The Snow Geese (29 page)

We continued along the southern shore. Cairns and other stone figures stood on every promontory and eminence, making dark vertical nicks on the white ground or deep blue sky. These were inuksuit:
inuk
means ‘human being’;
inuksuit
are stones that convey information as if a man or woman were standing in the landscape, most serving as aids to navigation, guides for hunters. My eyes were drawn to them, signs of human passage in the wilderness, holding the country in place like rivets or tacks. But the skidoos kept streaking eastwards, across the sea, the sibilance of front skis and sled runners just audible in the guttural engine roar. Above us, a blue abyss, with no flaw or blemish to give it scale, as if outer space began at the surface of the Earth. The snow seemed to touch directly on the void.

At Andrew Gordon Bay we turned north, heading inland, leaving Hudson Strait behind us. Snow and Canada geese rose off the valley floors, gaining height rapidly, veering from the two skidoos. But I’d stopped registering them as geese, as birds. My life offered no precedent for these surroundings. The new rushed at me, too much of it and too fast to be absorbed and processed. The motion, the albedo, the strangeness of ice plane and tundra, the numbness in my hands and feet, the constant engine roar – it left me dazed, dreamy, dumb, and for a moment it was as if we were travelling across the middle of a page, with whiteness and black markings all around us, and geese lifting off the snow like letters coming unstuck.

*

W
E CAME TO
a broad frozen lake, Lake Angmaluk, a small snow-roofed fishing cabin on its far shore. Natsiq and Paula parked the snowmachines outside the cabin and cut the engines.

Startling, the way silence romped in. Natsiq unhitched the bungees and we set to work, unpacking the qamutiiks. The cabin had plywood pressboard walls, a narrow sleeping platform, and a shelf that didn’t quite run true, with a jar of instant hot chocolate, a can of cooked ham and a packet of White Lily Marven’s Pilot Biscuits left on it. Two plastic travel mugs bearing the logo of the Pauktuutit Inuit Women’s Association hung on nails below the shelf. Natsiq and Paula exchanged a few words in Inuktitut and told me by means of simple gestures where I should put things: foam mats, bedding rolls, the Coleman stove, the cans of naphtha fuel.

Paula took a blue-phase snow goose from the qamutiik, severed its left wing with a hunting knife, and swept the cabin’s pressboard floor using the wing as a brush. Leaving the wingbrush on the sloping shelf, she sat outside, spread-legged on the snow, the rest of the goose between her knees. Muttering, she rent the carcass with a hunting knife, reached in with her right hand, and pulled out the bowels and craw. Purple-red offal steamed where it rested on the snow. Paula melted snow in a dented cauldron and boiled the skinned, limbless goose, adding a sachet of Lipton onion soup to season the broth, soon slicked and beaded with yellow subcutaneous fat previously stored by the goose as fuel for the long flight north.

We ate, sitting on the snow, leaning back against the shack. I didn’t want to eat snow goose. I’d often imagined myself in Foxe Land, at the end of my journey, seeing snow geese return to the country in which they’d hatched. It had never occurred to me that I might have to eat a snow goose. I was attached to these birds. I couldn’t help thinking of them as my companions. But I didn’t want to set myself apart from Paula and Natsiq. So I kept quiet while we ate goose. A few down feathers floated in the broth. I took small mouthfuls, chewing solemnly. The meat was rich: you could taste the miles in it. The morsels sat in my stomach like pebbles. We ate in silence, snug in our parkas, snow geese inside and out.

Natsiq stood up and looked around, taking stock. He had a twitch, a way of puckering his lips and pushing them across his face towards his right ear, stretching the skin of his left cheek and waggling the point of his featherweight beard. He looked down at me. He was wearing the
Aksarnerk
baseball cap and pitch-black sunglasses with curving black leather side-pieces, the cabin and dazzling snow reflected in both round lenses. He stroked his beard with a gloved hand. Sometimes his twitch carried the beard’s point outside the remit of the stroke.

‘We go,’ he said to me. ‘Shoot geese. Hunting? Bang bang?’ He raised his hands, miming, jerking upwards with each shot.

I didn’t want to shoot snow geese, but I followed Natsiq down the shallow valley, away from Lake Angmaluk. He was toting the Maverick over his shoulder; my binoculars bounced against my chest just as they had on the walk alongside Sand Lake to Houghton Dam, when Rollin had talked about bald eagles and his daring flight beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. The snow crust was firm underfoot and I liked walking: it got my blood moving; it restored sensation to my toes. We came across the splayed hoofmarks of caribou, tufts of grey-brown caribou fur (the reindeer were shedding their winter coats), and whole tracts of snow patterned like a convict’s uniform with the three-pointed footprints of geese. Flocks of snow geese and Canada geese flew overhead, yapping and honking.

