Consumption (30 page)

For the sea mammals, however, this is trouble. The seals tend their breathing holes in winter, and keep them open with their periodic nosings. But the white whales and the walruses dive under the ice, looking for places they might breathe, the whales chirping out their echo-locating cries and listening carefully for the sound of open water. As the leads close, the whales’ options diminish and they collect in those that remain. One lead, kept open by a unlikely combination of local weather patterns or ocean current, will attract dozens of belugas gasping into the air after each deep dive, reaching out under the ice as far as they can, calculating with infinite precision the moment when exactly half of their endurance has been reached, and then surging their way back to the lead they had left. There might be walruses there as well, and together the great breathing beasts of the Arctic Ocean line up behind one another and take their breaths and dive optimistically, determinedly, and wait for a storm to stir the ice.

All of this unfolds without urgency or panic, and is responded to with patience and energy- (and oxygen-) conserving attention. There
is plenty of air, after all, and each animal needs only a few seconds at the surface to fill their lungs with many minutes worth. All of this unfolds easily—that is, until the bears find the lead.

Nanuq, Ursus maritimus
, the polar bear is two thousand pounds when grown and able with one great swipe of his enormous paw to hook the spine of a beluga whale and pull it to the ice edge. Then, like some enormous steroid-infused weightlifter, it straightens and pulls back and hauls such a whale right up and out of the water.

Then the scent of blood is in the air and all the bears—usually fratricidally anti-social—converge. They line up at the open lead and they swipe until the water is a crimson froth. The bears stagger backwards under the weight of the walruses and whales, and collapse, sometimes killed by tons of flesh falling onto their chests. More often, they roll gamely out of the way and eat themselves into catatonia, dying whales all around—those on the ice and unknowable numbers of others, frightened into diving in search of leads. They gamble long past the halfway point that there will be others, and anyway, all that can be done is to continue, and listen, and hope. And get away.

FIFTEEN

THE INUIT ARE, AT THEIR ESSENCE
, a maritime people. The Thule culture relied on the hunting of sea mammals, and it is this culture that dashed across the Arctic about the same time the Norse arrived in Greenland. The Norse imagined themselves mariners without equal, but the Arctic reduced them steadily and they withered in their little fjords facing south into the Atlantic. But the Inuit prospered, pulling their living from the sea without iron spearheads, without compasses, and without any dependence on traded timber from far-off cities. There were offshoots among them, the Padleimiut and the Ihalmiut, who travelled inland in search of caribou, but they remained, firstly, men and women of the ocean. Though the government ships and the Hudson’s Bay Company barges had made obsolete their own tradition of open-water voyaging, on summer days when the fish were not running, the people still looked off to the edge of the ocean.

Sometimes that ocean horizon was marked by small sailboats. Most of the sailors who poke their way into Hudson Bay do not linger but run back before the ice closes in. Every few years, however, a boat will attempt the Northwest Passage. This will involve wintering-in, either at Iqaluit, or, as Amundsen did farther west, in Gjoa Haven. Some of the boats choose to head for more southern harbours in Hudson Bay, but this adds hundreds of miles to the
length of the passage and so sailboats are less commonly sighted south of Repulse Bay.

Therefore, when a steel ketch anchored in the inlet at the end of July in 1991, most of the town came out to watch the little man who rowed ashore from it. His name was Simon Alvah and he had welded his boat, the
Umingmak
, together in his backyard in Juneau over the course of four long years. He had spent the previous winter in Gjoa Haven, had broken out a month ago with the melt and made his way here. He had read of Marble Island and the long history of sailors who had been frozen in for the winter there, and had decided he wanted to pass a winter just like that. It was an odd ambition and, if questioned, he would not have been able to explain it. Nevertheless, it was what he wanted to do. He had studied the charts of the area for years, and now took in each promontory as if he had passed many years on this coast. The place drew him.

The following spring he intended to return back through the Northwest Passage to the Bering Strait and home. He had sailed around the world four times in other boats, had overwintered on Elephant Island and waited out cyclones in mangrove swamps, and now he was trying this. He found living in cities difficult, he told anyone who asked.

He was forty-eight years old and looked sixty. His beard was dreadlocked and the same steel grey as the sky. He had the appearance of men who have abandoned the company of women: not neglected, exactly, but clearly combining aesthetic decisions with ease of maintenance, an ethic he never allowed to prevail when it came to his boat. His hair was clumsily trimmed, and in the uneven and scalloped edges one caught a touching picture of the man awkwardly holding scissors as he leaned into his shaving mirror. His clothes were patched and sewn with waxed sail thread that stood up proud in tight, even stitches as thick as light cord; none of the seams were parting, but the effect on the eye was not subtle.

