Consumption (35 page)

Nobody understands, really, what winter is like on the tundra. Every book ever written about men wintering over in small cabins with caches of food has left the lingering misimpression that it is principally a question of resolve—with a few large sacks of flour, and some ammunition and determination, inexpert but strong men may attempt this confidently.

But there is no
wood
. Thus, there are no wood fires, no wooden shelter, no forests to break the wind, no trees from which to fashion skis or snowshoes, nor to collect the snow in sufficient quantity and depth to require them.
Tuktu
exist only in proportion to the scant forage: they are as sparse on the ground as their food is, and when they disperse, after the rut and after calving, they are thin on the ground in every sense.

She had not seen another deer since she had shot the fat buck. Now she recalled how cavalierly she had tossed the organ meat to the dogs and winced.

The Hornby party had had the Bay leave their order of plankwood and flour for them and they had found it easily enough, but they had underestimated how much they would need: how much flour, wood, coal, oil, and sugar three men will use over a very cold winter. Their supplies had given out before the solstice. They had thought they would use the flour to batter the chops, but there were no deer since the autumn river fordings. The boy’s diary describes the erosion of their strength, the five-day-long hunting expeditions that generated only a single rabbit. In the accumulating foreknowledge of their deaths, there was a kind of equanimity in his writing that had surprised Penny, familiar as she was with boisterous seventeen-year-old boys. She had ordered a transcript of the diary from the Hudson’s Bay Company archives, in Winnipeg.

When it had arrived, wrapped in brown paper, it had been accompanied by a handwritten letter from the archivist, reading:
Thank you for your interest in this material. I should be honoured to be of any further assistance whatever. We remain, Mickie Reid
. Penny had imagined a woman librarian drunk with the richness of her wares and simultaneously baffled by the absence of crowds at her door.

She found the Englishmen’s cabin and thought to herself that it was a grand title for what was not much more than a lean-to. It was collapsed, the greying timbers sticking up above the snow like the stumps of rotten teeth. There were no signs of anyone having camped here that year—or the twenty prior.

She built her iglu quickly and perfectly. After about thirty of them, she had found the knack, and had learned to recognize the best snow for making them.
Puka
, Emo had called it when he had shown her, sticking his
panna
in halfway and pausing to demonstrate its texture, the incomplete resistance it offered the knife. Pauloosie had given her the same lecture once, using the same words and the same sequence of gestures, and she had bit her lip in amusement but had not said anything to him. Pauloosie. She was certain he would not have returned to Rankin Inlet yet. It was still early winter and he would have hunted more successfully than she had. His anger at his family and at the town had lodged deeply inside him, born of grievances certain to inflame themselves with more contemplation—and there was only ever more time out here, alone and in the cold, for more contemplation.

She was out of ideas by now of where he would be. Her thought was that she would go south, to the ruins of the Padlei settlement, and then she would turn northwest and farther inland to arc back around to the ruins of the Wager Bay encampment. This would take her through the least travelled portion of the tundra, and perhaps one of them would see the other’s tracks. Beyond that, she did not know her own intentions.

Padlei was an abandoned plywood-sheathed hut with two smaller outbuildings already collapsing into themselves. She had been two more weeks getting here, had shot and eaten one old doe, not enough food for her dogs, but some anyway. There had been no other visitors to Padlei since the snow had fallen.

The days were growing short now, and, deducting the hour at the end of the day she needed to make her iglu, she could only travel for five hours or so. It meant that she had too much time by herself lying in her sleeping bag and imagining finding him. Her favourite scenario involved coming upon his camp when he was very tired, and the dogs (improbably: this was a fantasy, she reproached her excessively realistic self) not noticing her, sneaking into his iglu and waking him with a kiss, explaining to his delighted cries how she had sought him out, had brought him
tuktu
tongue and rifle cartridges and found a place on the Kazan they might camp together.

She imagined sliding into his sleeping bag then, him running his hands over the frostbite scars on her face, hands, and feet. His hands on her shoulders, down between the muscles on either side of her spine, fingers splayed out along her ribs, silently sliding along her skin, over her breasts, her arms, her shoulders, pushing her down. She imagined this. It’s what solitary travellers do when they are alone and far from company. They become so lonely they cannot resist their yearnings.

