In a place that hadn’t been seen by many people, she hadn’t been seen by many people, either.
She lived in the far northwest, inside of the Arctic Circle, beside the Chukchi Sea, in a town called Point Hope.
The Iñupiat people there knew from the beginning that every snowflake that falls from the sky anywhere in the whole wide world is unique.
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 make a snowflake are so sensitive to the conditions around them 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 surfacing on the waters of the Chukchi Sea can change them into something new.
Taki’s mother and father knew she was like a snowflake.
In the first moments of her life, her mother swaddled her in a warm blanket her grandmother had made just for her.
Her grandmother had sewn the three Arctic whales into that red blanket with yellow thread the color of the morning sunrise over the icy waters.
"With the beluga whale, I hope curiosity and song into the life of the baby," she had whispered, "For the beluga look quizzical in the way they look 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 name is Balaena mysticetus and that best describes it's wonderful, mysterious ways. It lives longer than any other creature on Earth for it’s heart beats slow and strong in the cold, cold Arctic water.”
As Taki looked up into the weathered faces of her parents with her deep brown eyes, she whistled a beautiful song her Father had heard only once before in his life.
As a boy, he had been roaming across the ice near the edge of the sea, hunting bowhead whales with his father.
There, as he stood still and silent beside the water, a bowhead rose to breathe in a breath of air.
For the Iñupiat people, the bowhead whale was a source of life.
They subsisted on it’s body and bones, eating it’s blubber to keep them fed in deep winter, using it’s skin and baleen to make their boats and fishing nets, and using it’s skeleton to frame their small houses.
They whispered it’s name with reverence and awe.
He raised the harpoon to strike the great whale, and he whispered an old prayer his grandmother had 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 to 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 all of his life.
Normally, when a bowhead whale is struck with the sharpened iron barbs of a harpoon, it dives into the deepest parts of the water and flees across the sea, trying with all it’s might to get away and stay alive.
This whale, though, was not a normal whale.
It was like 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 song that Taki made on that day of her birth.
As her mother and father looked down at her, they wondered, “Will her song reach the tiny, powerful ears and the giant, kind hearts of all the bowhead whales around is?”
They wondered, “Is the ancient wisdom of sacrificial love working in the world again?”
And they were afraid.
- Trevor Scott Barton, “Hilcias,” 2020
