Introduction After more than 40 years of travelling and living in the North, listening to and writing down tales of the land and its people, I''ve collected a lifetime''s worth of personal stories. This book may hint at a few of them, although that''s not my principal purpose. By the same token, I''ve had the good fortune to intersect with other people''s wealth of stories, all of which are rooted in the land I love. Some of those are shared here. One time I was out hunting for caribou north of Baker Lake with Mannik, a dear old friend and my first teacher in the Arctic. Suddenly, without comment, he lay down flat on the tundra, and pressed his head to the ground. He could hear the caribou, he said. I tried it and, of course, he was right.

In a sense, the land spoke to us, and we found the caribou needed to feed his family. In my multiple hunting trips with Mannik, he never once failed in that regard. For Mannik, this was pure practicality but I never forgot the unintended allegory of that event and it became a driving force behind my work. I like to think of the North as a "landscape of stories." It''s as if the land itself -- rivers, tundra, glacial scrapes in the bedrock, eskers, and sea coasts -- are all woven together by the stories of the people who walked there over the last few thousand years. Beyond mere survival, it''s this thing called "the story" that has tied the people to the land, and preserved their place in it. It''s carried their history down through the ages, in a tapestry fabricated of ancestors, animals and the land. There are special places, each with their own story attached, scattered all over the Arctic map.

According to Inuit who used to live in the magnificent Pelly-Garry Lakes complex on the Back River, near the southeastern extremity of Hanningajuq, there is an island called Uqaallajujuq that speaks to those who walk upon its shores. I was told about this place by my friend Edwin Evo in Qamani''tuaq, previously known as Baker Lake, who spoke from personal experience. "If you beach your canoe on this island, and step out," he told me, "the island will speak, to welcome you and wish you well on your journey." It''s actually the voice of a dead Inuk who was brutally murdered on that island more than 100 years ago. He didn''t cry out when he was killed and, to this day, he speaks kindly in Inuktitut to all who visit. A few hundred miles farther south, there is another island in Baker Lake itself, called Tuunngaqtalik, meaning "the place of spirits." As everyone in the nearby community knows, a piece of your equipment will often go missing if you camp on that island, mysteriously taken by unseen tuurngait , the tiny spirits that inhabit much of the North. Another old friend in Qamani''tuaq, Barnabus Pirjuaq, related innumerable accounts of this happening and warned: if you fail to believe this, you do so at your own peril.

The stories of the North often exhibit a similar powerful merging of myth and reality. While living in Cambridge Bay, in the Arctic archipelago, I had the immense privilege of working with a small group of elders to collect and preserve a foundational legend which was similarly rooted in the land. It is the story of the man named Uvajuq, from long before any qallunaat ventured north, when people lived forever. It''s been told for centuries by Inuit of the region from Coppermine to King William Island and is referred to as "The Origin of Death" in local tradition. One remarkable aspect of this experience was that no single elder could recall the entire story. Each one, independently, recounted the specific parts that they''d retained, and together, they were able to assemble the old legend before it was lost forever. That version, back from the brink of extinction, is what appears here. It serves as a testament to the power of oral-history and a vivid parable from the landscape of stories.

Notwithstanding the importance of Inuit oral-history to my own work over the years and the northern mythology that has seized the Canadian imagination, not all stories of the Arctic have this provenance. There are remarkable tales to be told from the exploits of early non-Native travellers in the Arctic. That has long been an integral part of the northern legend for me, and so it is now a small part of this collection as well. One difference I hope you will notice is that, wherever possible, the usually unnamed Inuit characters in these accounts have been identified. This was often made possible by previous oral-history work, either my own or others. For me, that''s an important feature but, in any case, I suggest the dichotomy is appropriate since these are all stories from the land. Nothing speaks more powerfully of the land than the personal accounts of the people themselves. Over the years I''ve had both the pleasure and the honour of interviewing dozens and dozens of northerners, sometimes on tape, sometimes just making notes as folks recounted their personal tales.

It was always an engaging process. A few of those are offered here, in the vein of "ordinary people" telling their extraordinary stories. What a privilege it is for me to act as the vehicle for transmission of their stories. None were more enthusiastic participants than Tuinnaq Kanayuk Bruce. She was also remarkable in that she was the only elder I know who was widely and frequently referred to as Mrs. Bruce. This was surely a sign of widespread respect, and a measure of the indivisible force that she and her husband Mikitok Bruce were throughout more than 60 years of marriage. Both of them were born in the 1920s, and they died in 2010 and 2012 respectively.

From that marriage came a gift to the future, in part evident in the important ways in which their children have contributed to Nunavut. Undoubtedly, they all owe their diverse success to the strength of their roots on the land and in Coral Harbour, as well as the values passed down to them by Tuinnaq and Mikitok. These two understood the importance of Inuit traditional knowledge, not only in the Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit sense as a way of seeing the world, but equally in the old stories as a reflection of where they had come from and the documentation of Inuit history. Born in 1925, Tuinnaq Kanayuk Bruce embodied a remarkable collection of well-documented stories, like a folk musician who leaves behind a repertoire of ballads. She loved to tell stories, some of which we heard many times. She took great pleasure in knowing that they''ve all been recorded for posterity. As she got older, she would occasionally say: "Have you recorded the story about the ____" and then smile when I reassured that, yes, we have that one recorded already. I once spent two days listening to Tuinnaq tell a very long story.

At this point I''d known her and her family for a dozen years and visited her at home in Coral Harbour multiple times. For many years, she treated me like a son. She endearingly called me Taututtiaq. This event occurred while camped with her extended family, 16 people in total from four generations. We''d returned to where she grew up on the shores of Wager Bay when Tuinnaq was 70. It was one of the most memorable weeks of my life. Her account was long, winding and detailed, but utterly enthralling and she spoke with absolute confidence and clarity. This story had been passed down through multiple generations to Tuinnaq, who understood that she was the final link in the chain.

At the end of the telling, she leaned over close to me, looked me straight in the eyes, and said: "I am saying the same words to you that Ajaruq said to his mother, as I heard it from my grandmother. It is not a legend. It is a true story." I believed her, of course, since that is how stories from the land have been transmitted through the generations for centuries.