Maybe, I told myself, maybe she remembers the old stuff. Like, finding me when I was eight in the ice hut next to the box of heads. After she shouted me from the hut she lifted the twelve-dog sled (lightweight, aluminum) from its hooks and had me hop the lead dogs (Hill-Billy and Cash) to the front lines, harness them, and drive into the night with her.
When it grew dark she had headlamps and then when the dogs grew tired she footed the brake. Secured all twelve husky-cross runners on a long chain pegged into the ice and fed them caribou joints and fish. She lit a fire, spread hay for the dogs, and stepped each into a sleep-sac. They curled into balls. When I woke, a light skiff of snow covered them, and she sat by the fire boiling a massive pan of kibble. I’m not sure what she wanted to teach me, but the labour of basic movement under all that winter clothing — I was exhausted before we’d left the yard.
After I boarded the flight I realized I had nothing to read but the safety guide — orange and grey cartoons of women and men inflating lifejackets on a flaming plane, expressions absurdly tranquil. Before Diavik I’d worked Search and Rescue out of the military base near the hometown, and there was nothing calm about it.
Mostly I’d duct-taped my seatbelt together in a helicopter and leaned from the craft, on the lookout for a missing hunter’s orange safety vest, a stream of smoke that rose in the distance, or the upturned hull of a trawler or skiff on the choppy ocean. Sometimes young idiots jumped ice floes with their Ski-doos. I’d done it when I was a teen — worked up enough speed for a leap and revved over open water, hydroplaning to the next bit of ice. If the Ski-doo didn’t reach the floe, we were on recovery.
The plane hit turbulence and the nervous flyer beside me, a huge man who must have been way too hot in his parka, jerked his hand from the armrest and gripped my fingers. He kept his eyes screwed shut and didn’t acknowledge the action, so I sat there and let him squeeze, and tried to think of anything besides the way my stomach lurched with each jolt of the plane.
Some of Search and Rescue had been good: I’d worked with Cindy. Five feet tall, pointed chin, black hair she wound in two buns above her ears that gave her face a kittenish shape. She’d volunteered at a fire department way south — Watson Lake, practically British Columbia — at the squat end of the Yukon. That led her to High Arctic Rescue Training at the military base outside my hometown, which led her to me. The first summer, when we were both in Basic Firearms, the deerflies slashed and sucked blood like a bitch. She was worried about tularemia, anthrax, eye worm, et cetera, and it was hot — the sun wobbled around the horizon like a helium balloon low on spunk. I suggested the ice hut.
Some thoughtless hunter had plucked geese in the corridor. Feathers and bits of blood were frozen into the gravel and on the walls. My family’s locker was okay, sparkly ice crystals coated the roof, but it was more like being in a deep-freeze than it was romantic, and when Cindy opened a cardboard box, she found — I shit you not — the same dog heads I’d obsessed over as a kid. One grey, two black, one tan.
She didn’t say anything, so I lit a smoke. Then remembered she wanted me to quit (lung cancer — she knew about the asbestos workers from Cassiar and said it was unholy hell) and I put the cigarette out in the tan dog’s eye.
When she calmed down enough to listen, I explained about the routine dog culls, that the town couldn’t let strays pack up. I said strays, but I meant sled or bear dogs that had slipped the chain and soured. Wild, feral animals plagued with mange and starvation — nothing friendly or rehabilitatable about them.
And once I started talking about the culls, I remembered those particular dogs. How had I forgotten? The first dog had turned up quietly — stretched in a green patch of dwarf birch by the Trader’s Co late August, its matted coat thick with flies. Town shot the nose off the second on the gravel strip outside the food bank. Third I couldn’t recall. But the fourth was a frothy-mouthed bitch the town ran down on Ski-doos and blew to pieces. There were kids to think of. I guess no one sent them south for testing. No one got around to it.
Cindy must have forgiven me, because later on we pushed a canoe into the Beaufort and dropped a fishing line. She twisted around to look at me in the canoe, her shiny black buns a little lopsided, the long-sleeve shirt she wore to fight bugs and sunburn one of those old-fashioned ones. You know the type, the colourful plaid cotton that was so popular in the mid-eighties. “Why are they still there?” she asked.
“The heads?” I let the fishing line spin out. Who knew? The town must have forgotten about them. I forgot. I wouldn’t have brought her down there if I’d remembered.
Baby-blue sky and clear ocean, the yellow canoe, the speckled red lure, Cindy’s shiny twists of hair. My eyes followed the weight and jigging spoon down, way down — I could see depth that hadn’t been there a moment ago — and then the glint of red fell too far into the black.
My flight landed in Inuvik in the early morning, and the aircraft marshals waved us off the tarmac with their orange beacons. I hustled to the bathroom. My hand-holding neighbour from the plane pushed past me and locked himself in a stall. I spit in the sink and washed my face, but the sounds and smell from the cubicle didn’t encourage relaxation.
“You all right?” I asked. No response. I went to the desk and put in a request for a rental, one with chains that could travel the winter road north to the hometown.
“Are you okay?” the boy at the desk asked.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Turbulence.” But I wasn’t sure that was why I felt like shit, why my face was grey and had greenish bags under the eyes, the eyes a bit red and more yellowed than I was comfortable with. There was more to it than the flight; it was a mind trip heading home. I knew what would happen when I arrived.
I’d bang on the door, wait for Trista to open it, and haul my backpack into the living room. Some of the furniture would be different — probably a satellite dish, a flatscreen — but the house would still have the same dusty, burnt smell of newsprint and kindling, and like whoever vacuumed used too intense a setting on the shag carpet. Dad in a wheelchair in his housecoat, both his legs propped on an ottoman, greenish-yellow bruises over his shins and knees. He’d have lost weight in the hospital and his skin would hang off him. He’d take my hand and then, seeing me note the stitches down his forearms, he’d lift his arms to shield his face.
“Studded tires coming right at me,” he’d say. “Ripped straight through the parka.”
“Don’t brag,” I’d respond, and he’d excuse himself: “They got me on opiates.”
I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to ask about Mom.
All that thinking about what waited, when I could do nothing to fix it.
“Here’s the keys.” The boy at the rental counter handed me a fob. “You’ll find the truck in the lot. Chains are in the box if they aren’t on the tires already. There’s a key for the storage on the ring.”
Mid-winter the Mackenzie was three feet thick and black and the only vehicles I passed were plows or water trucks sealing faults. Not much snow, but what powder there was had been scraped clear of the ice and piled along the sides of the frozen river. The pickup’s headlights lit the fog, and then the sky caught a lick of sun and glowed rosy to the south. Ravens perched on fishing boats dry-docked along the banks. A couple of foxes scoured for hares and roadkill with the lanky, airy gait I remembered alongside the dogsled trails. The radio played eighties classics, interspersing the songs with chatter about an NHL charity game in Whitehorse, and then an update on the berm construction Tuk to Inuvik — an all-season highway over the permafrost. I’d seen it leaving Inuvik: stockpiled geotextile rolls and silvery culverts.