Qiqirn

The dogs know first. Out on the sea ice, where the light has gone blue and flat and the wind drags every sound a long way, a team in harness begins to shiver, then to twist and drop, legs paddling at nothing. The man who runs to them feels his own jaw tighten and his knees start to fold. Nothing has touched him. Nothing has touched the dogs. Somewhere close, pale against the snow and impossible to fix with the eye, a great bald animal is standing very still, and it is more afraid of him than he could ever be of it.

This is the qiqirn, a phantom dog remembered by the Inuit of Baffin Island and the country around Cumberland Sound. It has the shape of an enormous dog, but almost none of the coat. Its body is bare skin, cold and exposed, the fur worn away to nothing except at the muzzle, the paws, and the tips of the ears and tail, where a few ragged tufts survive. There is something worse about a hairless dog than a hairy monster. The eye keeps expecting an ordinary animal and keeps being refused.

What the qiqirn carries is not tooth or claw but a kind of contagion of the nerves. When it comes near, men and dogs alike fall into convulsions, seized and shaking, and the fits can kill. This is the whole of its menace, and it is enough. The creature never has to close the distance or open its mouth. It simply exists too near, and bodies betray themselves. In a land where a fallen traveler far from help is already halfway to dead, a thing that drops you where you stand needs no other weapon.

And yet the balance of terror runs both ways, which is the strangest part of the story. The qiqirn is a coward. For all the harm its nearness does, it is desperate to avoid people, and it bolts at the first sign that it has been noticed. The remedy is built into the fear. When a person is thrown down by the qiqirn’s approach, an angakok, one of the shamans who deal with the spirit world, calls out and confronts the animal, and the qiqirn turns and runs. The moment it is gone, the shaking stops and the stricken sit up as if released from a grip. Should it linger instead of fleeing, the seizures do not ease, and the victim dies. Everything turns on whether the creature can be sent away in time.

Its origins are thin, and honesty is better than invention here. Almost everything known about the qiqirn descends from a single source, the anthropologist Franz Boas, who spent the winter of 1883 and 1884 in the central Arctic and set the belief down in his 1888 report on the Central Inuit. He recorded it plainly, as one of the beings that populated the country: the huge nearly hairless dog, the fits, the flight from the shaman. Later writers have added little of substance, because there is little to add. The qiqirn lives in a handful of sentences, and it has survived in them for well over a century.

Some who have studied Inuit belief have read more into those fits than a simple scare. Daniel Merkur suggested that the convulsions the qiqirn brings on are not random cruelty but a symbolic echo of shamanic initiation, the violent seizure and collapse through which a person is broken open and remade as an angakok. In that reading the creature belongs to the same family as the initiatory bear spirit of Baffin Island, another being whose terror is also a threshold. The man who shakes on the ice and the shaman who drives the dog away may be two stages of one process, the trembling novice and the finished master.

The qiqirn found an odd afterlife in English through Rudyard Kipling, who borrowed the name for a story in his second Jungle Book. His Quiquern, though, is his own animal and not the Inuit one. Kipling’s version looms out of a snowstorm as a monstrous, toothless, hairless dog with two heads and eight pairs of legs, and it leads two starving hunters toward better ground before it resolves, in the daylight, into two ordinary sled dogs lashed together and running as one. It is a fine invention. It is not the folklore, and the difference is worth keeping straight.

Stripped back to what the record actually holds, the qiqirn is a small and frightening thing: a bare giant dog that does its damage by proximity, kills without contact, and can be beaten only by being seen. Its power is its nearness. Its weakness is a nerve as thin as a whippet’s. Fix it with a hard enough look, and the terror of the Arctic ice turns tail and vanishes into the white.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Qiqirn in Inuit mythology?

The Qiqirn is a giant, almost entirely hairless phantom dog from the folklore of the Central Inuit of Baffin Island. It has hair only at its mouth, feet, and the tips of its ears and tail, and its presence alone throws nearby people and sled dogs into violent fits.

What does the Qiqirn do to people?

The Qiqirn causes convulsions in any person or dog that comes near it, seizures that are sometimes fatal. It never bites or attacks directly; the danger is simply its nearness, and victims recover as soon as the creature leaves.

How do you defeat or escape a Qiqirn?

The Qiqirn is terrified of humans and flees the moment it is confronted, so an angakok, an Inuit shaman, can drive it off by facing it and calling out. Once the qiqirn runs away the fits stop and the stricken recover, but if it stays too long the victim dies.

Where does our knowledge of the Qiqirn come from?

Almost all recorded knowledge of the Qiqirn traces to the anthropologist Franz Boas, who documented it in his 1888 study of the Central Inuit after spending the winter of 1883 to 1884 in the Arctic. Later scholars such as Daniel Merkur have interpreted its convulsive fits as a symbol of shamanic initiation.

Is the Qiqirn the same as Kipling’s Quiquern?

No. Rudyard Kipling borrowed the name for a story in his second Jungle Book, but his Quiquern is a two-headed, eight-legged dog that turns out to be two sled dogs tied together. The traditional Inuit qiqirn is a single bald phantom dog whose danger is the seizures its presence causes.

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