by Anne Degrace
Lucy had been the bright spark: imaginative, emotive, dramatic, and talkative. She was also the pretty one: raven hair, big eyes, in contrast to my mousy appearance. Where I was tentative, she was forthright; where I was shy, she was outgoing. By the time she was twelve, boys were drawn to Lucy like moths to a flame; they ignored me, three years older. Her life cut short before her thirteenth birthday, Lucy was the daughter who didn’t grow up, and so she would always be the shining potential of a future she didn’t get to live.
Being top of the class had nothing on that.
When Lucy died, my grandmother took me aside, perhaps worried that I’d burden my grieving parents with my adolescent outbursts; I was still a teenager, after all. “You’ll need to be strong,” she told me. “You’ll have to grow up.”
I took her at her word.
BACK IN VANCOUVER, I scrambled to find a car I could afford. I’d been so busy with school, I’d left it late. But I’d seen an ad tacked to the bulletin board in the laundromat on Commercial: Car. Cheap, or trade for truck. Quick sale, good Karma. It made me laugh; it didn’t even say what make or year, but I figured cheap was good. I don’t know what I thought about the karma part. I pulled off the number in an act uncharacteristic for careful, practical, no-nonsense Nina. Maybe things were changing.
James and Myra arrived in a rusty ’75 Civic, hand-painted flowers across the hood. James unfolded himself from the driver’s side and gave me a laid-back grin. As Myra awkwardly disengaged herself from the passenger side, I saw she was pregnant.
“Two reasons for selling, the car,” he said. “That’s one of them.”
“Hi,” said Myra, hand up, palm out.
“What’s the other?” I was waiting to hear the bad news about the car’s mechanical condition.
“We need to get a truck instead. We’ve decided to head for the Kootenays, find some land. Live a healthier life. Settle down.” He nodded towards Myra, who was leaning against the car, hand moving in rhythmic circles over her belly. “We have a kid coming. Been trying forever — we were ready to give up. I’m thirty-nine this year; figured it might be time to grow up. What about you?”
“What about me?” Was he asking about my reproductive status or my maturity?
“What do you need the car for?”
“I need to drive it to the Arctic Circle,” I said. “And back.”
James seemed to take this in stride. He patted the closest daisy. “No problem. She’s been around the block a few times, but she’ll get you there.”
After the papers were signed and the keys tossed into my hand, I had to empty my new used car of the detritus of someone else’s life — one wholly unlike my own. I shovelled out pamphlets, books, cassette tapes, odd articles of clothing, food wrappers, and other miscellany. The irony that it was an archeological dig of sorts — garbage being a telling indicator of what life may have been — wasn’t lost on me, heading as I was to a real dig of my own. I was Nina-turned-adventurer. I left the daisies.
After I’d packed my tent, sleeping bag, bug spray, boots, and field guides, I tucked into the glove compartment the journal I’ve kept with me since Lucy’s death. When I write in it I’m never quite sure if I’m writing to myself or to my sister. Maybe I’m writing to the person I’d be now, if Lucy were still alive.
The Civic behaved remarkably well on the long road north. Three days after I left Vancouver I pulled up at the Whitehorse address my supervisor had given me: a small house with a low roof and missing siding. When I knocked, a tall, freckled guy opened the door, hand outstretched, a big, friendly grin on his face.
“You Nina?” he asked, and I nodded. “Stuart McKinnon. Glad you made it.” He looked past me. “Interesting car,” he added.
Stuart was just back from Herschel, where he’d been setting up, arranging supplies, and scoping out the accommodations. After dinner we sat in his low-ceilinged living room, the stove going against the chill in the air, even though it was the beginning of June. I was warm and comfortable and happy not to be driving.
“Who else is there?” I asked Stuart.
