I unlaced my boots and stretched my legs and waited for her to continue. She sounded like she was waiting, too. I didn’t know what to say. I had a hard time picturing Dad in such bad shape — and Mom? My mind started to wander, to lope inward to its own hinterlands. The parents still lived where I grew up, a tiny cluster of trailers at the edge of the Beaufort Sea. No roads in or out except in winter, when you drove the frozen Mackenzie River. I remember Mom’s twelve husky-cross runners tugging the titanium sled over the packed snow at the dog races, or to the traplines. Dad revving his Ski-doo or motocross down the Run-What-You-Have ice track the town plowed on the frozen ocean. Dump fires in summer and the watery croak of the ravens.
“I can’t do this alone.” Trista broke the silence. “I can’t deal with the two of them and the dogs by myself.”
“How about the neighbours? They’ll take the dogs at least.”
“Didn’t you hear me? It’s not the same. Everyone’s moved south. You haven’t seen how bad she is and how sick the dogs look. No one’s been running them — I honestly don’t think anyone’s fed them.”
“All right,” I said, although it wasn’t possible everyone had gone. And I’d seen the community come together over drilling and poverty and childcare, hell, even to organize the tea-boiling race for jamboree. If there wasn’t family, there was always some gossip or do-good to enlist. Of course Trista could still feel no one was helping, and that people were shirking responsibilities — by people she’d mean me. “Fine. I’m coming.”
I hung up. The snow patted the window in gusts. I wished I’d missed the call, or was asshole enough not to go. It had been years, a real chunk of time, since I’d been to the parents’ place. Parents, neighbours — I didn’t want to deal. I suppose the land, too: the planned retirement of the ice road, and the migration south coupled with the melt and refurbishment of that part of the world — I was sad.
I pushed myself to think about next morning’s shift — the blast of the heated air in the mineshafts and the chug of the water-pumps. But I was only trying to think about work, and memories cracked open like the ice late spring — one frozen sheet then boom, fragments on open water.
Trista and I were kids when the local government started its push against rabies. Pamphlets tacked to the hunting board at the Trader’s Co showed sketches of bats, wolves, and skunks in various stages of disease: drooped head, sagging jaw, stiff gait. The presentation slides were graphic, intended to scare, so after the first image of a sick hound — arced body, scummy muzzle — the adults cut us loose. Trista and I and a couple neighbour kids, we bought chips and Coke at the Trader’s Co (the only store in town) and headed to the ocean.
Tides had piled ice along the shoreline of the Beaufort. Long spears of it, both clear and flecked with bubbles, jutted into the air and the sunlight. Beyond that, the sea in early freeze: deep navy, filled coast-to-horizon with small plates of white pancake ice. We walked the beach. Trista pushed her hood back and tugged her braid from her parka. I turned up the shore and opened the ice hut — a small wooden structure, similar to a fishing shelter, built on top of communal storage that had been tunnelled into the permafrost way back in the sixties.
Inside the hut, a trapdoor filled most of the floor space and the bottom, when we lifted it, was crusted over. A ladder sank into the permafrost like a lure. Of course we went down, all of us. The wooden rungs were slippery, and the walls of the tunnels coated with rime. In the hut people had stored caribou, whale blubber, a frozen seal, tubs of ice cream, fish for sled dogs. One of us lifted the lid of a cardboard box and found the heads of four decapitated dogs. The heads were to be sent south for rabies testing, something that happened regularly, but the stiff fur and the bullet hole between the tan dog’s ears startled us.
The first kids back up the ladder stood on the trapdoor and kept the rest of us in until they got bored. (We had the worst games. It would have been dangerous if we’d locked someone in and forgotten, but we never did.) Later I snuck back to look at the heads. Why not? It was as good a place to hide and smoke as any, and cold even in summer. When the heat had Mom’s sled dogs panting in the shade of their houses, when Dad gave up on his dismantled motorbike because of the clouds of mosquitoes, in the ice hut nothing changed.
Only now, I guessed it had. I went through my drawers and packed a couple shirts and a pair of jeans, and then realized I should probably book a ticket before hitching to Yellowknife from the mine.
At the Diavik human resources desk, I told the girl I needed time off.
“Gotta plug some pups,” I joked. I mean, I was serious, the dogs might have to be shot, but I wanted to keep the conversation light and away from the parents. Not a chance.
She knew all about my family issues, she told me. My sister had called her, and had no doubt gone on and on in detail about the accident.
“So I can have the time?” I said.
“You can have the time.”
I asked the girl to give me the number of the airport.
“No worries,” she said. “We’ve got you on a company plane. Yellowknife to Inuvik, and there’s a supply rig leaving the mine in fifteen if you’re ready now.”
I thanked her, trying at the same time to think if I knew the girl. It seemed out of character that Trista had spilled personal details to a stranger, but she was overwhelmed, so, maybe. The girl and I continued our back-and-forth with her talking like she knew me — knew my family — and me scrutinizing her but unable to place her. Was she from the hometown? There were a lot of people at the mine from the Territories. But she looked city-based: her fluffy bleached hair and sharp nose, the pierced eyebrow she was going to regret if she ever went outside in the cold, and the edge of a blue tattoo — a vine or maybe a snake or the arm of an octopus — creeping around her neck from under her collared shirt.
No, I couldn’t place her, and I had to give up. Which made me wonder if she had me right, or if there had maybe been another accident with another family, and I ended up thanking her again for arranging the plane instead of asking her if we did, in fact, know each other.
The doubt hung around, bothering me while I packed my bag, and I was distracted throughout the drive to Yellowknife with the supply rig. Had I known her, the girl? I held my hands to the heater in the cab of the semi. The driver blasted country music and I relaxed a little. I had to force myself not to chuckle. So I couldn’t remember a face. What must it be like for Mom?
My parents came to the north from the south, which was almost unheard of. Dad was RCMP, and Mom lived for the dogsled races. Which could explain why they led the roundup — town safety, and threat of disease circulating into the sled dogs. Each summer they’d gather a crew, catch and load any unchained dog into a pickup, and then drive the pack to the landfill to be shot. I hated it, although I ended up helping swing the dogs into the pit when I was older and working for Search and Rescue.
But Trista and I, we didn’t think of dogs the way our parents did — as dangerous. Even now my memory of the roundup strays is their scrawny, joyful rutting in the box of the truck on the way to the dump. We didn’t see the land as violent either. Trista and I’d harness a bear dog if Mom had her sled dogs out. We’d borrow the lightest-weight sled we could, and run the fast edge of the floe — where the frozen ocean held the shore. If we couldn’t find a sled, we’d repurpose plastic siding, half an aluminum culvert, or anything else that let us run the mirrored sheen of puddled ice late spring, stupidly happy over fathoms of black ocean.