WALRUS HUNTING

WALRUS HUNTING

I grew up in Aulatsevik, south of Killinek. There were two families there and other people outside, like my wife's grandmother, her parents and her brothers. We would dig a ditch in the ground, like a sandhouse, and we would fix it up inside with wood to keep the sand and ground from crumbling. Inside the house we used stone lamps, that's how we used to cook. The fuel for those lamps was fat, seal fat, walrus fat or white whale fat.

In the springtime we would walk all the way from Nachvak carrying our belongings on our backs. We would go to Nachvak to buy tobacco, gun powder, gun cleaners and bags.

I don't know when the Inuit got guns first but it was a long time ago. We used harpoons to hunt walrus. My wife's father hunted with us. We made arrows from walrus tusks. There used to be walrus around, occasionally, moving with the currents and tides. Once in a while hunters in kayaks would get a walrus. It happened like this. When a hunter hits the animal the harpoon goes into the flesh, then they would use a seal float with the hair taken off, what we, the Inuit call avataks. There would be three men together to hunt the walrus. There can be a lot of walrus in one place when they are migrating.

We ate char, seal meat, caribou meat, cod and sculpin. We never used any stores. There were none near.

When we went to Killinek we would have to sleep out for two or three nights on the way. It was hard going as the land was rough.

We started moving to Hebron in the 1920's The Spanish influenza that killed so many people in 1918-19 never got up to Aulatsevik.

In the springtime we would walk to find caribou. Even though we had dogs we still walked, just the men going to hunt. We might be gone as long as a month or more looking for caribou. We'd carry the meat back on our backs, in the winter time we used sleds.

When we fished we used fish forks made of wood. Fish to us is cod fish, but in general fish means cod fish, salmon, char and sculpin. The spears were used for the salmon, but we used jiggers for cod, jigger with a stone for a sinker. We never sold any of the fish. All we sold to the stores was fox furs and seal skins.

We would hunt seals on the ice and we would hunt them in kayaks in the springtime. We would get one dollar a skin.

The women made clothing from skins; pants and boots out of seal skin and coats out of caribou hides. We left the hair on the skins for our clothing, only the Innu took the hair off. In the summertime we had parkas made of duck down. I don't know how many ducks it took to make a parkas, but it must have been a lot. They also made parkas from gulls' feathers, they were very puffy, but the duck's down parkas were thinner. A gulls' parka was not very good on windy days because they were so big.

I don't have any stories about myself, but my wife's father was a strong man. It was most surprising that he could haul a walrus up by himself. Walruses are right heavy, eh, takes a lot of men to haul in a walrus, but my wife's father could do it all by himself. That really fascinated me. There was this saying. "A man with a lot of sins wouldn't even be able to even budge a walrus, but a man with a clean soul would be able to do it easily." The old people used to say that.

My wife's father had a gun like the kind they had in World War One, a big gun. Sometimes he'd use that. Other times he'd use his harpoon with special arrow heads. You always hit the walrus where it's soft, right by the lungs.

My wife's grandmother used to make seal skin tents. They never had these canvas tents that people can get in stores now. The seal skin tents would be long and high. I mean, you would have to stand on something to touch the ceiling of the tent. The old people also made kayaks, sewed them. Back when I was a child there were needles in the stores and nails and metal things.

JACKO KAJUATSIAK
1977 - NAIN

THEM DAYS VOL. 23.1