Week 11 Story: Igloo Spirits

Depiction of  one of the various spirit hybrids

Long ago there was a small village that was home to a simple Inuit tribe, who had one strange habit, when they would bury their dead they would do so by throwing them out into sea. This tradition had gone on for as long as all the village elders could remember or even remember hearing from their elders as this was the way of life for the tribe until one fateful night. There seemed to be a faint clicking in the distance, but no one stirred at first as the noise was so far away. The noise persisted though, where it at first only clicked every couple of minutes it grew to two minutes, then one minute. The noise grew louder each time as well until it almost became a sort of pounding and this had caused the whole village to wake up and go out to the nearby sheet of ice where they would fish. Underneath the sheet of ice they could see what seemed to be spirits in the form of various animals that also resembled many of the past tribe members that the current members remember taking out to the sea. Everyone in the tribe was overjoyed to see something so beautiful and to be reunited in a sense with all of the people that had lost over the many different years, but it felt like the spirits became more of a work of art rather than a free spirit so the tribe began to bury their dead in the snow and earth to cease the spirits, but some say if you go out onto a sheet of ice late enough you can still see the old Inuit spirits trapped under the ice.

Bibliography:
(http://mythfolklore.blogspot.com/2014/03/eskimo-folk-tales-papik-who-killed-his.html from the UN-Textbook)

Author's Notes:
Focused the story more on the spirits and not on the actual tribe members like in the original and had the passively end the story rather than the spirit coming back to kill one of the tribe members.