The Tarriaksuit: The Shadow People Seen Only Sideways
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 ...