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Told by a young Inuit boy, this story imagines what might have happened if the people of a Baffin Island winter camp had encountered European whalers.
This story is set on the eastern coast of Baffin Island in the early decades of the 1600s. Told from the point of view of a young Inuit boy, Tuk, it imagines what might have happened if the people of Tuk's Baffin Island winter camp had encountered European whalers, blown far north from their usual whaling route. Both the Inuit hunters and the whalers prize the bowhead whale, but for very different reasons. Together, they set out on a hunt, though they are all on new and uncertain ground.
Scrupulously researched, this beautifully told story will inspire extremely topical discussion about communication between two groups of people with entirely different world views; and about a productive partnership that also foreshadows serious problems to come.
“Through the eyes and voice of Tuk, a young Inuit boy, readers see, hear and feel the excitement and apprehension that the lost whalers' arrival engenders...[a] simple, elegant, eloquent tale...Mary Jane Gerber's delightful pen-and-ink drawings capture moments large and small.” — Globe and Mail
“Black-and-white illustrations show the action at a distance and help readers visualize the vast and flat terrain.” — School Library Journal
“The style is low-key and pared down but smooth, and the picture of seventeenth-century Inuit life is credibly drawn and narratively appropriate, avoiding the determined documentary flavor of some historical work.” — Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books