*
THE SMALL JET entered thick cloud over Meta Incognita Peninsula and emerged again over the southern edge of Foxe Land. Far below, the ice of Hudson Strait was breaking up, with stretches of open water making black slicks in the white surface, and polygonal plates of ice drifting across larger, lakesized clearings in the floe. I kept my face pressed to the window, hoping to see flocks of snow geese flying into Foxe Land on the south-west winds, wondering if the white birds with black-tipped wings would even be visible in these monochrome vistas. I felt the blood-hum of quickened expectation, the same excitement I’d experienced driving the blue Chevrolet Cavalier from Houston to Eagle Lake, and again as I waited for my first sight of snow geese at dusk near Jack’s house on the prairie. I was about to see snow geese in Foxe Land, in their breeding grounds – perhaps even the very same snow geese I had seen in their Texas winter grounds, in the long-limbed company of American white pelicans, great blue herons and sandhill cranes, three months and 3,000 miles ago.
Jeff was waiting for me at Cape Dorset’s airstrip: mid-thirties, with a stocky wrestler’s build, a thick Russian-looking moustache, and hard brown eyes like two hazelnuts behind little round wire-rimmed glasses. The rarefied scholarly fineness of these spectacles sat incongruously with his rugged outdoorsman’s figure and belligerent geniality. He was standing by a Big Bear ATV, smoking a cigarette with impatient, muscular purpose, wearing quilted waterproof dungarees, insulated black Sorel glacier boots and a green Arctic parka with a fur-trimmed hood. His chin and cheeks were covered with chestnut bristles one third the length of his moustache bristles, and this stubble looked like a protective accessory, a sensible adaptation to extreme wind chill factors. He worked for the Department of Renewable Resources and had offered to help me find snow geese.
‘Hey!’ he said, as if throwing a punch.
‘Jeff.’
‘Damn right!’
He heaved my two bags on to the rack in front of the handlebars of the Big Bear, sucked the last life from his cigarette, threw the stub like a dart at the dirt track outside the airstrip building, then straddled the four-wheeler, bouncing on its suspension.
‘Get on,’ he said. ‘Hold tight. Don’t let go.’
I climbed on and we ripped down the dirt road, the afternoon light heavy with the whiteness of cloud and snow. The buildings of Cape Dorset were distributed over hills below us: prefab huts and houses, panels of colour raised several feet off the ground on steel piles sunk through permafrost to the bedrock. Inuit children ambled up and down the mud-brown track, calling out as the ATV sped past, and sometimes Jeff accelerated towards them, cackling with villainous theatrical gusto, my grip tightening round his waist as he leaned forward over the handlebars, streamlining the Big Bear, the children soon recognizing their nemesis and stepping aside, ceding the run of the road.
We stopped at a two-storey prefab wooden house, stilted like a bayou house, with matt clay red walls, a shallow-gradient roof of Vic West corrugated steel, and icicles hanging from its eaves in the orderly, staggered lengths of tubular bells: the icicles would sing different notes if you struck them with a hammer. A large, thick-haired husky was tied to the short flight of wooden steps leading up to the front door.
‘Shooter! Have you missed me? Poor baby! Poor Shooter!’ Jeff said in a mewling voice, squatting down, ragging the dog’s ears, taking its lavish pink licks on his bristled chin and cheeks. I followed him up the stairs into the house.
‘Home sweet home,’ Jeff said, unzipping his parka.
The spare room was furnished with a narrow bed and a simple wooden table. There were no decorations on the walls.
‘I really appreciate this,’ I said.
‘Don’t sweat it, buddy,’ Jeff replied. ‘Put your bags down. Let’s get out there and take a look.’
We rode back up the hill on the Big Bear, following the dirt track up above the airstrip to the tank farm: large white drums holding diesel, gasoline and aircraft fuel. Jeff switched off the engine. There was no perceptible dimming of light to tell you it was evening. We left the four-wheeler and walked out across the snow.
‘Keep your head up,’ Jeff said. ‘Don’t want to get caught by a bear now.’
My body was struggling to cope with the cold, my feet almost numb in the green Below Zero gumboots, my hands lifeless in thick gloves. We walked laboriously, the snow crust apparently firm under our feet, promising a solid platform, only to collapse as soon as it had gained our confidence, plunging us knee-deep or thigh-deep in soft snow, making each step a cameo of optimism ending in disappointment. Jeff walked as though he had a bone to pick with the snow, his short sturdy legs ramming down with the force of pistons – as if he’d knocked the ground to the ground and now intended to stamp the life from it. We reached a vantage point and stopped.
