Ijiraq

A hunter on the barren ground straightens up from four gutted caribou and sees four more coming over the crest of a hill. They are walking upright. As they get closer he can see they are men, big ones, two fathers with their grown sons, and that their nostrils are cut wide and dark the way a caribou’s are. The oldest is furious about something. He covers the last stretch of ground faster than a man has any business moving and puts both hands flat on the hunter’s chest to throw him down.

The hunter did not go down. His name was Qingailisaq, he was an angakkuq of the Iglulik people, and he had just met four ijirait.

“Will you do any harm?” the old one asked him.

“I will do no harm. You need not be afraid of me.”

That settled it. The grip came off and they sat down together on a stone to talk, the way strangers do when the fight has gone out of the meeting. One of the sons butchered the caribou while they spoke. He had no knife. He tore the skin open the way a person opens a lemming and had the animals flayed faster than a man could have done it with a blade. The old ijiraq explained that they lived inland from Piling, near Nuvuk, and that they hunted caribou by running them down and killing them with two small stones carried in a pocket in the tunic. He also explained his temper. His son had gone out and had not come home, and he had assumed a human being had killed him. When he was satisfied he was wrong, the four of them left on good terms.

Qingailisaq went home and had a garment made in the ijirait’s fashion, with two white hands laid across the chest to show where he had been seized. It took several women to sew and a great many caribou skins, and it is the only ijiraq coat ever made by human hands. Captain George Comer bought it from him during a whaling voyage into Hudson Bay between 1900 and 1902, at the request of Franz Boas, and it has been in the American Museum of Natural History ever since under the number 60/4440. Three replicas were sewn in 1983 by Jeannie Arnaanuk and her family, descendants of the shaman, working with Bernard Saladin d’Anglure and with the shaman’s grandson Ujuraq.

There are two accounts of what happened on that hill and they do not match. The one above is the son’s. Aua told it to Rasmussen in 1922. Qingailisaq had told his own version to Comer twenty years earlier, and Boas printed it in 1907, and in that telling there is no argument at all. He shot a fat buck with an arrow, and the antlers and the hide came away from it and the head shrank, and where the animal had been there stood a woman in finely made clothes. She fell down, gave birth to a boy, and died. The other caribou stood up as men and told him to cover the two bodies with moss so nobody would ever find them, and to go home and have his clothing made like hers.

The name is the plainest thing about them. It comes from iji, eye, and it points at the one feature that gives them away, because an ijiraq’s eyes sit lengthwise in the face instead of across it, and the mouth lies the same way. They blink sideways. Otherwise they are built like people and dressed like people, though the women’s breeches are made of the white belly skin of the caribou, cut into strips. They live up in the hills, or rather inside them, in cracks and fissures fitted out as great stone houses, and shamans watch them disappear into the rock. Ordinary people cannot see them at all. What everyone else gets is a whistling in the air, and the rule about that whistling is absolute: show no fear. The ijirait only go after the timid.

Their houses hold enormous stores of fat and suet boiled down and left to set in bags sewn from bull-caribou hide, and something stranger sits among the household goods. Shamans who have been inside describe an implement that works as both a mirror and a spyglass. It glitters like mica, and looking down into it shows everything passing far away among the dwellings of men. That is how the ijirait know so much about people.

Mostly what they know is how slow people are. Nothing outruns them. Caribou in full flight they overtake at their leisure, and they carry a killed animal home slung over one shoulder the way a wolf carries prey. When they take a human being they fix the deficiency at once. Two women out gathering heather for fuel were carried off and kept under guard, and one of them bore a child among the ijirait. One day they were brought to a warm lake, the kind used for loosening hair from skins, and made to stand with their feet in the water while the big toe was opened and some of the flesh cut away. That flesh is what keeps human beings from running properly.

They got out eventually, hiding in a rock fissure by a river while the search went past. The ijirait came to the water and leapt it, and the only thing anyone heard was the wind of them going over. A dog found the women and was told it would be killed if it said anything, and it went off quietly and told nobody. The child on its mother’s back tried to call out to its father, and one of the women took it by the throat. The two of them reached a village where people were fond of games, and for years they hid what they could do, until one afternoon at a ball game one said run like a young caribou, and the other said run like a cow with a calf, and the dust went up behind them at every stride. Nobody invited them to play again.

