Long ago, in a village in the Far North, there lived a young man named Ivango. He was the oldest of the family and had four brothers and a little sister, eleven or twelve years old.
One clear spring evening, the little girl was playing out on the sand pit with some other children. They were playing “house,” and on the beach near them was the huge skull of a whale.
When they had finished making a toy house out of pieces of driftwood, Ivango’s sister climbed to the top of the whale skull to rest.
No sooner had she sat down, than suddenly the skull began to roll quickly toward the sea. It moved so fast and the child was so frightened that she just held on tight and screamed.
All the little ones ran after her, adding their cries to hers, until the skull plunged into the waves, turned into a whale and, with the little girl still clinging to his back, swam away out of sight on the gray ocean.
The children ran out into the water as far as they could, calling to their little playmate, but soon she was gone from sight. A sad troop of weeping children ran to Ivango’s igloo, to tell him what had happened.
Ivango and his brothers were in despair, for they loved their sister very dearly, as indeed did every one in the village.
That very night in the kasga they held a council as how best to find the little girl and bring her home again.
Ivango called all the shamans or witch-doctors to his house and bade them sing, hoping that they would sing something about his lost sister, and where she had been taken; but each one told him a different tale, so that he soon saw that they knew nothing at all about it. So he sent them all away again.
Now there was one woman among his neighbors, who was very wise, although not a sorceress. This woman could sing about many things that no one else knew, so Ivango sent for her and told her to sing.