“Not all that practical in the north. You’ll never get a job anywhere around here wearing yellow, red, and blue underwear. We’ve got to get you into something decent and warm. And your hair! Shoulder-length hair just isn’t in in Inuvik.”
“I haven’t had a chance to cut it for centuries.”
“You can have it now. Captain Al Cohol, you have been highly recommended to us by the RCMP who state that Nurse Alley has given you the highest character references. Here is fifty dollars. Go and buy warm, decent clothing and a respectable haircut.”
“I can’t do this. I’ve never accepted charity in my life.”
“False pride. We’re here to help you, if you are prepared to help yourself. But stay away from alcohol, captain.”
“I promise you by all the galaxies! Thank you and goodbye.”
Henry, hearing an engine, leaned forward to peer out of the window, but it wasn’t the Otter. It was a charter, a DC-3. On the radio, a door opened and closed. Street noises were heard. The narrator faded in, saying, “Out in the cold, inclement streets of Inuvik, Captain Al Cohol’s heart was still laden over the loss of the lovely Lois. Somehow he must regain his pride and prove himself worthy of the brave little nurse of the north. But meanwhile he has the nagging need for nutriment and a place to sleep for the night. He finds a transient centre where he can bunk down with the other lost souls like himself.”
Henry glanced out of the window again, unavailingly, and the next thing he knew Captain Al Cohol had fallen in with the ruffians in the transient centre, joining them in a poker game.
“This is a friendly game, stranger, and to make it friendlier I got a treat for all of us, a jug of moose milk. You ever tasted moose milk?”
“Never, but it sounds nutritious. I haven’t eaten in some time.”
“Good. Let’s pour a round before we deal a game.”
Glug, glug, glug.
“Drink up, stranger.”
The narrator intervened, alarmed. “DON’T DO IT, CAPTAIN AL COHOL! YOU’LL BE RIGHT BACK WHERE YOU STARTED—IN THE GUTTER AGAIN!”
Glug, glug, glug.
“The valiant wanderer from outer space may have stepped out of the frying pan into the fire. Keep your fingers crossed and wait ’til the next episode in the ordeals of Captain Al Cohol, the hapless nomad of the high north.”
The episode was followed by the usual warning that alcohol can make you a different man, and that once hooked on liquor it was a hard habit to break. Like God, Henry thought, surprised by his own irreverence.
“So if you can’t help yourself, call on someone who can, Alcohol Education, Government of the Northwest Territories, NWT.”
Henry switched off the radio but continued to sit by the window, searching the heavens from time to time, a Bible open on his lap.
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
It was past one A.M. when he saw a dot in the distance. Gradually it sprouted wings, it grew a tail, both with blinking red lights attached. Lowering, it bounced in the wind, the wings fluttering. The Otter finally circled the bay—swinging out—banking—seemingly consumed by the blazing sun before it was miraculously there again, sinking, settling into the freezing water, kicking up skirts of spray.
Henry Gursky slipped into his parka and mukluks and started for the dock, wheeling a porter’s cart before him. Henry, in his early forties, was a sinewy man with an inky black beard and long dancing sidecurls; he was knobby, with a gleeful face. Solomon’s face. A knitted yarmulke was fastened like a stopper to his thin black hair. He waved at the settlement children and the hunters who had already gathered in the bay, happy for a diversion. Two grey seals, freshly killed, lay gleaming on the rocks, their eyeballs torn out, the sockets bleeding, festooned with black flies already feasting there.
The pilot, new to North of Sixty, had heard enough gossip in The Gold Range Bar in Yellowknife to inquire after the settlement nurse. “Tell her I have a surprise for her,” he said.
Henry greeted the pilot with a smile. “Baroch ha’bo,” he called out.
Squinting, suspicious, the pilot demanded, “What’s that mean?”
“Translated loosely it means ‘blessed be the arrival.’”
“You must be Gursky.”
“Indeed I am. Did you bring it?”
“You bet.”
It was the familiar zinc half-trunk, battered, but the locks intact.
When the oil drillers of Inuvik, largely southern flotsam, had begun to move marijuana and even more lethal stuff through the territory, an alert RCMP corporal, unfamiliar with Henry, had asked him, his manner correct but firm, to unlock the half-trunk right there. Henry had obliged and the corporal, probing the contents, peering quizzically at the bill of lading, had shaken his head, incredulous.
“I never expected to find a Jew in such rough country,” the pilot said.
“We’re an astonishing people. Dandelions, my father used to say. Dig us out here and riding the wind and the rain we take root there. Any mail for me?”
There was a copy of Newsweek, a pensive John Dean filling the cover; two back issues of The Beaver; a quarterly report from James McTavish Distillers Ltd. and a cheque for $2,114,626.17; a gun catalogue from Abercrombie & Fitch; a copy of The Moshiach (or Messiah) Times for Isaac; a letter from the Rebbe at 770 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn; another letter from the Crédit-Suisse; a parcel of books from Hatchards, but not a word from his sister Lucy in London nor from Moses Berger.
The pilot watched Henry heave the half-trunk on to the cart and trundle off, past the Co-op, toward the settlement, oblivious of the swarming mosquitoes. The settlement was comprised of fifty pre-fab cubes, known as 512s because they each measured 512 square feet. The 512s were laid out in neat rows, huddling tight to a fire station, a meeting hall and school, a nursing station, the Co-op, and the Sir Igloo Inn Café, which was run by the local bootlegger. There was also a Hudson’s Bay trading post with living quarters for the factor, a taciturn young man called Ian Campbell. Campbell had been recruited to North of Sixty directly from Stornoway, on the Isle of Lewis. A wool-dyer’s boy, he now found himself master of credit and provisions, a keeper of ledgers, with something like the powers of a thane over the hunters in the community. He avoided the school-teaching couple from Toronto, who pandered to the natives, and he was no more than polite to the sluttish nurse who swam through his dreams, making him thrash about in bed at night. On occasion loneliness drove him to playing chess with the unbelievably rich crazy Jew, but, for the most part, he favoured drinking with the grey pulpy denizens of the overheated DEW line station, some eight miles from the settlement.
In the winter you could distinguish Henry’s pre-fab from the rest, as it was the only one without quarters of frozen caribou or seal ribs stacked on the roof. It was also larger than the other pre-fabs, made up of three 512s joined together. Henry kept dogs. He could afford to feed them. Twice a week a wagon passed and filled everybody’s household tank with fresh drinking water that had been siphoned through a hole in the ice of a nearby lake. Once a day the honey wagon stopped at each pre-fab to pick up the Glad bags filled with human waste. These were dumped on the ice only three miles out to sea in spite of the hunters’ complaints. The problem was that following spring breakup the bags floated free and many a seal brought in was covered in excrement, an inconvenience.