Auks

Auks are both a hunted food source and a force that can alter the appearance of the landscape in Smilla’s memories of Greenland. Their place in the narrative is most sharply defined when Smilla, after catching three birds, recognizes their connection to their young and releases them; the moment sits against the practical necessity of hunting and the abundance of earlier kills, making the birds central to a change in how she sees life around her.

Colony and landscape

During summer, a mountain near Atikerluk is overtaken by auks in numbers so great that Smilla says they defy measurement. The colonies are not simply scenery: the birds’ presence organizes the hunting season and gives the place its defining character. Smilla recalls that when a million auks take flight, the mountain seems to dissolve and rise into the sky. Their massed movement can turn space black, like the sudden return of winter, making the flock a visible transformation of the environment rather than a passive backdrop.

The birds also shape the experience of scale in the Arctic. Individual auks can be caught and eaten, but a flock of a million exceeds ordinary measure and temporarily changes the relation between land, sky, and observer. The contrast between the single bird in a hunter’s hands and the immense moving colony recurs in Smilla’s account: hunting depends on attending to particular animals, while the birds’ collective presence overwhelms easy counting or mastery.

Hunting and subsistence

Smilla’s memories place auk hunting within a practical food economy. Near the bird mountain, her group has gone twenty-four hours without eating. The method is to wait and blend into the landscape, then catch the birds with a large net. On her second attempt, Smilla catches three. The scene establishes that the birds are taken to meet an immediate need, not as an abstract exercise in sport or as a symbol detached from daily life.

Auks are hunted, cooked in clay, and eaten; the narrator remembers that many had been killed before the three she catches, so many that she could not remember them all. This history makes her sudden hesitation a break within an established practice, rather than evidence that the birds had never been part of subsistence. The account holds necessity and attention together: the same hunting knowledge that makes capture possible also exposes Smilla to the animals’ lives beyond the moment of capture.

Nests and the release

The three birds Smilla catches are females on their way back to their young. The young nest on ledges on steep slopes and make a great deal of noise. Their mothers carry worms in a pouch in their beaks, a detail that makes the birds’ journey home concrete: the captured animals are not only food but parents returning with food for their offspring.

As Smilla looks at the birds, she imagines their eyes as tunnels leading to their young, and the young birds’ eyes as further tunnels leading inward to the narwhal pup she had witnessed earlier. The thought links two hunting episodes through the relation between parent and offspring. Slowly, she turns over the net and lets the birds go. Their release is the decisive action of the scene: rather than complete the hunt as expected, she responds to the chain of lives she has recognized.

Her mother sits very still and looks at her as if seeing something for the first time. The account does not explain exactly what the mother sees or what follows from this change in attention. Instead, it marks the release as a moment of recognition between them, while leaving its meaning partly open.

Ecological and narrative significance

Smilla reflects that compassion is not usually a virtue in the Arctic, where survival depends on accepting the necessity of taking animal life. She understands her response not as a simple moral triumph but as a disruption of the feeling that necessity requires. That tension gives the auk episode its force: the birds remain animals with their own relation to their young, even as the people hunting them depend on what they provide.

The auks also serve as a recurring measure of environmental scale and interdependence. Their colonies can darken the sky; their nests connect the hunting ground to the steep slopes where their young wait; and Smilla’s decision to release three caught females follows her recognition of those connections. Through the birds, the novel brings the practical conditions of life in Greenland into contact with a moment of personal restraint, without erasing either the history of hunting or the animals’ lives beyond human use.