Angler In Darkness

by Edward M. Erdelac

  “I work for the government.”

  Matthew rolled his eyes and shook his head.

  “But what kinda work do you do, and how do you reconcile your culture and working for the white man?”

  “You gonna write a paper about it?”

  “Seriously.”

  The pilot announced their descent then, and they were quiet as the plane was buffeted by the crosswinds and made an arm rest squeezer of a landing on the little field.

  When they’d taxied to a stop near one of the blue green hangars that looked more like it was built to store snowmobiles than planes, Hal gathered his things and left the cabin without a word.

  They tromped down the ladder onto the gravel and into the biting November wind. It was colder up here, and Matthew, a Californian from the time he was three years old, was underdressed.

  “In a couple days we’ll have to use snowmobiles or sleds,” Hal said, as one of the mechanics brought a battered old Jeep around for them.

  Matthew was staring down the runway at a pile of ten big black stones arranged to suggest a standing figure.

  “What’s that? An inuksuk?”

  Hal smiled. The kid had done a little research after all. But the cairn figure wasn’t meant to be human.

  “That’s old Nanuq.”

  “What, like Mighty Nanuq?”

  “You know him?” Hal asked.

  “Sure,” Matthew said drolly. “The Canadian government’s big bad bear. Keeping the free world’s breakfast tables safe for maple syrup and fighting the Soviet menace, plus the occasional rampaging giant walrus. All for Queen and country.”

  “Don’t laugh at giant walruses,” Hal muttered. “This is Nanuq, The Master Of All Polar Bears.”

  “So the white men named their monster after him, huh? Just another example of aboriginal culture being commercialized and appropriated for anglo-Europeans.”

  “Looks good on a t-shirt,” Hal said. “And we call ‘em kabloonak.”

  “Huh?”

  “The white man. Kabloonak.”

  “Kabloonak,” Matthew said, trying it out and grinning slightly. “So do the Inuit believe in praying to bears or something?”

  “Inuit don’t believe,” said Hal, tossing his stuff in the bed of the Jeep and slipping on his parka. “We fear.”

  As they bumped along the unpaved road and Matthew rubbed his hands in front of the heater, Hal continued.

  “Inuit live in a changing world of storms and ice, migrating food sources. Hardship. We don’t believe in praying for comfort, we honor and appease the spirits of sila, the sky, which is filled with the souls of men and animals, to keep the people going. These things I’m telling you aren’t written down, Matthew. My grandfather used to tell me that paper can be ripped up and lost on the wind, or burned. These laws,” he held up his three fingers and counted them off, “are eternal. There is tirigusuusiit, that which must be avoided, the maligait, that which must be followed, and the piqujait. That which must be done. That last one, that’s an important one for you.”

  “How come?”

  “Because you come from a tradition of angakkuit, dating all the way back to the taimmani time – the long ago.”

  “Was my father an angakkuq?” Matthew asked.

  “He was too young when your grandfather initiated me. Then we drifted apart.” Hal sighed. “But you might be.”

  “Yeah?” Matthew smirked.

  “It’s no little thing, Matthew. But it’s the reason I brought you up here. I don’t have any kids. And the tradition has to be passed on. It’s piqujait for our family.”

  “We made a pact. Ages ago. This is back in the days when the kavdlunait threatened our lands. They were men from across the Atlantic, in dragon boats with yellow hair and weapons of steel.”

  “What, like Vikings?”

  “Yeah,” said Hal, waving to a broad woman bundled in a parka walking down the road with a child at her side. She waved back, smiling, and they went on. “They made their settlements up around the Tunulliarfik Fjord, and they started to push west across the strait, but somebody in our family, the first angakkuq, stopped ‘em. He called on the power of Nanuq, the Master of All Polar Bears, and Nanuq froze their dragon boats in the water, and knocked them back across the sea.”

  The Jeep turned up an unmarked gravel road and groaned along to a simple brightly colored one room house set back in the hills.

  “This is your place?”

  “You thought it’d be bigger, huh?” Hal smiled.

