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The hunter and the hunted

Derek Neary
Northern News Services
Monday, May 07, 2007

KIMMIRUT - Eliyah Padluq is very experienced in tracking and killing animals.

He also knows how it feels when an animal comes after him.

A couple of years ago, the Kimmirut elder, now 66, was sleeping at a small cabin at his outpost camp with a hunting buddy. In the middle of the night they heard something. Padluq said he jumped out of bed and grabbed a flashlight and his .264 calibre hunting rifle to see what it was. Before he knew it, a polar bear smashed through the front window, its fore-quarters actually inside the cramped cabin. It was so close that he could feel its breath on his face, he recalled.

He raised his rifle and pulled the trigger, he said, the barrel only a few inches from the imposing beast, hitting it in the neck and killing it.

As he recalls the dramatic incident and others, his wife Jeannie playfully warns that such talk of polar bears will summon one.

The couple have spent several hours skinning the hide of another polar bear, one killed in March by a sport hunter.

Blood streams in several directions on the blue tarp upon which they do their work in a classroom at the local school.

Much of the bear's white coat is also stained red by the spilling of its own blood.

But it's not just bears that have menaced Padluq. Many wolves wandered into the Kimmirut dump over the winter. Padluq had shot nine of them by late March.

One kill turned into a harrowing situation when he approached the wolf as it was caught in a trap he had set.

The injured creature managed to lunge at him, sending his rifle flying and knocking him backwards to the ground, he recounted.

Fortunately he was then out of the animal's reach and he retrieved his firearm to finish it off, he said in Inuktitut, with Syula Bobinski providing translation.

Padluq has been hunting on his own since he was a young man.

Although he travelled by dog team with his relatives as a boy, his own quests for food during the frigid depths of winter have been by snowmobile. He purchased his first machine in 1969 for $699, he said, chuckling.

He used that snowmobile to cover a lot of ground, hunting as far the Cape Dorset area, a few hundred kilometres to the west.

Although there is a lot of talk about the overall well being of polar bears these days, Padluq - giving his cramping hands a break from skinning this particular great white bear - said he has never seen so many near the community.

When he was young there were winters when he would go without seeing a set of polar bear tracks, he said.

As for the future of Inuit hunting in the face of climate change and a younger generation that is surrounded by the influence of a material and technological culture, Padluq remains steadfastly optimistic.

He said hunting is a never-ending story in life.

"I don't think it's ever going to fade away," he said.