The Snow Geese (28 page)

‘That’s what we talked about on the phone. The Hunters and Trappers Association.’

‘Right. You can meet the elders. Don’t let them fool you, though. They understand more English than you think. Just don’t sweat it, OK?’

*

T
HE DIRECTORS OF
the Aiviq Hunters and Trappers Association met once a week in a small shed behind the Dorset Co-operative building. The secretary was a wiry man, all ligament and sinew, with heavy steel-framed glasses and long black hair hanging down below his shoulders. His hair had the rough fineness of the hair in violin bows, and he wore a black anorak with the NFL logo on its sleeves and the word RAIDERS on its back, just visible beneath a curtain of dry, fanned hair.

‘Welcome to Cape Dorset,’ he said quietly, surreptitiously, confiding a secret.

Three of the elders were already seated, drinking coffee. Posters depicting the ecology of seals, walruses, polar bears and the salmonid fish called Arctic char were pinned to the walls alongside large sheets of paper on which ideas for future HTA projects had been scrawled in black marker pen. One said:
Goose Down. Collection? Cost? Needs study
. Three more elders came into the room and took their places at the tables. Five of the six were men, late-fifties to mid-sixties, with weathered, high-cheekboned Asiatic faces, dressed in jeans, worsted lumberjack shirts, and baseball caps embroidered with the name of the new Canadian territory, Nunavut, or the logo and slogan of the Polaris Mine:
Five Years Accident Free!
The sixth elder, sitting on my right, was a robust woman in a blouse on which twining green foliage, apples, pears, grapes and ripe, plump plums were displayed in Arcadian abundance. Her long black hair, silkier than the secretary’s, was drawn back from her face and held at the neck in an elegant silver barrette; her cheeks gleamed under the weak electric light as if coated with a slipware glaze.

The secretary distributed copies of the meeting’s agenda. The first item was ‘Prayer’. The elders closed their eyes and looked down while the woman sitting beside me said a prayer in Inuktitut. When she had finished, the secretary addressed me in his low voice.

‘Please tell everyone where you come from,’ he said, ‘and why you’re here in Cape Dorset.’

The elders looked at me expectantly.

‘I’m from England,’ I said. ‘I’m interested in snow geese. I’ve followed snow geese on their spring migration from Texas. I’ve come to Cape Dorset because I want to see the geese in Foxe Land, in their summer breeding range.’

The secretary made notes on a pad, then translated for the elders. The word ‘Texas’ stood out like a flaw in his Inuktitut. The man sitting to my left doodled on his agenda: spirals, arabesques, a neat head-and-shoulders sketch of a man in a fedora or panama. The wooden tables, like school tables, were scored and notched with graffiti, the wood splintered where ballpoint pens had gouged against the grain. The secretary finished speaking. There was a pause. The woman addressed the gathering in Inuktitut, smiling, cheeks gleaming. The elders laughed. The secretary turned to me and translated.

‘She says that you need to be careful about who takes you out on to the land. Some of the young people, they think they know the land, but really they don’t. You don’t want to get in trouble out there.’

The doodling elder looked up from his agenda and addressed the directors.

‘He says that travel is getting hard,’ the secretary translated. ‘Spring’s coming. Sometimes it can be too wet. You can’t cross the rivers any more. The snow isn’t hard enough for the snow-machines.’

Then all the directors began talking at once in Inuktitut. Sometimes they laughed. Finally, the secretary turned to me again.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘So. We’re going to ask around and see if we can find someone who’s going out on the land, who’d be willing to take you. You’re staying at Jeff’s. We’ll contact you there and let you know.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘So we’ll contact you at Jeff’s,’ the secretary repeated.

I took the hint, stood up, nodded at the elders and left the meeting.

*

M
AY BECAME
J
UNE
. The top of the Earth was tilting towards the sun. Nights were betrayed as nights by a slight slackening in the light, a sullen humour in the sky. I struggled to keep track of each day’s passing, without the grand events of sunrise and sunset as points of reference. I learned to distinguish white land from white sky by the flecks of black granite, but a raven holding steady against the wind could quickly confuse the issue.

The sky cleared; sunlight knifed off the snow and ice. Late in the evening I’d walk out across the harbour, passing dogteams asleep on their ropes, keeping to skidoo tracks where the snow was fretted and compacted underfoot, then turn and look back at the community, its districts nestled in hills: to the left, Itjurittuq, or Roman Catholic Valley; to the right, Kuugalaaq, the Valley; in the middle, Kingnait, or Town. Weak-coloured, impermanent structures, without foundations, raised on thin stilts like wading birds.