“There’s a couple of guys from U of T studying warming trends,” Stuart told me. “They’re presenting a paper on climate change for an intergovernmental conference next year. Man, if Herschel is anything to go by, something’s gotta happen quick.” He took a swig from a can of Canadian. “That’s it for people, except for the Lapierres. White guy and his Inuvialuit wife, four kids. They’ve been on Herschel for years, but I hear they might not be much longer.”
“How come?”
Stuart shrugged his shoulders. “Things are changing, I guess. It’s slated to become a territorial park, but I don’t think that’s the reason. The ice isn’t what it used to be; hunting patterns have shifted. It’s gotta be lonely. Who knows? Anyway, it’s good you’re going. I don’t think the Washout excavation site will be there much longer. It’s eroding so fast you can almost watch it go. This is probably the last chance.”
Before bed I stood on the porch marvelling at the light, wide awake, listening to coyotes call and answer across the bluffs.
I SPENT THE next day picking up supplies and got back on the road late in the day, energized by the daylight. As I pushed north I could feel the breadth of the land like a presence. When I pulled into Dawson City it had to be well after 2 a.m., but there was a soccer game in progress in a playing field near a school, and an old guy was riding an older bicycle, wobbling down the middle of the road as if it were the middle of the afternoon, the sun just above the low mountains to the north.
The next morning the Dempster Highway was a minefield of mud and potholes, but the land opened up, a vast canvas of open space and light. I crossed the Peel River on a cable ferry, drinking in the scent of water, running on little sleep but with the heady excitement of the shift in light and landscape and the adventure ahead. Here, the boreal forest gave way to the scrub of the Mackenzie Delta, a wash of subtle colour and texture. On the ferry across the great, swollen Mackenzie River I stood on the deck and thought about the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline proposal, still in its ten-year moratorium. I closed my eyes and imagined a pipeline running like a scar across the land.
At Inuvik I took a late room at the Eskimo Inn and ate in a bar filled with men, sitting on a tall stool facing a wall of bottles, feeling conspicuous. The blind was broken in my room, and I slept with the covers over my head, trying to shut out the light.
The next day I found my way to the airport, bleary from lack of sleep, but the flight woke me up. From my bird’s-eye view in the Twin Otter, hundreds of lakes and ponds below looked like puddles nestled in foliage of green and russet. I wanted to look, and at the same time I wanted to put my head between my knees as the bumpy ride played havoc with my stomach, and my nerves. Jerry, the pilot, yelled soundless words over the roar of engine and wind, once pointing at a pair of Tundra Swans on a pond below, and I took a deep breath and looked. In turns fascinated and terrified, I managed to hold it together until we landed on hardpacked beach at Pauline Cove, the Otter bumping to a stop a reasonable distance from two figures: Barry and Andy, I guessed.
As I emerged from the plane, the wind took my breath away.
HERSCHEL ISLAND IS not the sort of place where you can sneak up on a person; as I stand in the graveyard I see the woman and two kids approach from well in the distance. She appears to have a level of comfort with the blasting wind, or at least she doesn’t seem to be fighting it like I am. She’s wearing a light summer parka, and her features tell me she must be Inuvialuit. With her are a boy and a girl, perhaps seven and five.
I stand up from where I’ve been examining a grave. I feel guilty, caught poking around here. This grave likely belongs to a person held in living memory, unlike the thousand-year-old Thule house we’re working on at the Washout site.
“Hello.” I smile at the approaching woman. The boy
regards me with that disarming stare some children deliver so well, but his sister tucks herself behind her mother’s legs. “Hello,” I say again, directing the greeting at the girl. In an odd way, she reminds me of Lucy, the way she was when she was small. That black hair; those eyes.
“This is Pauline,” the woman tells me, then points to the boy. “That’s Luke. The other two are fishing with their father.”
“Nina,” I offer. “I’m working with the group on the Washout site.”
She nods. “Annie.”
Luke pokes at his sister, who hangs back further. “I don’t bite,” I tell her.
