Louis Ayah’s grave in Deline. ©NWT Archives/Rene Fumoleau/N-1998-051: 1707.
What Louis Ayah may have foreseen is what scientists now call a nuclear winter. The explosion of just one hundred of the thousands of nuclear weapons in existence would create widespread firestorms lifting such quantities of soot into the stratosphere that much direct sunlight would be blocked, leading to temperature drops, crop failures, famine, and the deaths of billions.
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed the death and destruction resulting from the first use of just two atomic bombs in 1945. Louis Ayah had foreseen the elongated “Little Boy” atom bomb dropped by the American B-29 bomber that destroyed Hiroshima. “I saw a flying bird – a big one. They were loading it with things . . . I watched them and finally saw what they were making with whatever they were digging out of the hole – it was something long, like a stick. I wanted to know what it was for – I saw what harm it would do when the big bird dropped this thing on people – they all died from this long stick, which burned everyone. The people they dropped this long thing on looked like us, like Dene.”