angered, then there would be no way of knowing what they might do.
The big wooden boat swept into the gorge and was steered into the western channel by the tall man at the stem whose bellowing voice could be heard even above the roar of the waters. From the cliffs high above, my people watched… and did nothing, and the strangers passed on down the River.
As the Innuit began to rise to their feet, one of them yelled, and they all looked where he pointed. Three long, bark canoes had appeared upriver, and this time there was no doubt who came into our lands. They were Itkilit, dressed in scraped hides and wearing the faces of death, and driving their canoes as swiftly as wolves racing after a deer.
There was barely time for my people to snatch up the sharp rocks lying beside them. As the canoes flew past below, they came under a hail of boulders that smashed bark boats and men’s bones. Two of the canoes broke apart like the skulls of rabbits under the blows of an axe.
The River was red that day; but from out of the spray of the gorge, one canoe emerged. The Innuit men ran to the shore, tossed their swift kayaks into the stream and gave chase.
Great falls block the River only a few miles downstream from the gorge, and it was toward the falls that the last canoe, holed by stones and with some of its men wounded, was being driven. When the funnelling current above the falls was reached, the Itkilit saw death ahead and knew death was behind them. At the last moment they turned out of the current and drove their sinking canoe ashore. They leapt up the bank toward a ridge of rocks from whose shelter they hoped to defend themselves from the Innuit.
They did not reach that ridge. It was already held by the iron-clad strangers who had also been warned by the current and by the roar of falling water and had gone to the shore. These strange ones rose up from behind the rocks of the ridge and charged down upon the Itkilit roaring like bears, thrusting with great long knives, and slashing with iron axes. Only a few Itkilit got back to the River. They flung themselves into it and were swept over the falls.
The strangers—they whom we later called Innuhowik, Iron Men—stood watching the kayaks where they hovered in the current. Perhaps my people seemed as terrifying to their eyes as they had seemed to ours, but they were brave. One of them came slowly to the shore carrying no weapon in his hands. At his approach the kayaks nervously moved out of the backwater and away from the land. The yellow-bearded leader of the Innuhowik came to the water’s edge, and my people wondered at his size for he stood a head taller than any of them. They watched as he drew a short knife from his belt and held it out, handle first, toward the kayakers.
It was a man named Kiliktuk who paddled cautiously toward the spot and, reaching out his long, double-bladed paddle, touched the handle of the knife. The stranger smiled and laid the knife on the paddle blade so Kiliktuk could draw it to him without touching shore.
Soon all the kayaks were beached and the men who were my forefathers were crowded around the Innuhowik fingering their tools and weapons. It was clear the strangers were not ill-disposed to the Innuit, so they were brought back to the camp. Far into that night the song-drums sounded while Innuit and Innuhowik sat together by the fires and feasted on caribou meat and fish. It is remembered that the strangers ate like men—like hungry men—and that they looked at our women with the eyes of men.
As to what happened after, the stories speak of many things. They tell especially of the strength of the Innuhowik, and of the wonderful tools and weapons they possessed. These were mostly of iron, which was unknown to the Innuit except as hard, heavy stones which sometimes fell from the skies.
After they had been in the camp for a few days, the Innuhowik began asking questions by means of drawings in the sand, and by signs, and the people
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