Narwhals

Narwhals matter in Smilla’s recollections as animals hunted for sustenance and as a vivid measure of the Arctic’s unstable abundance. A catch of eight leaves the hunters with far more meat than they can use, while the sight of an unborn calf and the prolonged silence that follows mark a limit in Smilla’s ability to participate in the hunt.

Hunting and Abundance

Smilla remembers traveling north with her mother and other hunters in small, diesel-powered cutters to fish for narwhals. One day they caught eight. The ice had confined the animals to a restricted area, and the three boats had lost contact with one another; together, these circumstances produced a catch too large to consume, even as dog food. The episode shows the hunt as a practical response to Arctic life, but also as an encounter with quantities that exceed immediate need.

The pregnant female in the catch makes that excess difficult for Smilla to treat as mere provision. As her mother opened the animal to remove its intestines, a fully formed calf, about two and a half feet long, emerged. The scene centers not on the hunters’ skill but on what the catch contains: a new life that had been hidden within an animal taken for food.

Silence After the Catch

For nearly four hours, the hunters stood almost silently beneath the midnight sun and ate mattak, narwhal skin. Smilla could not eat. The hunters’ meal and their silence hold together the ordinary practical use of the catch and her personal inability to join in it. The remembered calf remains present in the scene not as an abstract idea but as the immediate context for her refusal of the food.

The recollection also sits beside another Arctic hunt in which Smilla catches three auks after the group has gone a day without food. Those birds, like the narwhals, are part of subsistence hunting; yet seeing the birds as mothers returning to their young draws her attention toward the lives connected to the animals being taken. The contrast helps explain why the narwhal episode becomes more than a report of an unusually large catch: it belongs to a developing estrangement from hunting and from nature as something she had once experienced without distance.

Population Cycles and Human Scale

Smilla’s mother later explains that narwhals can gather by the thousands in a single fjord and then become trapped by ice and freeze to death. She places that fluctuation alongside the seasonal abundance of auks and the mass starvation of birds. Her account does not deny the importance of hunting; it situates the hunters’ take within Arctic populations that can change drastically from one month to the next. In that scale of abundance and loss, the number people take may seem negligible.

That explanation does not restore Smilla’s earlier ease with the natural world. She understands her mother, but understanding changes nothing: around the year before her mother disappears, she begins to feel nauseated while fishing. The narwhals therefore connect ecological knowledge to a personal change. Her mother offers a way of seeing human use within natural fluctuation, while Smilla’s response registers that knowledge without resolving her sense of alienation.

Narrative Significance

The narwhal episode gives concrete form to the novel’s interest in how Arctic life resists simple judgments. The catch is both necessary provision and more than the hunters can use; the animal is food and, through the calf, a bearer of life not visible until the hunt is complete. Smilla’s silence, her inability to eat, and her mother’s later explanation preserve those tensions rather than settling them into a single moral conclusion.

The animals also shape the memory through which Smilla approaches the ice and her own estrangement from it. The encounter does not make her an outside observer of hunting: she has grown up within it and understands its practical conditions. But after the calf’s emergence, the work of subsistence is bound to an awareness of the lives it interrupts, and the narwhal becomes a lasting measure of that uneasy closeness.