by Anne Degrace
At the excavation site Barry and Andy are discussing the damage. The tide has receded, but at its highest point it washed away most of the berm we built yesterday. If we can’t keep the water back, we’ll have to do our best at low tide. This site is closest to the shoreline. Barry begins to carefully excavate the gravel we had excavated yesterday, while Andy and I work on a new berm. That work takes us well into the morning. At lunchtime I stretch, every muscle aching from too many hours hunched over.
“I got lunch,” says Andy, and I stretch out on the ground, letting the sun warm me, while he trots back to the barracks, and our stores.
Barry flops down beside me and scratches at his beard, then rubs his hands over his face.
“This afternoon we’ll be able to start sifting,” he says. “As long as we don’t get a serious storm, we’ll be okay. You can still get a blizzard this time of year.”
“It would be awful, wouldn’t it? To lose everything before we’ve really started?” I’m up on my elbows now, squinting across the surface of the sea. There’s a rise in the water in the distance, then a blow. Once, whales here were “thick as bees,” according to historical records, and the area remains a favourite of Bowhead and Beluga. Closer to the shore, a flock of black guillemots bob in the water.
Barry follows my gaze and watches for a moment before replying. “Hard to say which would be worse: losing everything now, or losing everything after we’ve finished. You heard about what happened in ’73?”
I shake my head. My stomach growls, and what I’m most thinking about is lunch, to be honest, although I’m looking forward to getting back into the dig.
“What happened?”
“A group spent all summer excavating two house features at Pauline Cove. It was an important collection: aboriginal artifacts from the 1880s, when the Cove was almost a city, full of whalers and Inuit. There were some trade items there, too, so it was a good indication of relationships between the two. The collection was stored at Newport House, an old whaling warehouse. It’s gone, now,” he says. “Fire.”
“Fire?”
“Yep. Kids with matches. I guess kids will be kids, anywhere you go. There was nothing left.”
“Nothing — ?” In this climate, with little opportunity to spread, I’d have thought fire would be easy to put out. The permafrost is right there, too, the reason why artifacts are so well preserved on Herschel.
“There were also twenty-four drums of helicopter fuel stored there.”
I wince.
“It’s a good thing the kids didn’t go up with it, too,” Barry says.
My first thought is the Lapierre kids, but they’d have been too young or not yet born. Maybe Annie, her brothers and sisters? I can’t tell how old she is.
Andy comes back with a knapsack and starts hauling out a big thermos of tea, some hardtack, peanut butter, and dried fruit. He spreads his big hands and grins.
“Dig in, grunts,” he says, and Barry raises an eyebrow.
“Okay, grunts and bosses,” Andy amends. He holds up a package. “And,” he adds, with a flourish. “Tuktuk! Ray gave it to me. He was over at the other camp last night.” He looks at me. “Dried caribou to you, newbie,” he says.
I put a piece in my mouth. It tastes leathery and rich and strange.
The afternoon is spent screening earth through three-millimetre mesh, and for the most part we turn up bone fragments — the remains of Thule dinners, most likely — and an excellent harpoon head. Andy’s attention is on construction, primarily: analyzing the remains of the once sod-and-driftwood structure with its square pit and log floor.
Residents of Herschel have always been happy recipients of the driftwood bounty spilling out from the Mackenzie Delta and washing up on the island’s south shore. That same driftwood kept the whalers alive in the late 1880s and early part of this century — that, and the help of the residents themselves, who provided meat and replaced the whaler’s heavy wool clothing with pants and parkas made of hide. By the height of the whaling era, these “Eskimos” were people from Alaska, Siberia, and the Yukon North Slope, coming to trade or to work on the boats, all living in tents and igloos and driftwood dwellings at the relative metropolis of Pauline Cove.
I measure, weigh, and catalogue the fragments we find. Late in the afternoon a piece of baleen turns up, the bony plates of the Bowhead whale’s filter system. This house predates the coming of the whalers by hundreds of years, of course, but the discovery of the baleen fragment — likely used as a flexible scraper — brings to mind the real reason for Herschel’s version of the Gold Rush: the wasp-waists that were popular with “civilized” women of the time, and which necessitated corsets — constructed of baleen. I can’t help but feel insulted on behalf of these mighty beasts.
