Consumption (9 page)

Beside her, along the bank, the tops of creek willows poked out of the snow, looking like a dusting of pepper. Here and there the drifts had been pawed away by the
tuktu
, and the willows were chewed down to the frozen sphagnum moss that otherwise covered the ground. As the sound of her machine rang out down the river, the
tuktu
grazing there rose up on the shallow embankment like packs of large dogs and trotted slowly to the crests of nearby ridges to watch her pass. She was twenty miles and an hour north of town. Their cabin was almost at Twin Lakes, and was one of the farthest out of any of the hunting cabins. Robertson was proud of that fact.

He had phoned that morning to tell her he would be another week in Yellowknife. His business was taking longer than he had expected. He didn’t bother to apologize. She thanked him for letting her know. The trip before, she had gone to the airport to pick
him up on three successive days before he remembered to call her to say he was delayed. She had been a little irritated. Nobody likes to waste their time. But it wasn’t like she was disappointed, then or now. And, though she wouldn’t have put it so directly, even in her own mind, it gave her ammunition for their next argument. If they could overcome their postures of mutual indifference to have one.

Her machine swerved and slid over the stretches of bare river ice that opened up episodically, but Victoria did not slow until she could see her cabin in the distance, three miles downstream. Then she let up on the accelerator and crept at walking speed, looking carefully all around. She knelt on the seat and lifted her head high, so she could see. There was smoke curling out of the cabin chimney.

When she reached the bend in the river in front of the cabin, she slowed the machine until it had just enough momentum to crawl up the bank, and then stall. She watched the cabin for a moment. She could not see movement within it. But a fire had been lit. She swung her leg off the snow machine and stood.

When she opened the door to the cabin, she felt warm air flowing over her, and as her eyes accommodated themselves to the dark she saw the glow of the wood stove, and the man crouched over it, feeding it bits of scrap wood. He rose to look at her, and she sloughed off her parka and went to him, pushing him backwards onto the single bed that lay along one wall.

“How long have you been here?” she asked as she kissed him.

“Ten minutes,” Simionie answered.

“You got the cabin nice and warm.”

“Maybe it was more like half an hour.”

“Or an hour.” She pressed against him, and felt as if she was waking from some numb place.

“Or an hour,” he admitted.

Emo wrapped his rifle in stiff, spotted canvas and tied the bundle onto the komatik. The dogs were yelping and dancing on their lines, tethered on the sea ice in the inlet abutting the town. The dogs of the other hunters sat watching, just beyond lunging distance. In the west there was open sky. The dogs were hungry and eager to move.

He whistled to the lead dog, a bitch named Kanyak, for whom he felt an affection that rivalled any other in his life. She threw herself against her lead and the sled flew forward. The other dogs, jerked into alignment by the tautened leads, began panting into the wind. The old man ran alongside for fifty feet and then knelt on the komatik, one hand on a walrus-skin whip, the other holding a line tied to the cross struts. The dogs knew the way.

They passed the wooden Peterhead motorboats, pulled up on shore the autumn before. Snowdrifts concealed their length, revealing only ten of their twenty-five feet. The oldest of them had been built in the 1950s and had been kept going through a succession of engine replacements and shorings-up. The cedar planking had been repaired with spruce two-by-fours, carved to fit, to the point where they had become like the Bay Boys, creations as much of this place as they were of their origins, although still made of wood and hence foreign. Snow was piled even in the wheelhouses, swept in from between dried planking and ill-fitting windows. For twelve weeks every summer these boats charged across Hudson Bay, down to Churchill for goods brought there on the rail line, or north to Coral Harbour for
iviaq
, bloody and bellowing, tusks stabbing the air as they died.

Emo’s own father had travelled to Newfoundland in
1925
to ferry such boats back to the trappers grown briefly—disorientingly—rich from Arctic fox. In the summer when the foxes were mangy and shedding, the men hunted
arviaat
from these boats too, and filled caches along the coast with dried meat and lamp oil and ammunition, for the long winter hunting trips. To find the caribou, the hunters had to move fast, and if they carried food for the dogs with
them this was difficult. Coming home, they were laden with meat, and the problem was less acute but, of course, neither was it necessary to move at any speed.

Snow machines had come to the Arctic in the late 1960s and early 1970s, just as the last of the people had come in off the land. The sequence of decisions—to move into a house, and to kill the dogs—had been constant in each of the hamlets along the coast until no one lived on the land. Whale Cove, Repulse Bay, Chesterfield Inlet, and Coral Harbour had all grown inexorably, accreting like crystals in a supersaturated solution, the barrenlands emptying as the towns swelled. Twelve people and two families to a house, and tuberculosis running through each of these hamlets like a rumour. Life in the settlements was as difficult in many ways as life on the land had been. An iglu, or even a small river valley, would only ever have held one family, after all.

