Consumption (27 page)

“That. Is a really. Big. Whale,” Emo said.

“I’ve never seen a bigger beluga,” Pauloosie replied. “It’s hard to believe they used to hunt bowheads in qayaks.”

“It’s hard to believe I used to do that.” Emo was hoarse.

And then, for the first time, Emo sat and only watched as Pauloosie eviscerated and cut up the whale, removing the
muqtuq
in great foot-thick slabs, like heavy squares of red and white sod, and placing it in green plastic garbage bags on the floor of their boat.

Balthazar walked into the drug room in the nursing station while a patient waited in his examination room, clutching her aching ear. He found the large bottle of amoxicillin and he poured out a handful of pills onto the medication tray. He counted them out, three two-hundred-and-fifty-milligram tablets a day for ten days. Thirty tablets. He reached for the stickers printed in Inuktitut summarizing the commonly prescribed regimens:
Take after each loose bowel movement to a maximum of eight per day. Complete the entire course of this prescription, even if symptoms begin to resolve. Avoid grapefruit products while taking this medicine
.

He picked the appropriate label for the amoxicillin and stuck it on the bottle. He listened to the noise outside. It was the end of the work day and people were leaving. There was a box of morphine on the shelf above the amoxicillin. It had already been opened. He looked inside. He removed a package of a dozen ten-milligram vials. He put it in his lab coat pocket. He closed the door behind him and
walked back to his examination room. One of these days they were going to start counting narcotics, just like in hospitals in the south. He wished they would start now.

Pauloosie stooped and picked up another rock the size of his head. He carried it clasped against his abdomen and staggered back to the river.

Forty years earlier, there had been a char weir here and the outlines were still evident on the stream bed: the rocks themselves had been scattered by successive spring breakups, moving ice, and marauding bears. The weir had been maintained for most of a thousand years by the Inuit who had inhabited this area. It directed the char as they swam downstream into a stone enclosure, which surrounded them with acute angles that spoke to them of further confinement rather than escape. Instead of simply swimming out the way they had come, they stayed.

After two days work, Pauloosie was nearly finished. He had rebuilt the walls three feet above the water level, tightly enough that no fish large enough to eat would escape, but loosely enough to let the water run through. That had been a lesson he had learned over successive attempts. After he placed the last rock on the weir, he removed the piece of wood blocking the trap’s entrance and waited.

The char run was on and every few minutes he saw a red and silver fish flash by, but over the two hours he sat there expectantly, none entered his trap. He decided to take a walk, and picked up his. 22 in case he saw a rabbit. When he returned, the water in the weir boiled with motion. He dropped his rifle and the ptarmigan he had shot and stood grinning beside the fish trap. There were dozens of fish in it, some as long as his arm, circling madly within.

He untied his
kavitok
from his pack and stood beside the weir, watching the fish. One of the larger char approached him. The spear flashed and it was caught and he carried it to high ground and
removed it. He walked back to weir. The sun was shining brightly and with the work of spearing and carrying the fish, he was soon hot. He removed his sweater. The fish seemed to enter the weir as quickly as he removed them. He figured out how to fling the fish in such a manner that they were piled, jumping and writhing, far enough from the river they were not able to bounce their way back to it. His long wet hair flew around his head as he twisted his torso and worked his spear. His shoulders and back stood out in the oblique afternoon light, his skin as white as a beluga’s beneath the unfamiliar sun, shining like wet polished ivory.

When his arms became rubbery, he hunkered over and slowly caught his breath. There were as many fish in the weir as when he had started. The mound on the bank still squirmed collectively, and was as high as his
kamiks
. He set down his spear and lifted a rock out of the enclosure. The fish began swimming through the channel he had created. Soon they had rejoined their brethren and the weir was empty. Pauloosie began cleaning and splitting the fish he had caught. He erected laundry racks he had bought in the Northern Store and lay the fish open-bellied in the sun and the wind. He had brought ten laundry racks but hadn’t quite enough room to lay out all the fish.