I quit at five with Barry’s blessing; they’ll work a while yet, but I want to keep my appointment with Annie and her family, not that we had any sort of time set. I’m told that things are not so precise in the North, which makes sense to me. What does it matter when the day just goes on and on?
I’m excited; this visit could develop into an important element for my thesis. I set off across the tundra. In this light it’s hard to imagine winter, how long and quiet that must be. For the Inuvialuit, winter is a part of life, but for the whalers a hundred years ago, it’s no wonder they might go mad with drink or fear or boredom, and bolt. Months of isolation and lack of light would push dark emotions to the surface like bones from the ground. For some, there may have been a point where risk no longer mattered, never mind that others had tried and failed, been put in stocks, lost limbs to frostbite, died; a run for civilization, as a deck hand or boatman might see it, was worth it. I close my eyes, try to imagine day after day without a sunrise.
I open my eyes and blink. Ahead of me, an Arctic fox stares, interrupted in its hunt for a shrew or lemming. We look at one another for several moments and then it moves on, and I exhale.
I stop at the whaler’s graveyard on the way to Annie’s house. These wooden headboards will be restored this summer. The Inuvialuit graves, respecting belief and tradition, will not be touched. I pause at the grave of Archibald Gorham, who died in 1896. Barry told me that the melting permafrost is having the effect of pushing these graves up to the surface, and that some, close to the shore, have actually been washed away; between this and the erosion of wind and rising water, I half expect a bony hand to poke up and give me a wave.
The kids run towards me as I approach the Lapierre house, a large structure made of driftwood logs. One of the older boys I didn’t meet yesterday is pushing a wheelbarrow with his small sister Pauline bumping about inside. They’re good-looking kids, grinning and laughing. They don’t seem bored, in this world without electricity.
“One of you must be Luke,” I say. I look at Pauline in the wheelbarrow. “Have I met you before? Are you Luke?” My uncle used to play this game with Lucy and me, mixing us up. Pauline giggles and the boy pushing her laughs.
“He’s Luke,” the boy says, pointing at his younger brother.
“So you must be Pauline, then,” I tell him, and I make a point of not looking at Pauline, who’s beside herself with barely stifled laughter, or at Luke, who’s tugging at my arm.
“I’m George,” the boy at the wheelbarrow grins. “That’s Albert.”
“Ah!” I say, and now Luke is pulling me towards the house, where Annie stands in the doorway smiling. Beside the house five huskies are also smiling, but not barking. With a full escort, they must figure I’m okay. Ray doesn’t appear to be around.
“He took some people on a hunting trip,” Annie tells me.
“Tourists?” It seems ridiculous even as I say it, but then Herschel is slated to become a park. I suppose it stands to reason.
“Pipeline people. I guess they have some time off.”
Annie tells me that Ray was
a commercial pilot, flying between Inuvik and Sachs Harbour. He grew up in Tuktoyaktuk, where his father ran the Hudson’s Bay store.
“How did you meet him?” I ask.
“One time he landed here. He was picking up some people. This was at the beginning, when they were first talking about the pipeline. The weather turned bad, and Ray stayed with my family.” She smiles, almost girlish. It’s infectious: I smile back. “He started landing here more often after that.”
The house is a clutter of bins, buckets, and tools, all of it useful; there are no knick-knacks. There are three rooms, two clearly for sleeping. We sit in the main room, light pushing through the panes of the big front window, the ceiling low. Clothes hang drying above us. On the woodstove, a pot sits, and from this Annie pours tea into mugs, adds powdered milk and sugar. The kids still play outside, but I catch Pauline periodically peeking through the window.
“Are you happy about the island becoming a park?” I ask Annie. The tea tastes as if it’s been steeping for days; with the milk and sugar, it’s surprisingly good, and I close my eyes for a moment to savour it.
