Next came the trials of Qarak, Adlaytok, and Ouyerack.
The first witness was Mosee, Mina’s husband. He said Ouyerack had told him to kill Ikpak, since he, Ikpak, was Satan. “But I didn’t want to kill a person like myself,” Mosee stated.
Ouyerack told the court that he did not think of Satan as a person like himself. Rather, Satan was an “ijuruq [ghost or phantom] who can jump into anyone, even a piaraq [baby].”
Since the atiq (soul) of an animal, any animal, can also jump into a person, even a baby, Satan’s jumping abilities were hardly unique.
Adlaytok, who had killed Keytowieack, admitted that he knew very little about Satan, except that he, Satan, was “piunngituq [very bad].”
Before Keytowieack’s Bible readings, none of the other Qiqiqtarmiut knew about Satan, either. But they had their own very bad beings, such as …
… the kukulingiat, which emerge from the ground to slash at people with their myriad claws, and the ever-hungry katintayuuk, a creature that boasts a huge head and, in lieu of a mouth, a female vulva that swallows unwary members of our species. Let’s not forget man-eating eider ducks, either.
Such creatures carry with them this underlying message: do not underestimate the power of Nature.…
Judge Plaxton seemed to understand the risk of having a diabolic being in one’s camp. If you think another person is Satan, he told the court, “then by doing away with him, you are doing away with a wrongful thing.”
Satan’s jumping ability would seem to include video games. At a recent creationist conference in Phoenix, Arizona, Christian video game developers blamed Satan for the failure of their products. They tried to perform an exorcism at the conference, but failed.
Satan hasn’t interfered with video games in Singapore, where 90 percent of the children are myopic because they spend so much time playing video games.
“My son spends the whole day playing video games,” a woman told me. She was from New Haven, Connecticut, not Singapore.
I told the woman with the video game–playing son about the Belcher murders. “Terrible,” she said while texting someone.
I also told the texter’s husband about the Belcher murders. Immediately, he googled “Belcher + murder,” then proceeded to read me a story about the Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher, who in 2012 killed his girlfriend, then himself.
Qarak was accused of killing Ikpak with bullets “borrowed from Jesus.” This caused a titter among several of the jurors.
The crown prosecutor asked Qarak whether he still believed Ikpak was Satan. He shook his head. He said that the Rev. Neilsen had made him see the manirtaq (light, lit. “lamp wick”).
When I mentioned Qarak’s name to a Cyberian friend, she laughed. “Qarak is a popular video game character called the Dark Wanderer.”
But Qarak didn’t become any sort of wanderer, dark or otherwise. The jury gave him a suspended sentence. He was such a good hunter that, in the words of the Judge Plaxton, “he will hunt for the families of the other prisoners if his sentence is remitted.”
“Ayeeh!” shouted Qarak when he learned that he wasn’t going to be executed by the qallunaat or—just as bad—exiled away from the Belcher Islands.
Adlaytok was a considerably less successful hunter than Qarak, so the court sentenced him to a year’s imprisonment with hard labor at one of the RCMP garrisons on the mainland.
Almost nothing is known about Adlaytok’s life from that point on … except that, according to the Mountie records, he had a very difficult time living away from the Belchers.