Blaze Island

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Blaze Island Page 17

by Catherine Bush


  When Miranda slipped once more to the window, the two parkas, her father and Agnes, had reached the shore. Pat slid his boat up onto the landwash, Brian hauling a black body from it. She scribbled the date and time in her notebook, wondering all the while why her father had brought Agnes to the island, because it surely wasn’t just to bring home a seal.

  In bed, quilt pulled all the way over herself, she was interrupted moments later by a voice calling her name. From the foot of the stairs, her father shouted, “Miranda? Agnes wants to clean the seal down at the shore. Help me bring supplies.”

  “I’m going skating with Caleb,” Miranda called back.

  “Miranda, come with us this morning.” Even when she pressed her hands to her ears, her father’s voice penetrated, boyish and pleading, which made it hard, then impossible to refuse his desire for her to be with him.

  In the kitchen, Alan thrust a mug of tea into her hands. “Drink up, sweetheart.” He danced as he gathered tin foil, a carving knife, tossed things into the plastic wash basin. Passing Miranda his phone, he told her to send Caleb a message, and she sensed Caleb’s disappointment like a kernel inside herself.

  Out in the cold, bright air, snow winking at them, her father, bucket in one hand, grinned as he pulled their old wooden toboggan, not the bigger sled on runners that he took out into the woods to gather wood, his step light at her side. Miranda carried the basin, knife and foil and plastic bags jostling inside it, as they stepped into the footsteps that Agnes and her father had made in the snow.

  Usually seal meat came to them bottled or frozen. It wasn’t that Miranda hadn’t seen the butchered carcasses of creatures before: deer, rabbit, duck. Fish she’d caught herself, though she had never entirely got used to the feeling of eating the soft, sweet flesh of something she had killed. Why, she wondered, did her father insistently want her with him when he had Agnes for company?

  The seal lay on his back in the snow, just above the line of pebbles, a sprawl of red slowly leaking beneath him. A harp seal, a year old probably, what Pat Green called a bedlamer. With a close-lipped smile that appeared then vanished, Agnes teased that if she’d known there’d be seal hunting, she’d have brought her ulu. She said she’d already warmed some snow with her breath and given the seal a few drops of fresh water to drink. Miranda’s father nodded, as if this was something he’d expected her to do.

  You drop fresh snow in a dead seal’s mouth so its soul will not go thirsty, Agnes told Miranda. She and her mother used to process seals by the shore in Nain, she said, seals that her uncles would hunt and bring in for them.

  “When I was a child, my brothers and I used to play on a pebbly beach like this one,” Agnes said, “building landscapes out of stones, while our mother was at work.”

  “Sweetheart,” said Alan, beckoning to Miranda as Agnes threw her jacket into the snow. No longer wearing her sealskin mitts but their dishwashing gloves, Agnes crouched over the seal and carved a thick line through the centre of his body, opening the skin and flesh and fat beneath. Moving with strength and tender care, she exposed the pale cage of the seal’s ribs and ribbons of intestine. She cut off the flippers. Deftly she cut away the pelt, gently sliding it free of the blubber beneath. The body was a seal and by now not a seal. Blood drifted across the white snow.

  In spring and summer, seals sometimes visited the cove, their bashful heads bobbing. During their second summer in the little white house, one particular seal had come every day. They believed it to be the same seal, and because the creature came alone, Miranda’s father decided it was a he. Miranda, just turned twelve, named him Lucky. After three weeks of daily visits, the seal vanished, and no matter how often Miranda walked the path her father had scythed through the grass to the shore and searched the water, she saw no further sign of him. She stared at the sea-lapped rock not far from shore that looked like a seal head but it did not turn into one. Most likely the fish he’d fed on had gone elsewhere, her father said, but the loss of Lucky’s gleaming head and inquisitive gaze left Miranda keening.

  One night, waking to a moon so full and bright it turned the white walls of her bedroom azure, Miranda slipped from bed. Outside, the water in the cove was smooth as glass and the shadow of the white house fell across the grass nearly as darkly as during the day. Out on the blue-black rocks where she and her father had come to watch the seal, she sang, hoping her voice might lure him.

