Consumption (14 page)

Watching the deer, Pauloosie drew back the bolt of his rifle and then pushed it forward, rotated and locked it. The rifle round was seated in the chamber. He fell to his knees in the slow motion of a movie action hero and then onto his elbows. He crawled forward and up the slope of the ridge the deer stood upon.

The tundra is as much rock as it is snow, and any doubt on this point is dispelled by an attempt to crawl on it. When it is studied close up, it resembles a gravel parking lot with inadequately crushed stone, punctuated by eskers: great stony ridges that appear, wind sinuously across a couple or a couple hundred miles, and then disappear. Over this is laid the thinnest of layers of snow, spread clumsily. Where the
tuktu
have been pawing, there are exposed grasses and moss, dried and frozen and as nutritious-looking as a mouthful of sawdust. The deer must range so widely to find even the smallest amounts of forage that their wide cloven-hoof marks are found anywhere there is wind-pressed snow.

Winter for the
tuktu
is an exercise in deficit spending: they cannot hope to consume as many calories from the frozen mosses as they expend staying warm and running from the wolves. They earn their living in a three-month sprint of frenetic activity bracketed by
clock watching. In the summer, the tundra is a green and voluptuous feast. In hollows, the grasses rise to mid-ankle and the
tuktu
proceed through it like mowers lined abreast. The sun shines most of the day and the rest of the time there is twilight. By August, their bellies bulge and their necks appear like swollen wineskins appended to their trunks.

Which is the miracle of these animals—that they stand out here in wind and cold so complete it freezes exposed skin instantaneously, yet so long as they have had enough to eat, they do not freeze, do not simply succumb, but paw on without cease, scraping their teeth against the rocks to break free flakes of lichen, stalks of grass, bits of shrub.

Between this thin soup and the fat they wear around their bellies, they endure the winters and a whole chain of existence is constructed upon that improbability. The wolves follow them, and feast on the calves and the animals gut-shot by inexpert hunters. Behind the wolves come the foxes, which scavenge the cracked bones, the shards of sinew and hide left by the wolves. Behind the foxes come the ravens, studies in endurance equal to the deer themselves, the only large bird present year-round in the Arctic, and which quixotically retains its black coloration in an otherwise monotonously white landscape. The ravens fly above the herds of deer looking for spots of motionlessness within the sea of movement—an aborted calf, a senescent bull finally given in.

The
tuktu
, the last of the large herding land mammals in North America, exist in enormous herds that disperse and regroup, to calve and to mate and move from summer forage to winter: a hundred thousand animals each and growing steadily for the last forty years, as man has retreated to the edge of the tundra and the climate has warmed. The sparsest the caribou ever were was in the last years of man’s presence on the tundra. There was famine then, which was part of what propelled the hunters into the hamlets. Just as that movement of people reached the point of no return, the caribou reappeared and have multiplied steadily faster ever since.

Every extra frost-free day increases calf survival measurably and the herds are now astonishing things: masses of vitality in a landscape of icy stone.

What the tundra
feels
like, as it grinds itself across one’s belly, is cold and pointed. Pauloosie pulled his rifle along with him exactly as his grandfather had taught him, with sights turned into and protected by his arm, the stock lying within the crook of his elbow. He watched the deer constantly as he crawled, and at the first shiver or suggestion of anxiety, he froze.

When he was in range he stopped. He pulled the rifle up to his face, and raised it to his cheek, his elbows in grooves between the rocks. As he breathed, the rifle slowly rose up and settled on his shoulder and he watched the fattest buck walk closer to him. And. Finally. Pause. He tried to calm himself. Pow.

He missed. The bullet hit a rock and whined into the air. The caribou shuddered collectively and then stared intently away from the boy, off in the direction the bullet had headed. As they did so, they edged closer to him, looking backwards as they advanced. Pow. He missed again. The caribou stutter-stepped as he yanked back the bolt of his rifle and slammed another round in the chamber and dropped his head to the sights and aimed generally at a fat doe that was standing broadside to him looking in every direction. Panting, he missed again. Abruptly acquiring some sense, the
tuktu
erupted in a mad dash down the hill at a right angle away from where Pauloosie lay and he got up on his knees and fired again with the reasoning of a losing card player—luck like this couldn’t just go on. He missed again. He jammed the last round into his rifle and, casually, almost as an afterthought, fired at the
tuktu
, running now as if they were airborne, legs stretching ahead and behind them nearly the lengths of their own bodies, little kicks of snow flying up in arcs as high as their heads. One of them fell. And then bounced back up and flew off with the others.