Whiteness. Below us, prefab housing units around the harbour, the water covered with snow ice. A few roped-together dogteams lay on the white surface, doodles on a blank page. Beyond the harbour you could see the open water of Tellik Inlet running out into Hudson Strait. The inlet remained ice-free all year, a stretch of water known as a polynya. The surface was motionless, without whitecap or wrinkle, a deep-saturated, viscous grey, a sea asleep. Beyond it snow-covered hills merged with white sky, land distinguished from sky by the black flecks and stipplings of rocks.
‘Igneous granite,’ Jeff said. ‘Been here since the beginning of time.’
We walked a few yards to the left and stepped up on to an outcrop of black rock. The black on the granite’s surface looked like a charring, but in fact it was a lichen, a living tar, the black overlaid with patches of other pale green and yellow lichens, growing out from their own centres like tie-dye patterns. I stretched out my left arm, drawing my coat’s cuff back from my watch. It was ten o’clock, evening, but the light still held to the idea of day, with no sign that night was imminent or ever expected. The light was hyperreal, flushed with precious metal, platinum-tinged.
Jeff lit a cigarette, cupping the flame in hands as burly as boxing-gloves, then pointed across Tellik Inlet to the rolling white hills.
‘Sometimes I’m out there,’ he said, expelling words along with cigarette smoke, ‘I’m out on the land, and it’s like the void. It’s like a sentence or two before Genesis.’
‘I’m going to have to find some thicker gloves,’ I said. ‘Maybe a thicker coat.’
‘You think this is cold?’ he asked. ‘Eight or nine below? This isn’t cold. This is Hawaii!’
He laughed, throwing his head back, a manic, gleeful, booming laugh, as loud as he could make it, as if hoping to leave traces on the muffling white. But Jeff’s laughter hardly broached the silence. He sucked on the cigarette. We looked out over Tellik Inlet. There was no wind. A few gulls flew low across the open grey water. The huskies lying roped together made simple patterns on the harbour ice: points joined by lines. The silence was something you could hear, as though it were itself a sound: a steady, white drone. The light was suffused with the character of blades and foil. Across the water, chains of hills merged into white sky with no visible seam.
Jeff and I noticed the geese simultaneously – a faint horizontal line, flying northwards: a skein of fifteen or twenty birds, black wing-tips flickering above the hills, the line undulating as if a lazy energy were rolling through it from tip to tail; blue-phase and white-phase snow geese, borne across Hudson Strait on the south-west winds of the past few days, back in Foxe Land after a winter sojourn close to the Gulf of Mexico. I felt a sudden lightness in my chest. We’d got here on the same day.
Jeff threw down his cigarette and raised both arms in the air, celebrating.
‘Whoa!’ he yelled. ‘Geese are coming! Look at those babies! Oh man! We’re going to have us some geese!’
‘Good timing!’ I said.
‘Damn right!’ Jeff was ecstatic, restless on our rough granite podium. ‘Oh man. I’ve got a good mind to go straight over the other side of the island right now. Waste no time,
pick up a gun, start shooting. We’re going to bake a snow goose for you real quick.’
The flock trailed northwards, over the mainland.
‘I love you!’ Jeff hollered at the birds. ‘My babies!’
*
IN THE LAST WEEK of May, waiting for the chance to go out into Foxe Land, I walked the dirt tracks of Cape Dorset as I’d walked the length and breadth of Churchill – getting my bearings, working up a mental map, configuring the settlement according to certain prominent landmarks: the Northern Stores, the Dorset Co-operative, the cairn-topped hill that marked the harbour’s entrance. The community, which numbered about 1,000 people, mostly Inuit, was spread across three valleys on the north side of Dorset Island, just off the southern edge of the Foxe Peninsula. The prefab wooden housing units had small windows to minimize heat loss, and this made them look like people squinting.
