Consumption (34 page)

“Ginger and Mary Ann have the beauty contest.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh.”

“What?”

“What do you make of Simionie?”

“He didn’t do it.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Look at him.”

“I know. Wouldn’t that be a surprise, though, if he did?”

“He didn’t.”

EIGHTEEN

October 21, 1991

Dear Uncle Keith:

  I finally got your letter. Mom gave it to me today when we met for lunch. I’m sorry to hear about your friend. It sounds to me like everyone’s taking it really hard. Murder must be so much more personal a thing up there. Everyone knowing each other and everything. Here everyone’s more used to it. It’s always on the news, you just hear about it more. When it happens to someone you know then, it’s not such a big surprise.

So things are pretty much the same around here. I’m still seeing Lewis. He’s really smart. Mom and Dad don’t like him, natch. I’m actually not as bothered by them as I used to be. I think everything is gonna be okay. They might not be, but I will.

So you should get yer butt down here to visit me sometime soon! I have lots more to tell you.

Love
,

Amanda

The people Lewis drew to himself were as fascinating as he was. Amanda’s friends at school had always been conventionally timid girls who regarded the world as an opaque and ominous place, the only shelter from which was their parents. She compared those sweater-wearing clarinet players to Kat, who Lewis brought along one afternoon when they met at the mall, skin like white latex and blue-black hair. He was thin and long and erect, dressed in anarchist regalia and almost entirely mute in any group larger than a pair. Kat knew the members of every hard-core band in the city, and was preoccupied with anime and graphic novels. He sat with them at the food court and flipped through his comic books and when Amanda asked him about them, he described the nexus between western and Japanese animation, and how it hybridized ideas of sex and submission and irony into a thing that struck all concerned as intriguingly alien. A part of her wondered if he had read those words somewhere, but she was stirred by the effort he put even into posing. And when he smoked his Camel Plains and laughed through his teeth, she could not take her eyes off him.

The three of them were at a house party when the boys stepped outside to smoke a joint. Amanda stood against one wall, feeling the music throbbing in her chest and listening distractedly to the conversations around her. She was just learning to smoke pot herself. That night she felt a thin sliver of anxiety that had to do with her father’s inevitable departure and had thought better of getting high and letting that anxiety free to roam.

The girl sidled up to her like she just wanted to lean against that part of the wall too. It was very dark and Amanda was nodding to—being nodded by—the music and the next thing she knew the girl was asking her if both the boys were her boyfriends. Amanda laughed, flattered at the daring that had been imputed to her. No, just the muscular one, she said, though no one other than besotted Amanda would have so characterized Lewis, only marginally less stringy than Kat. “They’re both so cute,” the girl said. “I’m Beth.”

“Amanda.” And she closed her eyes a little and nodded to the music. “Do you wanna go smoke some pot with them?”

“Where are they?”

“Outside, in the back. Go ahead.”

When the three of them, Lewis and Kat and Beth, finally came back inside they were giggling circularly and so short of breath they could hardly speak. They walked up to Amanda arm in arm and looked at her.

“Well, hello.” She felt so cool.

“Uh, hi,” Lewis said, smiling so widely it looked as though his face might just split. “D’you wanna stay here or go?”

“It’s pretty heavy.”

“We could go.”

“This is Beth.”

“We met.” Beth smiled soporifically at Amanda.

In the course of a weekend it became winter, thirty below in late October. The dogs panted their way across the tundra, the squeak of the komatik’s runners on the fresh snow a kind of musical counterpoint to their breathing. The interplay between these rhythms and harmonies caught Penny’s ear and held it. The sun glistened off every crystalline shard of snow and ice and it simply could not have been brighter or colder than it was.

She wore sheepskin booties over her
kamiks
and curled her hands into fists inside her mittens. She watched the texture of the snow, alert for any sign of candling, of the snow beginning to form jagged and miniature stalactites that would abrade the dogs’ paws until they bled. But for that to happen it would have to warm up. For now, it was so cold the snow had the consistency of coarsely ground cornmeal, and it erupted into clouds as the dogs’ feet collided with it. Every time she inhaled, her teeth ached. Under everything else, she sensed dread like another forty degrees below zero.

She had an idea where Pauloosie might be. Twenty miles down the Meliadine was a valley with steep sides, through which a tributary of the river ran fast and deep. It had good fishing even in winter. The valley walls would provide some shelter from the wind, and the snow packed nicely there too. It was one of his favourite campsites, he had told her, because no one else seemed to know about it. The snowmobilers are careful with river valleys and fast water. With dogs, one goes slower and so is more certain of the footing.

