from the encyclopedia of things lost and found

In a place that hadn't been seen by many people, she hadn't been seen by many people, either.

The Iñuit people know that every snowflake that falls from the sky is different from all the other snowflakes that fall from the sky.

No two snowflakes are alike.

No two snowflakes have ever been alike.

No two snowflakes will ever be alike.

The crystals that come together to build the beautiful snowflake are so sensitive to the conditions around them, a wind blowing across the ice or a cloud moving between the sun and the earth or the heartbeat of a whale surfacing in the waters of the Chukchi Sea off the coast of Point Hope can change them into something new.

So Taki's aaka and aapa knew from the beginning that she was unique, that when she was born into the world something new was happening.

This is how they knew.

On the first day of her life, as her aaka bundled her in warm blankets, she made a sound her aapa had heard only once in his life.

She whistled the most beautiful notes they had ever heard in their life together.

They reminded them of the hope they felt as children standing in the snow with their families in their village on the coast of the Chukchi Sea.

At the same time, they reminded them of the suffering they felt trying to make a life in the land in the Arctic Circle.

The music brought a stillness and a quietness to the room.

When he was a boy, her aapa roamed the ice near the edge of the sea, hunting whales with the elders of his village.

There, silently by the sea, a bowhead whale rose to the surface to breathe out it's old, salty breath and breathe in the cold, crisp air of the far north.

The agviq, the bowhead whale, was life for the Iñuit people.

Whenever the people say it's name, they whisper it with reverence and awe.

He raised the harpoon to strike the whale, and prayed an ancient prayer taught to him by an aanaluk.

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 to see the great day

that dawns

And the light that fills the

world

Then he plunged the harpoon into the whale.

Normally, when a bowhead whale is struck by a harpoon, it dives to the bottom of the icy water and tries to flee across the sea.

It hopes with all it's heart to live another day.

This whale, though, was not a normal whale.

As Taki's aapa stood at the edge of the ice and looked into the eyes of the bowhead whale, the whale willingly gave up it's life for him and for his village.

"Did my prayer reach the small, powerful ears of the giant, kind heart of this whale?" he wondered.

"Is the way of the old ones at work in the world again?"

The sound that Taki made of that first day of her life was the same sound the bowhead whale had made as her aapa looked into it's eyes.