One evening I walked to the hill beyond Itjurittuq, trudging through deep snow to the summit cairn, looking down on the strandline where the harbour’s white ice fronted the open water of Tellik Inlet. The grey sea surface lay heavy and tight, with a few small bergs drifting across it. Dogs barked. Children shouted. These sounds rolled round the bowl of the hills like balls in a roulette wheel. Snow buntings flitted from rock to rock below me, their black-and-white plumage entirely of a piece with the prospects beyond them.

I sat by the cairn. The gleam off the ice and water was blue-tinged, this blueness like the nuance carried by a remark, an inflection or emphasis to the way the light was speaking. Gulls preened on hunks of broken floe in Tellik Inlet, heads down, fiddling in their armpits. A seal surfaced. Skidoos tore across the harbour ice, plying the diagonal from Kuugalaaq to Kingnait. A flock of king eider flew from the south, skimming low over the water, breasting their own reflections, easily distinguished from geese by their rapid wingbeats, the flock’s quick kaleidoscopings. King eider winter along the Atlantic coast from Labrador to New Jersey; many breed on Baffin Island. More new arrivals, returning to their natal grounds, their journeys almost over.

Five Inuit boys clambered through the snow to the cairn, four of them ten or eleven years old, in parkas, baseball caps, baggy jeans and black Sorel glacier boots, and the fifth much younger, tagging along, wearing a blue wool toque.

‘I keep my cigarettes in there,’ said one of the boys, pointing to the cairn.

‘What do you smoke?’ I asked.

‘Players Light. You?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You speak Inuktitut?’

They told me a walrus was
aiviq
; a bear,
nanuk
; a snow goose,
kanguq
.

The boys began foraging round the base of the cairn, trowelling at the snow with half-cupped hands, gathering stones. They chose flat stones, as if for ducks and drakes, though we were too high above water for skimming, then launched one missile after another, each limber loose-armed pitch accompanied by a grunt of effort, the stones hanging above the white mainland hills before dropping to the blue-grey surface of the inlet. I was sitting just a few feet from the boys but I watched them as if from a distance, or as if the scene were being projected on to a screen in front of me, my senses registering the silver-toned alien light, the water below, the glistening bergs, the hills rolling away in infinite white vacancy, but my mind elsewhere. The stones rose spinning and faded like clay pigeons fired from traps, and I imagined gunshots, targets exploding high above the water, designs for fireworks.

*

‘W
E
’
VE FOUND SOMEONE
willing to take you out on the land,’ said the secretary. We were standing outside the Dorset Co-operative building. The secretary, in the black NFL anorak and heavy steel-framed spectacles, pushed his long hair back behind his ears, tracing small sickle curves with his fingers. ‘The woman at the meeting? Paula? She’s going hunting. She’s going with her son, Natsiq. She says you can go with them. OK?’

*

J
EFF LENT ME
a can of CounterAttack bear-repellent spray and an old green Arctic parka: a quilted, down-filled, knee-length coat with a horseshoe of light grey coyote fur round its hood, a map of dark oil stains on its back, and several badges of grey masking tape repairing tears in the fabric. Jeff drew my attention to the label on the parka. The coat was called a Snow Goose. I tried it on, engulfed, surprised by its heaviness on my shoulders: it was like wearing a bungalow.

In the West Baffin Co-op I bought six cans of naphtha fuel for Paula’s Coleman stove, four bottles of Yamalube oil for the snowmachines, and a chit for twenty gallons of gasoline, and carried these supplies in two loads to Paula’s house in Itjurittuq. I was wearing my green Below Zero gumboots, three pairs of socks, Capilene thermals, fleece leggings, waterproof Gore-Tex trousers, two fleece tops, inner and outer gloves, a blue wool toque and the Snow Goose parka. In my bag I’d packed binoculars, a notebook, extra clothes, and my grandmother’s copy of
The Snow Goose
, with Eleanor’s auburn hawk’s feather like a bookmark between its hard blue covers.

