Country of Cold (21 page)

The Toongies and the Tortooks were sitting in the reception room waiting for their chest X-rays, part of the TB survey. Louisa went into the X-ray room to warm up the equipment. Mary was scheduled to do the well-woman clinic after lunch, and she grinned at Ophelia Sateanna and slipped her rings into her pocket as Ophelia, with less enthusiasm, rose and smiled.

The arrangement was that a woman came in on the Thursday of the week of her birthday; twenty Sagittariuses in a row would wear anyone down. When Mary walked into the little laboratory with a stack of pap smear slides, at first she didn’t even notice Louisa
standing there, and when she did, she saw that Louisa was looking at a pregnancy slide test and was weeping.

She walked over to Louisa and put her arm around her and looked down at the slide and the little magenta + sign on it.

“Oh Lou, look, you have lots of choices here. Don’t get overwhelmed.”

“Mary,” Louisa said.

“Yes?”

Louisa ran out of the lab and put on her parka, leaving the front door swinging open and minus forty blowing in like an open meat freezer.

The festival that celebrates the founding of the town by whalers and priests is held in early winter. In the beginning, the people profited through their interaction with these men: the hunters were paid members of the whaling crews; the tools they brought home—steel sewing needles, rifles, shotguns, sharpening stones, and axes—made their lives easier but not fundamentally different. Some of the hunters became leaders of the Kablunauks’ whale hunt, honoured for their ability to find the whale pods, and to handle the small boats that chased down the bowheads and the rights and the smaller, stranger narwhals. The people had stayed alive for millennia hunting the whales from tiny skin boats, and they knew what was knowable of them. This was a proud time for the people, in their dealings with the
Kablunauks; there was a version of mutual respect then that has not been sustained.

Today, to the extent that Kablunauks are interested in the people, they are interested in features of their lives that were abandoned thirty years ago: the famine, the
iglu
, slavery, whaling from the
qayaq
, song cousins. No one knows how to answer the questions that people from the universities are always asking.

Shrug. It sounds like it must have been very cold a lot.

Kablunauks seem not to understand that the history of the Inuit is contained in what they are. Kablunauks wish to buy soapstone carvings of men in sealskin trousers spearing seals as a way of capturing that tradition, unconscious that the people never carved stone ornaments before the Hudson’s Bay Company paid them to. They were nomads, and carried what they owned over the tundra. Heavy ornaments had a limited place in that life.

Around the prefabricated government buildings, disposable diapers poke through the shifting snowdrifts, plastic bags from the Hudson’s Bay store fly like aerial jellyfish through the streets, and the unmarked tundra beyond looks more and more alien to everyone.

The day before the festival is Dog Day. Feral dogs run in the garbage dump and on the periphery of the town; it is a problem in every Arctic community. Every year children are mauled, sometimes killed and eaten. On Dog Day all the dogs that belong to anyone are tied up.
Beginning at noon any dog that is not tied up is shot. The teenagers enjoy this. The carcasses are burned by the ocean with gasoline. The smell is like tires burning.

Mary stepped into the night and held the door for Dan. They were on their way to the Hamlet Dance, the first night of the festival. It was perfectly black and the stars glared like electric arcs. Dan closed the door behind them and they both shuddered and hunched their shoulders. They were going to be late for the dance because Dan had not been home when Mary got back from the clinic. He had been visiting one of the old men, he said, seeing if there might be any work helping to run someone’s trapline. He had stopped talking about getting a government job. In the hurried dressing for the dance he added that he was starting to think that he might be able to live up here, you know, over the long run.

They turned to walk into the wind to the community centre.

“Who?” she asked, through her hood.

“What?”

“Which one of the men?”

“The one we always say hi to at the Hudson’s Bay store.”

“Apulardjuk.”

“Yes.”

They walked on, squeaking over crystalline snow.

At the dance a table had been laid out, covered with pots of
muktuk
and
iviaq
. The walrus smelled almost as strongly as the whale, and on entering the hall it was as if one were being pushed facedown in entrails. Laughter boomed out through tobacco smoke and steam; the overhead lights shone down in broad purple cones.

