The scene is winter's end on the Strait of Belle Isle. Large floes and pans of ice have brought with them whelping harp seals and their pups which will supply meat for several months and skins to make boots and clothing for another year. The young whitecoats were probably killed with wooden clubs, while larger seals were first secured with toggling harpoons such as those found in the Port-au-Choix cemetery, then dispatched with lances. Seals were butchered on the ice to reduce the load on the return to shore.
Hunters could either walk out on the ice from shore or travel to the ice in boats such as the one shown here. Even when it was possible to walk, boats would be dragged or carried over the ice to transport the meat and skins back to shore and to ensure the hunters' escape should the pack ice be driven offshore by a change of wind. In spite of precautions, many hunters must have been lost to snow, fog and drifting ice.
Times of plenty surely involved feasting, singing and story telling, but some of these stories must have recalled sealers who had vanished during the hunt as well as the years when the seals failed to appear and the times of starvation and even extinction of local groups which followed.
Courtesy: National Film Board of Canada and National Museum of Man, National Museums of Canada
