Victor put the tooth into the pocket of his pullover jacket with the other pieces of himself — the ones he’d managed to find, anyway. He still liked the feel of caribou skin against his own and had Anika make his inner layers of clothing in the traditional manner. On the other hand, his outer jacket had been made by qablunaq of something called Gore-Tex. It was a little garish, but it was warm and did not retain moisture like the caribou pelts. On his head he wore a tuque made of synthetic black wool with the spirit of adidas carefully embroidered on it in white cotton thread; on his feet, a pair of winter boots and thick wool socks from the outpost store. Victor had never found any gloves to be as warm and durable as those of polar-bear hide, so these his wife made for him, replacing each pair as they wore thin. Polar bears, too, were less abundant, and those that remained were protected by the qablunaq and their laws.
Others — the poachers and the tourists — didn’t always follow the qablunaq laws, and so, sometimes, neither did Victor. He carried his flaying knife, his fishing hooks, harpoons, ropes, and rifle, and he took whatever the spirits let him catch.
Always there were the spirits of his ancestors with him, so Victor never felt he was alone. And always, always, he had his dog. Victor had found the dog — a Siberian husky, weak from a skirmish with another carnivore and nearly starved to death — in the wilderness north of Pelly Bay. The dog had a snow-white mask and a thick, peppered coat worn ragged in places, but a strong chest and a healthy, upturned curl in her tail. Her sharp, unwavering eyes were subtly but uniquely mismatched in color, one blue and the other a curious gray. Victor saw hunting potential in the stray and had taken home his valuable find.
His kindness had been rewarded. The dog was a truly excellent hunter, and she had stayed with him for the past five years. She could be lazy, but with her feral instincts she could sniff out seal breathing holes better than almost any dog Victor had ever seen, all the more amazing when one considered the art of ice fishing for seal hadn’t been practiced much in at least a generation.
The husky was obedient and never begged for more food or rest than the hunter allowed her. Victor let his dog eat well on this trip. Sharing the bounty of the hunt was of paramount importance among the Inuit, but hunter and dog shared the spoils first, often alone and always before anyone else in the village — even Anika, who prepared Victor’s food for distribution to their neighbors in the village as was done in ages past. Summer would be a difficult time for the dog, with little food for either of them and much carrying of Victor’s packed tools and other gear.
The dog had become Victor’s closest friend, and eventually he gave her a name:
Janey. His sister’s name. If there had only been enough food to go around, Victor believed his sister would have made a fine hunter someday.
The days of walking were long, punctuated only by prolonged waits at uncovered seal holes in the ice. When a seal nosed up to the surface, Victor followed the dog’s lead and lunged at his prey with a handmade harpoon. As the harpoon struck the seal, its toggled point would turn perpendicular to the shaft and lodge the harpoon inside the seal’s skin. With the harpoon set on the end of its braided line, Victor then had to chip away at the ice around the hole until the fat, slippery seal could be landed.
A seal in the water is cunning and quick, and an injured seal is very strong. If the seal darts when the line is wrapped too tightly around the hunter’s hand, there is the chance he could lose his fingers.
Victor even bragged to young Annu that fighting a monstrous bearded seal was how he lost the last two digits on his left hand. In fact, Victor had lost those pieces of himself to frostbite after losing a mitt to the sea. In the Arctic, loss perpetuated itself in this way and tempered Victor’s half-truth. The water spirits had probably taken the mitt as a gift to the seals, so, indirectly, it was as though the seals had taken Victor’s fingers.
Victor’s insistence on hunting in the traditional way was viewed almost derisively by many of his fellow Inuit. The rest glowered with envy at the sharpness of his skills. His critics had stopped thinking about the hunt as a lifestyle and now considered it an unending series of struggles against the ice and snow for very little return. Hunting had become a job for someone else, or at least someone with a snowmobile or a pickup truck.
But Victor did not really mind hunting alone. He could set his own pace across the pack and was never concerned about crossing too much or too little terrain in a given day. He pulled his grandfather’s komatik, an antique wooden sled about twelve feet long, supported on two runners fashioned from caribou antlers and coated with ice, lichen, and moss. Dogs, too, were no longer the possession of most Inuit because they ate too much and crapped too much for what they contributed to the settlement. The hearty, rambunctious animals of qablunaq lore, dogs that willingly took a sledge harness or a saddle pack were a chimera.
In truth, Janey often shrugged off her packs and preferred to nip playfully at Victor’s feet while he pulled his own sled.
Victor could pull or push his komatik loaded with nearly three hundred pounds of gear or animal meat up to twelve miles in a single day twice or three times that if the floe was moving well with the current. If the spirits granted him a larger catch, he stashed his kills in well-hidden hutches he built along the way, for retrieval on the way home or on a later trip. Theft by other Inuit hunters was almost unheard of, but polar bears and foxes were shameless opportunists, so Victor built his stores far out on the sea ice. Very soon the ice would begin its spring movement and he would be forced to turn back, but not just yet. He had waited too long for the winter seal hunt to let it slip away.
The solitude of this kind of hunting was appealing to him. Sometimes he walked for days at a time, building temporary camps, small snow houses or lean-tos for shelter. When he slept it was only for minutes at a time. When he dreamed, it was of hunting. He enjoyed the art of stalking with his dog, silently finding his way across the ice, looking for quarry. When the sun turned the ice to a spongy mush during the day, he napped, then walked on the refrozen pack at evening twilight.
Victor’s upbringing, with its emphasis on tradition, now seemed little more than an anachronism, an optimistic dream to which he often referred for moral guidance or technique. He remembered his grandfather conducting ceremonies for the entire village to appease the spirits for the hunt. He remembered helping to build snow houses and the taste of warm seal blubber and akutuq — Inuit ice cream during the dance festivals. He remembered having a full set of teeth.
Victor sensed that the growing disregard for the old ways especially among the young Inuit men now expected to be leaders of the village had annoyed the spirits of both land and sea. That was why their harvests continued to dwindle. Kannakapfaluk, the mother of all animals and a tremendously powerful spirit, was angry with them.