Annie sips from her own cup. “It’s good, I think. But we will move.”
“Because of the park?”
“Because the children should go to regular school. Because it’s better, maybe, to be in Aklavik. More people. But we’ll always come back. This is our place.”
“You never said if you have other relatives in the graveyard.”
Pauline bursts in, and Annie pulls her up onto her lap. “My mother and my grandmother are here. Maybe I’ll be buried here. Do you have children?”
I smile. “I’m only twenty-five.”
“I had three children by the time I was twenty-five. A boyfriend?”
I shake my head. I don’t say that I’m too awkward, too shy, too unapproachable in social situations. Other girls had boyfriends; I had school.
“What about your family?”
“My parents live on Vancouver Island. I had a younger sister.” Annie’s gaze contains the question, and I find to my surprise that I don’t mind answering, here amid the happy clutter of the Lapierre home. “Meningitis,” I tell her. “It happened so fast.”
“My grandmother had eight kids,” Annie tells me. “Five grew up. My mother had six, but my little brother drowned. So far, I’ve been lucky.”
Before I can respond, Pauline slides from her mother’s lap and climbs into mine, as if it’s something she’s always done. It warms me — my lap, and my heart — as she holds up a toy to show me, a small figure carved from some sort of bone. I take it and turn it around in my hand.
“She’s nice,” I say to Pauline. “Does she have a name?”
Pauline utters the first words I’ve heard her speak. “Nina,” she tells me.
Annie laughs. “She likes you,” she says.
I sit with the little girl on my lap. Outside, a dog barks, and I can hear shouts of the boys in play. “I like her, too,” I say.
AFTER THREE WEEKS on Herschel Island, sleep for Nina is still fraught. Often, she wakes exhausted. It’s only the half-remembered ghosts of dreams that tell her that she has, indeed, slept. Tonight she came back to the barracks after a dinner with Ray and Annie and the kids, her first dinner with them. Nina found Ray Lapierre friendly and talkative, a self-styled ambassador for Herschel; she liked him. John McGrath, the climatologist from the other camp, had turned up as well, having been out with Ray examining shifting shorelines, listening to Ray’s recollections of changes within the sands and the seasons.
Dinner had been challenging: raw seal meat and Beluga whale blubber, cut up with an ulu on cardboard that had been spread on the floor. Nina, kneeling with the others, had taken a deep breath and joined in. John caught her eye and gave her a complicit smile that told her he had eaten this way before, and she found she watched him more than she watched Ray and Annie, following his lead. The blubber surprised her with its taste, which she found almost pleasant, but the texture, she thought, would take some getting used to.
Ray nodded at them both approvingly. He clearly enjoyed eating in the tradition of his wife’s people, but told her he was pretty happy for a restaurant meal in Fort McPherson, too. It’s a rare Southerner, he told Nina, who can chow down on a traditional meal. Pauline had spent most of the evening close to Nina, bringing her small things to look at, chatting non-stop as, indeed, Annie had warned Nina she would.
Nina walked back full of raw meat and personal pride. John walked her as far as the barracks, the two of them discussing the meal.
“You dug in like a Kigirktaugnuit,” John said. She raised her eyebrows. “I was impressed.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I liked it.”
Nina declined John’s offer to play cards with the others at the warehouse, preferring some quiet time to digest the evening — physically and intellectually — sitting on the front step of the barracks and writing in her journal.
Now, Nina tosses in a sleep as light as the sky outside, pillow over her head to shut out the fingers of light that creep from behind the blinds.
SOMETIME PAST MIDNIGHT the scent of tobacco smoke and drying caribou hide overtakes the smell of socks drying over the stove.
“There’s a storm coming,” Kudnalik comments after a while.
“Well, you’d know,” says Gorham. “You Eskimos always seemed to know. It’s downright spooky.”
“It’s not so hard. You watch the colour of the water, the movement of animals. You listen, and you hear the birds are no longer singing. Even the dogs are smarter than you. You should have paid better attention.”
