After the snowbird, comes the whale pt 6, sec 6: ‘The edge of the beach, the Point’s hook – changing as the tide erodes and builds it – is frozen, sealed down, hard to distinguish from the inshore sea ice, the chaos of the inshore rubble. Transitional and scarcely noticed. ‘Am I on the land or sea?’ the hunter asks in crossing. Does it matter? Transformation of environment which scarcely matters.’

Part 6, Sec 4: ‘When the generation of our fathers is still active, we tend to project longevity, even immortality, onto its existence. We imagine it to be an omniscient regime that intensifies the childish sense we have of our own low status. But that experience is illusory. Tulugaq knew, as I did, that Pauyungin’s represented the last cohort to speak Inupiaq with competence and thereby knew things that only the old language could grasp. The language was what enabled the eye and the mind both to see and comprehend the complexity of existence. With the death of the language, the multiple realities residing within that complexity, would become inaccessible.’

Part 6, sec 1: Born in 1884 on the Kobuk River, Bob’s Inupiaq name was Qimiuraq. In the diseases and famines that claimed many in the lower Arctic, Qimiuraq lost his parents, his adoptive grandparents, and in 1893 the boy and his shaman aunt Avagruaq walked north to Tikigaq in search of food and shelter. Stumbling up the beach from Cape Thompson, the two migrants found shelter at Jabbertown, and within a few months they were living as a family with the whaling man from Swansea.

Part 5, section 2: ‘There is, nonetheless, a significant difference between resource utilisation by Natives and Euro-Americans. Native peoples have traditionally shared their territories with co-residential creatures. Native hunters never displaced a prey object. On the contrary, the pursuit of animals is in itself a reason for remaining in home territory. A subsistence dependent Native group will not make its capture and travel off elsewhere. They will remain in order to repeat the experience.’

Part 4, sec 3: ‘The hinterland looks beautiful. I stride forward, in the tutelage of Whitman, to embrace the wholeness. A place in the sunset of two half-defunct traditions. The globe’s circumference girdling my own uncertain stomach. As for the crossroads where I meet Mrs Charlotte, we acknowledge that our paths are culturally coincident but historically, religiously, divided. She’d been present at an early, raw encounter: between ‘savages and Christians’ as some stories had it, interpreting one tale from the vantage of another.’

After the snowbird, comes the whale pt 4, sec 1: Once we had been briefly introduced to one another, Mrs Charlotte launched her monologue. She didn’t wait for me to introduce myself, but diagnosed, with some impatience, my character and attitude to Native business. Impatient, maybe, to off-load the contents of a split mind, as she saw it, to a likely fellow being.

After the snowbird, comes the whale pt 3, sec 2: ‘With Dido interred, to some degree among the fleshpots I’d carried to the care home, I continued to engage with Virgil…Once I’d spent more time in Tikigaq, I started to see this as a part of my training. It was the deep modeling of Virgil’s poetry, its part organic and part artefactual glamour, that translated a notion of the Aeneid’s internality to a version of what Tikigaq earth comprehended. ‘

After the snowbird, comes the whale pt 2, sec 2: ‘A Tikigaq name ties its owner to both past and present. My local name is also a fictional extension, a local self, a mask connecting me to village history. I’m both sceptical and acquiescent. I am and am not Aniqsuayaaq. It doesn’t matter. What I’ve brought to this bedside is a name that’s part of Asatchaq’s experience. My other self has no existence.’