The Inuit did not only use harpoons with steel tips to hunt caribou; they also used wooden spears. Caribou are known to cross rivers in large herds and seals are known to go in large groups to the shores of islands. This is when a qajaq would be used for hunting. When the caribou started their crossing, hunters would row towards them and spear them in the back while they were crossing. I have not experienced this personally, so I can only say what I have heard. Likewise for seal hunting, I haven’t heard personally of anyone using qajaqs for seal hunting, but it seems probable to me that they would have done this.

Seal hunting required both special training and equipment. In our area Inuit didn’t use the term ‘seal hunting in the winter’ because they hunted year round with harpoons. In the spring time when seals started lying by their holes and ice started lowing down the rivers, the Inuit around here would use their harpoons near the seals’ holes and call this ‘aiming for seal using harpoon’. This was the practice in the springtime for seal hunting. The Inuit had a way of thinking about seasons that reflected our way of life on the land.

Frank Analok, an Elder from Cambridge Bay, said that the Elders before him had used the moon as their calendar to tell when the seasons were changing. He described the seasons with words that tell what happened and what needed to be done in each part of the year.