Victor and Janey camped near the bear that night, but still no scavengers came.
The next morning they walked on, the ice growing slushy as the sun rose higher in the sky. The floe seemed to protest every one of his footsteps, every sporadic lurch of his komatik. He knew it was too late in the year to be hunting on the sea ice. At any moment the ground could open up and swallow both of them.
By now, Victor knew, he should have moved inland to hunt the returning caribou, but the winter catch of seals had been poor and he had seen almost no walrus on this hunt. Unless Victor could catch a few more seals this spring, there was the risk of running short of food before fall. Besides that, he knew the fishing inland had been poor last spring. And the spring before that. The char in the streams had looked undernourished and their flesh tasted sour even before it was allowed to ferment. The springtime caribou still looked too gaunt and tough to warrant the attention of any serious hunter.
While Victor and Janey trudged ten or fifteen miles each day between hours spent stooped and waiting at the seal holes in the ice, Anika was at home. She cared for young Annu, preparing the meat from Victor’s last hunting trip for storage and gnawing on the news the DIAND doctor had given her: she had the lewkeemeeah.
There was every possibility that Victor had it too — he certainly had something — if he would only sit still long enough to be examined. Anika knew only that her husband had lost a lot of weight over the winter.
Like most Inuit, Victor suffered no apparent health effects from a diet high in energy-rich fats and oils. It was another qablunaq myth that Inuit were fat; more often than not, the rigorous lifestyle and naturally elevated metabolism kept the Inuit hunters’ bodies lean and hard under the bulky, layered clothing that gave them such apparent girth. It was also untrue that the Inuit were somehow indifferent to the cold — fifty degrees below zero knew no genetic defense — but unlike the qablunaq, the Inuit knew there was no point in becoming distressed by it. Cold was a constant, like ice and snow and losing teeth.
As the Inuit also knew well, next to the cold, the utter dryness of the polar environment posed the largest threat to survival. Less than eight inches of precipitation fell here each year. Despite the constant presence of snow and ice, most of it is tainted with brine, even without the pollution. Meltwater must be captured before it can be defiled and, for the sake of expediency, it is rarely boiled, except for soup. The Inuit know well that seals, caribou, and fish may provide necessary sustenance, but this means nothing if there is no good meltwater. Victor could taste grit, oil, or spoor in a meltwater source, but no one knew the taste of mercury, lead, PCBS, or any number of invisible pollutants that distilled out of the atmosphere into the apun, the fallen snow. He only knew that, both literally and figuratively, the meltwater had not tasted the way it should for far too long.
Victor could ignore his own health, but he could not ignore the hunt.
Kannakapfaluk, the mother of animals, was not pleased. The seals were missing. The fish were sick. The bears were dying, or moving hundreds of miles south to plunder the garbage dumps and trash cans in places like Churchill and Arviat.
Victor tossed a fresh piece of seal blubber to Janey, then tugged his komatik around another hummock. From the appearance of landmarks on the shore, he estimated he could be as much as ten miles out onto the frozen edge of Foxe Basin a long way to swim back if he underestimated the pack or the weather.
But even this far out and this late in the year, the up-thrust ice was more than four feet thick, so he could easily attach a pulling line and climb around the rise with both his hands free. Victor hauled the sledge after him, then took a moment to adjust his stowed equipment. He built a small fire with the remains of a cardboard box he had found, then beat the frost out of his wet clothing before laying it out to dry. To survive the Arctic means always to have a dry change of clothes, for wetness steals heat and rots garments made from animal hides.
Victor quickly changed into his spare clothing, then sat down on the ice to have his breakfast. As he chewed, wincing whenever the plugs of food found a fresh crater in his gums, he became aware of a new noise.
It was not the breathing of the ice. It was not tariuq, the sea, or hilak, the sky. It sounded mechanical.
Victor carried an encyclopedic knowledge of this area, so much so that qablunaq like the RCMP and the Army often enlisted his help as a paramilitary ranger.
Rather than being lost in the absence of any discernible landmarks, without even the regular punctuation of day and night, Victor knew exactly where he was, which made his discovery all the more surprising.
He should have been miles from anything human, much less mechanical. He crawled up the face of a large hummock and peered south, into the low sun.
Against the whiteness of the landscape, the ship stood out like a scar on the snout of a seal. It was surrounded by ice, moored to a large floe in fact, but drifting along with the rest of the pack.
Victor squinted against the glare and moved around the ridge of ice for a better look. It was an icebreaker. A large one, with many qablunaq and their equipment spilled out onto the ice. Many of them were clustered around holes chipped through the ice and were stooped over the openings as if they were hunting for seal. If they were, they would be greatly disappointed seals were smart enough to stay well away from a noisy production like that. If, instead, the qablunaq were broken down out here, well, good luck to them.
Now a snowmobile came toward him, at least as far as the continuous plateau of ice permitted. Both riders were wearing fancy orange and silver suits. The one on the back of the machine, a woman, was waving one arm above her head as if to say, “Come closer,” or, at least, “Don’t run away.” She would be waving a lot more frantically if that snowmobile decided to break through the ice.
As the snowmobile drew nearer, Victor could see that the driver was qablunaq, but the woman was not. Not qablunaq, not Inuit. Something in between.
The machine stopped as close to him as was possible on the ice and its riders hailed him to approach them closer.
Victor waved back. Now what did these qablunaq noisemakers want?
7
Even after the longest of journeys in the harshest of conditions, an Inuk remains considerate of his personal appearance and that of his possessions. This persona must especially be maintained among qablunaq. The Inuit knew how they had been ridiculed by the white man since the arrival of the first trappers and explorers, and so when given the opportunity to say nothing, they willingly accepted it.
Following after Junko, Victor climbed the landing ramp with almost imperious dignity. As the crew of the Phoenix greeted him, his broken smile was reserved at first. But once the bond of several handshakes had been established, Victor’s natural grin crept across his weathered, suntanned face with little resistance. To them, he was an anachronistic statesman of the entire Inuit nation; to him, the Phoenix was an astounding and convenient oasis after two straight weeks of traversing the ice on foot.