Paula and Natsiq were checking the Enticer and Polaris skidoos. Paula, long black hair pulled back from her glazed cheeks and cinched at the nape in an elastic band, wore an unzipped green Snow Goose parka, navy-blue waterproof dungarees over a bright red polo-neck, and black Sorel glacier boots. Her son, Natsiq, was about thirty, slight, dark-complexioned, with high, jutting cheekbones, a wispy beard, and dense, furtive eyes. He was dressed in a black fake-leather bomber jacket, black waterproof trousers, black Sorel boots, and a baseball cap embroidered with the word
Aksarnerk
– Inuktitut for ‘northern lights’. He chain-smoked du Mauriers, lighting one cigarette on the ember of its predecessor. Paula nodded at me and said something to Natsiq in Inuktitut. Two qamutiiks were loaded with orange-red fuel cans, bedding rolls, food boxes, ammunition, radio equipment and guns, all lashed down under ropes, bungees and blue tarps. Natsiq took my bag and lodged it securely in the qamutiik hitched to the Polaris.

‘Ready?’ he said.

He yanked the Enticer’s starter pull and heaved on a navy Snow Goose as the engine turned over in a low chug. He slung a Maverick pump-action shotgun across his back – the gun rusted all over like a salvaged musket – and straddled the skidoo, revving the engine. Paula started the Polaris, zipped up her parka and slung a rifle across her back – a Ruger fitted with veteran telescopic sights, its steel barrel bent out of whack. She indicated that I should get on the Enticer behind Natsiq. I held tight to his waist. The Snow Goose gave him a bear’s girth. We moved off down the dirt road to the harbour, skidoo tracks rumbling on grit, the runners of the long slender sleds scraping on chips of stone. The sky was clear; the albedo fierce. Behind my sunglasses I squinted like the houses receding behind us.

The skidoos and qamutiiks took to the harbour snow as if returned to their native element. Natsiq opened the throttle; we tore past huskies lounging in tethered teams; we raced breakneck across the clean white plane to the hills of Mallik Island. I could feel the Maverick’s stock and breach pressing into my chest, the ash from Natsiq’s du Maurier peppering my face in the icy apparent wind as we sped away from Dorset, cresting the first slope and sailing as if on our own momentum down into Foxe Land, the whiteness around us flecked with black granite protrusions, the parka’s heavy fur-trimmed hood bouncing on my shoulderblades, the sky not a finite canopy but a blue opening-out into ever larger spaces, and my heart pounding, roused by the exhilaration of our speed, the light’s brilliance, the nearness of snow geese in their natal homes. We cut eastwards over the mainland and then hit the sea again, accelerating across the hard roof of Hudson Strait, skidoos and qamutiiks rocking on fissures in the shorefast ice, the snow blown in gleaming dune-smooth ridges called sastrugi and smaller windrows like the fins of white Cadillacs caught in the freeze.

For two or three hours we travelled along the south coast of Foxe Land, short-cutting across peninsulas and headlands, with flocks of snow geese and Canada geese passing overhead, from right to left, coming in off Hudson Strait on the south winds: contingents of twenty or thirty birds, arranged in their limited alphabet of V, U, J and W formations, white-phase and blue-phase family groups intact in each skein, black wing-tips beating with inked distinction on the clear, vivid sky. Inland, in the valleys, flocks were grubbing in patches of open tundra, crowding the first available districts of sedge and running water, and the engine-roar of the two snowmachines sent geese up in flurry after flurry, as if the land’s own surface were breaking loose.

Sometimes Natsiq and Paula stopped the skidoos, and Natsiq unslung the rusty Maverick, crept up as close as he dared to a feeding flock, then shot at geese. He shot two blue-phase snows and a Canada, securing the dead birds under bungees on the qamutiiks.

Once, out on the ice of Hudson Strait, we stopped to examine footprints in the snow: deep, round, five-toed impressions in the crust, the prints of a polar bear, nine or ten feet from nose to tail, travelling alone, coming in off the sea. Once, racing eastwards, a lone tundra swan flew low over our heads, heading in the opposite direction, its broad-winged cruciform shadow slipping across the open ice. And once, we stopped a mile offshore for no obvious reason, the two machines tiny on the brilliant ice plane. Silence – the steady, white drone of it – poured into the space vacated by the engines. The flat white surface stretched away into mist like the edge of the world. Natsiq pointed towards the mist. Looking along the line of his arm, I found the fat blackness of a ringed seal, slouched beside its breathing hole, a dollop of life. Natsiq crept up on the seal, hunched over, keeping low. He got down on one knee and raised the Maverick to his shoulder. I trained my binoculars on the seal. I held my breath. A gun-crack; an explosion in the snow like a puff of goose down. But the seal had slid down the breathing hole, unharmed.