Ego-driven Kallanut with sponsors in mind,
yearning to return with a bounty of some kind.
A ship's cold breath, a promise spun in ice,
brought six souls south to experience city life.
Greenland's stark beauty traded for a glassy world, clanging trolleys, iron wheels grinding, coal dust settles on skin and relentless hammering. Qisuk, father, Minik, small shadow, his eyes wide with wonder.
They were wanted as studies, like Neanderthals encased in glass - not men who laughed, or knew the kayak's hue.
Sickness came, like a yearning for home, coughing out life in the museum’s stone walls, their thick furs no good at all.
Four fell, like snow dissolving on warm stone.
Minik remained, a seed in foreign soil, with an adopted name, another’s touch.
He learned Kallanut ways, hurried footsteps, loud emotions; but in his dreams, the northern lights still danced, like vivid streams.
But then, betrayal, like the tang of acrid ice.
A bone-chilling truth, his father's frame, Qisuk a skeleton on exhibition. The promised burial, a cold, cruel deception.
A hunger grew, for the vast, familiar silence of the floe.
He sailed back north, a ghost in borrowed skin, the old tongue clumsy, the old ways slow.
Caught between two worlds, belonging to neither, he turned South again.
A fever rose, a final, levelling wave, Minik, was gone like snow melting on a warm palm.
A whisper of the human price, science turning living souls to silent displays.