Tagak surprised everyone with his ability as a bookkeeper at the mine’s purchasing office in town. He was less surprised himself—he had always suspected that a job involving methodical patience and a well-defined set of problems would suit him. As a hunter he had been considered lazy, but he was not. He demonstrated this now in his new job, working late into the night and arriving the next day before anyone else in the office.

As a hunter, his problem had been that he was too inclined to be thinking about where he would go next. Over the course of his hunting years, thousands of caribou had scampered over ridgelines as his
distracted gaze had passed over them unawares. Seals had slipped into and out of their
alus
as he thought about how quickly his grandparents had abandoned their old gods,
nanuqs
had padded away from him as he wondered what the hunters had thought the first time they saw a rifle, and char darted across riverbeds while he imagined how the lives of his daughters would unfold.

His inability to empty his mind and simply observe betrayed him as a hunter but made him unusually capable in his new job. He wondered and reflected upon problems that arose constantly, simultaneously, and found himself reaching conclusions and thinking of solutions in a steady stream that matched the attempts of the mine’s suppliers to bill twice for the same services, to overcharge and undersupply with ruthless avarice. Tagak, whose contact with business had been limited to avoiding the bank manager when he spotted him in the Northern Store, was soon in charge of the office, a step every Kablunauk in town who hadn’t found work with the mine attributed to his race. The mine operators thanked Robertson repeatedly for having recommended him. The first few times, Robertson apologized.

THIRTEEN

October 17, 1990

ALREADY THE SNOW SHOULD HAVE BEEN DEEP
. It was falling heavily at last, and Emo watched it with a pleasure snow had never occasioned in him. It was still dark at six and very cold. He had fed his dogs and was walking home to eat breakfast with Winnie when the silver flakes appeared in the sky, moonlight glinting off them. He studied the moon, which was full and bathed the town and the bay in a light that seemed to him unprecedented in its intensity. He blinked his eyes. The moon had been halved. The right side of his face was no longer cold. He tried to rub it and his forearm hit his ear. He fell. He was unable to move his right arm or leg. Every time he attempted to rise, he turned in a circle in the accumulating snow.

Penny sat on the floor in her living room and slowly ran her hands along the leather dog harnesses, inspecting the swivels and the stitching. They had been gnawed in spots, and she clicked her tongue as she ran her fingers over them. They would do as spares. She unwrapped one of the new nylon harnesses she had ordered from Minnesota and lifted it approvingly. It weighed half of what the leather harness did and would, she hoped, be less appealing as a chew toy. She had food packed into her two rucksacks and her rifle
was oiled and lying in its case beside them. She had been holding her breath all summer, waiting for this.

On the bay, her dogs leapt in the air when they saw that she was carrying gear and not just food. The nylon harnesses were unfamiliar and the dogs sniffed them as they were attached; they did not seem appetizing. The dogs attempted to express their disapproval to Penny even as she was clipping them onto the sled lead. She ignored them. She lashed the packs down on the komatik and picked up the ice hook. The dogs took off and the komatik flew forward.

In the blue half-light, the ice appeared even more textured and uneven that it was. Shoulder-high ridges burst up from it regularly, amongst shards of pack ice of smaller dimensions. Penny turned the dogs north when they reached the mouth of the inlet, and they followed the coast another twenty miles before heading inland, where an Inukshuk marked the beginning of a little river valley that stretched westward.

She and the dogs ran for hours, until they came to a fork in the river. There was a char weir there now, and this is what she was watching for. She stopped her dogsled in a sheltered bend near the river. She began assembling her tent, hoping at the same time that there would soon be enough snow for an iglu—which would be so much warmer.

Pauloosie’s dogs smelled the other team long before he saw them. They called out to the dogs and were answered. The baying of the two teams of dogs drew them nearer, call and response growing closer and closer until there was no distinction at all, and when the cacophony became constant, Pauloosie spotted the dome of Penny’s tent. He drew close and tied up his dogs several lunge-lengths away from the other team. He set his sled on its end and untied his rifle and his pack. He bent down and unzipped the entrance of the tent.