Skidoos and long sleds called qamutiiks were pulled up by the front steps of the raised box-like houses. Stretched sealskins dried on the porches; the stiff tailflippers of flensed seals poked from rusting oildrums. Inuit children careened down the winding dirt roads on weather-beaten ATVs as the ancient municipal sewage truck hauled itself from house to house. Someone had parked a Yamaha Enticer snowmobile outside the Lillian Prankhurst Memorial Full Gospel Church, and on the long qamutiik hitched to it stood a glittery purple Ludwig drum kit: bass drum, snare, high-hat, cymbals – a cymbal-clash of colour.
I walked back and forth, following the lanes and paths, experiencing the same views again and again, until they became familiar prospects. I got to know the layout of the place, how forms were organized within it, but I couldn’t shake off my sense of disorientation and estrangement. My eyes wouldn’t relax into the hyperreal, silver-lined light, the whiteness bundled like sheets and towels into a space too small to contain it all. My circadian rhythms were confused by each day’s failure to darken. People spoke Inuktitut, a language I couldn’t begin to understand. I walked around town bewildered, off-balance, nervous, detached. Now and again a husky sat up on the harbour ice, pointed its nose skywards and crooned, each open-throated harrooo quickly gathered in by the low cloud.
*
I FOUND JEFF sitting on the linoleum kitchen floor, legs akimbo, plucking feathers from two blue-phase snow geese with brisk tugs.
‘So,’ he said, not looking up. ‘You ready to go out on the land?’
‘More than ready,’ I said.
‘You better go soon.’ Little muffled puffs of white goose down appeared wherever Jeff yanked flight and contour feathers from their follicles.
‘I want to.’
‘There’s no way to travel once the thaw sets in. It’s way too wet out on the tundra. The snowmachines just get stuck, or sink, more likely.’
‘I can’t wait to get out there. I’ve been travelling with the geese for quite a while now. I’m about ready to head home.’
‘Don’t sweat the small stuff, buddy. You know? I guess the thing for you to do is meet the guys at the HTA. The secretary speaks some English.’
‘That’s what we talked about on the phone. The Hunters and Trappers Association.’
‘Right. You can meet the elders. Don’t let them fool you, though. They understand more English than you think. Just don’t sweat it, OK?’
*
THE DIRECTORS OF the Aiviq Hunters and Trappers Association met once a week in a small shed behind the Dorset Co-operative building. The secretary was a wiry man, all ligament and sinew, with heavy steel-framed glasses and long black hair hanging down below his shoulders. His hair had the rough fineness of the hair in violin bows, and he wore a black anorak with the NFL logo on its sleeves and the word RAIDERS on its back, just visible beneath a curtain of dry, fanned hair.
‘Welcome to Cape Dorset,’ he said quietly, surreptitiously, confiding a secret.
Three of the elders were already seated, drinking coffee. Posters depicting the ecology of seals, walruses, polar bears and the salmonid fish called Arctic char were pinned to the walls alongside large sheets of paper on which ideas for future HTA projects had been scrawled in black marker pen. One said: Goose Down. Collection? Cost? Needs study. Three more elders came into the room and took their places at the tables. Five of the six were men, late-fifties to mid-sixties, with weathered, high-cheekboned Asiatic faces, dressed in jeans, worsted lumberjack shirts, and baseball caps embroidered with the name of the new Canadian territory, Nunavut, or the logo and slogan of the Polaris Mine: Five Years Accident Free! The sixth elder, sitting on my right, was a robust woman in a blouse on which twining green foliage, apples, pears, grapes and ripe, plump plums were displayed in Arcadian abundance. Her long black hair, silkier than the secretary’s, was drawn back from her face and held at the neck in an elegant silver barrette; her cheeks gleamed under the weak electric light as if coated with a slipware glaze.
The secretary distributed copies of the meeting’s agenda. The first item was ‘Prayer’. The elders closed their eyes and looked down while the woman sitting beside me said a prayer in Inuktitut. When she had finished, the secretary addressed me in his low voice.
‘Please tell everyone where you come from,’ he said, ‘and why you’re here in Cape Dorset.’
The elders looked at me expectantly.
‘I’m from England,’ I said. ‘I’m interested in snow geese. I’ve followed snow geese on their spring migration from Texas. I’ve come to Cape Dorset because I want to see the geese in Foxe Land, in their summer breeding range.’
The secretary made notes on a pad, then translated for the elders. The word ‘Texas’ stood out like a flaw in his Inuktitut. The man sitting to my left doodled on his agenda: spirals, arabesques, a neat head-and-shoulders sketch of a man in a fedora or panama. The wooden tables, like school tables, were scored and notched with graffiti, the wood splintered where ballpoint pens had gouged against the grain. The secretary finished speaking. There was a pause. The woman addressed the gathering in Inuktitut, smiling, cheeks gleaming. The elders laughed. The secretary turned to me and translated.
