The Snow Geese (26 page)

The elevator blocked out the low sun like a censor’s mark. Sam threw the kitbag into the back of the Ford. The steel bodywork was left bare in the cab and smelled of wet stone. Sam had bought the truck when he was with the Air Force in Camp Gordon, Ontario. He’d bought the Harley-Davidson in Winnipeg. Churchill had about thirty miles of paved roads: Sam cruised them as if they were the grandest highways.

‘You hit the end of the road and turn around and go straight back again, and on and on like that until you’re sick of it or out of gas,’ he said. ‘When I left the Air Force, I rode the bike from Thompson, Manitoba, on the Dempster Highway north to Inuvik, and that’s as far north as you can drive. I had a tent. At night I’d pull off the road wherever I found myself. I’d push as far as I could into the bush and camp there, and I guess I found a river to wash in every three days or something.’

We passed the elevator, leaving the asphalt for the uneven rubble track that led out to Cape Merry. Sam parked the Ford at the end of the track. We clambered over boulders covered in pale green, grey and rust-red lichens, making for the tip of the promontory, stopping at a wide, flat rock right by the rivermouth, the ice nearest us forced up in sooty rifts where it hinged on the rise and fall of tides. Sam pointed across the river to the remains of Fort Prince of Wales, the old Hudson Bay Company stronghold, the sun on the edge of the bay to the north-west.

I asked Sam about the gyrocopter.

‘That’s my current project,’ he said. ‘I’m building it myself. I’m using ideas from about six other gyrocopters, just taking the best ideas from those and putting them in my own design. I bought one basic set of blueprints plus I’ve had other design plans from pictures. You can order the equipment in from the States; it’s pretty easy, actually.’

‘Where are you going to fly?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Just around.’

There had been other projects. Sam had made a power kite from a design in a book. He’d used an old hang-glider sail, and doubled the proportions recommended in the plan.

‘Yeah, I made an extra-large version of it. Then I brought it out here and went out on the ice on my cross-country skis. Wind wasn’t bad. Pretty soon I had the kite launched. It pulled me along at a lick across the fast ice, the smooth part before it’s all smashed up close to the lead. I was holding on as tight as I could to the handles, and the wind was just screaming into the kite. It pulls you along real fast, faster than you want to go. I had a friend on a snowmachine who came and picked me up after each run. You see, I wasn’t able to use the kite back into the wind, to tack on it like you would in a sailboat.’

For several years Sam had kept a sailing boat in Vancouver, moored in Burrard Inlet across from Stanley Park. He sold the boat after almost sinking it off Bowen Island. A violent squall caught him sailing alone.

‘The boat was sideways on the water for about three minutes,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know how to get the sails down. Everything was jamming up on me. I went into brainlock. I couldn’t understand what was happening, it was all so sudden. I was trying to pull in a roller furling and keep hold of the tiller. The squall was driving the boat sideways, and I just got lucky it blew over so fast. I really thought I was going to die. Yeah, I thought I was really close, and I just felt sad. I didn’t feel much other stuff I’d expected to. Just sad, mostly.’

We sat down on the rock, looking out into the bay. I imagined Sam speeding past on the ice, clutching kite strings, his toque a blue spot whizzing by. His projects were variations on a theme: schemes of escape.

‘I like to get lost on purpose,’ he said. ‘I like to get deliberately lost. I got lost on purpose in China, Russia, Mongolia, the Philippines. I got lost in Beijing and wound up in an industrial section in the middle of nowhere. I got deliberately lost in Manila. I was in Germany with the military, doing NBCW training, nuclear biological chemical warfare training, and got deliberately lost in Berlin and Munich, and other places I don’t even remember the names of.’

