James Powlik
Meltdown
For Carl
EPIGRAPH
We do not believe, we fear.
MAP
PROLOGUE
The tooth came out easily in Victor Tablinivik’s hand, a mature incisor nearly an inch long and intact to the root. It was yellowed from infrequent cleaning, worn and chipped from its occasional use as a tool, but looked otherwise healthy — just like all the others. Victor took a moment to count: three in the past month alone. He knew by now that it did no good to simply jab the teeth back into their fleshy sockets and hope that they would root again. His gums, it seemed, were growing tired of them. They didn’t even bleed in sorrow as much as they could have; a minute daub of blood, another, then only a small crater remained to prove that the tooth had ever been a part of him.
At a relatively young age, Victor found it commonplace to find pieces of himself coming off. He supposed such things came with age and so did not know if that distressed him; he had never before grown old.
Certainly it was very unlike the aging of his parents and his parents’ parents before them.
In Victor’s memory, it seemed that one day his father and mother were there, the next they had been claimed by the bad spirit with the queer-sounding name: lewkeemeeah. Victor was raised to adulthood by his grandparents before the government qablunaq — white men, or “heavy eyebrows” in the Inuktitut language — came through the territory, held meetings in all the settlements, and talked about this new problem the Inuit had known of for years. Few Inuit really listened to the lectures. For this generation and the one before it, the heavy eyebrows furrowed about lewkeemeeah. When Victor’s grandparents were still children, missionaries and doctors had come to the Arctic and told the Inuit they had tooburqlosus, or small-pocks. They had once talked about the meesuls, too, and how nine out of every ten men could die in an “unprepared population” like the settlement where Victor was born. The qablunaq admitted they weren’t exactly sure what to do about this lewkeemeeah because it could kill quickly or very slowly or not kill at all. Victor had to laugh at that. Just being Inuit meant being killed very slowly what did lewkeemeeah have to do with anything? Until the qablunaq brought their diseases to the Arctic, the Inuit had been prepared just fine. So what, in the perspective of the horizon that all Inuit adopt, did one more orphan or a handful of teeth matter anyhow?
The Arctic is as fluid as the sea ice itself. For as long as Victor had been old enough to notice such things, this territory was re-created differently each season. In a matter of days or weeks, entire camps were displaced miles by the moving ice or were lost to the sudden opening of new crevasses. Landfast ice broke free to become new islands while the great slabs of sea ice crunched together to form bridges or thrust up new hummocks too large to traverse.
Nunavut — “Our Land” in the Inuktitut language represented the first major change in Canada’s geography since 1949, when Newfoundland became a province. After parliamentary debate lasting nearly three decades, Nunavut had officially come into existence on April 1, 1999.
Encompassing nearly 1.4 million square miles of the former Northwest Territories, one-fifth of Canada’s land area, this new land was now home to some twenty-four thousand northern natives, more than 80 percent of them Inuit. Stretching from Ellesmere Island to Hudson Bay, from Baffin Island nearly to Great Bear Lake, it did look impressive on the freshly inked qablunaq maps. But to Inuit who knew about April Fool’s Day, the transfer date seemed bitterly appropriate. During an early referendum to decide the name of this new land, dozens of Inuit had voted for bob as a write-in candidate on their ballots; for generations, the people of Canada’s north had referred to themselves as “bob,” or “bottom of the barrel” in terms of recognition or support from the federal legislature in Ottawa. New land, old problems the government had never understood this. What the diseases didn’t take, or the sea swallow up, the complicated land claims now engulfed no matter how nonpartisan they tried to be. To try to place such boundaries on the slippery arctic ice was like trying to chew seal meat without teeth.
Victor looked again at the tooth in the broad palm of his polar bear-skin mitt.
It was a fine mitt his wife had sewn with waterproof stitches, forsaking nylon thread to use caribou sinew in the traditional way.
“In the traditional way” was an expression the qablunaq used to describe what they took to be the sad, quaintly primitive condition of Victor’s people. By now, the Inuit had had generations of experience with the condescension of the qablunaq. Ironically, with their books and cameras and exhibits, it now seemed as though the qablunaq were more interested than were Victor’s own people in keeping alive the Inuit traditions. There was much irony in this, since the first qablunaq had mocked the Inuit ways, calling them primitive and barbaric. It was the qablunaq who had brought more unnatural change than the Inuit had ever known and so began — as Victor’s grandmother called it — the fraying of the village threads.
Victor’s grandmother had been one of the finest Inuit seamstresses of her generation. Her designs with sealskin and caribou hides had been reproduced all across the Arctic, were often worn at festivals and dances, and were highly valued by museums and souvenir collectors.
Victor’s grandfather had been one of the last true shamans in the Central Arctic, a proud angatkuk who had filled his grandson with the oral history of their culture from a very early age. It was Victor’s charge to learn of the spirits, the traditions, and the responsibilities of his people.
To fully understand the Inuit is to know that the people are not distinct from their culture, their environment, or the wildlife around them. In the distant — but not too distant — past, to be an Inuit was to know hunger, or at least to know of hunger and fear it greatly. In the hunt, as in the community, avoiding hunger was a priority above nearly all else. Victor remembered a winter of his childhood when the famine came especially hard and his mother had willingly suffocated her own daughter in order to spare food for the hunters in the village.
Historically, in times of famine, the hunters were always the last to go hungry, for they were the only possible salvation for the village.
For nomads traveling far with limited sustenance, acts such as cannibalism, infanticide, or sacrificing sled dogs for their meat were not debated; they were essential for survival. Girls were considered expendable to the village, since they were often married off by the time they were old enough to contribute useful work. There was no retribution to be paid, no talk of the dead as the baby girls disappeared one by one or the elders were left behind. The outposts had to move as the animals moved, and all had to move with the ice.
Victor did not cry when he learned of his sister’s death, in part because he feared his father’s rebuke and in part because he understood the significance of his own life being spared. In the traditional way, there is no beginning or end to the existence of the soul. A life is lived not to prepare for some hoped-for afterlife, but simply to survive, to acquire the basic needs of life in order to continue living, and to live that life in a manner that does not offend the spirits. The modern Inuit seemed to forget this a little more with each generation, and as a result, Victor feared the end of the Inuit soul. This fear and the personal sadness of his grandparents’ last years haunted Victor and pushed him onward in his hunting every single day. Even if his catch did not reward this resolute dedication, the spirits would see Victor’s efforts and, if he was fortunate, smile upon his family. At a minimum, they would let him catch enough food to feed his wife, Anika, and his young son, Annu. Having enough to eat was the best blessing for which an Inuk could ever ask.