Annie lays her palm on her daughter’s black hair, and the girl breaks into a smile. Luke reaches around back of his mother’s legs and gives her another poke. The smile broadens, rosebud lips in a round face and dark, shining eyes.
“You remind me of someone I know,” I tell her.
“She’s quiet now, but she likes to talk,” Annie says. “We saw you walking here.” She follows my eyes, seeing the lopsided fences, I suppose, as I’m seeing them. Suddenly I feel like a tourist.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “Maybe I shouldn’t be here. Are some of these your relatives?”
Annie doesn’t answer directly. “This grave belongs to Kudnalik.” She nods at the grave in front of us, fragile in its precarious grip on the shifting earth. “He was in a fight with a whaler who ran away from his boat. This happened a long time ago. It was a big storm. Kudnalik and his wife and boy, they were inside their igloo, waiting for the storm to pass. And their dogs started to bark and a man came out of the snow. Maybe he got lost because of the storm. He said he had been travelling for two days, but he was not so far from his ship, maybe a few miles.”
“And he was killed? Kud —”
“Kudnalik. Yes. And later his wife died. The whalers brought all kinds of diseases.”
“And the boy?”
“The boy grew up.” She turns to the kids, who continue to poke one another, giggling, and speaks to them in Inuvialuktun. They scamper off towards the gravel beach.
“How do you know all this?” I ask.
“Kudnalik was my great-grandfather,” she pauses: “Come to the house.” Annie points over the dunes, but I know where it is. Andy pointed it out a few days ago, a square house built of driftwood logs. “I’ll make tea,” she says.
“How about tomorrow? I still have some things to write up.”
Annie nods and calls to the kids, who hear her despite the wind. “We don’t get many women here,” she says, then: “My grandmother believed that if you touch the possessions of a dead person, you’ll be cursed.” She shades her eyes and watches Luke and Pauline playing tag, taking their time returning. “These are old beliefs. She would not have liked to see me here, even, near this burial place. I don’t think it’s bad to be here, but right now I can feel her beside me, telling me to go.”
She calls the kids again. Her words sound like the clatter of beach rocks in a receding wave, a pleasant sound, a mixture of granite and sand.
Tomorrow I’ll ask Barry about these graves, and about the whaler’s graveyard. I know there are plans to try to move some of the buildings farther from the shore — there’s the Hudson’s Bay Trading Post, Anglican Mission, the RCMP detachment, the warehouses, all of which eventually may be washed away — but I’ve heard of no plans to move the graves. In most graveyards, people remain safely underground. They won’t come up to remind you that life is, after all, a fleeting and tenuous thing.
The Washout site is clearly threatened. The first half of my day today was spent constructing a berm to keep out the sea, which, at high tide, threatens to compromise the first house site; maybe not the next tide, or the one after that, but all it would take is a high tide or a good storm to wash away a thousand years.
I can feel it now in my shoulders, the hard work of earth-moving followed by the small, constricted movements of delicate excavation work. I watch the receding figures of Annie Lapierre and her children, then turn, the wind now comfortably at my back.
IN THE SEMI-DARK of the RCMP barracks, Nina sleeps. She’s alone; Barry and Andy are visiting the climatologists who are staying in one of the warehouses. She met John and Frank on the first day. Both had been interested to find out there was an unattached female working on the island, and John had asked her several questions about herself. She’d answered awkwardly, later consoling herself that she was there to work, after all, and had since declined enough invitations to socialize that they had ceased to be offered. After several days Barry and Andy had opted to sleep in their tents, giving Nina the barracks to herself at night. Nina was grateful; this way, she might eventually get a good night’s rest. Now, she sleeps fitfully, her breathing shallow.
ARCHIE GORHAM, BARELY backlit against the point of light creeping from behind the covered windows, shifts in his seat. There is still a small amount of tobacco in the tin he carries, and he pinches it into his pipe and lights it, observing the form of the girl asleep in the bunk as he does. He’s dressed in caribou hide, fur turned in, as if for winter; even in the mild temperature, he appears cold. His skin has a blue cast.
