Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg

appear when we were hunting for auks. At first they would be nothing but two tiny dots on the horizon. Then the mountain seemed to dissolve and rise up into the sky. When a million auks take off, space turns black for a moment, as if winter had returned in a flash.
    My mother would shoot at the falcons. A gyrfalcon dives at a speed of 125 miles per hour. She usually hit them. She shot them with a nickel-plated, small-caliber bullet. We would pick them up for her. One time the bullet entered one eye and lodged in the other, as if the dead falcon were staring at us with a shiny, piercing gaze.
    A taxidermist on the base stuffed them for her. Gyrfalcons are a protected species. On the black market in Germany or the United States you can sell a baby falcon for $50,000 to be bred for hunting. No one dared to believe that my mother had violated the ban on hunting them.
    She didn’t sell them. She gave them away. To my father, to one of the ethnographers who sought her out because she was a female hunter, to one of the officers from the base.
    The stuffed falcons were both a gruesome and a dazzling gift.
She would ceremoniously present them with an apparent display of absolute generosity. Then she would drop a remark about needing a pair of tailor’s shears. She hinted that she was in need of eighty yards of nylon rope. Or she let it be known that we children could certainly use two pairs of thermal underwear.
    She got whatever she asked for. By wrapping her guest in a web of fierce, mutually obligating courtesy.
    This made me ashamed of her, and it made me love her. It was her response to European culture. She opened herself to it with a courtesy full of pallid premeditation. And she closed around it, encapsulating what she could use. A pair of scissors, a coil of rope, the spermatozoa that brought Moritz Jaspersen into her womb.
    That’s why Thule will never become a museum. The ethnographers have cast a dream of innocence over North Greenland. A dream that the Inuit will continue to be the bowlegged, drum-dancing, legend-telling, widely smiling exhibition images that the first explorers thought they were meeting south of Qaanaaq at the turn of the century. My mother gave them a dead bird. And made them buy half the store for her. She paddled a kayak that was made in the same way they were made in the seventeenth century, before the art of kayak building disappeared from North Greenland. But she used a sealed plastic container for her hunting float.
    To the earth shall you return.
    I can see how others are successful. But I can’t find success myself.
    Isaiah was on the verge of success. He could have gotten ahead. He would have been able to absorb Denmark and transform it and become both a Dane and a Greenlander.
    I had an anorak made for him out of white silk. Even the pattern had been passed down by Europeans. The painter Gitz-Johansen once gave it to my father. He had gotten it in North Greenland when he was illustrating his great reference work on the birds of Greenland. I put the anorak on Isaiah, combed his hair, and then I lifted him up onto the toilet seat. When he saw himself in the mirror, that’s when it happened. The tropical fabric, the Greenlandic respect for fine clothes, the Danish joy in luxury all merged
together. Maybe it also meant something that I had given it to him.
    A second later he had to sneeze.
    â€œHold my nose!”
    I held his nose.
    â€œWhy?” I asked. He usually blew his nose into the sink.
    As soon as I opened my mouth, his eyes found my lips in the mirror. I often realized that he understood things even before they were expressed.
    â€œWhen I’m wearing annoraaq qaqortoq, this fine anorak, I don’t want snot on my fingers.”
    And from the earth shall you rise again.
    I try scanning the women standing around Juliane to see if any of them might be pregnant. With a boy who could be given Isaiah’s name. The dead live on in their names. There were four