Kunayou used the Little Spirits' favorite tune to summon her Guardian Spirit to her side.
It was a polar bear named Gomok, covered from head to toe in snow-white fur and looking utterly majestic. Ordinary polar bears lived to around thirty, but Gomok had lived for a full hundred and fifty years, and its teeth were still in excellent shape. Only, as it grew older, it became increasingly difficult for it to hunt enough food. So one day, as the sun set, it crawled out of its cave and resolutely walked into the long, dark night.
No one saw it again after that, until one day when an Inuit girl named Kunayou was playing by the river and spotted a polar bear leisurely basking in the sun on the bank.
Kunayou ran home and told her father, but when her father and two other hunters came to the riverbank, they saw no polar bear and found no tracks in the snow. Yet Kunayou clearly saw the white polar bear lying on a piece of floating ice, drifting downstream with the current.
It floated right past Kunayou's father and the two hunters, yet the adults acted as though they could not see it at all. When the shaman learned of this, he told Kunayou's father that the girl could communicate with spirits and should study under him. From then on, Kunayou was raised as the next shaman, while Gomok, the first Little Spirit she had seen, became her Guardian Spirit and protected her as she grew up.
Although Gomok loved to play and often vanished to who knew where, as long as Kunayou sang a cheerful song, it would always come running back. Just like now, the white polar bear lumbered in from outside, shook its fur as if trying to