  A sound made her turn. A wild man burst towards her, shirtless, in jeans and boots. Her father’s face contorted, contorting again at the sight of her.

  “Miranda — get back here right now.” His voice made her grip the rocks all the harder, his face full of expressions she could barely fathom.

  “It’s so beautiful,” she said, wanting him to see what she saw. No seal, yet the moonlight made a world more spectacular than any she’d encountered.

  “Off the rocks. The tide’s high.” His voice was hoarse and broke in pieces. When he held out a hand, Miranda took it, his hold like a vice. She told him how she never wanted to leave this place, never, never, certain this was what he wanted to hear, even as she was terrified he might crush her.

  Back in her room, he pulled her close. “I woke up and had no idea where you were,” he said in his strange, hoarse voice. “Never go out by yourself at night. Never down to the water in the dark. I might have lost you, too.”

  Above the icy cove, gulls scored the air, alive, the sea so quiet apart from the sloshing as Agnes rinsed the seal skin at the water’s edge, the water curdled with puffs of red. Miranda’s hands, her breath. Alive.

  Then it was her father’s turn to tug out the long ropes of intestines, handfuls of them, his arms bloody now, too, asking Agnes what to do, as if their roles had reversed and he were her assistant.

  “Nowadays, when there’s no longer ice near shore, and the seals stay out at sea, hunting’s harder for everyone,” Agnes said. “Boats have to go farther, that takes more gas, and when the ice breaks up early, it disperses the seals.”

  “They lose their breeding platforms,” Alan said, lowering the intestines into a bucket. “Do you remember that time we went sealing together up on Baffin Island?”

  Agnes nodded. “You and your 20/22 distance vision. Everyone wanted to hunt with you because you spotted creatures across the water before anyone else could.” With a wistful grin, she reached deep inside the cavity of the seal’s body and pulled out a shining bulb.

  When Miranda brought the basin, Agnes held the dripping bulb over it. “It’s the seal’s heart,” her father said as Agnes cut a slice of the shininess and held it out to Miranda on the edge of the knife blade.

  “We’re giving thanks to the seal for the gift of his life,” Agnes said.

  Miranda was to take the slice of heart from Agnes’s blood-stained fingers. This much she understood. The past was all around them, her father’s past, Agnes’s past, the seal’s past, though her father’s longing was wrapped up in this present moment, too. He wanted her to share in whatever this was. So how could she not take the slice of seal heart from Agnes? Miranda placed the slice on her tongue. Blood and muscle. Grief. Now Agnes was cutting another slice, which she held out to Alan, one more for herself. There were tears in her father’s eyes and on Agnes’s cheeks. They were eating a body so close to swimming through the sea. A lost body, gift and loss. Heat and wind filled Miranda’s mouth, her throat.

  The whole house smelled of seal, pungent and dense, despite the vinegar and baking soda her father was using to soak the seal meat. There was seal meat on every kitchen surface, zip-lock bags out for freezing, a pot boiling on the stove, her father stirring whatever was in the pot, Agnes turning from the kitchen counter to offer Miranda small cubes of seal blubber held out at the end of a knife.

  Mittens on, Miranda was ready to set off for Caleb’s when Alan called out, “Would you mind going back down to the shore? Seems we left the carving knife there and with luck the tide hasn’t stolen it.”

  Soon Agnes and her fat
her would be alone, talking about whatever their own business was. Outside, the air was cool and free of seal smell. Calming. More pack ice had entered the cove, the pans winking turquoise, undulating with the swells beneath, the sea ice that had broken up in the Arctic and been tugged south by the Labrador Current, travelling along with the seals. Here, too, the pack ice no longer came to shore some years. When it did, the ice was wondrous, mesmerizing, appearing so suddenly, and, when the wind shifted, vanishing as quickly, pulled back to the horizon. Even out at sea, the strong, white field of ice was a riveting presence. The sea ice spoke in many voices, it groaned and crackled and softly sifted, and when it filled the cove, the whole world went silent.

