If people in the arctic region won't eat what they have, i.e. whales, then what will they eat? Should they think of saving the extinct animals or saving their own lives? This is the argument stated by Kari Herbert and she has indeed confused and convinced the readers by the use of argumentative language throughout the passage and especially in the last paragraph. ‘But the inighuit people..................animals they kill'
Kari Herbert, from the beginning, is creating an atmosphere of sympathy towards the inighuit people using adjectives like, ‘harsh environment’, ‘remote settlement ‘and ‘snowy wastes' for their habitat. She informs us that there is no other source of food (no plants) except hunting whales due to extremely low temperature. She succeeds in giving us evidences and proofs by giving us even the smallest details of the area and the whale in the strap lines and proving that hunting is not a sport but a need for the inighuit people.
She has even used local language or jargons to tell that nothing of the narwhale is wasted or thrown away and that every part of a narwhale helps them in this or that manner - even the things which would have been worthless in our eyes are made useful like the skin is used as a source of light and heat ‘For centuries the blubber of the whales was also the only source of light and heat.’ They depend on a narwhale not only for food but for almost everything, ‘it was part of their staple diet’
Kari Herbert goes through a difficult time in this passage and sometimes she gets emotional, ‘my heart also urged’, sometimes excited and tensed. ‘The hunters were close enough to touch the narwhale with their bare hands and yet they never moved’ and sometimes taken over by conflicting thoughts ’It