‘She says that you need to be careful about who takes you out on to the land. Some of the young people, they think they know the land, but really they don’t. You don’t want to get in trouble out there.’
The doodling elder looked up from his agenda and addressed the directors.
‘He says that travel is getting hard,’ the secretary translated. ‘Spring’s coming. Sometimes it can be too wet. You can’t cross the rivers any more. The snow isn’t hard enough for the snow-machines.’
Then all the directors began talking at once in Inuktitut. Sometimes they laughed. Finally, the secretary turned to me again.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘So. We’re going to ask around and see if we can find someone who’s going out on the land, who’d be willing to take you. You’re staying at Jeff’s. We’ll contact you there and let you know.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘So we’ll contact you at Jeff’s,’ the secretary repeated.
I took the hint, stood up, nodded at the elders and left the meeting.
*
MAY BECAME JUNE. The top of the Earth was tilting towards the sun. Nights were betrayed as nights by a slight slackening in the light, a sullen humour in the sky. I struggled to keep track of each day’s passing, without the grand events of sunrise and sunset as points of reference. I learned to distinguish white land from white sky by the flecks of black granite, but a raven holding steady against the wind could quickly confuse the issue.
The sky cleared; sunlight knifed off the snow and ice. Late in the evening I’d walk out across the harbour, passing dogteams asleep on their ropes, keeping to skidoo tracks where the snow was fretted and compacted underfoot, then turn and look back at the community, its districts nestled in hills: to the left, Itjurittuq, or Roman Catholic Valley; to the right, Kuugalaaq, the Valley; in the middle, Kingnait, or Town. Weak-coloured, impermanent structures, without foundations, raised on thin stilts like wading birds.
One evening I walked to the hill beyond Itjurittuq, trudging through deep snow to the summit cairn, looking down on the strandline where the harbour’s white ice fronted the open water of Tellik Inlet. The grey sea surface lay heavy and tight, with a few small bergs drifting across it. Dogs barked. Children shouted. These sounds rolled round the bowl of the hills like balls in a roulette wheel. Snow buntings flitted from rock to rock below me, their black-and-white plumage entirely of a piece with the prospects beyond them.
I sat by the cairn. The gleam off the ice and water was blue-tinged, this blueness like the nuance carried by a remark, an inflection or emphasis to the way the light was speaking. Gulls preened on hunks of broken floe in Tellik Inlet, heads down, fiddling in their armpits. A seal surfaced. Skidoos tore across the harbour ice, plying the diagonal from Kuugalaaq to Kingnait. A flock of king eider flew from the south, skimming low over the water, breasting their own reflections, easily distinguished from geese by their rapid wingbeats, the flock’s quick kaleidoscopings. King eider winter along the Atlantic coast from Labrador to New Jersey; many breed on Baffin Island. More new arrivals, returning to their natal grounds, their journeys almost over.
Five Inuit boys clambered through the snow to the cairn, four of them ten or eleven years old, in parkas, baseball caps, baggy jeans and black Sorel glacier boots, and the fifth much younger, tagging along, wearing a blue wool toque.
‘I keep my cigarettes in there,’ said one of the boys, pointing to the cairn.
‘What do you smoke?’ I asked.
‘Players Light. You?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You speak Inuktitut?’
They told me a walrus was aiviq; a bear, nanuk; a snow goose, kanguq.
The boys began foraging round the base of the cairn, trowelling at the snow with half-cupped hands, gathering stones. They chose flat stones, as if for ducks and drakes, though we were too high above water for skimming, then launched one missile after another, each limber loose-armed pitch accompanied by a grunt of effort, the stones hanging above the white mainland hills before dropping to the blue-grey surface of the inlet. I was sitting just a few feet from the boys but I watched them as if from a distance, or as if the scene were being projected on to a screen in front of me, my senses registering the silver-toned alien light, the water below, the glistening bergs, the hills rolling away in infinite white vacancy, but my mind elsewhere. The stones rose spinning and faded like clay pigeons fired from traps, and I imagined gunshots, targets exploding high above the water, designs for fireworks.
The Snow Geese Page 21