from “Fragments of Hilcias and Taki’s Notebook”

She lived in the far northwest, inside the Arctic Circle, beside the Chukchi Sea, in a town called Point Hope.

The Iñupiat people know every snowflake that falls from the sky anywhere in the world is special.

No two snowflakes have ever been alike.

No two snowflakes are ever alike.

No two snowflakes will ever be alike.

The crystals that form and create a snowflake are so sensitive to initial conditions that a breeze blowing over the ice, a cloud passing between the sun and the earth, or the vibrations from the heartbeat of a bowhead whale can change them into something new.

Taki’s aakaga (mother) and aapaga (father) knew she was a snowflake.

In the first moments of her life, her aakaga swaddled her in a warm blanket Asiavik, her aanaruaga (grandmother), made just for her.

Asiavik sewed the three Arctic whales into the red blanket with yellow thread the color of the morning sunrise over the icy waters of the Chukchi Sea.

“With the beluga whale, I hope curiosity and music into the life of the baby,” she whispered, “for the beluga look quizzically at you and sing songs that cause us to call them the canaries of the sea.

With the narwhal whale, I hope compassion and empathy into the life of the baby, for the narwhal will place the tip of it’s own hornlike tooth into the broken tooth of another narwhal to ease it’s suffering and pain.

And with the bowhead whale, I hope mystery and endurance into the life of the baby, for the bowhead’s scientific name is Balaena mysticetus and that best describes it’s wonderful, mysterious ways. It lives longer than any creature on Earth, for it’s heart beats slow and strong in the cold, cold waters.”

As Taki looked up into the weathered faces of her aakaga and aapaga with her earthy brown eyes, she whistled a beautiful song her aapaga heard only once before in his life.

As a boy, he roamed across the ice near the edge of the Chukchi Sea, hunting bowhead whales with his aapaga.

There, as he stood still and silent by the water, a bowhead rose to breathe a breath of air.

For the Iñupiat people, the bowhead whale is a source of life.

They subsist on it’s body and it’s bones, eating it’s blubber to stay fed in deep winter, using it’s skin and baleen to make boats and nets for hunting and fishing, and using it’s skeleton to frame the shape of their traditional houses.

They whisper it’s name with reverence and awe.

He raised his harpoon to strike the whale, and he whispered an old prayer his aanaruaga taught him.

I think over again

my small adventures

my fears

those small ones

that seemed so big

for all the vital things

I had to get and reach.

And yet there is only one

great thing,

the only thing

to live and see

the great day

that dawns

and the light that fills

the world

He plunged the harpoon into the whale.

He would remember that moment for the rest of his life.

Normally, when a bowhead whale is struck with the sharpened iron barns of a harpoon, it dives into the deepest parts of the water and flees across the see, trying with all it’s might to stay alive.

This whale, though, was not a normal whale.

It was a snowflake.

As he looked into the eye of the great whale, as he watched the light go out of it’s wise eye, he thought, “This whale is willingly giving it’s life for the lives of my people.”

The last sound it made was the beautiful whistling sound Taki made on the day of her birth.

As her aakaga and aapaga look down at her, they wondered, “Will her song reach the tiny, powerful ears and the giant, kind hearts of all of the bowhead whales around us?”

They wondered, “Is the ancient wisdom of sacrificial love working in the world again?”

And they were afraid.

- “Fragments of Hilcias and Taki’s Notebook,” Chapter 18, by Trevor Scott Barton (Stories for a Brown-Eyed Girl, 2020)