Innusiq was familiar with whatever it was.
"What is it?" I asked.
"Qilalugaq tugaalik. They don't usually come in this far. Sometimes they will in summer, though, when the ice opens up."
Qilalugaq tugaalik.
In eleven years of living (which by my estimation was quite a long time) I had come face to face with most of the animals who make their home at the top of the world; on occasion I thought I might have seen them all. I had forgotten about this one.
Innusiq tugged at my sleeve. "Look, Benton, look! They're closer, now, see?"
But I didn't see, not even when I squinted, and if they didn't move even closer I might never see, unless I somehow managed to develop superhuman vision within the next few minutes.
Except, wait. I already had it. How could I be so stupid?
"I'll be right back," I said, and sprinted back up the beach to the firepit. Reaching blindly into my knapsack I yanked my binoculars out by their strap, spilling half the contents of the knapsack in the process. I made the error of dashing back to the shore with the binoculars already raised to my eyes. If Innusiq hadn't grabbed my arm I would have toppled headlong into the water, breaking my binoculars and quite possibly putting an eye out.
There were three of them. I had never seen one, but I knew from descriptions that they must be a male and two females. Keeping close together, the creatures lazily pushed through the water. The male was at least fifteen feet long and bulky, larger than the females by a considerable amount. Not counting, of course, the distinguishing spiral tusk that extended some ten feet from the left side of his jaw. It resembled nothing less than jouster's lance, or the horn of the unicorn whose myths were so much entwined with its own.
Despite the animals' close proximity to one another, not once did the male's tusk even come close to piercing the skin of one either the females. They moved gracefully in the water, almost as if they were dancing. I watched for a while, then offered the binoculars to Innusiq, mentally kicking myself for forgetting my manners. He looked through them for less than a minute before shrugging and passing them back to me. We watched until the animals had moved past the headland and out of sight.
We went back to the fire pit, smiling at each other as if sharing a secret
"Hey," I said as I tried to restore my poor knapsack to some sort of order. "Now I guess I can tell everyone I've seen a unicorn."
"You could, but your grandmother would get mad."
"Why would she? It's no more of a lie than any story your family tells."
I waited while Innusiq thought about that. To someone who didn't know him, it looked like he had decided not to discuss the matter any further. I knew better.
Finally, he nodded and said simply, "True, but she doesn't like our stories, either, unless they're written down."
He was right. To my grandmother, stories belonged in books, to be read by people who knew they were stories. Myths and legends presented as if they were historical fact were misrepresentations of history, and as far as she was concerned might as well have been outright lies. According to her worldview, to seek insight in myth was all well and good, as long as such tales weren't being passed off as truth (parenthetically, my grandfather who was usually far less stringent about such things, in this particular case chose to avoid the matter entirely, and when the subject came up would coincidentally discover something essential needing his attention in the barn).
And in fact, the narwhal (called qilalugaq tugaalik in Inuktitut) is not a unicorn at all, but a cetacean of the species Monodon monoceros, closely related to the beluga whale. The close association with unicorns comes from medieval Europeans who believed that narwhal tusks were actually the horns of a unicorn (a belief perpetuated by unscrupulous northern traders who were making a small fortune selling them). In drawings of the period, the unicorn's horn very often resembled a narwhal's tusk.
Nonetheless, when my grandparents came to fetch me I did get some amusement from announcing quite solemnly that I had indeed seen a unicorn. My grandmother, unsurprisingly, was less than amused. However, the expression on her face (not to mention the one my grandfather was trying desperately to keep from showing on his) was more than worth the stern lecture and extra writing assignment, as was the return letter from Aunt Lucie when I wrote her about it.