We hid in the lee of a craggy granite slab, close to an area of exposed wet tundra. Natsiq removed his gloves, lit a du Maurier, loaded red shells into the Maverick and hunkered down, keeping out of sight. I followed suit, curling up on the snow, face against stone, the granite pink with iron in places, run through with crystalline quartz seams. I could see black, green and rust-red crustose lichens, and brittle, foliose lichens in paler colours, and clumps of green moss among chips of grit and quartz, with new buds forcing through, tiny pods of moisture and pigment like the vesicles in limes, and I breathed in the rich loamy vegetable smell that came off them, surprised, delighted, nostalgic for plants.

Natsiq took long drags on his du Maurier. Ash flakes caught in his beard. Together we listened hard for geese, tracking a flock’s approach by the crescendo of yaps or honks. Natsiq waited until the flock was right on top of us, then got up on one knee, raised the Maverick and started shooting, the butt thudding back into his shoulder, red shell casings leaping over me in short, smoking arcs, while overhead, against the deep blue, a flock of Canadas or lesser snows veered away, calling frantically, flocks breaking up, bevies of geese peeling off in the fleurs-de-lys of aerial displays, circling, gaining height, and gathering again, out of range.

Not all of them escaped. A white-phase snow goose dropped to the snow like a cloth bag filled with coins. A winged blue sheered off from its V, flapping in vain, down-strokes getting no purchase on the air. I was shaking. I’d been shaking since the shooting began. I left the slab’s shelter to pick up the dead birds, holding them by the shins, heads dragging on the snow, a bright scarlet daub on the white bird’s breast. I thought of the young girl, Frith, carrying the snow goose to the hunchback in his lighthouse hermitage. I tried not to look at the dead birds, not to think about the dead weight in my hands. But I kept shaking as we tramped back up the valley to the cabin, carrying six geese between us, flocks still passing overhead on the south winds. Whenever Natsiq looked up, tilting his head back, puffing on a du Maurier, I saw skeins and chevrons slipping across the black lenses of his sunglasses.

The light’s tension had slackened: it was night. The Coleman stove was going inside the cabin. We washed down White Lily Marven’s Pilot Biscuits with mugs of instant hot chocolate. Paula and Natsiq said little. It was a hunting trip, there were things to be done. Paula rolled up my Snow Goose parka and stuffed it inside a pillowcase, making a pillow. We got into our sleeping-bags and lay back on the small platform, side by side, Paula in the middle. The plywood pressboard next to my head bore a message, written in careful ballpoint capitals.

I lay on my side, considering this haiku. I wondered about Zeke and Cindy. Had it been snowing while Zeke sheltered in the cabin beside Lake Angmaluk, or in the dream in which Cindy had appeared? Whose face was chapped, Zeke’s or Cindy’s? Paula and Natsiq fell asleep beside me. My mind wouldn’t shut down. It was thronging with geese.

*

N
EXT MORNING
we loaded the qamutiiks and left Lake Angmaluk for the Kimmik Hills. Spring seemed to have happened overnight. Patches of sodden, marshy tundra appeared along the valley floors, bristling with sedge tussocks, veined with trickling meltwater rills. Sunlight sparkled off rills and meltpools; the snow, softening, glistened with fresh, watery sheen. The going was hard for the skidoos. Paula and Natsiq stood up in the saddles to guide the skis round rocks or bogs, but as soon as we hit furlongs of flat snow they opened the throttles and we sped deeper into Foxe Land, Canada geese flying low alongside us like outriders. Sometimes Natsiq pulled up the skidoo to shoot at geese, and sometimes Paula tried her luck with the Ruger, creeping on stalwart bandy legs towards willow ptarmigan. The barrel’s curve hooked each shot several feet from the target, and the grouse, in dapper feather spats and trousers, stood their ground unperturbed as bullets ricocheted off the granite around them, Paula’s curses flying close behind, delivered with more accuracy than the bullets.

We travelled for just over four hours. Everywhere I looked, there were geese: flurries of Canadas and snows lifting from open tundra; flocks coasting overhead in familiar, straggling lines on the south winds. My hands and feet went numb. I held tight to Natsiq’s waist, still dazed, watching geese, thinking of the 3,000 miles behind me. I wondered if any of these flocks had wintered close to Eagle Lake, or been counted by Michael at Sand Lake, or gleaned for leftover grain on the Portage Plains while the Viking, jeans secured with braces and belt, styled his steel-grey hair with nimble flicks of a pink comb. Sometimes I turned my head, looking back over the hood’s coyote fur trim at Paula – her antique snow goggles, her face’s beaming eggshell glaze, the Ruger’s barrel poking at an angle from her right shoulder. Each qamutiik’s load of dead geese grew steadily, bird by bird.

