Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  He could plainly see the weak links in Fay’s crazy story. How could she know for sure that this Hugh Morgan, whose mention in that file had so upset her, really was her grandfather? They shared a name, but Morgan was hardly uncommon. What’s more, how did he himself know that Morgan really was her grandfather’s name? She could have made that up. Maybe she’d even written that note herself, the note that she had tried to blame on him. He knew that he hadn’t written it. When he examined the handwriting it appeared to be Bert’s, like all the rest of it, but some people are good at forgery: she could have written it herself – he’d been asleep quite a while. And as far as he knew it was that note, and that alone, that linked Fay’s own supposed family history to Bert’s weird obsessions.

  Nelson knew something about delusions. Towards the end of her life his mother had told her doctors – although not her own sons, whom she no longer trusted – that she was really Princess Anastasia, the missing daughter of the last Czar of Russia, whose body couldn’t be found after the Bolsheviks butchered the royal family.

  This was, the doctor told Nelson and Bert, a surprisingly common delusion among troubled women. Nelson hadn’t really understood the doctor’s explanation, but he thought himself that it might have something to do with swapping sorrow for tragedy. Tragedy would be kind of an upgrade. It at least could be said to have some sort of point.

  Who are you? His mother had asked him that too, and then she stopped talking to him. She thought that he and Bert worked for the communists and she was terrified that they would kill her, the last of the Romanov princesses. Or even worse, that they would annihilate her story and force her back to her own life.

  Who are you? He should have asked Fay that question. World War Two. Lost explorers. What an interesting person she was in those yarns.

  He remembered how he had found her, waiting alone in a deserted airport whose planes were all grounded. How long had she been sitting there? How long had it been since the last flight came in? Had she really flown in that day, or had she been haunting the place, waiting for someone to share in her madness? Had she been waiting for him?

  But that was impossible. He’d missed his sign, his turn-off. Otherwise he would never have gone to the airport that evening, would never have met her at all. Then the storm had closed the passes. If it hadn’t been for that random delay – two hours would have seen him past the boom at Fort McPherson – he would have left her in Inuvik, forgotten already. Right about now he’d be driving into Edmonton.

  It was only coincidence that brought them together. He felt again, just for an instant, the stab of grief and loss that had staggered him, a few weeks after the death of his mother, when Russian scientists announced that Anastasia’s DNA had been found in the ashes of her family. She had never been lost, would always be dead now. His mother too had once been a girl.

  He made himself think of driving on a clear winter day in Alberta, distant sunlight through the birches on the banks of the Peace River. It was beautiful, it was black and white, it was thirty-five years ago, and it was still there before his eyes, but how could that highway still be an escape?

  He foresaw himself buying gas in Dawson Creek so that he wouldn’t have to stop in Grande Prairie, the town where he’d been fairly happy, he had thought, with his parents and his brother and his grandfather.

  He saw himself driving Bert’s Equinox and being randomly stopped by the cops.

  There was no getting away from it. He’d have to talk to the Mounties before they talked to him. But he felt very tired. He would wait until tomorrow and then he’d go and see them. He had until then. Meantime, there were still several folders piled up on Bert’s desk. He picked up the top-most. ‘Eskimo Joe,’ it said.

  King William Island, North West Passage, 1903

  My name is Ipiirviq, which was also the name of my father’s brother who died just before I was born. He went hunting for seals on the edge of the ice and his dogs came back without him. When I was born the angakkuq examined me and said that Ipiirviq had returned to his family. I was given his name, and my father and mother called me their brother and my sisters called me their uncle. My uncle was a very good hunter, and so am I.

  The English whalers called me Joe, though why they chose this name I don’t know. In the gospels Joseph was a kindly man who raised a child that wasn’t his own. I too became a stepfather, but that was much later and the child didn’t live.

  When Captain Bowlby took Taqulittuq and I to England on his whaling ship he tried to call me by my Inuk name, but he could only say ‘Ebierbing’, which I thought was close enough. Then when we were in England I became Joseph Ebierbing, because it was thought proper that I offer two names, like a white man, when we went to meet the Queen.

  The Queen was named Victoria, like the island to the west of here which the Copper people call Kitlineq. She was very polite to me but she spoke mostly to my wife Taqulittuq, who wore the fine clothes of an English lady, as handsome as any of them, and took her tea with the best English manners. I had to sit still and keep my mouth shut and watch what Taqulittuq did with the cups and the forks so that I wouldn’t embarrass her. The Queen’s husband was also there. He had to keep his mouth shut too, which I thought was rather funny. He caught my eye while the women were talking, all of us there in our stiff clothes and buttons, and it was all that the two of us could do not to laugh.

