A Lost Knife

Story by Lawrence Millman

Ecologist Aldo Leopold defined wilderness as “an area that possesses no possibility of conveyance by mechanical means.”

Welcome to Mansel Island in Canada’s eastern Hudson Bay, where there are no cars, tundra buggies, ATVs, SUVs, motorcycles, or airplanes, all of which are mechanical conveyances. As my Inuit guide Jake and I explored this large, uninhabited chunk of limestone, I was obliged to use my feet, the very best conveyance of all.

It was a raw, gray day with drizzle and a leaden rack of clouds. At one point, we discovered an old Inuit burial cairn on a hillock. The cairn had a hole on top, so I peered inside and saw a well-preserved skeleton curled into a fetal position, suggesting the inhabitant of the cairn had lived in the late Thule Period (maybe 400 years ago). Inuit from that era believed their dead should exit the world in precisely the same posture as they had entered it.

I took my knife and gently turned the bleached skull until it faced me. The condition of the teeth would tell me whether it had belonged to a male or female. If it had belonged to a woman, the teeth would be worn down from chewing skins, but if it had belonged to a man, the teeth would hardly be worn at all. As it happened, the skull turned out to be a man’s.

“I don’t think you should have done that,” Jake said. “That guy could be an angakok (shaman), and he might decide to take revenge on you—maybe stick a knife in your skull.”

“I’ll take my chances,” I replied. Later, when we were nearly a mile away from the cairn, I reached for my knife, but it wasn’t in its case. I looked in my pockets. Empty. I investigated the mesh flaps and pockets on the outer shell of my rucksack. It wasn’t there, either. Would I soon become insensible? For there’s an old saying in the Canadian outback that “A knifeless man is a lifeless man.”

“Maybe you left it at the cairn,” Jake said. So we walked back to the cairn, and I looked around but still couldn’t seem to find it.

All at once, I saw an arctic fox standing next to the cairn gazing at me with what seemed to be a wry grin. This seemed somewhat odd, since arctic foxes are seldom this fearless with respect to my species, especially so in the North, where they’re commonly trapped for their fur.

Blue Fox on St. Paul Island

Photo by Ryan Mong/USFWS

Occasionally, a fox will emit a high-pitched barking sound when it sees a person, then beat a hasty retreat. Once in a while, it will retreat a short distance, then peer quizzically at that person from behind a boulder. But this one uttered not a sound, nor did it withdraw.

Witnessing the fox standing fearlessly about ten feet away from us, Jake proclaimed: “That proves it. The person in the grave is an angakok, and he’s taken on the form of an akunnatuq (fox). He’s telling you, “I’ve stolen your knife, so you’ll never touch my skull with it again.”

However long I looked, I couldn’t locate the knife. Finally, I realized I had no choice but to conclude that the shamanic fox had indeed stolen it.

The Last Speaker of Bear

Lawrence Millman’s new book, The Last Speaker of Bear, is classic Millman: by turns respectful and irreverent, profound and whimsical, often funny, and always wildly entertaining. A collection of vignettes (several first published in Adventures Northwest) chronicling his many years of travels in the far north, this is not an adventure tale, nor does it possess a narrative flow. But it is rich with finely-wrought details of an arctic that most of us will never know, portraits of the indigenous people who have preserved ancient wisdom, (and suffered mightily), and, of course, Millman’s one-of-a-kind persona.