  The knife was on top of a rock, right by the water’s edge. The tide was creeping in, water lapping almost invisibly beneath the thinnest skin of ice. There was still blood among the lonely pebbles and, pulling off her glove, Miranda crouched to touch that slickness. In the quiet, she pressed the sharp tip of the knife blade to her skin and the whisper of this pain was satisfying.

  Approaching the house, she was stopped by the sound of voices: Agnes and her father were out on the bridge, a rope of seal intestine swinging from their laundry line.

  “What do you tell her?” Agnes asked.

  “I tell her some of what’s going on,” Alan said. “Not all, obviously, something of the science, a little of what may lie ahead. I’m teaching her practical knowledge, survival skills, about the natural world. Berry picking. Planting. This morning, too, it’s all part of her education. I want to bring her back to the land, hoping perhaps that’s the best preparation for whatever’s coming.”

  “You’ll stay here,” Agnes said.

  “Just breathe this air. How could I, how could we, leave that?”

  “You asked me here. Why? Apart from, you know, procuring me some country food.”

  “I’ve been monitoring the weather out here, as I told you, keeping track of what’s happening in this place. More and more I’ve been wondering what might be done to save the ice, stop catastrophic ice-sheet melt and sea-level rise, all these things that, as you know, are already happening right across the Arctic.”

  “Set all the oil barons loose on melting ice floes and make everyone else return to a subsistence life.”

  “If that doesn’t happen, Agnes? Even if it does, what if things are so far gone we still need to intervene more aggressively, cool things down by, say, injecting something into the atmosphere — possibly sulfate aerosols, which would circulate rapidly in the stratosphere and reflect back incoming sunlight. I’ve been modelling. Others are, too, but out here I’ve been working largely on my own. A risky proposition, injecting atmospheric particulates, admittedly, but could we not conceive it as a necessary form of care, an act of reparation for all the damage done?”

  “Change the atmosphere by adding more dirt to it, and change it knowingly? Is that a form of care?”

  “If the situation’s grave enough.”

  “I’ve heard people talk about making clouds.”

  “Spraying water particles lower down in the troposphere, but this would be higher up, to reflect incoming sunlight. Possibly reducing global temperatures, that’s the goal. Because nothing’s happening, is it? What about all those fires in Siberia last summer? How many died in that heat wave across India? And the droughts in Kenya that have gone on for how many years? Still the engines of business crank on and atmospheric carbon goes up and up.”

  “More forest fires and more industry means more clouds of black carbon,” Agnes said. “The dirtiest clouds on Earth someone called them. When the soot falls onto the snow — I’ll pick up a handful — you can see how all the feathery crystals have turned into small, dark grains that don’t reflect light, just absorb more heat.”

  “So do we not have a responsibility to see what might be done? To save the world? Protect the snow and ice? Out of a kind of love? Others are talking about spreading giant swathes of white cloth over ice sheets or setting up huge reflective mirrors on their surface, but a stratospheric global haze of particulate matter might be more effective. Could such a plan work on a smaller scale? Regionally? We don’t know yet. Here’s where I could use your help. All that data on the snow and ice pack you say no one wants — Agnes, I want it. We can make use of it together, create a baseline data set of the most up-to-date ground-truth data for this region, here, in Labrador, and Nunatsiavut.”

  Their words drifted towards Miranda, settled over her like dust.

  “Who would do this particulate injecting, Alan? People like you? And where?”

  “Issues of governance are crucial, obviously. Tricky. Gov­ernance and consent. Particulates don’t pay attention to borders any more than the weather does. But perhaps those who will be most affected should have some say?”

  The back door closed. Their voices vanished.

  “Who’s your visitor, Miranda?” Sylvia asked. The kettle was boiling on the far side of Sylvia’s kitchen. Miranda and Caleb had dropped their skates inside the back door before heading up to the barn to feed the goats. There Miranda, still flushed with exertion, had climbed into the pen to press her nose to the noses of Fleur and Jewel, whose pregnant bellies swelled, while Caleb forked hay from the loft. As they left, Caleb said, brushing her arm, that he had to fetch something from the shed, the shed being his den, where his woodworking tools hung on the wall in a neat row.