The hall was a Quonset hut dating from the war, made of galvanized steel and floored with plywood. Bright industrial lights hung from the ceiling, trying their best to penetrate the smoke in the air. There were five hundred people packed into the little building.

Louisa sat with Little Billy on her lap against one wall. Her mother was standing not far away. Louisa waved Mary and Dan over to sit with her. Lined up against one wall were chairs borrowed from the school for the elders. A dozen of the older men and women sat on these too-small hard-backed chairs, their sealskin
kamiks
shining in the electric light, bright skirts draped over blue jeans and bountiful laps.

Louisa’s father, Simionie Ooluk, sat with his drum among the old people, smoking his pipe at the end of the row. Simionie Ooluk was one of the few elders whom Mary didn’t know. He was on no regular medications, and the only time she had seen him in the clinic was when he had come in with an infected cut in his hand. He had sewn it up when he was out on the land, he said, and had used cotton thread. He had done a reasonable
job. Mary had given him some antibiotics and, in an effort to win his approval, several packages of sterile suture material for the next time, which he had accepted. Even after this he had not acknowledged her when they had seen one another in the Northern Store, ignoring her cheerful
kahn-a-weepie
, which from anyone else elicited at least a nod and a smile. Her first impression was that he didn’t like Kablunauks, or maybe it was a gender thing, but long after she had stopped greeting him, she noticed that his interaction with the other Inuit proceeded along the same lines. He moved through them like a sled dog. Everyone kept well out of his way, would move aside if he was coming but would not interrupt their conversation or vary their gaze. He sat straight and silent and wore a thin wispy beard in the fashion of the old men. He still hunted with dogs.

Mary watched him for a long time and he did not move. She looked over at Dan, who was smiling across the room at someone Mary couldn’t see.

Mary said, “How are you, Louisa?”

Louisa said, “A little better, maybe.”

“Things will be okay.”

Dan started laughing and then, looking back at his girlfriend and Louisa, choked it into his hand. Mary looked through the dark and smoky room but didn’t see who Dan had been looking at. Louisa excused herself, dumped Little Billy off her lap and walked into the crowd.

It was only in the late sixties that the last of the families came in off the land in the Keewatin District. Even these holdouts had been deeply affected by contact—rifles, pots and pans, matches, Coleman stoves—long before coming into town, but think about this: thirty-five years ago there were still families listening to mid-winter storms in houses of packed snow. For many of the young men and women it is still normal to think of the night and the wind as malevolent and lethal.

The visitor finds this place more familiar than unfamiliar. The rooms are just as warm and dry here as in the south, the television works the same way, the bathtubs are as comfortable. The tundra is marvelled at, as is the view from the airplane descending to the airport. On the walk between the airport and the taxi, it really is cold outside. Really cold.

A few months later and the visitor is struck by how similar her life up here is to that of her new friends. Chiliburgers at the Harbour Hotel, videos and Cheez Doodles on weekend nights. During the festival everyone tries to build an
iglu
and mostly the
iglus
fall in. The hunters ride snowmobiles and carry hand-held satellite receivers to guide their way home. Ask, and you can go with them. You can drive into the middle of the caribou herd yourself and shoot these docile and imbecilic creatures, shoot as many as you feel like skinning. The barriers between the people are not in what is done, or how. Not anymore.

The drumming started and the talk died away. Simionie Ooluk spun his drum and began singing a song about the woman shapeshifter, Sedna, who has the body of a fish and who hangs out by the floe edge, trying to lure hunters into the water. Mary had heard this song before, had had it explained to her, how once the hunter was in the water Sedna’s fingers became fish and her teeth were as sharp and pointed as a seal’s so that she could dismember him with one bite. Mary had listened to these stories and the other savage accounts of the spirit world and its interaction with the world of man with awe and disgust; walking through the frigid night, the dark low hills barely visible under the moon, she had wondered why, with a life as hard as these people’s, they needed a spirit world so hostile and unforgiving. But then she realized how naive that question was, and suspected that she had answered it in her own framing of the question. So what did that mean then? There was no warmth to be had in this place, even in an interior landscape? What refuge existed in the snow and wind?

