Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

In the museum cases of the world — Helsinki's Etholén collection, the Smithsonian's Alaskan halls — rest the slender kayaks and carved dishes of the Yup'ik people of the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta; and along the hulls and around the rims of a striking number of them runs a painted creature that no zoology of the region has ever contained: a long low body like a monstrous otter's stretched past reason; jaws like a toothed trap opening the whole length of a narrow head; a ridged back; and — count them, for the painters were consistent — six legs , and within the outlined body, rendered in the Yup'ik art's transparent style that shows the inside of a being along with its outside, three stomachs , drawn as chambers down the body's length, sometimes with the painter's grim wit visible in their contents. This is the palraiyuk, and the elders who explained the paintings to the first collectors explained a creature of the old warm time : in the ancient days, they sa...

Of all the signs a hunter could cut across in the snow country of the Bering coast, the Yup'ik traditions marked one above the rest, and its dread is entirely in its geometry. Wolf tracks — fresh, large, purposeful — crossing the sea ice or the shore snow in a straight line, toward the water : and at the water's edge, at the lip of the lead or the open sea, the tracks end . No turning. No milling. No carcass, no blood, no sign of a swimmer's flailing. A wolf walked to the sea and continued — and where it continued, the tellings say, a black fin rose. That is the akhlut: the being the Yup'ik knew as one hunter in two bodies — on land the great wolf, in the sea the orca — a single continuous appetite that changes its shape at the shoreline the way a traveler changes boots, and hunts on both sides of the line with the same yellow patience. The tracks-to-water sign was read accordingly, and the counsel attached to it was absolute: follow those tracks nowhere; camp nowher...

The Inuit traditions of the great Arctic — set down by the ethnographers who traveled with the last generations of the old life, and carried still in the communities — describe, among all the beings of the land, one nation defined entirely by an angle . The tarriaksuit — the word builds on tarraq , shadow: the shadow people — are not ghosts, not spirits, not monsters of any office this chronicle has yet catalogued. They are, the accounts insist, simply people — a nation living exactly as the Inuit lived: hunting the same caribou and seal, raising the same kind of families, laughing in their dwellings, sledging, quarreling, singing — in a world that is not elsewhere but here : co-located with ours, overlapping it, sharing its very ground — with one law of optics dividing the two nations absolutely. The tarriaksuit can be perceived only in peripheral vision . At the edge of the eye they are there — plainly, casually there: a figure hauling something heavy across the snow just off your ...

The Arctic does not need to invent horrors of cold and hunger; it has the real ones on permanent staff. So when the Inuit of the high North — a people whose traditions look starvation, storm, and drowning full in the face — chose to imagine one more demon for the ice, they built something that no southern nightmare ever thought of, something stranger than any fanged thing in the world's warm-country bestiaries. He is thin as a lash, sinewy, and strong beyond all appearance. His skin is the pale blue of old ice, and he goes naked and barefoot across the frozen sea in weather that kills clothed men in an hour, untroubled, splashing through the freezing shallows. His long stringy hair hangs down over his face, so that he watches the world through a curtain of it with cold bright eyes. His fingers are long, bony, and tipped with hard sharp nails. And he is always — this is the thing, the unforgettable thing — giggling . A high, continuous, delighted tittering that carries over the ice...