  Sylvia’s words filled Miranda with unease. Red hair pinned loosely atop her head, Sylvia pinched tufts of dried spruce needles and nettle and raspberry leaves, strong hands moving deftly — grimly — from bowls to fill a row of mason jars on the table.

  If people ask, Alan had said, as in Miranda’s mind they were bound to, simply say Agnes is an old friend of mine. Caleb had asked about the woman with the sealskin hat as they’d snowshoed in to the pond, and Miranda had told him what her father had said. Inuk. Lives in Ontario. Back in the summer, Sylvia had asked about Anna, with a surprise that mirrored Miranda’s own. Again as if she couldn’t help herself, Sylvia had wondered aloud why Miranda’s father now spent so much time holed up in his cabin, what did Miranda think?

  The changing weather brushed at the edges of everything like fur.

  “Pat Green brought in a good catch this morning, didn’t he,” Sylvia said with a keen stare from across the table. “I gather your father took one.”

  “Yes,” Miranda said.

  The long velvet curtain closing off the kitchen from the breezeway billowed as boots clumped through the back door. The next moment, a man plunged into the kitchen.

  “Hello, Alan,” said Sylvia, straightening up, caught out as Miranda herself was.

  “How’s it going, Sylvia?” He’d taken off his boots but not his down jacket, his feet bulging in wool socks, car keys still in his hand, his beard trimmed the day of Agnes’s arrival. Preoccupied, he made no attempt at charm in Sylvia’s presence. “All right, Miranda, let’s go.”

  She’d called her father on Caleb’s phone and left a message, telling him she’d be at Caleb and Sylvia’s for supper. “I’m staying here,” Miranda said.

  In Sylvia’s house they would eat venison stew with dumplings, deer meat brought back by Caleb’s uncle Leo from a hunting trip over to the other side, the stew’s spicy aroma already filling Miranda’s nose. Afterwards they’d lounge in the parlour, enclosed by the folds of the red velvet curtains, maybe watch a movie on one of the old silver DVDs Sylvia had kicking about, and everything would feel like the old days, when the three of them used to do this frequently. Miranda longed for the old days. Maybe, if she were tired and lazy enough, she would curl up and fall asleep on the daybed in the room at the top of the stairs, where Sylvia might kiss her good night, a perfect combination of being like a mother yet not a mother, and it would be as if she were floating in a safe ship at sea all through the night.

  “What you mean is, Yes, Dad, I’m coming,” Alan said, because he did not want her to be here where Sylvia might ply her with quest
ions about Agnes.

  “You’re welcome to stay for supper as well, Alan, there’s plenty of food,” said Sylvia. Her voice, while light, held what sounded like a challenge rather than the teasing warmth of earlier years.

  “Can’t, I’m afraid. Come on, Miranda.” There was an abruptness in him different than the tentative abruptness of his first encounters with Sylvia. It seemed to border on anger, to be resisting something that Sylvia was trying to bottle but which kept escaping into the room.

  “Here’s something I marvel at,” Sylvia said. “Why is it, Alan, that when you have a friend visiting, such a rare occurrence, mind you, you never invite us to meet them? You’re welcome to bring your new friend by. Even tonight, we might all sit down together. If they’ve come from far off, why not bring them here and let us show them some hospitality? We’re friendly.” Colour rose in Sylvia’s cheeks.

  “I’ve left something on the stove, Sylvia. Our visitor and I, we’d bore you, honestly — all we do is talk about the weather.”

  “The weather?” Sylvia slung her arms across her chest. “We’re all interested in the weather, aren’t we? You and I have spoken about how queer it can be.”

  “Anyway,” Alan said curtly, “I’ve no desire to bother you.” Yet his face was saying something else. There was a struggle in him. Perturbation. Conflict. Guilt.

  “No desire?” Sylvia threw back her head with a raucous laugh. “No desire to bother me? Well, thank you, Alan, I must say, for clearing up that point of confusion.”

  “Miranda, let’s go.”

  “Why exactly are these women here? Friends, you say, yet, whenever I ask, why do you always act as though I shouldn’t be asking?” Sylvia had raised her voice. “Why lead me on, Alan?”

 

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