A bear tooth instead of a heart. Uqsuralik, a young Inuit woman, has just seen a crack in the ice turn into a canal, her family disappear into the Arctic fog and her father throw that tooth at her. Which becomes an amulet and destiny. She is alone with a bearskin that contains everything she owns: a spear, a knife and a harpoon. An initiatory journey towards survival and balance begins. Nature is powerful and ravenous, white a chasm and “icebergs are dazzling in the hours when the sun rises into the sky, you can’t look at them without hurting your eyes”.
Hunting for foxes, seals and caribou
Uqsuralik crosses expanses of snow and ice: he has to hunt to eat, build an igloo and beware of obsession with space. Bérengère Cournut, who has done a long research work on the Jean Malaurie and Paul-Émile Victor funds preserved at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, recounts his days in Of stone and bone, a book full of light in an inseparable relationship with the horizon and with listening to white. The young woman’s only chance of survival is a strip of land, hunting foxes and seals or chasing caribou. And find a field that becomes his new family.
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There are enigmatic characters, distant and eternal spirits who speak through songs. Uqsuralik becomes Hila’s mother after losing her husband and finding an adoptive mother in Sauniq. Who will sew raven feathers on the child’s suit so that if someone tries to harm her, she can escape like a bird exploiting the updrafts. Songs, spells and spells fill the white void full of human solidarity, hunting trips and endless nights.
Man-nature fusion
Immersion in nature is identification, spirits are everywhere and, when Hila is wasting away, it will be Naja, the shaman, who will remove the evil from her body. Where men are powerless, nature blows the spirit of primal fusion. The pages of the French writer breathe to the rhythm of time, following the flow of the moons, which «shine like two woman’s knives placed side by side, with sharp edges. A vast flock of stars runs all around ».
What the shamans say
In this society, so feminine, the Arctic is magical and dreamlike. Uqsuralik’s research is inexhaustible. She listens to the voice of nature, she experiences the initiation as a shaman, she learns its language: “if I walk alone on the pack ice I perceive the sea moving below, I know she laughs with me”. The breath of the Great North contains everything and everyone, whoever dies in the ferocity of these lands relives in those who are born into life: “The pains and pains are far away, nothing exists anymore – if not the love of a couple of parents and that of a whole clan, and the ardent desire to survive the dark and cold winter ». You always survive the storm.