Northern News Services

Rankin Inlet (July 18/01) - The home-made harpoon's wooden shaft rests in a cradle formed by his thumb and forefinger, the tip pointing at an angle toward the carpet.

Tony Manernaluk holds the harpoon ready for an imaginary kill. Manernaluk hopes to teach a course in harpoon making. - Jorge Barrera/NNSL photo

In his living room, Tony Manernaluk stands behind an imaginary line he etched in the air with the harpoon, the razor tip poised for an imaginary kill.

The harpoon is about 1.5 meters long, three-quarters steel a few millimetres in diameter, and one-quarter wood for a grip. He says this type is used in the winter to get through the snow and at seals coming up for air through breathing holes.

He draws a circle with the tip of the harpoon millimetres above the hairs of the carpet. Here, he says, the seal will come up. A hunter can wait hours for prey.

The Rankin Inlet elder makes his own harpoons from scraps. The wood could come from the dump and the steel from a snow-machine's idling rod. The razor tip that clips to the end of the rod he makes from old saw blades.

Manernaluk is a harpoon maker. He holds a different harpoon with a shorter steel rod section. "My son made this watching his father," says Manernaluk through an interpreter.

Manernaluk is planning to teach a course in harpoon making, sponsored by the Friendship Centre.

"Young people must be taught to make harpoons because they are the future hunters," he says.

"Some of the youth like to go hunting and if they've never seen one used they don't know how to make it," he says as he clips the razor tip to his son's harpoon.

He strings a rope attached to the tip through a nail bent in an arc that rises a few centimetres from the wooden handle. Manernaluk jabs at an imaginary seal and snaps the rope and the tip from the harpoon and holds it separately.

The seal is hooked like a fish on a lure and the hunter waits until the seal tires and has to come up for air. Then it's jabbed in the eye with the end of the steel rod.

It's much harder with a beluga whale, says Manernaluk. Usually the whale is shot first and harpooned so it's not lost. But they can be hunted without a gun using just a harpoon with a floater attached.

Manernaluk says the float tires the whale as it tries to swim away.

Without it, you just hang on tight, he says.

The Friendship Centre is still looking for people to sign up for the harpoon making course. It needs five students.

Manernaluk says he wants to share his knowledge and his knowledge is vast. He's been around these home-made harpoons since he was a child.

Standing on in his living room, harpoon poised for the kill, Manernaluk describes every step, every movement of the seal hunt in the middle of ice and snow, but it's July and the tundra green burns into the horizon outside the window of his Area Five home.