Not every visit ends that way. Two old men with nothing left to live on walked inland along a river until the tents came into view, and were given sleeping rugs, a tent of their own, tongues and tender steaks, and fresh skins to sleep on every night for the rest of their lives.

Where the ijirait came from depends on who is telling it. In the great Inuit story of the girl who refused every suitor and finally married a dog, her children are scattered across the world to become different peoples, and in several of the Nunavut versions of that story the ijirait are among them. In the version told across Nunavut today they were Inuit once, hunters who pushed too far north and got caught between the country of the living and the country of the dead.

They left their names on the land. There is a stretch of ground near Mittimatalik called Ijiqqat and an island off Kimmirut called Ijiraqtalik, both meaning the place where there are ijirait. Fewer than one Inuit place-name in two hundred refers to any non-human being at all, so the ones that do stand out. Across most of Nunavik the same beings are called tuurngait instead. And since 2003 there has been an Ijiraq in orbit around Saturn, a small moon found in 2000, eleven million kilometres out, taking 451 days to get round.

The ijiraq that travels furthest in English now looks different from the one Boas and Rasmussen wrote down. In the modern telling the eyes stay red whatever shape the creature takes, it can be a raven or a bear or a wolf as easily as a caribou, it steals children and hides them and abandons them, and the inuksuit standing on the land are how a released child finds the way home. Some say the ijirait sing. Some say they are helpful and carry messages to travellers. That version is told in Nunavut today, and an Inuit production company in Iqaluit put it in front of Inuit children in 2018 with artwork by Germaine Arnaktauyok. It is not in the older record, where the eyes are strange for lying the wrong way in the face rather than for their colour, and where the people carried off are adults. Both versions are real. Only one of them is old.

What an ijiraq can do follows from what it is, which is a hunter better at hunting than anything else on the land. It runs faster than the animals it eats. It vanishes from ordinary sight and reappears as a caribou when it wants to be looked at without being seen. It sees into distant camps through a piece of glittering stone. It is as strong as a wolf, and it can reach into a person’s memory and take out the encounter afterwards, which is why so many accounts of meeting one end with the teller admitting he does not know how he got home.

The limits are more interesting. An ijiraq attacks the frightened, so composure is a defence and a plain sentence spoken calmly is a better one. They can be reasoned with, and they will apologise in their fashion and sit down on a stone. Their prisoners escape. Shamans see through them entirely and put them to work as helping spirits, which is the ordinary fate of a great many terrifying things. And they are not invulnerable to grief: the oldest of the four who came over the hill at Qingailisaq was not out hunting at all. He was looking for a son who had gone out and not come back.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an ijiraq?

An ijiraq is a shapeshifting spirit of the Inuit inland country, one of a people called the ijirait who live inside the hills and hunt caribou. They can take caribou form, stay invisible to everyone except a shaman, outrun any animal alive, and erase a person’s memory of meeting them. Early Inuit accounts recorded by Franz Boas and Knud Rasmussen treat them as neighbours on the land rather than as gods.

What do the ijirait look like?

The ijirait are built and dressed like human beings, with one difference that gives them away: their eyes are set lengthwise in the face instead of across it, and the mouth is turned the same way, so they appear to blink sideways. In the account Aua gave Rasmussen, their nostrils are wide and dark like a caribou’s. The women wear breeches made from the white belly skin of caribou, cut into strips.

Do the ijirait really have red eyes?

The red eyes belong to the modern telling, not the old one. In the version told in Nunavut today, and the one that circulates most widely in English, an ijiraq’s eyes stay red no matter what shape it takes, and this is offered as the way to recognise one. The ethnographic record collected a century ago says nothing about colour; there the eyes are strange because they lie the wrong way in the face.

How do you protect yourself from an ijiraq?

Show no fear. The ijirait are said to attack only the timid and the cowardly, so a person who hears their whistling in the air and stays calm is safest. The shaman Qingailisaq was seized by one and simply said he meant no harm and would not be hurt, at which point the ijiraq let go and sat down to talk with him.

What is Qingailisaq’s coat?

Qingailisaq’s coat is a caribou-skin garment made around 1902 for an Iglulik shaman after his encounter with four ijirait, decorated with two white hands across the chest to mark where one of the spirits had grabbed him. Captain George Comer bought it for the American Museum of Natural History, where it is catalogued as number 60/4440. Replicas were sewn in 1983 by the shaman’s descendants in Igloolik, one of which is in the Canadian Museum of History.

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