  “Well, you’re like a national personality! Is this all the white man would give you?”

  “Hey. I live here because I choose to. I could build a big house somewhere away from my people, in Toronto or St. John’s or something. But then I’d be exactly what you think I am, right?”

  He killed the engine and went out into the cold without another word, greeting a pack of heavy coated dogs that seemed to come barking and leaping excitedly from everywhere at once, out from under the porch, from under a broken down and rusted-up pickup, from around back of the shabby little house.

  He laughed and greeted each one in his own language, and Matthew wondered at him as he got the bags from the back and followed him inside.

  The interior was dim and cluttered, the house of a man with no partner to tend to it. There were stacks of books and newspapers, and antlers and carved wooden masks covered the mantle. A pair of handmade snowshoes hung on the wall, and a harpoon. Hal took off his parka and draped his suit jacket over a chair, the red and gold medal dangling forgotten.

  “I’ll make some coffee,” he said, and got busy doing it. “Get that fire going. You think it’s cold now, it’s gonna storm tonight.”

  Matthew lit the fire in the low stone hearth and fed it.

  “How do you know? Angakkuq got some kind of weather sense?”

  “Angakkut is the plural,” Hal said from the kitchenette. “Nah, I heard it on the pilot’s radio.”

  He returned with a mug of steaming coffee that had some kind of insignia on it: The Canadian Intelligence Corps.

  Hal watched as Matthew turned the cup to read the insignia, and smiled.

  “It’s OK to drink out of it.”

  Matthew took the cup and sipped, feeling the hot brew warm his chilled insides. There was something else in there that had a bite of liquor.

  "Now you asked me what I do for the government," Hal said, settling into a patched leather chair with a hiss and blowing into his mug. "It started for me, back in October of 1943. I was way up on Cape Chidley with my grandfather, undergoing the initiation rite to become an angakkuq. I had met my tuurngaq. That’s the spirit helper, kind of a familiar that...”

  Matthew had sat down on a foot rest, and as Hal began to speak, the kid’s eyes slid along the mantle, over stone knives and arrow heads, and settling finally on a fearsomely carved mask that represented a bear’s snarling face.

  “Go on, take it down,” said Hal, when he noticed Matthew’s look.

  Matthew blinked.

  “Sorry.”

  “Nah, take it.”

  Matthew rose and touched the bear mask on the mantle, then took it in his hands. He grinned at the touch.

  “Feel that?” Hal smiled. “The thrill of contact, the connection to ancient things?”

  “Is this Nanuq?” Matthew asked.

  “That’s right. Try it on.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Matthew turned the mask around and held it up to his face.

  “It’s better that I show you anyhow,” said Hal.

  When the old wood mask touched Matthew’s face, he wasn’t Matthew anymore. He was young Hallauk Anawak, standing outside an igloo at the edge of a blizzard at the foot of the Torngat Mountains.

  It was 1943 and his grandfather was dead.

  * * * *

  Hallauk was staring down at the wooden mask in his hands, on the stony shore of the strait, deciding whether or not to fling the thing into the turgid s
ea, when a spluttering drone reached his ears above the howling of the polar wind. It quickly changed into a plummeting screech.

  A silvery twin engine plane streaked at an alarming angle down from the impenetrable white sky, knocked off course by the storm. The pilot must have been crazy, trying to fly a hunk of metal like that through a cloud of blowing powder.

  Hallauk could see no markings he recognized. She had flown up the coast from the south. Probably from Hopedale, or maybe Rigolet. But she was no local. She was losing altitude fast, but the pilot was doing his best to keep her nose up.

  Hallauk forgot about the mask for the moment and flinched as the plane’s buzzing racket was cut violently short. He saw a plume of water and heard the tremendous noise as the belly of the plane met the churning water with a terrible impact and a spout of water, the wings shearing off and flopping into the waves.

  Hallauk dropped the mask into his pack and pushed his whalebone and sealskin kayak out across the frozen surf to the edge of the roiling sea, then hopped inside and paddled as hard as he could for the sinking wreckage.

