The two Nations were in the sixth, the last year at war with each other.

Geographically, they were situated, literally, a world apart. The enormous distance between the countries made the war senseless to everyone except the war mongering Politicians governing one of the Nations!

The one had neither warships nor submarines, and so, at sea, could afford to fight in self defence only, with minesweeping craft that kept the enemy submarines at bay by mining territorial waters with depth charges.

For six years, notwithstanding the frequent sightings of enemy submarines patrolling offshore, the minesweepers had deterred all attacks by sea by the enemy.

The enemy was known to have warships, but it was a mystery why no enemy warships were ever sighted within territorial waters.

Equally mysterious, perhaps, was why, so far, for six years there had been no casualties among the minesweeper vessels suffered by enemy submarine aggression.

Most, if not all war professional scholars after the war guessed that the cause of the scarcity of destructive war engagements at sea between the adversaries in that theatre of the war, was the weather.

It was a place of continuous freezing rain and blustering hurricane winds and fog and sinister-lurking ice floes.

The floes were the most dangerous on account of there always being more to a floe hidden underwater than was visible abovewater.

Early in the sixth year news grew that both sides had grown weary enough that talks of peace had begun at the highest levels of leadership.

Onboard the minesweeper named “Esquimalt”, the Captain, Bert Millan, was considering pleasantly surprising one of the engineers serving onboard, Officer Ley Anning.

Officer Anning was twenty-three years old. He had enlisted at the beginning of the war, six years earlier. The “Esquimalt” was the sixth minesweeper he was serving on. The other previous five were the Avalon, Cornwallis, Peregrine, Stadacona, Star.

When rumours of the end of the war surfaced, Officer Anning had proposed marriage to his fiancé, Dorothy Seryn.

Dorothy was living over a thousand miles away in a river port town.

Dorothy Seryn had accepted Officer Ley Anning’s proposal of marriage.

His proposal and her acceptance came as no surprise to their families and friends. Both of them had been born on the same day, Sunday 16 April, in the same small town, The Pas, and had attended the same Grade School, The Huntley Allison.

At sea, the war, so far, had been uneventful. None of the minesweepers had detected any submarines in territorial waters.

That was just as well for the “Esquimalt” since, among the minesweepers, it had been the only one plagued continually with faulty mechanical issues. So much so that its Captain Millan let it be known among his crew of seventy-eight that he had no doubt the “Esquimalt” would be immediately and officially de-commissioned and taken out of service the moment the war ended.

The most serious mechanical problem, so far, was the engine either unexpectedly stalling or accelerating. Either would be fatal in a fight with an enemy submarine.

Over the years, the “Esquimalt” had been in dry dock twice, each time for weeks, to be refitted in an attempt to eliminate the problem!

On one occasion, at sea on a parallel mine-depositing run with the minesweeper named “Sarnia”, the “Esquimalt’s” engine malfunctioned, causing the operation to be aborted. Had there been at that time a confrontation with an enemy submarine, the consequences could well have been catastrophic for both the “Esquimalt” and the “Sarnia”!

The matter had been made worse, privately, for Ley because of what Dorothy Seryn had secretly conveyed to him.

Dorothy Seryn was Inuit. The Inuit people was among the first humans who arrived in that sub-Arctic region of the world from elsewhere, more than ten thousand years previously.

Among the Inuit, as among all the Indigenous peoples of the sub-Arctic, there had forever been the unpleasantness of the concocted-up name ‘Eskimo’ by which insensitive foreigners named all sub-Arctic Indigenous peoples.

The shameless explanation foreigners offered in justification of their disrespect was that the word ‘Eskimo’ is an allowed variation of a legitimate Algonquian word in the ‘Eskimo’-Aleut language family!

Dorothy Seryn had whispered to Ley, that when some of her family heard he was serving on a boat named “Esquimalt”, they were upset because they had regarded the word ‘esquimalt’ to be a mere clumsy variation of ‘eskimo’; and just another of many deliberate insults by foreigners of sub-Arctic Indigenous people’s earlier presence.

Dorothy Seryn said she suspected some of her family members had resorted to an ethnic religious puja ritual of exorcism, albeit virtually obsolete, to either cleanse the minesweeper ship, “Esquimalt”, or to doom it to never leave port.

The Seryn family believed the Seryn family’s Ancient puja of cleansing was why the “Esquimalt” vessel was having continuous mechanical failures at sea. The family acknowledged that the puja’s failure to be successful continuously was that they were not flawless in the execution of the puja’s Ancient details.

Seryn elders noted among themselves in righteous justification of their intentions, that none of the other minesweepers in the nation’s wartime fleet had Culturally-offensive names: Avalon, Cornwallis, Peregrine, Stadacona, Star.

To both their credits, the most credence Dorothy and Ley gave to that virtually obsolete Ancient puja ritual was their thankfulness that Captain Millan was certain the “Esquimalt” would be immediately taken out of ‘active duty’ at the end of the war.

Dorothy knew her family was taking the matter extremely serious because, when they discovered their puja to keep the “Esquimalt” inactive permanently had failed, they searched for an Inuit Shaman, an Angakkuit, to conduct the puja.

While the puja ritual itself was of little significance to Dorothy, she was excited at the prospect of being involved in a religious ritual officiated by an Angakkuit, a genuinely full-blooded Inuit Shaman!

It would be her first time seeing an Inuit Shaman!

Dorothy did not divulge to Ley that she suspected that her family was regarding the matter to be of the highest importance to require an Angakkuit officiator especially because he, Ley, was not Inuit!

When Dorothy’s parents eventually located an Angakkuit for hire, they became aware of how more urgent the matter was.

