Kak, the Copper Eskimo

by Vilhjalmur Stefansson; Violet Irwin

“I do not want to be your wife! I do not want to stay!” the poor girl cried.

But he would not let her go. So the last of the geese got tired waiting for her and flew away. Then he took her to his house and she became his wife.

Now when the bird-girl had been the hunter’s wife for many months she grew weary of living in the same spot. She longed to fly about in the open sky, to hover and swoop and sail, and most of all to find her lost companions; so she began to look for goose feathers, and when she found any she took them carefully and hid them in her house. Of course her husband knew nothing about this. While he was away hunting she used to work sewing the feathers into a dress. And finally one day, when the dress was finished, she carried it outside and put it on. At once her powerful magic turned her into a goose, and she flew to seaward.

That evening her husband returned joyfully, for he had killed three caribou. He ran calling out the good news to make her happy. But when he came into the house and found it empty and cold, all his gladness turned to bitter grief; he sat down with his face in his hands and cried. And the next morning early he went out and skinned his caribou, brought home the meat, dried it, packed enough to feed him for a long time, and started out to look for his wife.

He walked and walked and walked over the rolling hills, but he never saw anything of her at all. He looked in every pond and lake and wandered by the rivers. When he saw geese black against the sky he would crouch down quickly and call “Lirk-a-lik-lik-lik! Lirk-a-lik-lik-lik!” for that sounds like the goose call, and he hoped she might hear and relent and come back to live with him. But she never came, and he never heard anything of her.

One day the hunter’s travels brought him to a mighty river on the bank of which sat a man making fish, adzing them out of pieces of wood and throwing them into the water. Now this man was called Kayungayuk, and he had a strong magic. You can believe it for the fish he made out of the wood swam away as soon as he threw them into the water.

The hunter, seeing this, thought: “Here is somebody who can help me.” So he approached the stranger and said: “I am a poor man who is looking for his wife.”

But there was no reply.

“Can you help me to find my wife?” he asked.

The man continued cutting his fish out of pieces of wood and naming them as he threw them in the water. “Be a seal,” he commanded a large piece, and the wood turned into a seal and swam off. “Be a walrus,” he said to the next, and it became a walrus. When he took up a handful of chips they turned into salmon. “Be a whale,” he commanded his largest model, and it turned into a whale. He made all the swimming things on the flesh of which men live, and the hunter watched him.