  As he approached the swiftly disappearing machine, he heard a loud crack and saw the cockpit window burst open in a spray of glass.

  A kabloonak appeared, blood pouring down his pink face. He cursed as he pulled himself through the broken window, then crouched precariously on the roof of the sinking plane and reached back into the cockpit to pull out a rucksack bulging with gear.

  Hallauk called out to the man and made for him. The bloody kabloonak struggled with the rucksack and paused to wave frantically before falling to his hands and knees to scramble up the back of the tilting plane, grabbing for the tail section as the nose dipped under.

  Hallauk pulled for all he was worth until the rising and falling bow of the kayak bumped alongside the hull of the plane.

  He held out his paddle and the bloody man slung the rucksack over his back and steadied himself, slipping down the side of the plane until he laid sprawled over the bow, boots in the water, nearly upsetting the little craft.

  Hallauk regained his balance and pushed off. He cut through the turbulent sea, away from the suck of the drowning plane. He aimed the bow for shore as the kabloonak wheezed and spluttered.

  When they had reached the shore, the man flopped onto the ice, chilled from the spray of the icy sea, the blood freezing on his face.

  Hallauk slipped from the kayak and pulled it onto the ice, then gripped the kabloonak by the strap of his rucksack and dragged him to the shore.

  The man’s eyes fluttered, and Hallauk used the back of one of his furred mittens to wipe away the blood from his eyes.

  He was a strong looking man, clean shaven and blonde haired, with a long nose and bright eyes. The blood in his face had come from a gash in his scalp, nothing too serious.

  The man was a Canadian soldier by his clothing, a heavy canvas jumpsuit with many pockets and a belt with an automatic pistol. He had wool gloves and a scarf against the cold, and heavy boots, but they were soaked and freezing, which worried Hallauk.

  “My God, boy, where did you come from?” the man said in French. He almost laughed when he’d had a moment to study his savior.

  “This man saw you crash from the shore,” Hallauk answered haltingly. His French wasn’t good.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Hallauk.”

  “Hal, then. George LeDuc’s the name. Major. Canadian Intelligence Corps.” He sat up slowly, groaning, and looked back over his shoulder at the open sea. “Nobody else made it?”

  “No,” said Hallauk.

  “Right,” LeDuc breathed. He attempted to get to his feet and sat down hard. “Damn! I can’t feel my feet.”

  “They are frozen. This man’s igloo is only a little way up the shore. Let this man help.”

  Hallauk drew LeDuc’s arm over his shoulder and stood up, supporting him. It was a chore dragging the larger man to the igloo, which he and his grandfather had built only yesterday, but soon they were out of the wind.

  The man fell on his back on the skins. Hallauk took out his knife and began to saw away LeDuc’s boots. It was tough work, and halfway through the first job LeDuc realized what he was doing and slapped his hands away.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “They will come off no other way,” said Hallauk, and he pushed aside LeDuc’s hands and continued to work.

  “What are you going to do?” LeDuc mumbled after the first crackling ruin of a shoe was peeled away, revealing the icy sock beneath, which Hallauk also cut away until the pale shiny white skin and the rosy red toes were exposed.

  Hallauk said nothing until the second frozen foot was exposed, then he turned and hunch-walked across the igloo to the carcass of the caribou he had shot only moments before his grandfather had walked off into the storm, leaving him alone.

  He bit off his mitten and touched the trunk of the cooling animal. The igloo had protected it some. It was still a little warm, though not as much as he would’ve liked.

  He dragged the carcass over and sliced the belly open. As the steaming guts bulged from the wound, he turned and grabbed the kabloonak’s ankles and thrust his frozen feet into the wound.

  LeDuc screamed and cursed and hammered at Hallauk’s arms and shoulders. That was good. If he felt pain it meant he would not lose the feet.

  After a while, he released his hold on LeDuc and the man sat up. He did not remove his feet from the caribou.

  “Where are we, son?”

  “Ikkudliayuk.”

  LeDuc stared for a moment, blinked, and reached into his breast pocket. He pulled out a waterproof map and smoothed it on the floor of the igloo.