She had resisted her own yearnings all her life. Coming out on the land was the first extravagant thing she had ever done. She was strong and therefore had constructed checks within herself to guard against self-pity. Her reflexive response to self-pitying words and thoughts was the appearance of her father’s skeptical face in her mind. She imagined her father’s reply to the contention that she had only once been extravagant and wondered if she wasn’t on an eccentric orbit, being propelled farther and farther from the centre with each revolution: first from the farm and then to the Arctic and then into the Arctic, in pursuit of the boy. That would be how it looked to
her father, she supposed. And now, certainly, to everyone at the school, even Johanna, though she was not as certain about that last. It would be Johanna’s inclination to give her the benefit of any doubt. She had caught the scent of the other woman’s admiration a few times. Though she might be seen in a different light now. How does one know when one has gone crazy? Don’t the insane always consider themselves simply courageous?

She was tired. Her hands slid back up along her abdomen, imagining themselves to be his hands, and then she folded her fingers together and lay on her side.

In the morning she rose, struck camp, and hitched her dogs up to the trace. She turned them north and headed for Wager Bay.

December 20
,1991

Dear Amanda:

  Well, things here in Rankin Inlet just get stranger and stranger. The son of the man I told you about, the one who was killed, has disappeared, with his dog team. Everyone figures he has gone out on the land. But he has been gone for almost three months now. We’re all worried about him. I delivered him, when I first got here.

One of the schoolteachers, who
happens
to own a dog team herself, has gone missing too! You can imagine what everyone is thinking. I don’t know either of them well, certainly not well enough to know what their relationship to each other was. But it is difficult not to draw inferences. Could either of them have had anything to do with the murder? Well, one thing is certain, they won’t stay out on the land much longer. Soon it will be mid-winter, and the days even shorter. Tonight it is fifty degrees below.

It would be remembered for years after as a difficult winter, heralded by an awful autumn. In the final two weeks of her journey Penny travelled barely a hundred miles. Her dogs were exhausted and so was she. Their paws had been cut by ice shards until they became bloody stumps. She had had to carry three of them on the komatik with her gear the last three days. It had been five days since any of them had eaten—two rabbits that she had shared with her dogs. She hadn’t seen any caribou in a month.

She thought he might now be making his way to the Back River, where his grandfather had hunted as a young man. She had taken a route he had once marked on her map, and several times she had come across what appeared to be dog tracks. She wondered now if they might have been small wolves or large foxes.

No, they had been dogs. There were sled-runner tracks with them. Still no sign of a recent camp.

She was very tired. There had been two days of storm for every one of fair weather for the last month. She wondered how he was doing. Her dogs started to die.

She could not travel any more. She climbed out of her sleeping bag and cut the dogs’ leads and then she returned to her sleeping bag. She undressed within it, peeling away the oily woollen underwear she had been wearing for weeks now. When she was naked she ran her hands over body, her breasts, still growing even as the rest of her became so thin, skin sagging from her throat, her ribs, her almost-empty abdomen.

NINETEEN

WHEN PAULOOSIE SAW HER IGLU
he thought that it had been built by a hunter out of Baker Lake, come north looking for
umingmak
, muskoxen. After watching for three hours he had established that there was no activity there; then he drew closer and studied the response of his dogs. They did not smell fresh scent from other dogs. He saw gear strewn around the iglu and from the chewed-open packaging and mittens it was clear that foxes had been through the camp.

“Qanuipiit!”
he hollered hoarsely, after his dogs had drawn to a stop. There was no response from within the iglu. He looked again at the mittens in the snow and recognized them.

He bent low and crawled in the entrance. He saw her. She was the first human he had seen in four months. Frost ran around her nostrils and had collected in her eyelashes. She lay on her side, curled within her sleeping bag. Her skin was almost as white as the walls of her iglu, made precisely in the fashion of his
attatatiak
. Her hair was stiff with frost and when he swept it from her eyes, it bent like waxed thread. She was so thin the bones of her cheeks jutted out like armour, her shoulders standing out like knobs on a stick, her belly tight against her spine. Still, she looked strong, her thighs were grooved and powerful. Her little stove and kit bag lay neatly beside her. He was grateful to the foxes for not eating her. He kissed her
forehead. He ran his lips along her eyebrows. His tears fell onto her frozen skin and melted the faint crusting of frost, running down in short rivulets before they froze themselves and stopped.