  Taqulittuq was the only wife I ever had. We chose each other when we were little more than children in Cumberland Sound and I never shared her with another man. I remember our wedding in Captain Bowlby’s house in Hull in England. They said we should be married by a Christian priest if we were going to be presented to the Queen as man and wife. We’d already been married with our own people in Cumberland Sound, but Taqulittuq was a great Christian when we were in England, and I thought to myself, what harm was there in another feast? After the prayers were said there was a wonderful dinner, with fresh beef and pork and mutton and cakes, as much as you could eat, and Mrs Bowlby played the piano for us. Taqulittuq wore a blue silk dress that Mrs Bowlby had given her, one that had belonged to her own daughter, and we danced a Scottish and other dances whose names I don’t remember. There were many people there and all were kind to us. Taqulittuq amazed them with the grace of her dancing, but I wasn’t surprised. I knew how well she had danced in our own country.

  Taqulittuq had been known to the whalers in Cumberland Sound as Tookoolito, but in England, and later in America, people called her Hannah, which is a name she took for herself after reading the Bible. In the Bible, Hannah was a woman who couldn’t have children, and prayed to God, and was eventually rewarded with a baby of her own. Taqulittuq also had much sorrow with children, and that is I believe why she started to pray to the Christian god when we were both in England. After we returned to Cumberland Sound she kept many of her English dresses in a sea-chest and would wear then when the whaling ships came. She made tea for the whalers and served it in china cups, and wouldn’t allow them to use bad language in our house. Nor did she sleep with any of those who arrived on the whaling ships, not even Captain Hall.

  Captain Charles Francis Hall was from Cincinnati in the United States. He first came to Cumberland Sound aboard the George Henry, a whaler of New London, with Captain Budington, who we knew from his previous voyages to our home. When we first went aboard his ship that summer, having ourselves come back from a journey up the coast, Captain Budington drew Taqulittuq aside and pointed to a man who stood on the deck by himself. He wore city clothes and had thick arms and legs and a very dark beard, and he stared across the deck at us as if he knew us from before.

  Budington said that this man Hall was not a whaler but a traveller. He needed someone to interpret for him and to guide him, and if we agreed to work for him Hall would pay us well, having already read about our expedition to England. And so we agreed to help him. Captain Hall was not like the other white men who came to Cumberland Sound
in the whaling ships. He didn’t swear, seldom drank and didn’t try to sleep with the women. This made people suspicious of him, especially as he showed no interest in whales or in hunting, unlike the other white men in the ships.

  It was easy for our people to understand why white men would come in search of whales, even if they took only the blubber and whalebone and threw the precious meat to the blind eqalussuaqs, the giant Greenland sharks, which became very numerous when the whaling ships were in the sound, moving like shadows under our kayaks. Like us, the whalers loved hunting and were happy when they succeeded. When opportunity afforded they abandoned all other activity to kill as many whales as they could, and when there was nothing else to do they rested and ate, as did we.

  But Hall was an explorer who wanted to make new maps. To accomplish this, he needed always to travel quickly onward, and he was always angry whenever we natives broke our journey to hunt or fish and he was forced to stop with us until we had eaten our fill and rested and repaired our clothing and gear and cached whatever food was left over. He didn’t understand that for us there was no reason to travel except to find better hunting, or that haste is very dangerous: when it is very cold, a person who sweats will soon freeze, and a person who wastes their strength will not easily regain it. But Hall was always in a hurry, always wanting to be somewhere else before the ice melted and made sledging impossible, or before the ice froze and stranded the boats.

  Taqulittuq and I, unlike the others, had been to England and seen all the bustle and industry, and how people there were in so much of a hurry that they built railways and rivers that cut

  into the land. We therefore understood the curiosity that drove Hall to search for new places and put them on his map. I think that is why we became such friends with him. We even invited Hall to stay with us at our camp ashore, to learn to speak and travel like an Inuit himself, instead of wintering on the ship with the whalers.

  Hall had brought with him several books with very old maps. One of these maps showed that the long inlet to the south of Cumberland Sound was really a strait, a short-cut through our island to the further sea beyond it. Hall hoped that he could sail down this strait to reach Repulse Bay, which the people there call Naujaat, and thence make his way overland to King William Island many weeks away in the west. He was sure that on King William Island he would find news of Lord Franklin, the famous English captain who had gone missing many years before. This was then his greatest goal.

  Now, it was well known to us that the inlet in question was not a strait but a very long bay. So to spare Hall a wasted journey I brought him to see my grandmother, Ookijoxy Ninoo, who was famous for her stories of the old days and who could draw maps of all the islands for many weeks around. She talked with Hall and in time he became convinced of her truth. He was on the point of abandoning his plan to visit that inlet when she mentioned that long before her grandmother’s time many white men had left piles of coal there amid the ruins of stone houses.

  Hall became excited when he heard this. He said that my grandmother’s account resembled a story told hundreds of years before by Martin Frobisher, an English captain. Frobisher had come to our country looking for a passage to another great sea to the west.

  But Frobisher found gold in the inlet and instead of exploring he stopped to build mines. After much digging the gold was found to be a different metal, without any value, and they all sailed back to England, keeping the location of the inlet a secret: Frobisher had meant to return there one day and claim the secret passage for himself.

