Board Thread:Fanmade/@comment-26912075-20180924190439/@comment-27358240-20181118145822

Adlartok is struck in awe by the details of his comrade's life. He sees J.W.'s teary eyes, and thinks back of his own family back in Yukon. The village kids who he would teach how to hunt and fish, and who would follow in his footsteps in the snow to avoid getting too tired. He snaps back into his senses at J.W.'s demand.

"Me? Well, if you want to, I will gladly tell you. I come from a small Inuit village in Yukon. I travelled many moon in order to get here. It is a tiny village amongst hundreds of others that surround the ancestral Great River, and life is hard, with every man having to go out to hunt and fish to bring back food to the tribesmen, and always at risk of being raided by Southern "Indian" tribes, but it is my home. One day, a day which we thought would be like any other, a group of white men came to visit us, men from the Hudson Bay company. We knew of them because other villages traded with them, and now they wanted to trade furs with us. We welcomed them and sold pelts in exchange for iron and gold. I thought we could live in peace, and that the tales of white men killing natives without mercy were lies."

Adlartok pauses for a moment and thinks of that dateful day. He clenches his fist, holding the knife in his hand firmly, sighs, pets one of his dogs a little, and resumes.

"I was wrong. One day, I woke up to find the Great River dried up. It was the Hudson Bay Companu, they cut the Great River by building a dam. Our protests were ignored, and they threatened to stop trading with us. If that happened, we would be without guns and at the mercy of Indian raiders, who could buy muskets and rifles. If we wanted to get our river back, we would need to buy the lands. But how could we, natives of the land who lived off nature, have the money to buy the acres of the river? That's when, one day, while selling furs, I heard that a race would be happening here, in America, and that the prize money would be enough for five generations to live without working. That was the only hope left to our tribe. That is why I am here."

Adlartok finishes his tale, gazing into the fire as his dogs lie next to him, two of them play-fighting and biting each-others' ears. He remembers the face of the North Western Mounted Police when they threatened him and the tribesmen.

("Oh yeah? And how would you get your guns without us, would you? I dunno, maybe your friends the Cree to the South will be more understanding. They want bullets too, you know, ones to put in your children's heads. Now you'll either stay out of this or the lead can stay out of your hands.)"

His anger is visibe in his eyes as his knife-holding hand shakes and the reflection of the fire in his gaze turns blood red. Oh, how brutally he would have murdred those men should the circumstances have allowed him to. He wouldn't have gave them a swift death. He would beat them to death, just like seals.