A pair of Canada geese flew low from left to right in front of us, keeping to the layer of cool, dense air above the ice. There was no wind. Snow buntings flitted from rock to rock. Three larger white birds appeared on the rocks below, stepping about on the lichens: willow ptarmigan in their snow-white winter plumage – a kind of grouse, with a chunky body, short legs, round black eyes and a small hooked bill. Ptarmigan are year-round tundra residents: their plumage chameleons with the season, white moulting into checkered chestnut browns, the birds remaining camouflaged even as the snow disappears. They have feathers right down their legs, like trousers, and develop feathers on their feet in winter (their scientific name,
Lagopus
, comes from the Greek for ‘hare-footed’) both to keep them warm and to function as snowshoes, reducing the distance each foot sinks in snow by as much as fifty per cent. These three didn’t seem bothered by two men sitting on a rock.

It was about 200 yards across from the cape to the fort. There were shallow meltwater pools in the ice. Sunlight flickered on the water like candles under panes of glass. We could feel the sunlight on our faces. Sam gestured towards the rivermouth, stretching out his left arm the way people often do to draw a cuff back from a watch.

‘I swam across there,’ he said.

‘I believe you. I’m not sure I’d believe anyone else.’

‘It was just a challenge. This was 1988. I wasn’t long out of the military. People were pretty negative about the idea. Nobody here much wants to see anybody who stands out for any reason. I trained for a year. I knew I needed to swim as fast as possible across the river because of the cold, so I trained myself in the front crawl. Nobody ever taught me to swim. I taught myself when I was a kid. I started long-distance swimming when I was stationed at Baden Baden in West Germany. They had a pool there, but more often I’d swim in the quarry behind the base. There was a deep quarry pool with cliffs around it. It was somewhere you could be on your own, I guess.

‘I started training as soon as I’d decided to swim the rivermouth. I swam in the pool all winter, at least an hour a day. I swam miles in the pool. When the ice broke up on the lake in June I swam in that to get used to the temperatures. I’d go out there on my own and grease myself up with Tenderflake lard, which is a white beef fat. I bought blocks of it from Northern Stores. I slathered my hair with the lard, and put a bathing cap over that, and wore swimming goggles. I don’t think the lard helped too much, but I’d read that people who swam the English Channel used that.

‘I trained all of 1988 and the first half of 1989. I did the swim on August the first 1989. The river’s usually open from July through September. I tried to pick a day when the water was as warm as I thought it was ever going to get, but it was still really close to freezing. I paid a couple of guys boat money to come with me in a boat. Nobody came to watch. I’d told a few people but they weren’t really interested. I started right here, on the Cape, swimming across towards the Fort. The thing was to start off right at the bottom of low tide. In the afternoon, maybe one o’clock. I greased up with lard and pulled on the bathing cap and swimming goggles. You have to start swimming as soon as you hit the water. You can’t waste any time. As soon as you’re in the water your energy level’s plummeting. It’s in free fall. It doesn’t come back if you stop to rest. The water’s so cold it’s sucking the life out of you, and the only thing for it is to just keep going.

‘The thing is, on the swim across, as soon as you put your head underwater, you can hear the whales. There are lots of beluga whales in the river at that time. I swear you can hear them perfectly. These are white whales. People call them sea canaries. They make a whining sound, it’s like a psychedelic whining sound, unlike anything you ever heard before. One of the guys on the boat said that while I was swimming he saw a beluga whale swim right underneath me.

‘It took me half an hour to swim across to the Fort. It was much harder getting back. I got swept up in these tidal currents which took me five hundred feet out into Hudson Bay. I knew I had to keep swimming. I swallowed some water and cramped up almost immediately. My goggles fogged over. I couldn’t see where I was going. I followed the sound of the boat. It was an aluminum boat with an outboard, and I just kept swimming for the drone. Then for some reason the guys slowed up, and I almost swam right into the propeller. I swore at them because I was sinking. I was doing a zigzag course back in from Hudson Bay and I was pretty close to passing out. I think I was hallucinating a little. The whales got to sounding like mermaids and I thought maybe I should head down and join them.

‘Eventually I got back to the Cape. When I got out I didn’t know where I was, I was so hypothermic. I felt like I was looking way down at my feet. My feet were a long way down below me. I was shaking violently and almost convulsing. The guys from the boat sat me on a chair and covered me with blankets. They gave me hot tea, and I started to warm up a little, and I guess I was happy. Before I did it I was either going to do it or I was going to die, that was my thinking. I trusted myself that I could do it. When I warmed up a little, I had this feeling of gratitude. I wanted to thank the spirit of the river, for letting me live.’

