“Let’s go to sleep.”
“But we can’t yet. We still haven’t reached the apogee of the evening, you know, the point where you show me a picture of your wife and tell me what a terrific gal she is, and you don’t know what got into you, maybe it was those northern lights, maybe it was the booze, but would I please not ever write or phone you at home, now there’s a good girl.”
“I’m not married.”
“That’s difficult to credit. I mean a guy like you. Such an obvious barrel of fun,” she said, making him laugh for the first time.
“You’re nice,” he said.
“No hyperbole, please. My head will swell.”
“Beautiful?”
“I’m thirty years old.”
“Now you know that I’m not married,” he said, “but surely a girl like you—”
“—as talented and intelligent as you—”
“—must have a boy friend?”
“The men around here are afraid of women, especially talky ones.
They like huntin’ and fishin’ and watching ‘Hockey Night in Canada’ on TV and talking dirty about us in The Trapline,” she said, reaching out for him.
“I’m afraid I’ve had too much to drink to be of any more use tonight.”
“You’re not sitting for an exam, Moses. Relax. Give it a try.”
When he wakened in the morning, he found that she was already up, reading in bed. A paperback edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude. “Surprise, surprise,” she said, “I’m not just a sensational lay.”
THE FOLLOWING SPRING the ebullient commissioner of the Northwest Territories convened his council, declared 1970 Centennial Year, and invited Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Princess Anne for the revels.
Beatrice, recently appointed to handle the commissioner’s public relations, slipped into his office one afternoon and surreptitiously added Moses’s name to the guest list for the royal banquet.
“Who’s Berger?” the commissioner asked, going through the list the next morning.
“Why, the distinguished Arctic scholar,” Beatrice said, simulating surprise.
Moses, who was lecturing at NYU at the time, his status shaky, flew in from New York a few days early, bringing everything Beatrice had forgotten in his apartment on her last visit, as well as a gift, a black silk negligee. Beatrice met him at the airport and they proceeded directly to her place. They were still in bed together when she made him promise that he would turn up sober for the banquet. So going about his rounds in Yellowknife the morning in question, Moses drank nothing but coffee. However, once he caught up with Sean Riley at noon in The Gold Range, he saw no harm in joining him for two and a juice, providing he sipped his beer slowly.
“Right now,” Riley said, “I’m being pursued by a publisher in town for the banquet, one of your brethren out of Edmonton. A smiler born, awfully fancy, he sits down at your table and you’re surrounded. He wants me to write a book about my thrilling adventures in the Land of the Midnight Sun.”
True to his pledge, Moses turned up sober and properly attired in black tie for the royal banquet in the Elks Hall. Then he caught a glimpse of Professor Knowlton Hardy, surrounded by admirers, and hastened over to the bar for just one, a quick one, a double.
Before dinner the royal couple was entertained by a group of outstanding Inuit artists, flown in from remote settlements for the occasion. Professor Hardy rose to introduce the first poet. He explained that unimaginable hardship was the coin of the Inuit’s daily existence, but, reflecting on the woof and warp of their lives, they made ecstasy the recurring theme of their anacreontic salute to the world. This remarkable people plucked odes of joy, pace Beethoven, out of the simplest blessings enshrining them in their own form of haiku. Then Oliver Girskee stood up and recited:
Following the traditional drum dancers, there was a demonstration, rare as it was lively, by the Keewatin and High Arctic champions of the mouth-pull, a contest wherein the two opponents hook their fingers into each other’s mouths and pull away until one of them faints or admits defeat. Then Minni Altakarilatok and Timangiak Gor-ski, the justifiably celebrated Cape Dorset throat-singers, were heard from.
“The distinctive sounds of throat-singing,” Professor Hardy explained to the royal family and their entourage, “part of a time-honoured native tradition, are made by producing guttural nasal and breathing sounds, rather like dry gargling. The art cannot be described, but it can be likened to the sounds of great rivers … the gentle glide of the gull … the crumbling of the crisp white snow of the mighty gale of the Arctic.”
Once the performers were done, Professor Hardy stood up to announce that the evening’s artistic events, which had displayed the many-faceted face of Inuit culture to such advantage, were now over. Next a beaming Moses—terrifying Beatrice—rose to say a few unscheduled words. He expressed the hope that this prized part of the Canadian mosaic would never be contaminated by the introduction of mindless American television into the pristine northland, and sank back into his seat, acknowledging applause with a blissful smile and calling for another drink.
Then it was time to eat. Smoked Arctic char and cream of tomato soup followed by caribou steak. Vanessa Hotdog, who was serving Prince Philip, hesitated before removing his steak plate. “Darn it, Dook, hold on to your knife and fork, there’s dessert coming.”
For years the Eskimos of the Keewatin, the Central and High Arctic and Baffin regions, were known to Ottawa only by the numbers on the identification discs they wore around their necks. Then, in 1969, they were granted surnames. Many chose traditional Inuktituk names, say Angulalik or Pekoyak. More rambunctious spirits insisted on invented surnames such as Hotdog, Coozycreamer or Turf’n’Surf. One name that recurred among a roving band of natives out of King William Island was Gursky or variations thereof including Gor-ski, Girskee, Gur-ski and Goorsky.
Moses had found what he believed to be the first mention of the name Gursky, in this case spelled Gor-ski, in the diaries of Angus McGibbon, the Hudson’s Bay Company chief factor of the Prince of Wales’s Fort. The entry was dated May 29, 1849.
“The weather continues extremely cold. Severe frost again last night. Jos. Arnold has taken very ill with considerable pain across his body from his back to his breasts. The ignorant natives who are wintering with us have offered all manner of herbs and potions for a cure, but I will have none of it. Ordered some blood taken from Arnold, after which he found the pain somewhat easier.
“McNair and his party arrived before dinner from Pelly Bay by way of Chesterfield Inlet with the most astonishing tale, if true.”
McNair’s tale:
“A young white man who is unknown to the Compy. or opposition is living with a wandering band of Esquimaux in Pelly Bay and appears to be worshipped by them as a manner of faith-healer or shaman. He goes by the name of Ephrim Gor-ski, but possibly because of his dark complexion and piercing eyes the Esquimaux call him Tulugaq, which means raven in their lingo. McNair, hardly averse to claiming the reward, dared to conjecture that the young man might prove to be a survivor of the Franklin expedition but this vain hope was soon dashed. Gor-ski had no intelligence of either the Terror or Erebus. He claimed to be a runaway off an American whaler out of Sag Harbour, but was not in want of rescue. Gor-ski was obviously at ease with the Esquimaux in a snow house and when one of them brought in freshly killed seal he partook with them of the soup of hot blood and invited McNair and his party to share in that disgusting broth.