Amarok: The Giant Wolf of Inuit Legend
The wolves of the Arctic hunt in packs — this is their nature and their strength, and every people who shared the tundra with them knew it. Which makes the great wolf of Inuit tradition all the more deliberate a creation: the Amarok (amaroq, in the orthographies of Greenland and the Canadian Arctic) is a wolf of enormous size that hunts alone . He does not run with a pack; he needs none. He is the solitary hunter of the empty places, the shape that trails the lone traveler across the snow at dusk, and the tradition's warning about him is aimed with characteristic Arctic precision: the Amarok takes those who hunt alone, at night, where no one knows they have gone. Around this figure the storytellers of Greenland wove one of the most profound tales in the circumpolar world — a story in which the great wolf is not the enemy of human strength but, unforgettably, its maker. The Boy Who Was Thrown Away The story was set down in the nineteenth century by the Danish-Greenlandic scholar ...