Simionie stamped his feet and sang louder, his nasal, high-pitched growl hopping through a cadence of fear; everyone listened, and sat straight in their chairs. The old men and women did not smile and held their mouths tightly and grimly. Simionie sat down, and for a moment there was no movement or noise. Then conversation slowly returned to the room, the young people first,
then stepwise by generation, progressively older. Simionie’s drum was between his knees and he looked like he was asleep.

Mary looked around at the room, examining people for their reactions to Simionie’s song. Dan was watching a woman smoking a cigarette. The new librarian, Mary figured. Her eyes were so blue Mary could see their colour across the room. The librarian quickly looked away. Louisa sat down beside Mary and looked over at her father, still apparently napping, and then back to Mary. Simionie shifted in his chair and Louisa’s eyes darted back to him. He settled again, and she looked back at Mary, relieved. Mary lifted her eyebrows. Louisa shrugged.

Big Billy showed up as the throat singing started. The two women singers sat cross-legged, facing one another. Their polytonal and discordant harmonies rose above them and filled the room. Billy was drunk and friendly. As he crossed between the audience and the singing women he did a little step dance. There were a few laughs. He bowed to the audience. The women continued singing. If they were aware of him they did not show it. Billy stepped to the side. He walked up to Louisa. He did not acknowledge Mary. “Hello, Billy,” Louisa said, in English. He replied in Inuktitut.

“You missed my father’s song,” Louisa continued.

“Good.”

Billy nodded at Dan. Dan nodded back. After a moment he turned and walked away. The throat singers finished. People clapped quietly. One of the young men plugged in the PA and “Pump Up the Jam” began throbbing into the hall. The kids all stood up and began dancing in their sealskin boots.

Toward midnight Billy appeared again on the dance floor, much drunker now. The old people watched the dancing from the sides, tapping their feet and smiling, talking to the young people who came over to visit. Billy seemed to prompt no response at all. Mary and Dan tried dancing but then they stopped and sat down in their chairs, perspiring, and frozen. Louisa was still sitting and watching. Mary smiled at her. Then she looked again and suddenly Simionie was kneeling on the floor and talking in Louisa’s ear. Billy stumbled toward them and pulled on Louisa’s arm. Simionie stood up and said something to Billy. Billy blanched. Everybody nearby looked suddenly embarrassed and stared at the floor. Simionie took Louisa by the arm and led her away. She followed her father silently. Billy sat down on the floor.

It is difficult for a Kablunauk to know the extent to which magic survives, because anyone who would know will not speak of it. Nurses spend twenty years in a community and remain mostly ignorant of these matters. They know all the other secrets—the incests and
the different betrayals and the madnesses. And they know that there are clearly men and women who are avoided and feared. But it is possible to fear for very non-mysterious reasons too. They find that the intersection between magic and the more familiar gods of sex and loneliness and selfishness is far larger and more complete than they ever would have suspected before they came here and saw magic at work.

Three in the morning and so cold the snow squealed under Constable Lucien Gregoire’s stamping feet. Mary woke slowly to the hammering on her door. Her eyes were still red from the fighting before they had gone to bed. The constable did not say anything at first when Mary opened the door. He stepped inside. The blast of cold swirled around her nightie. He wanted her to come and see Billy Tagalak. Billy was drunk, and waiting outside the nursing station. “Lucien,” she said, “this isn’t anything new, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do for him.” But she was already pulling a sweater on and reaching for her boots.

Dan looked out from the bedroom. He said, “Hello, Lucien.” Lucien nodded at him. Mary told Dan that she was going into the nursing station. “Don’t go anywhere,” she added. Dan just looked at her. Mary and the Mountie bustled out into the cold.

Billy had phoned Lucien at home and asked if he would get the nurse for him. It was an emergency, he
had said, and he would meet them there. Someone was going to get hurt, he said, and wouldn’t elaborate.

Their lungs ached with the first breath of the night air. Constable Gregoire walked quickly toward the nursing station and Mary followed him as fast as she could. She fell steadily farther behind. The snow was so cold her feet slid with every step and she almost fell, over and over again.