A part of the boy wanted to believe the doe had simply slipped on the snow, and had recovered her feet as quickly as she had fallen
and jumped up and rejoined the rest of the sprinting herd and disappeared over a ridgeline as he stood there, kicking at the nearest stone for his stupidity at taking that last careless shot. But he walked back to his snow machine and started it, and set off on their trail.

At the top of the esker, Pauloosie stopped. The caribou were half a mile away now, and still running, none of them trailing. He turned his machine around to pick his way down the slope he had ascended. Then he ran the length of the esker to the valley the deer were in. When he was on the plain where he had last seen the caribou all there was were tracks that led to another ridge a mile away. He followed them.

Three hours later it occurred to him that it was growing dark and that he had become so preoccupied with the task of finding the caribou he had shot that he was not entirely certain where he was, except vaguely west of town and north of the Meliadine River—maybe fifty miles out. But it was four in the afternoon and the sun was setting.

He stopped his snowmobile. He opened his pack and withdrew his steel
panna
, and walked in enlarging circles around the snow machine, probing the snow periodically. When he found snow that was packed yet penetrable he stopped and cut a small block from it. It would do, he thought. He had watched his grandfather do this many times, but he had never done it by himself. He began by summoning up a memory of the old man assembling blocks and placing them around himself, cutting the blocks to fit in an ascending spiral. The sun was already dipping toward the horizon when he realized that his iglu was taking the shape of an upside-down ice cream cone. He tried to lean his panels of packed snow in more aggressively as he rose, but nothing like a sphere emerged. By the time his walls began to meet one another, he was reaching as high as he could. He hunched down within the dark space, felt the wall in front of him and found a joint. He carved out a crawl hole just large enough to admit his shoulders and emerged into the dusk. He collected his pack from the komatik and pulled it inside the iglu. There was not enough room to spread out the sleeping bag and so he sat in
it, his head hunched over his knees. He had been very frightened but felt better now.

It was the first Friday night that winter that Penny hadn’t telephoned the old man to discuss the weather and to arrange a time to meet in the morning. After her supper of rice and smoked fish she had crawled into bed at eight and fallen asleep. She walked to her dogs in the purple and frigid darkness the next morning and when the dogs smelled her approaching they began yipping to one another, the neighbouring teams replying with their own agitated cries. Soon the whole bay was echoing with high-pitched cries of dogs flinging themselves skyward against their chains in air so cold it seemed to fracture a little with each strangled cry.

She rounded the hills above the bay quickly, running alongside the dogs, their paws squeaking on snow so cold the komatik seemed to float rather than ride on it. They ran easily in the darkness, so comfortable in the cold they would not have wished it even ten degrees warmer, feeling able to run forever at this pace if they could so choose, or if this woman running beside them would for once decide not to turn back, carry on instead toward the horizon and whatever lay past it, never again returning to the long heavy chain frozen into ice on either end and surrounded by a baffling array of odours and antagonistic and ill-mannered dogs.

Two hours later Penny was still running and wondering to herself if it was dangerous to feel so light. The dogs’ exuberance had swept through the air, through the rind of white and frozen hoarfrost clinging to her parka hood, and into her lungs and bloodstream. She reminded herself to watch the time to ensure she turned back early enough in the day. The dogs yearned for just the opposite, and a struggle occurred as they ran, the dogs willing her to shut her careful mind off, to lift her feet higher and stride with them longer and faster toward the distant-most ridge and the one past that. The sky
was now lightening in the southeast and it was possible to make out such landmarks as there were with little effort. Penny was struck by how much easier this was when she was alone with her intrusive and impudent dogs and their incautious urgings, and not relying on Emo’s expertise. She kept a running fix of her position in some part of her brain—it felt like it was just behind her left ear—and she never wondered for a moment where she was.

And then she rose over a ridge and she saw a snowmobile glinting on the horizon. As she approached, she recognized the old man’s parka. His machine was twenty years older than any other in the hamlet and she had never seen him use it. She was worried that he had come looking for her, and she prepared to apologize. She had just kicked out her snow brake when he asked her if she had seen anyone else on the land, any tracks at all. She said no, and he told her his grandson, Pauloosie, the boy from Johanna’s math class, had not come home from hunting the night before.