The Angakkuit was in his late eighties. He lived thousands of miles away in the Country. Because of the explosive technological progressive advancement of Inuit Culture within the century, he was the last one!

The latest most modernized generation of Inuit felt no urgent need for the services of an Angakkuit.

Since the sacred Inuit tradition from most Ancient times was that there could be only one Angakkuit in the world at a time, and that an Angakkuit had to be initiated hands-on by a previous Angakkuit, the present Angakkuit would be the last one because nobody had come forward to inherit the Ancient honour!

The situation worsened when the Angakkuit, after accepting the opportunity to conduct the cleansing of the Esquimalt, learnt that nothing about the minesweeper was Inuit!

The Angakkuit observed that is why the family’s puja ritual had failed; not because the family had erred in the execution of the details.

The Angakkuit notified the family that while the cleansing ritual was ineffective on non-Inuits, that could be remedied if he included in the ritual at the beginning, a baptism conversion of a non-Inuit serving on the “Esquimalt”.

When Dorothy informed Ley of the problem, Ley did not hesitate to consent to be initiated into being an honorary Inuit, provided that the initiation did not include any brutality, like circumcision. Dorothy was happy to inform Ley it did not; not even ear-piercing for ritual wearing of even purest- gold ear rings!

Officer Anning was granted a few days shore leave to attend the Angakkuit’s conversion and the cleansing rituals at the Seryn home.

Without letting anyone know of their secret intentions, Dorothy and Ley planned to get married during his shore leave.

During the first day of Officer Anning’s shore leave, the Seryn family received sad news. The Angakkuit would not be coming to the Seryn home because during a sacred ceremony petitioning the Gods to create an Angakkuit successor, he had been inexplicably attacked and devoured during the ritual by the Polar Bear which the Angakkuit had enticed to be a part of the ceremony in order to empower the ritual.

Even as sad as the event was, in Inuit religion there is another perspective.

In Inuit religion, the Polar Bear is symbolic of the perfect combination of mightiest unblemished physical and spiritual life.

In Inuit belief, when the phrase “devoured by a Polar Bear” refers to a person’s non-suicidal death by a Polar Bear, it is believed that person immediately joins the Company of immortal Spirits.

This Inuit belief of everlasting apotheosis resulting from indeliberate dying, is not found in any other major religion.

During the second day of Officer Anning’s shore leave, the Esquimalt encountered an enemy U-190 submarine.

The crew of a minesweeper was accustomed to interruptions to shift routines because of the weather and, or, ocean conditions.

It was night. No moon. Thick fog restricted movement on deck. When onboard electronics indicated there were ice floes within contact of the ship all around, Captain Millan ordered that the “Esquimalt” be brought to and maintained at a halt.

That was when the onboard electronic monitors revealed the presence of an enemy submarine located stationary and submerged approximately five-hundred yards away.

On the one hand, Captain Millan knew his duty was clear. He had no choice but to attack the enemy if only because the enemy was within the “Esquimalt’s” territorial ocean waters.

On the other hand, however long or briefly the enemy had been there, they were, surely, aware of the “Esquimalt’s” presence; and yet they had not attacked!

Were they inactive out of respect for the possibility of the imminent cessation of war hostilities between the Nations?

Captain Millan had no duty to consult with the “Esquimalt’s” crew. It was well within his military command to sink the enemy submarine, immediately! The extreme weather had thwarted his attempts to communicate with the other minesweeper that patrolled the area, the “Sarnia”.

Captain Hans Erwin Reith of the enemy U-190 had stationed his submarine precisely where he had calculated. What the weather was above-water meant little-to-nothing to people in a submarine.

The electronic monitoring capabilities of that U-Boat were far advanced beyond that of the “Esquimalt’s”.  For the previous hours, the U-Boat had been tracking the “Esquimalt’s” every move.

Captain Reith had been particularly curious about the erratic sudden stops and starts of the “Esquimalt”.

The U-Boat’s electronic hologram projections had continuously misled the “Esquimalt’s” electronic radar probes.

The U-Boat’s location was not where the “Esquimalt’s” Captain had calculated it to be.

From his underwater position, Captain Reith had a torpedo-fix on the “Esquimalt”.

It was the U-190’s last torpedo. Captain Reith was depressingly aware that when he fired that last torpedo, that would signal his U-190’s last engagement.

When Captain Reith had sailed out of his homeport for the last time three months previously over three-thousand miles away, his U-190 had a full complement of twenty-two torpedos. His U-190 had played its important role in naval battles on oceans. The U-190 had suffered normal wear-and-tear.

Here, silently facing an enemy minesweeper, Captain Reith hoped he would not have to engage in battle, because he couldn’t be certain his U-190 would survive its own mechanical battle fatigue sturm- und-drang.

He had lost contact with his partner U-boat. The mechanical condition of his own U-190 made unwise a wide ocean search for his U-boat partner.

Three months earlier the U-190 had launched from its homeport into battle for the last time. For over a third of its crew of fifty-two that was the last time they would be in that port. Most were doomed to become fatal casualties of war.

Indeed, what would come as no surprise to Captain Reith was that within a month later, the poor condition of his U-190 would oblige him to unconditionally surrender in another harbour like the present, approximately five-hundred miles away from his present location, and six months to the day before the official end of the war!

It was well within his military command to sink the enemy minesweeper, immediately. He was well aware of the unofficial talk about the imminent end of the war.

Was there any official benefit to him and his crew to cease hostilities and allow a possibility of the end within days; or to carry on the war until he, a professional soldier, received an official order  of the end of hostilities?