Victor had walked nearly continuously for six days after leaving the Phoenix, the residue from the qablunaq food sitting heavily in his gut.
Yet even had he known his route paralleled that of the ship, he would not have asked for a ride.
They had their hunt and he had his. But he secretly prized the rock from Elephant Island given to him by the qablunaq named Garner. Yes, it was just a stone and the true distance to Elephant Island meant little to Victor. But a gift from a stranger, especially a qablunaq, was rare indeed. Victor had kept the souvenir in his pocket, as cherished as any talisman.
The hunter and his dog reached their destination just after dawn on the seventh day. Victor topped the final ridge of ice with a grunt and squinted ahead with grim satisfaction. Home. Quiet and still-strangely still even at this hour — the buildings slept against the snow without even a trace of smoke or a warm glow from the indoor lamps. Unfailingly located after two hundred miles through this limitless bleak splendor with nothing but the sky and the land to guide him.
Victor stopped to catch his breath, but only for a moment. The longer he stood, the more firmly the wet snow would soak his boots and freeze to the runners of his sled. Too much pride would make him heavy. It had been difficult, it had been unprofitable, but Kannakapfaluk had guided Victor back to his home and that was all that ever mattered. He had been allowed to hunt among the polar bears, to visit the qablunaq as an ambassador, to have this little adventure, then to return home to share his fantastic tales with the others. In that instant Victor realized how much he missed this desolate oasis and he found the strength to push his legs through the final yards. He thanked the spirits, then he thanked both his ancestors and his descendants, for nothing happened without their combined efforts.
The settlement was little more than a cluster of two dozen prefabricated shelters in the drifted snow. Victor’s house was plain, a two room particle-board box hung on aluminum studs and stocked with secondhand furniture, but it would seem like a palace compared to the tents and snow houses he had built for himself over the past weeks.
Even among the settlement’s humble inhabitants, the buildings were considered to be more of an outpost a construction of little meaning beyond reliable shelter from the wind providing enough commerce to be taxed by the government. A ridiculous excuse for quelling the nomadic lifestyle of the Inuit and teasing them with the trappings of the qablunaq world of which they wanted nothing.
The coastline here was ideal for kayaks and nearby was a river that had once spilled over with fish. Now Victor’s settlement was a familiar place for Anika and the other wives to sew and for the men between jobs to drink and to listen to the CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada on Saturdays. A campsite close enough to chase the caribou herds with snowmobiles or hunt seals on the shore with rifles.
A sturdy place for the women to raise the children at least, until they were old enough to see the need to leave then the colleges in Manitoba or Saskatchewan lured them away, never to return. Some of the younger Inuit called that the age of common sense.
Far from the age of common sense herself, Janey sank up to her belly in a nearby drift, then bounded from spot to spot until she extricated herself, her up curled tail waggling like a sprung coil. Had the other dogs in the village seen this display of indignity, they might have teased her mercilessly.
In that moment, Victor realized he probably knew more about animal behavior than that of his own son. Worse, he probably would have reprimanded Annu for exhibiting the same kind of undignified behavior the unpardonable sin of a child being childish, for which Victor’s own father had scolded him several times.
Certainly, though the sensation was strange in its sudden prominence, Victor missed his family. He always missed them on the hunt, but, as he grew older, he appreciated them a little more with each return. He thought of Anika and wondered whether the spirits had taken her lewkeemeeah back into the sea. Like a hunter, sometimes it could go away and sometimes it did not come back. Sometimes Kannakapfaluk took away the pain and to any Inuk that was a blessing.
Victor trudged forward, his attention more on the rope harness he had fastened around his torso than on the path ahead of him. He had approached to within a quarter mile of his village before he saw the qablunaq vehicles parked beyond the darkened and lifeless structures.
He saw the four-wheel-drive trucks of the Canadian Armed Forces and a large snow tractor vehicles for qablunaq war.
Moments later he saw the qablunaq troops in their insulated fatigues and furry caps moving from building to building, putting padlocks on the doors.
Approaching closer still, Victor saw their guns. He saw them smoking cigarettes as they spoke to one another but he recognized none of them. As an experienced and practiced Inuit hunter with an unfailing knowledge of the land, Victor’s skills were highly valued by the qablunaq law enforcers. From time to time Victor served proudly with the Canadian Rangers, a paramilitary group that garnered the respect of even the most jaundiced Inuk. Maybe the soldiers were here looking for men to help with a poacher or a rescue.
Then Victor saw a row of gray flannel blankets flapping listlessly in the cold, dry wind. Without looking further he knew those blankets covered the bodies of his family and neighbors. The hunter knew too well how any animal, even such an awkward one as man, adopted a certain innate reverence when faced with the death of its own kind.
By tradition, the Inuit would lay their dead beneath piles of stones, since burial in the permafrost was so difficult. The deceased would have their possessions set around them for use in the afterlife, and would sometimes be surrounded by a circle of ceremonial stones known as an ilovgak. As Victor approached closer still, he could see that the bodies were not set in intended graves but merely placed here temporarily like drying fish.
He dropped his ropes and continued forward without his sled, the realization of what he witnessed making his legs feel like lead. An Inuk is not afraid of death, but he is afraid of the dead. Mistreated in death, the spirits of the dead could return to exact revenge. So Victor kept walking, dreading the thought of what lay beneath those blankets, if only because he could not imagine anything more vengeful than this.
Standing among the soldiers was a lone woman with a small child clutching the hem of her snowsuit. Victor knew the woman as Marie, a government social worker from Iqaluit. She looked as though she had been crying the entire way. Then he saw the DIAND doctor who came to the village every two months to take their blood — the one who had told them of Anika’s lewkeemeeah. Marie and the doctor were talking to a uniformed qablunaq who seemed to be in charge of the standing around.
From the west, a snowmobile approached. The driver was his neighbor, Eddie, a broken Inuk who no longer hunted anything but government checks and alcohol. As Eddie altered his course and drove over to Victor, he looked like he had been recently successful at both. Victor had never liked Eddie. Even in a culture that once encouraged spousal exchange and came to accept alcoholism and suicide as practical and inevitable, Eddie stood out as a sad example. It was not Annu but Eddie’s son, Victor realized, who now clung to Marie.