  “Where?” he repeated, pointing to the coast.

  Hallauk found the remote fjord and tapped it.

  LeDuc nodded and traced a line to the northern end of the peninsula.

  “I need to get here, Hal. Cape Chidley Islands. It’s very important. Can you take me in your kayak?”

  “No,” Hallauk said. There was no room.

  LeDuc put the heels of his hands to his eyes.

  “Listen, boy. Maybe you don’t know this, but there’s a war going on. All over the rest of the world. Between us and the Germans. Bad people.”

  Hallauk nodded, but grew disinterested in the kabloonak’s banter. His grandfather had told him all about the white man and his many wars.

  “But it’s going against us. In Japan and China, they’ve got these beasties. Big. Tremendous things.”

  He held out his arms to demonstrate, and let them fall with a sigh when Hallauk made no response.

  “I don’t expect you to understand. Look, they’re monsters. Bigger than the biggest thing you can imagine. The SS, the Nazis...the Germans. They developed their own. And the Tracking Room in Ottawa, they picked up an Enigma code message. It was garbled. Something about Operation Fenris and Taskforce Jormungand. Look, don’t worry about that. We think it’s being escorted by a U-boat control. Gah!”

  He pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment as Hallauk furrowed his brow. Then he continued.

  “That’s like a kayak that travels under the water. They’re bringing their monster to shore at Cape Chidley. We don’t know what it is, only that it’s amphibious. They’re going to march it south, right down to Ottawa, destroy the C.I.C. HQ and probably every settlement in between.”

  This made Hallauk pause. He knew of several Inuit communities between the cape and Ottawa. His parents and his young brother resided in one.

  “God knows what it’ll do after that, but it’ll mean the Nazis will gain a hold in the North Atlantic, and a whole lot of innocent people will die. There’s nobody up here equipped to deal with the thing and no time to divert any ships. My squad had anti-monster gear, but it’s lost.” He looked out across the crashing sea again and shook his head. “I’m gonna miss the landing, too. But I’ve still got to get to the cape. I’ve still got to try, dammit.”

  LeDuc turned back to Hallauk and shook h
is head.

  “Is any of this getting through to you?”

  Hallauk stared at the exasperated kabloonak. He understood that some of what LeDuc was talking about was very important to him. But he also understood what was important to him personally.

  His grandfather had said a test would come, just before he walked off to die. And his family lay in the path of this Nazi monster.

  “This stupid man knows of monsters,” Hallauk said quietly. “But you can’t use his kayak.”

  LeDuc opened his mouth to protest.

  “You can use his grandfather’s, though. It is outside under the snow.”

  LeDuc pursed his lips. He smiled, and struck Hallauk an open handed blow on the shoulder that nearly bowled him over.

  “Well, that’s something,” he said, and gathered his map and his rucksack. “Now, what about these feet? Am I going to have to stay in the kayak, or can I walk?”

  “They are not too frozen. This unskilled man can make boots from this animal,” he said, nodding to the carcass in which LeDuc’s bare feet reposed.

  “I’ve got a spare pair of dry socks in my pocket,” said LeDuc. “So that’s something else.”

  * * * *

  They cleaved to the shoreline out of necessity, for to drift to far out in the strait could mean getting turned around in the storm. They paddled without respite. Hallauk was impressed by LeDuc’s resilience. He was not like the other white men he had known or heard of. Though battered from the crash, sore footed, and alone, he still kept pace with Hallauk, and argued that they should press on, even when the sun had sunk behind the Torngats and further progress was impossible.

  The storm finally abated at sunset. LeDuc cursed Hallauk when the Inuit steered to shore and pulled his kayak out of the black water, but he begrudgingly followed, knowing well enough he couldn’t go on in the blue dark.

  They made a low fire in up in a cleft of rock in the foothills and huddled around it. Hallauk stared up at the ominous dark mountains.

  “What the hell were you doing out here, Hal?” LeDuc asked. “And what happened to the man whose kayak I’ve been paddling?”