The death of the dogs had been hard. The sled dogs had lineages as carefully remembered as those of the hunters who depended on them. They could smell approaching bears at night and find their way home in blizzards so blindingly dense that all that could be done was to trust them. In the course of half a dozen years they had nearly all been shot—if you lived in a house, a snow machine was an altogether less cumbersome thing to take care of. You could leave it for two weeks or three, and it would still be waiting for you and ready to run. If you still lived on the land, the business of keeping the dogs active was simply part of the day, and anyway it was lonely out there and the companionship of the creatures, surly and unpredictable beasts though they were, was valued. If you lived on the land, the business of carrying gasoline and oil was difficult—but not if you lived beside the Hudson’s Bay Company depot in town. This thing that made it so much easier to travel quickly on the land made it impossible to remain on it.

Following the move into towns, some put their dogs on islands in the bay in the summers, with seal carcasses. The old men shook their heads over this; it wasn’t how they had been raised to treat dogs.

A few hung on to their teams, as Emo had, but the status of dogs changed from essential to ornamental in about five years.

When Emo’s dogs got to the floe edge, ten miles offshore, he called to them to stop and threw out the snow hook. The wind was settling and it was abruptly quieter. He stood on the sled and studied the ice. He could see
nautsiaq
, ringed seals, upwind—tiny black dots to the north. Emo stood on the snow hook, driving it into the thin, packed snow to ensure its purchase. He unwrapped his rifle and slung it over his shoulder. The tide held ice pans against the floe edge like crackers spilled casually on a plate. Between them lay the open, purple, and viscous water, with whitecaps scudding across it leaving streaks of foam and slivers of ice broken free and running.

Emo walked toward the seals, watching them carefully. They were sleeping, but awoke in turns every few minutes to smell the air, for bears and for men. From this distance the movement was subtle, and difficult to see—the outline of the black dot against the ice seemed to shimmer for a moment. When Emo saw that, he stopped moving. The dogs behind him were silent and watched him attentively.

That same Saturday afternoon, Dr. Balthazar sat in his office at the nursing station, surrounded by medical charts. He was alone in the place; no one needed tending to. Earlier, the on-call nurse had been there, seeing some kids with ear infections. Balthazar had told her that he had to stay to catch up on his charting and she had nodded “whatever” to him and gone home. For most of the day he had done just that, writing carefully in his almost-feminine script chart summaries of patients he knew well, and referral letters to specialists in the south. But then he began daydreaming. In the empty clinic, it was easy to push aside the charts and imagine a different life. Around him were the records of two thousand acquaintances of his. By this point he had been coming north for three-month stints
for seventeen years, and he knew almost everyone, except a few of the very healthy men. But the kids, and all the women, and anyone old—over sixty, that is—he knew those people well. Walking through the chart room and sliding his eyes at random over the various names summoned up for him almost two decades worth of maulings and depressions and complicated childbirths: the Katoongie clan and the terrible asthma they had as kids, the fire that had burned the Panigoniaks so badly. And then the Robertsons. He brought Victoria’s chart back to his office and flipped through the earliest records in it, pages that were brittle and crumbling. Soon, the chart would be split into two, with volume one relegated to the basement, where the records going back more than twenty-five years dwelt. But in the meantime, within the spare and data-laden language of the chart—such agony here. He turned the pages over, one after the other, rapt, imagining the girl.

What she probably remembered most strongly from her operation was the overwhelming smell of the ether the instant they turned it on—the olfactory equivalent of having a flashbulb go off in front of one’s widely opened eyes. She would have thought, What a strong smell, and then stopped counting backwards.

The anaesthetist had passed a twin-lumened endotracheal tube into her throat, one branch of the tube riding in her right main bronchus and lung and the other in her left. The tuberculous cavity was in her right lung and so the air in it was sucked out through this tube and the lung collapsed upon itself, like a balloon hooked to suction. Ventilation was maintained in the other lung—the anaesthetist hooked that half of the tube up to a ventilator, which wheezed and sighed over the following two hours as the surgeon made a deep incision between Victoria’s ribs, high up on the right side. The intercostal muscles connecting the ribs were exposed, and the surgeon pushed a blunt-tipped clamp through this muscle and into the chest cavity. The air rushing into the chest as the pleural space was opened sounded like a gasp. He inserted the rib spreaders
and squeezed them apart, revealing the glistening chest cavity gaping open beneath. At the Clearwater Sanatorium where Victoria had been sent, the chest surgeon did little other than operate on tuberculous lungs, and was adept at these procedures, having done them by the thousand for the previous twenty years. Excising a lung was considered routine, almost vulgar in its simplicity—nothing like the complex anatomy of the abdomen, say, or, especially, the neck.

The right lung lay within this child’s cavity-ridden chest like a wilted flower, collapsed and unbuoyant. The surgeon felt the upper lobe between his fingers and identified the scarred and rotten abscess within it, feeling like a piece of cookie sewed inside a sponge. He clamped the right upper lobe bronchus and prepared to divide it. The accompanying pulmonary veins and arteries were clamped in turn and ligated on both sides of the clamp. When he had cut and sealed the tubes supplying and receiving blood and air from that lobe of the lung, the surgeon directed his attention to the ligaments supporting it, and cut each of these in turn. Then he lifted the lobe through the rib spreaders like a child from the womb, cupping it in his hands, clamps and ligatures dangling like amnion and umbilical vessels.

He next picked up a tool that looked like a stubby-jawed stainless-steel wire cutter. With a dull click he snapped the little girl’s ribs, removing the middle third of each rib that had overlain the cavity.