  According to Hall’s book, Frobisher had left messages and cairns on an island at the mouth of the strait that he had called Lok’s Land. But when Hall asked my grandmother about that place she said that it was a very bad place and that he shouldn’t go there. A strange tribe had once lived there, a people called the Tunits, who were cousins of our own people but older in their ways. One day in spring they all went onto the ice foot to celebrate a seal hunt and the tide broke the ice from the land and all the people were taken out to sea and never seen again. Since then our people wouldn’t go to Lok’s Land for fear of their ghosts.

  Nevertheless, Hall took me aside and asked me if I would go there with him. Taqulittuq was away visiting her family and she wouldn’t know that I had gone to Lok’s Land, he said. Besides, there was nothing for Christians to fear from old stories. He told me that he would pay me well. And when I still didn’t agree he made me another promise: that if I went with him to Lok’s Land he would take Taqulittuq and I with him when he returned to America.

  And at that I gave in to him, because I was restless. Since I’d come back from England I found I could no longer be happy just to travel to hunt, and to hunt only to eat, and to eat so I could rest, and to rest only to be able to travel again. In England I’d seen roads diverge from me in all directions and the trains rushing back and forth and the smoke from all the ships that docked in Hull and London. Where were they all going? I’d been told about Jesus, and that life was a journey from one thing to another. If I stayed at Cumberland Sound I would roam around the same shores all my life until one day I didn’t come back from the hunt, or I grew sick and died, or else I grew too old to feed myself and, having no children to care for me, the young people might leave me alone in my last house. Perhaps if I’d had children then, if I could have seen their lives moving onward from my own, I might have answered Hall differently.

  We set out for Lok’s Land with two dog-sledges, accompanied by another man whose name was Koodloo. He’d been promised a rifled musket if he would come. It was June, never dark, and we travelled over smooth ice for a day and a night until we came to Lok’s Land, where we found a little shingle beach on which to drag up the sledges. There were many bearded seals further up the beach nursing new pups. These seals had never been hunted by men, and only tried to swim off when we were already within striking distance. Koodloo and I speared and clubbed so many cows and pups that the sea turned red. And then to add to our happiness a bear came around the point, attracted by the distress calls of the seals, and we brought it to bay with our dogs. I killed it with a single shot from my gun.

  And it was only then, still hot from the pleasure of killing, that we paused to look around us and realized that Hall had disappeared. I saw the great slaughter that we had committed on the beach and an emptiness came into me and then a great fear. The seals looked like dead people – women and children washed up on the sand.

  Koodloo too was filled with horror, and we debated what to do next. We wanted to leave at once but we couldn’t abandon Hall there. So we followed his trail up a steep rocky ridge until we came to the top of the island – rocks and old snow and the odd tuft of sedges shaking in the wind.

  It wasn’t long before we caught up with Hall. He was walking very slowly, casting from one side to another like a dog seeking a scent. Although we hailed him from a distance he didn’t look at us until we were almost upon him.

  Many seabirds nested on the island – gannets, terns and gulls – and these attacked us as we walked, shrieking about our heads and striking our shoulders with their wings and their beaks. Koodloo was frightened. Although he was a famous bird-nester, who would creep down the sheerest cliff just to take a single gull’s egg, he swore to me that he had never encountered an onslaught such as this.

  At last the birds relented and we came to the far side of the island, where steep cliffs dropped into the open sea. There, perched on the edge of the cliff, we saw an odd heap of stones, the height of a man, made of slabs of flat rock piled up on each other. There were two large pieces sticking out from the sides so that it made the shape of a cross facing out to sea. Now Hall slowed his pace at the sight of this strange thing, which was surely man-made, and when I looked at his face I saw how intently he stared at it.

  But of course it was only a heap of old stones, and when Koodloo and I ran towards it Hall shook off his strange mood and came after us. We walked aroun
d it a few times and when he was satisfied Hall said to us that we had made a great discovery, that this was a cairn that had been left by Frobisher as a sign to those who came after him, and that if we opened it up we would surely find a message from hundreds of years ago.

  But it seemed to me that the stones were set together more loosely than the cairns built by white sailors, and when I moved around to the seaward side, to the edge of the cliff itself, the stones no longer resembled a cross but rather the figure of a human, arms outstretched to the sea. I thought of inuksuks, the stone statues built by our people as markers or decoys, and I remembered the story of the strangers who had all been taken by the ice. Or perhaps not all: someone had built this stone thing to mourn for them.

  I told Hall that we had made a mistake in coming to Lok’s Land, and it would be a much greater error still to tamper with these old stones. But he wouldn’t listen to me. I stood apart and turned my back as Hall and Koodloo took the cairn apart stone by stone, setting the pieces around them in an ever-widening circle. There was nothing inside it – no paper, no metal, no cache of old food.

  The waves crashed unseen in the mist at the foot of the cliff, hurling chunks of broken ice against the rocks. The gusts carried spray which froze on our sealskins.

  I told Hall that we should rebuild the cairn so that it would look as it had done before we disturbed it. But again he wouldn’t listen: he was hungry and cold and very downcast at not having found any sign of his Frobisher. He wanted only to leave that place at once.