From the other side of the dim room comes a cough, and Archie looks up.
“What, you back?” he asks through the pipe which is clenched in teeth the colour of old piano keys.
“I am back.” The words are spoken in Inuvialuktun.
“Talk English,” says Gorham. “Goddamn Eskimo.”
“You should learn our language. You should know my name. Kudnalik.”
“I know your name.”
“You come and you buy our meat, we teach you how to hunt, our wives make your clothes, you take our wives and sometimes even our daughters —”
“I never took anyone’s daughter!”
“— and you don’t learn a single word. I’ve heard you are all thieves and murderers where you come from. That’s what your captain Bodfish said. That every one of you should be dead, hanging.”
“He was drunk when he said that, which was something for him, I’ll allow. None of those officers was supposed to be drinking, that was the rule. You know why he was drunk? Because it was Christmas, and we got him to have a little glass just for a toast. Shamed him into having a toast with the men for once, and then kept topping up his glass. So then he started telling everyone — even you Eskimos, because by then the party was pretty big, and the bonfires and all, and the dancing —”
Kudnalik smiles. “I remember. It was a good time.”
“— that we’re all a bunch of scoundrels, when he’s got a past, mark my words.”
“And you?”
“Some petty thievery. Nothing serious.”
Kudnalik rises and picks up the straightback chair, moving it closer to Gorham so they sit with just a small table between them. “You got some tobacco?”
“You know I don’t have much left.” He looks across at Kudnalik, the whites of his eyes glinting in the diminished light. “All right.” He pulls the tin from his pocket and hands it to Kudnalik, who sniffs at it.
“Smells old,” he comments, but he takes his own small pipe from his pocket, similar to Gorham’s but carved from antler. “When you robbed that hunting camp, that was not a small thing.”
“No,” Gorham admits.
“White men, no guns, no food, no dry clothing. They had to come after you or die.” Kudnalik draws on his pipe several times until the tobacco glows.
“But they didn’t die.”
“No, because you did.”
Gorham snorts. They’re both quiet, regarding Nina as she shifts, rolls, and sighs.
After a while Gorham taps his pipe on the metal tabletop. “Anyway, that Christmas night? That was the first time we made a break for it. If it wasn’t for the cabin boy spilling the beans, we’d have made it. Too many pe
ople knew. We’d been hiding food, so the cook was in on it. We promised to pay him once we made it.”
“It would have taken many days, even with good dogs. And you were on foot.”
“Of the three of us, I was the only one who kept all of my toes. And Barclay lost his whole foot. Bodfish was heavy-handed with that saw. And he put the cook in irons.” Gorham rolls his eyes. “We were never going to make money on those boats. Not that whaling wasn’t profitable. But by the time it got down to us — we weren’t getting rich. And it wasn’t like the beginning, when we were taking hundreds of whales —”
“Whale heads, you mean. You take just the baleen and throw the rest of the whale in the water. Inuvialuit would never treat the Bowhead with such disrespect. Or any animal. That is why we can live here, and you freeze to death.”
“Not all of us. My point is that by the end of the season some of us wound up owing money, and that’s after risking our lives in the killing boats. Two drowned on our boat alone that season. In the Gold Rush we could really make our fortunes. We’d have made the cook and that damn cabin boy rich, too.”
Kudnalik stands up. “I need to see to my dogs and get back to my wife.”
Gorham shrugs his shoulders. “They’re not going anywhere.”
“No,” Kudnalik agrees. “But I will go now, anyway.” He steps through the barracks door and out into the hard, flat light.
I WAKE UP and clutch at the fading ghosts of dreams. I can’t quite pin down the images, which dissipate even as I try to grasp them. Such is the nature of dreams, but it’s frustrating. On the other hand, if I dreamt it means I must have slept. I look at my watch: seven o’clock.