Bones litter the beach. A murder scene, I wonder? Or just the work of time and tide? Either way, whatever befell this beluga happened a long time ago. Its weathered vertebrae poke up from the shingle like the giant keys of a derelict piano. Here on the western shores of Canada's Hudson Bay, there are many ways in which a beluga might meet its maker. One of them is revealed as we trudge to the top of the ridge, where my guide, Terry Elliott, points out an Inuit tent ring. This circle of lichen-encrusted limestone slabs once anchored the caribou-skin shelter of a hunting party. Indigenous people hunted the whales here for centuries -in Greenland, they still do. The blubber gave them oil for light and heat; the meat, a dish called muktuk; the skin, food for their sled dogs. Or perhaps this beluga was a casualty of the ice that every winter locks the whole 4 million km~2 of Hudson Bay in its grip. Delaying its departure too long, the whale might have become trapped in an inlet while its companions headed north on their autumn migration to the open Arctic Ocean. When the food ran out, nature took its course.
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