As he pulled his tender ashore he looked around impatiently, as if he felt crowded, which was strange to observe in someone who had
just been a month by himself coming down the coast from Gjoa Haven. When Inuit families came in off the land after very long trips, they acknowledged everyone they saw; solitude was understood as an unavoidable imposition but never as a thing to be sought. Alvah was plainly mad, however much one might admire his capacity for endurance.

In order to overwinter on Marble Island, he planned to use some of the coal left behind by the whalers to heat his stove, then get going again in early July the next year. He figured that would give him time to get back out into the Pacific again. He did not ask anyone’s permission about anchoring there, or using the old coal. He wanted to be in Gjoa Haven again by the end of July, would have to, if he was to get around again to open sea against the prevailing winds and current. The older men who spoke with him about his plan concluded it was as insane as he was. Then one of them said, in English, “We’re sure you know that water better than we do.”

In the Northern Store hardware department, Alvah spent long hours looking at the array of wrenches and arc welders, solder and crimping tools. The way in which he weighed the decision to buy each tool testified to how short his money was—if that point wasn’t made clear enough by his determination to remain on his boat even after it was frozen in for the winter, and eat rice and tinned fish and listen to the radio, rather than live in the town or fly home to wherever it was he belonged. He represented a disconcerting challenge to those who imagined themselves confined to this place. Here
he
was, after all, broke, and still making his own way around, not acquiescing to anything. It would have been more comfortable simply not to have known about him.

The territorial mining commission had expected ten people at the hearing and prepared for twelve. The boardroom in the hotel had sixty people in it. Men and women in parkas stood along the walls.

They had been promised some interesting developments and they waited impassively. Robertson and the other members of the commission had realized something was up the moment they had arrived and seen faces they had never previously seen anywhere but on the land, or in the Northern Store.

Okpatayauk stood first when it was time for questions from the public. Robertson looked to the people on either side of him, then finally said, “Yes, Mr. Iqapsiak?”

“Mr. Robertson, I wonder if you could tell me why you have been accepting illegal disbursements from the mining corporation?”

Nobody moved. The people lining the walls had not expected anything so personal. They all looked at the floor or the ceiling, uncomfortable to the point of agony. If it had been possible to leave unobtrusively, they all would have in an instant.

Robertson looked at his wife, sitting in one of the chairs around the table, waiting to pick him up so they could go shopping after the meeting. She had wondered what Okpatayauk was talking about, but with that look from Robertson she knew.

“I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Iqapsiak. The Ikhirahlo Group is contracted in an advisory capacity and is remunerated for that.”

“What I’m asking, is, have you accepted bags of uncut diamonds from the mine manager, Mr. Robertson?”

Robertson looked at him.

“Is there, as we speak, a bag of diamonds worth one hundred thousand dollars or more in your dresser drawer at home?”

“No, there is not.”

“All right,
Mr. Robertson
, is there a bag of diamonds worth
any
amount of money in your dresser drawer at home?”

Melvin Anders intervened. “Okpatayauk, this is slander.”

“No, Mr. Anders, it is not.”

Victoria sought out Pauloosie, standing on the other side of the room, but he did not meet her eyes. Simionie was sitting beside Pauloosie and he stared resolutely at the floor. Okpatayauk said he had more questions, and turned the page in his notebook.

Betty Peters and Melvin Anders were both looking at Robertson, who stood gulping for air, his face completely flushed.

Victoria ripped her son’s bedding off his bed and carried it into the kitchen. She opened the door and threw it out into the snow. Then she emptied the porch of his gear—his
kamiks
and dog harnesses and his sleeping bag and his harpoon and rifle and the boxes of ammunition—and threw all this out into the snow too. The wind picked up the corners of his sleeping bag and stirred it, and the snow drifted over the rifle shell boxes, the cartridges spilled out and glinting. One of the
kamiks
rolled over in the wind, tumbling slowly, making its way to the sea ice. She looked at it, blinking through tears, and then she shut the kitchen door and locked it for the first time in her life. Robertson had left the meeting room without speaking to her.

She had been unable to determine who was the architect of this. He was more certain. Neither Pauloosie nor Simionie had looked at her, and she blamed them both. She had trusted them, and had been betrayed. The trust was the mistake, and so she withdrew it. As it had been withdrawn from her.

SIXTEEN