Gorham grunts in agreement. “All that planning we did. I didn’t like it that there were twelve of us when the time came. I thought we’d have better luck with fewer people, but then one found out, and another, and another. We broke into one of the warehouses that the Pacific Steam Whaling Company kept under lock and key — to keep out the Eskimos — and stocked up on food and guns and ammo, so that when Bodfish and his party went after us, as we knew he would, we could keep them at bay.”
“The one you killed first was Kiogiak. He was my cousin.”
“Well he shouldn’t have been there,” Gorham says dismissively, but he pushes the tobacco tin across the table to Kudnalik in a conciliatory gesture.
“What was he to do? The captain says go search, he goes. He left behind a wife and a daughter on the boat, where they sewed the clothes for the white whalers. Too many of our women were on those boats. Some for the captains — some young ones, too. Some to make parka or mukluk. Kiogiak’s wife probably sewed the clothes you were wearing when you shot him!”
Gorham, ignoring him, continues. “I felt bad about ransacking that camp. I knew a couple of those men, even though they weren’t from our ship. But what could we do? We needed those supplies. But I’d have come after us too, I warrant, if my supplies were gone. Still, we’d have escaped if it wasn’t for that storm.”
“Like the one that’s coming now,” says Kudnalik. “Can you hear my dogs whining?”
Gorham listens, head cocked. “That’s just the wind,” he says.
“No. My dogs know. It’s a long way off, but still they know.”
“It was the storm that did it. Six were captured. Simpson was shot, and Morgan’s knee was shattered. Three got away, and for all I know, made it out.”
“Maybe.”
“The storm confused me. All that white; I couldn’t see. I shouted for them. I walked circles looking for tracks, but they were gone. The wind was howling; I’d never felt anything like it. I couldn’t feel my hands or feet or face. After a while I prayed to see anyone, anyone at all — even that goddamn joker Bodfish.”
“You saw me.”
“Actually, I tripped over one of your dogs. They were all just lumps in the snow, but he came up all teeth.�
�� Gorham shakes his head at the memory and rubs at his ankle. “There I was, drowning in snow and wind and fear and then there was this goddamn thing tearing at my leg.”
“You shot my lead dog. He was sleeping.” Kudnalik nods at the figure in the bed, as if the sleeping young woman and the long-dead, sleeping husky have something in common. “She wants to know about the people who were here a long time ago. Maybe she digs up our past so she doesn’t have to dig up her own.”
“That’s awfully philosophical of you.”
“Being dead makes you see things differently,” Kudnalik says. “Anyway, I think it is better to leave bones lie.”
“As long as mine don’t get chewed up by some damn Eskimo dog,” Gorham tells Kudnalik as he rises from the table, “it doesn’t matter to me.”
IN THE MORNING I’m tired, still short of sleep, and making tea when I hear the sound of voices. It’s Sunday, and our day off. I was planning a hike around the island, perhaps another visit to the graveyards. For some reason I feel drawn there.
John is here, with Pauline and Luke. Pauline is talking a blue streak, and I feel suddenly jealous that she should be as comfortable with John as she’s become with me.
“They tagged along,” John explains when he walks in the door without knocking. “Sorry; I’m looking for Andy. I was thinking of a hike — with anyone other than Frank,” he laughs.
“You two have an argument?” I ask him. Pauline wraps her arms around my leg and I rest my hand on her head, my jealousy abated.
“It’s just a lot of time to spend with one person.”
“I know what you mean.”
John and I eat breakfast while Pauline and Luke wander around the barracks, looking at my things, mostly. Pauline puts on my sunglasses and grins. Before long both kids are decked out in my clothes. When Luke holds up my bra, I take it away, embarrassed. “That’s about enough,” I say. “How about we walk you home?”
We find George pitching a ball at Albert, who swings at it with a solid piece of driftwood. “Want to play baseball?” Albert asks John, but he shakes his head. We’ve decided to hike across to the north shore and then circle around to the graveyards. We leave the kids and strike out across the tundra. It’s a grey day, fog drifting, but it’s all we have, and it’s enough.