When she reached the fork on the Meliadine she turned toward the tributary she sought and started scanning the sky for smoke, even though he would be more careful than that. Still, when a wisp of snow blew up in the air, for a moment she felt like she couldn’t breathe. There had been dogs through here too, she saw, but not for a while, and she kept going. It was her third night out. She was missing work. Even if she turned around now she wouldn’t make it back before the end of the week. She had lost her job then.

She stopped on a bend of the tributary where the bank was close to the ice and provided good shelter. The snow wasn’t yet deep enough to make an iglu and so she erected her little white dome tent and pulled her gear inside with her, thinking of the last time he and she had been inside that tent. She hacked frozen meat off the caribou in the komatik and threw it to the dogs. She checked each of their feet in turn, and then she peed in the snow. She crawled into her tent and pushed her Primus stove out of it and lit it. She boiled water for tea and drank it while she heated a can of stew. The dogs smelled the food cooking and whined at her. She fed them some more and they still whined. She too heard the wind rising.

An iglu is a surprising thing for most people to contemplate. For instance, the Dorset Inuit, the predecessors of the Thule culture Inuit, struggled with the Arctic the entire time they lived there, scratching out a living in skin tents heated by low smoky fires. Neither had they the dogsled, the toggle-headed harpoon, or qayak; any contention that technology inevitably demeans humans falters on considering what must have been the misery of that life.

Penny had occasion to contemplate such misery—the difficulty of remaining warm and dry in a tent when the wind reaches sixty miles an hour and freezing rain hits the fabric with such velocity it blows through the wall in a frigid mist of atomized ice. Melted snow formed puddles at the base of the windward wall and then trickled the length of the tent running downhill and wicking its way through everything fabric.

After the blizzard there was more snow. She lay in the tent for four days, eating quietly and settling her dogs. When the wind finally lifted, every track she had seen coming to this place was gone, her own and those of the dogs she had been following. A slender, even a false hope, is still a hope, and when she emerged under the bright sky to see the tundra scoured bare of any evidence of movement, she sagged. Her dogs emerged from the mounds of snow they had become, shaking their great curled tails and rumps and then throwing themselves against their tethers toward her.

She headed inland, south and west, because she knew that there would be fewer hunters there, and he would know that too. She crossed the great rivers one by one, noted the fording sites the
tuktu
used and tried to remember their Inuktitut names. Her dogs charged across them successively, pausing only to note the scent of
tuktu
and to glance back at her, wondering.

She shot a fat buck they came upon when they rounded a hilltop. She had her rifle out and was kneeling down, her elbow planted on her thigh when he turned to run parallel to her and afforded her a lung shot. She led him by a foot, he was running so fast, and when she fired she blinked her eyes and when she looked up again he was somersaulting onto the snow.

She drove her dogs down to the young buck and stopped them, fifty feet away, tying the sled to an ice hook planted firmly in the tundra—as she had seen the old man do a hundred times. The dogs leapt forward at the smell of the blood leaking out over the snow from the deer’s chest. She approached it. It seemed not to be
breathing but when she was close enough she saw its eyes were open. She squinted her own, and then she drew out her hunting knife and cut its throat. Blood flowed forward like a river in flood and the dogs whined like puppies. Still he looked up at her. She thought to herself that if she had cut both the carotid arteries, and clearly she had, then he must be unconscious. But the eyes were not glazed, were unmistakably gazing up at her and there is no denying the fact of another creature studying you, especially when it is doing so in pain or malice, and so she raised her rifle and shot it in the head and then the eyes were shattered and what remained of them froze quickly. As she flung the tongue and the liver and the heart and lungs to the dogs, she wondered if it might be too much food for them, after eating so sparsely for the last week. But her dogs harboured no such hesitation. The fattest, strongest dogs ate deeply and well and then staggered away and the older and younger dogs snarled over the steaks she continued to fling their way. At least, she thought to herself, she knew that she could find food out here, could remain here until she found him or until she or the dogs were hurt.

She had crossed the Thelon River and was staring along its length, studying it for tracks, for abandoned tent or iglu sites, when something about the sinuous curve of ice resonated with her. It was only a few miles downriver of where she and Johanna had camped after the bush pilot had dropped them off, the summer before. She smiled at this recollection, but then the contrast between the memory and this circumstance was too much and she had to push the picture of Johanna laughing into her tea from her mind. Instead, she reduced the memory to a series of abstractions in order that she might find what was useful to her in it. Fact: there was a cabin upriver from here, the pilot had told them, built by three Englishmen before they starved to death sixty years ago. One was a boy, Edgar Christian, seventeen years old, rowdy, and unloaded by his parents onto his adventuresome and impetuous uncle, Jack Hornby, who had proposed that they cross
the Canadian tundra together. With Hornby’s friend Howard Adlard, they had reached the Thelon from the west, after coming up the Mackenzie River to Yellowknife. From there they had walked and canoed their way east, and had prepared to spend the winter on the Thelon before completing their journey the following spring.