Of all the modern marvels.
The all-season road had been talked about for decades, opposed by the south because of the price, and in the north we had mixed feelings. Win some, lose some — the new road would be a bit of both.
Back when I was in the hometown, and right into my Search and Rescue years, you flew in or waited for the freeze. Water one day, ice the next, and vice versa. You had to watch yourself. Like when that overloaded rig cracked through the ice road — eighteen-wheeler bent at the coupling and hung on by the front axle and rear wheels long enough for the driver to pray his way out of the cab. The town patted the man’s back, handed him a coffee as the tractor raised its nose and slipped backwards into the water. Nothing to do about it, and the rig vanished into the black without a burp, the whole picture eerily quiet.
It was a shock, but we went on. That same year: first haze of green in May, we harpooned a beluga. Cut and dried slabs of blubber and skin on the rock shore of the Beaufort. Cubed the fat into muktuk and stored it in the ice hut. Yellow warblers returned and perched in larch and white spruce that managed stunted growth in sheltered valley dips even this far beyond the tree line. Buds turned to meaty leaves. Hares and foxes shed their winter colour and the muskoxen gathered with undercoats hanging from their backs in mossy strips.
Summer. The last piles of snow collapsed and the entire town became a puddle. Water reflected the sky, heather bloomed and the horizon took on a yellow-white sheen. Fireweed, green-keeled cotton grass, Arctic huckleberry. The sun careened around the horizon. Mosquitoes and blackflies rose from the tundra in clouds.
Another roundup, we shot strays at the dump and swung them by the legs into the landfill. Anything that looked sick rather than starving got decapitated (carving knife between the vertebrae base of the neck) and tossed to a box. Once it was done, we’d empty a canister of mixed-gasoline on the pile and light it up.
Then fall, then winter. Then another spring. And again, the ice breakup — sudden, impressive, and loud. Groans for weeks, and then a boom that thundered over everything. The ice gave and flowed.
Rose-coloured shit, I told myself, navigating the pickup around the cracks in the frozen Mackenzie.
The Mackenzie ice road hit the Beaufort and I drove the last leg of the winter road over the ocean. And then I was there. The hometown. The sign marking the weight capacity of the ice was pocked with bullet holes, and a couple mangy strays tugged at a muskrat hide. Dry-docked boats by the frozen shore. All the buildings on stilts above the permafrost, all the stilts buried in snow. Trailers coated in frost. Aluminum utilitdors, silver and pink in the twilight, snaked electric and plumbing and phone between houses. Insulated with foam and yellow fibreglass, those tubes are full of voles, and come summer the couple tattered cats that’ve survived the foxes will spend sunny days on top of the warm metal.
I parked outside the Trader’s Co and threw my bag over my shoulder. I trudged through the snow over the Ski-doo trails up the hill, past too many boarded houses, to the parents’ place, where I stopped. They must’ve tossed caribou antlers on the roof every single year they lived there, and the trailer looked fortified for the apocalypse. Dad’s busted motocross sat in the shed beside the Ski-doo. A satellite dish (I was right, they’d installed one) pointed due south. And in the yard, Mom’s dogs. Fifteen to twenty husky-cross chained to square-frame doghouses. Tan and black, pale-eyed, most curled and asleep on straw and snow. A torn ear, a raised head. Walking closer I saw most had yellow crust in the eyes. Shit stains down the legs.
I stood for a while. If I had Cindy’s number I’d have called her. She’d probably hang up on me like my ex had, but I only wanted to make sure they remembered everything we’d been through. The embarrassing fuck-ups I used to wish I could forget. I mean, if we can laugh over it, we should be okay, right?
I watched the dogs squint through pus and chew their sores.
Until then — until I saw the condition of the dogs — I’d kept telling myself the situation wasn’t as bad as Trista claimed. Same as Dad had done with Mom’s illness, probably. Probably what kept him from calling for help — he couldn’t get past the sadness.
I can forgive him that.
From the look of the animals, I guessed I would suffer a bit of heartbreak inside the house.
I climbed up the frozen stairs and banged on the parents’ door. Trista opened it and we hugged. I handed her a bottle of Malbec I’d snagged in Inuvik.
“Wait here.” She set the bottle aside, zipped into a parka and joined me on the steps. “I got to fill you in on the damage before you see them.”
“That bad?” I said.
I didn’t want to interrupt her, but I couldn’t bring myself to listen either. In the yard, Mom’s skinny dogs gnawed frozen char. Trista must have fed them. And watching the dogs eat I suddenly remembered when the other stray from the ice hut had turned up: a grey bitch, milky at the teats, wandering slowly from the eastern lake area. The dog’s stiff gait, her relentless stumble along the rocky shore. The ice hut, I wanted to ask Trista. When you got the fish did you see the box with the dogs’ heads?
“Okay,” Trista squeezed my arm.
I grabbed the doorknob.
It’s been thirty years since Trista and I were kids, but I remember this one winter when the snow came late. Dad and I ski-dooed the trapline with two neighbour boys, baiting foot traps with stink salmon. I scratched together the scattered, powdery cover — more frost than snow — at the river’s outlet to hide the traps. We’d thumped a couple snared foxes earlier that morning and had a rogue, cherry-coated male and one white vixen lashed to the Ski-doo trailer. The light bounced a warm orange over the ice — the sun scraped around the south horizon and set fire to colour, every red enriched and backed by blue shadow. We lowered our hoods, the neighbour boys’ toques bold yellow against the wolverine trim on their parkas. Dad and I planted marker logs near the traps and loaded the bucket of stink salmon on the trailer. Below — honest to god, I remember this as clear as the ice under us — we realized we could see the silty rocks of the riverbed and good-sized sheefish swimming in the brackish water. Course we broke out the auger and then took maybe thirteen fish total. Each time we dropped the lure we hooked and pulled a flopping, tinny fish onto the ice.
Mom was a long shadow on the horizon, running her titanium sled, six dogs off the gangline. Trista followed on the four-dog behind — there’s no sound when you run, nothing but the breath of the dogs and the hiss of the sled over the snow. They caught us unawares, and helped haul the catch home.
Later we barbecued and ate. The white, flaky meat sweeter than halibut. While Dad cooked, I hung the two foxes from the shed by their rear legs and wrapped their noses in paper towel and duct tape. Cut a slit around each ankle and peeled the skins from the carcasses like a sock.
Standing with Trista, opening that door—
No, the fish is what I want to leave you with. Never saw anything like it again. We kept reeling one after another, saying, as their tails flashed in the sun and pounded the ice, “Would you look at that.”
DA CAPO AL FINE