Natsiq stopped the Enticer on a ridge. We looked down on the white oval of a frozen lake, a broad valley stippled with granite protrusions and open tundra, and soon we were setting up camp on a granite plateau beside the lake, raising a dun canvas tent, knotting guy ropes to a ring of small boulders, rolling out yellow foam sleeping-mats over damp black and green lichens. We sat round the Coleman stove. Paula melted snow in the dented cauldron; we ate cereal bars, Pilot biscuits and pots of instant noodles, all washed down by strong, sweet coffee. Mother and son exchanged occasional phrases, Natsiq stroking his beard, smoking one du Maurier after another. We rested for a while, then heaved on our Snow Goose parkas and left the warmth of the tent to walk around on the bare rock, the white lake immediately below us on one side, the undulating flecked white landscape of Foxe Land receding into mist on the other.

Slipping the can of CounterAttack bear-repellent spray into my pocket, binoculars hanging round my neck, I walked alone up the ridge behind the tent to a summit marked by a small inuksuk. I kept checking for bears, looking left and right as if preparing to cross a road. I could hear snow geese, their calls second nature to me now. My boots sank deep in the snow. I reached the summit. The inuksuk was a large piece of granite, crusted with black lichen, standing on end like a rough-hewn column, with two flat pieces of granite set on top of it. The pedestal might have been righted by the traction of a retreating glacier, the two topstones placed by melting ice.

I didn’t touch it. I didn’t stand too close to it. Some inuksuit marked the sites of deaths, murders, betrayals and acts of bravery; others had healing powers, contained spirits, expressed joy, happiness, evil or terror. There were inuksuit to indicate places of power, places where one should never sleep, places where human beings had been eaten, places of confusion and disorientation, and fearful places where travellers got lost. Some made whistling sounds when wind blew through them; some were healing arches where shamans effected cures. There were inuksuit to which one should show respect, inuksuit which could confer blessings and ensure safe passage. Certain inuksuit marked entrances to spiritual realms from which one returned unburdened.

Wind riffled through the fabric of my parka, the fur-trimmed hood luffing on my shoulders in stronger gusts. Far below, our tent looked like a jousting pavilion, wanting knights, pennants, escutcheons. There were hills and swales in all directions, drawing away on the curve of the sphere, and clouds massing in the south, above the sea. Wind blew into my ear as if into a shell, making a sea sound. A pair of tundra swans flew north, at eye level, their long lancing necks tipped with black bills. An arctic fox trotted across the frozen lake, a tinge, the ivory-yellow of old piano keys, its coat changing from white to a blend of tundra browns as summer approached. Flocks of snow geese pressed northwards. Through binoculars I tracked a pair of white-phase birds as they glided down to a stretch of open tundra beside a stream. They’d start to build nests as more and more tundra was exposed, choosing sites on top of slight undulations, where the ground was comparatively dry and firm.

I wouldn’t see those nests: in two or three days the tundra would be too wet for the snowmachines. I wouldn’t reach the Great Plains of the Koukdjuak, just over the horizon to the north. I was resigned to this. I didn’t mind. I was in Foxe Land, with snow geese. Exhilarated, light-headed, I stood on the summit, next to the inuksuk, breathing deeply. Apart from the wind, all I could hear was geese: the faint halliard tinkle of distant flocks, the sharp yaps of nearby birds, the low electric thrum of beating wings.

Natsiq was sitting outside the tent, smoking a du Maurier.

‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Kingnait.’

I nodded.

‘Home!’ Smiling, tic twitching his wispy beard.

*

P
AULA BOILED
another snow goose. She left the Coleman stove burning while we ate. Muzzy, head swimming, drunk on the fumes, I saw myself hurtling backwards, southwards, everything in fast-motion, a plane flying tail-first from Iqaluit to Churchill, the Muskeg Express rattling back to Winnipeg, the Greyhound reversing all the way down Interstate 35, a film rewinding. I remembered driving the blue Chevy Cavalier from Houston to Eagle Lake, the mesquite trees and shambling longhorn cattle, the galvanized farm sheds and rice bins. I thought of snow geese flying from those Gulf Coast prairies to Baffin Island, flying according to inherited programmes, modified in adult birds by the experience of previous journeys, determining their direction by reference to the sun, the stars and the Earth’s magnetic field, pushing north at the leading edge of spring.