We sat quietly for a while. Sam took off his toque and ruffled his hair. Then, abruptly, he stood up.

‘Do you want to shoot some potatoes?’ he asked.

We walked over the rocks to the pickup, and Sam retrieved the green kitbag. Then we went back to our flat rock with its prospect of the river, the bay, and the sun, orange-gold, low on the horizon.

The kitbag contained a large plastic contraption resembling an exhaust pipe: a homemade gun, a howitzer fashioned from the kind of black PVC tubing used for guttering and downpipes. The barrel was striped with yellow tape, and the trigger, an electric barbecue lighter, was fastened to a red wooden handle with black tape. Wires led from the trigger to a chamber in the butt of the gun.

From the green kitbag Sam produced a plastic Northern Stores bag full of potatoes. He pushed a potato down the muzzle of the mortar, ramming it home with a dowel, working fluently, like a musketeer. There was a black line on the rod, with arrows pointing towards it. Next to the arrows, in black felt-tip, Sam had written,
Potato up to here
. He unscrewed a cap in the butt of the gun and wafted fresh air into the chamber.

‘Would you pass me that can of Lysol?’ he asked.

I found the disinfectant in the kitbag. It contained denatured ethanol and had a ‘Crisp Linen’ scent.

‘Lysol! The choice of champions!’ mocked Sam.

He sprayed Lysol into the chamber for a few seconds, then screwed back the cap. When you pulled the trigger, the barbecue lighter would spark the gas in the chamber, causing it to combust.

‘I’ll shoot the first one, OK?’ Sam said.

I stood aside. Sam aimed the mortar out over Hudson Bay. He pulled the trigger. With a roomy
whoof
like wind buffeting a small woodframe church, the explosion launched the potato on a long, high trajectory. We tracked the missile – a dot, a speck, then nothing, falling invisibly, somewhere in the ice, close to the sun. We were laughing.

Sam took another potato from the Northern Stores bag and pushed it down the barrel with the dowel. He unscrewed the cap in the butt. Smoke poured out of the chamber. He wafted in fresh air.

‘You’ve got to have enough oxygen in there,’ he said.

He sprayed in more Lysol, screwed back the cap, and handed me the mortar. I held it low. I pointed the barrel at the sky over Hudson Bay and squeezed the trigger. I felt the explosion at my hip, heard the potato whoosh up the tubing. Another arc: dot, speck, nothing.

We took it in turns, shooting potatoes till the bag was empty.

8 : FOXE LAND

W
E TEND TOWARDS HOME
. Migrant birds don’t travel for the sake of it. They move between winter and breeding grounds because the Earth’s axis is not perpendicular to the plane of its orbit round the sun. They migrate in response to the tilt, to the seasons and seasonally variable food supplies that exist on account of the tilt. In any species, an individual that remains within a familiar environment has more chance of finding food and water, more chance of avoiding predators and exposure, than an individual that strays into unknown territory. Homesickness may simply have evolved as a way of telling an ape to go home.

When I climbed down off the plane in Iqaluit, Baffin Island, my first impulse was to look for birds: herring gulls, skittering snow buntings, ravens with slick vinyl lustre in their feathers. The sky was stuffed with cloud, like the down filling in a duvet, snow tuning the light to its own white pitch. Painted prefabricated houses made rudimentary occasions of colour and line in this whiteness. Dented, rusting pickup trucks, and four-wheeler ATVs blazoned with the names Big Bear, Timberwolf and Kodiak cruised the reddish-brown dirt roads. Figures trudged through rubble and dirty snow along the roads’ shoulders, huddled in heavy green or navy knee-length Arctic parkas with short reflector stripes on their breast pockets and fur-trimmed hoods. Caribou grazed on patches of bare ground. Teams of huskies, roped together like mountaineers, slouched on the ice of Frobisher Bay.