“Qanueppit!” Victor called out. “What’s happening?”
“Holy shit, eh?” Eddie shouted to Victor, nodding his head toward the village. “Fuckin’ army shut us down.” He gunned the snowmobile’s engine with one last twist of the throttle, then switched it off.
“What happened?” Victor asked. The snowmobile’s engine died with a cloud of blue smoke in the silent air. He spoke in Inuktitut, giving them some privacy and challenging Eddie to be an Inuk. Dignified. It didn’t work.
“They tol’ me there’s radiation in the water,” Eddie replied. “And the food. And the goddamn houses, eh?” Eddie coughed an ugly cough and spat a bolus of yellow phlegm into the snow.
“But what happened?” Victor pressed. There had always been some sort of bacteria. Mercury. PCBS. Toxins ten to a hundred times the levels the government called “healthy” and none of it originating within a thousand miles of this place. Sickness fell here within the snow, poisoned mothers’ milk, and clung to the surface of the ice. But even this had never produced a line of gray blankets in the middle of the road.
“Out there.” Eddie nodded to the nearby coastline. “They’re tryin’ to keep it quiet in front of us ‘stupid Eskimos’ like we’re gonna hire a lawyer or something’ but I heard ‘em talkin’ about a spill out there, drifting by us. They’re gonna quarantine the whole fuckin’ coast.”
Victor thought about this. The qablunaq on the big red ship had been talking about spilled radiation and their planned route would have taken them north of the peninsula in the past few days. They told him he was sick from it too, but not sick enough for a blanket in the road.
“You’re lucky then, huh?” Eddie challenged him. “The radiation killed them all while you were out playing Nanook.”
Victor didn’t know if it was the anger of envy or disdain for his stupid luck, his convenient absence when the deadly water washed over their land, but he had seen the sneer on Eddie’s flat face before.
“What about you?” Victor asked the flat face who had survived to spit and grin at him.
“I was over in Pelly Bay with my kid until last night,” Eddie said.
Eddie’s wife had died several years earlier and Marie had taken a motherly interest in the boy since then.
“Marie was already here an’ the soldier boys came by helicopter a coupla hours later. The three of us is all that’s left,” he added, meaning the two Inuit men and the boy.
“Holy shit, eh? Not much screwin’ to be had this weekend.” Victor said nothing. He stepped around Eddie’s machine and continued trudging toward his house. Marie and the uniformed qablunaq saw him and walked out to meet him, Marie hugging her arms. Seeing Victor, she began to cry again.
Marie and the soldiers told Victor not to worry. They escorted him into town, past his dark house to one of the other shacks that had been converted to a field hospital. Two other men from the village, they explained, were still missing. It was assumed they had gone hunting.
Victor thought that was a bad assumption but he said nothing.
Marie, the doctor, and all the qablunaq who looked at Victor wore hoods, gloves, and breathing masks. Victor had to find humanness in their faces by studying only their eyes. They asked him to strip to the waist and the DIAND doctor listened to him breathe. They took his blood and told him to piss in a cup. They stuck a sticky plastic swab up his nose, just like Dr. Junko had done. He turned to the head soldier and started to relay the story of the scientists on the big ship, but the soldier cut him off and said “we know.” The soldier sounded annoyed that he might need more blankets. He had no interest in what Victor knew, even as a Ranger. That was the most deflating of all.
They wanted him to wear a respirator but Victor refused. They wanted him to sign a medical release, but he refused that too. They confiscated his meager catch of fish and told him it was probably contaminated. They took blood from Janey, then tied her up outside.
Then they gave him some cold tea and iodine and some tablets that tasted like chalk, but denied his request for muktuk, the flavorful skin of the beluga whale. Only when they had finished poking and probing did they take him to see his dead wife and son and then told him he was lucky: while he was out walking, those who had stayed had grown sick from a sudden flood of radiation and died from the exposure.
Walking, they called it. Not hunting — walking. Even Marie, born and raised on the peninsula, didn’t see the purpose in Victor’s travels. He felt like a ghost already.
They told him a helicopter was coming in the morning to take him, Eddie, and Eddie’s son down to Churchill. They said there was no more outpost here and that the army would be dismantling the buildings. Then they left him alone in his shack and told him to get some sleep.
Victor sat there for a long time, ignoring the lifetime of family mementos all around him, his clothing half removed as he prepared for bed. Across the road, he heard the qablunaq — those who had not taken the snow machine back to wherever they were stationed — retiring for the night. He heard Eddie yelling in the next shack and the sound of Eddie’s son crying and thought what a miserable trip it would be on that helicopter to Churchill.
Then there was nothing but silence and darkness. Victor dressed again and sat quietly by the door as he might by a seal hole. He waited until he was sure of the silence, then he gathered up his belongings and stepped out into the night.
A single floodlight had been erected by the qablunaq to illuminate the central part of the village but there was no sentry. The twenty seven gray blankets lay unattended in the road, out of the wind. Victor approached them, peeling back the corner to reveal six dogs, several of his friends — all of his friends — and, eventually, Anika and Annu. He knelt close to them, studied their faces. Their skin was very dry, and reddish in places, but they looked peaceful enough to be sleeping.
Their spirits had gone and Victor believed that was a good thing. He kissed them goodbye.
It is said that an Inuit hunter never cries. It is, at worst, a sign of weakness and, at best, pointless self-pity. Suddenly Victor felt as though he had been crying his entire life, but no one had ever seen or heard him. He had cried when his sister died, cried when his parents died. Now he cried for Anika and Annu and for all his past losses as well. He cried until his well of tears had run dry and all that remained of his pain was a tight, angry ball in the pit of his stomach.
Then he stood and gathered his tools, an Inuk once again. He retrieved Janey from behind the hospital. The dog looked up, nuzzled Victor as he untied her, but she did not bark. She trotted at his heels as he passed the sheds of snoring qablunaq and retrieved his sled, now abandoned and empty after the soldiers’ inspection. Finally, he headed north, out of the village and past the reach of the floodlight and beyond the sound of the generators. In the night sky he located a trio of stars, part of a familiar constellation. The white man called them the Belt of Orion, but the Inuit believed the stars represented three lost seal hunters. They followed only each other, but at least they did so in a straight line.
Victor walked, ignoring the stiffness and fatigue in his limbs and the dampness in his clothes. The snow was still weak but partially refrozen, firm enough under his boots and far less treacherous than the southern route. He and Janey would travel nonstop until dawn, then see where that left them.
There was time enough for one last trip onto the ice. One last foolish hunt.
With Kannakapfaluk guiding him, Victor, too, would soon find a better place.