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...