I didn’t touch it. I didn’t stand too close to it. Some inuksuit marked the sites of deaths, murders, betrayals and acts of bravery; others had healing powers, contained spirits, expressed joy, happiness, evil or terror. There were inuksuit to indicate places of power, places where one should never sleep, places where human beings had been eaten, places of confusion and disorientation, and fearful places where travellers got lost. Some made whistling sounds when wind blew through them; some were healing arches where shamans effected cures. There were inuksuit to which one should show respect, inuksuit which could confer blessings and ensure safe passage. Certain inuksuit marked entrances to spiritual realms from which one returned unburdened.
Wind riffled through the fabric of my parka, the fur-trimmed hood luffing on my shoulders in stronger gusts. Far below, our tent looked like a jousting pavilion, wanting knights, pennants, escutcheons. There were hills and swales in all directions, drawing away on the curve of the sphere, and clouds massing in the south, above the sea. Wind blew into my ear as if into a shell, making a sea sound. A pair of tundra swans flew north, at eye level, their long lancing necks tipped with black bills. An arctic fox trotted across the frozen lake, a tinge, the ivory-yellow of old piano keys, its coat changing from white to a blend of tundra browns as summer approached. Flocks of snow geese pressed northwards. Through binoculars I tracked a pair of white-phase birds as they glided down to a stretch of open tundra beside a stream. They’d start to build nests as more and more tundra was exposed, choosing sites on top of slight undulations, where the ground was comparatively dry and firm.
I wouldn’t see those nests: in two or three days the tundra would be too wet for the snowmachines. I wouldn’t reach the Great Plains of the Koukdjuak, just over the horizon to the north. I was resigned to this. I didn’t mind. I was in Foxe Land, with snow geese. Exhilarated, light-headed, I stood on the summit, next to the inuksuk, breathing deeply. Apart from the wind, all I could hear was geese: the faint halliard tinkle of distant flocks, the sharp yaps of nearby birds, the low electric thrum of beating wings.
Natsiq was sitting outside the tent, smoking a du Maurier.
‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Kingnait.’
I nodded.
‘Home!’ Smiling, tic twitching his wispy beard.
*
PAULA BOILED another snow goose. She left the Coleman stove burning while we ate. Muzzy, head swimming, drunk on the fumes, I saw myself hurtling backwards, southwards, everything in fast-motion, a plane flying tail-first from Iqaluit to Churchill, the Muskeg Express rattling back to Winnipeg, the Greyhound reversing all the way down Interstate 35, a film rewinding. I remembered driving the blue Chevy Cavalier from Houston to Eagle Lake, the mesquite trees and shambling longhorn cattle, the galvanized farm sheds and rice bins. I thought of snow geese flying from those Gulf Coast prairies to Baffin Island, flying according to inherited programmes, modified in adult birds by the experience of previous journeys, determining their direction by reference to the sun, the stars and the Earth’s magnetic field, pushing north at the leading edge of spring.
In August, prompted by Zugunruhe, they would fly south again, just as swifts would be flying south across the Mediterranean to their African winter grounds. In a few days I might be watching swifts. I was high on naphtha fumes. I was brimming happily with the fact of being here, with geese, in Foxe Land, on the brink of return. I was ready to go back. But I didn’t want to go back to the conditions of childhood. I didn’t want to feel safe inside the old ironstone house. Not all returns are retreats, and if I wanted to go home, it wasn’t a dream of escape, it was because love can’t exist without the pain of separation, and so much of what I loved was there.
Resting my head on the rolled-up Snow Goose parka, I opened The Snow Goose. Eleanor’s hawk’s feather fell on to my chest. ‘The bird was a young one,’ I read, ‘no more than a year old. She was born in a northern land far, far across the seas, a land belonging to England. Flying to the south to escape the snow and ice and bitter cold, a great storm had seized her and whirled and buffeted her about. It was a truly terrible storm, stronger than her great wings, stronger than anything. For days and nights it held her in its grip and there was nothing she could do but fly before it. When finally it had blown itself out and her sure instincts took her south again, she was over a different land and surrounded by strange birds that she had never seen before.’ I remembered Mr Faulkner reading to us in the high-windowed classroom, women gathering at practice tees to loosen up their swings. I closed the book. There was a pale grey light inside the tent. Paula and Natsiq were asleep beside me. But I couldn’t sleep. Even now, I could hear geese.
*
WHEN MY SPIRITS had been low, alone in the white motel room, adrift in Churchill, confused in Cape Dorset, I’d looked ahead to the moment of return, willing it closer. Now I wondered when my going back began. Was I already going home when I walked down to the tent from the inuksuk? Or not until the next morning, when we packed the qamutiiks and straddled the skidoos, my gloved hands linking at Natsiq’s chest, the engines turning over? We moved away from the campsite, a ring of stones recording our tent’s circumference on the granite plateau, and soon we were heading south, scudding down the lowland tundra swales. I was going back. My mind seized on the word, repeating it – back, back, back – until it lost all meaning. Geese were rafting overhead on the wind. My hands and feet went numb again. There were heaps of dead birds in the long sleds.
We reached the sea that evening: low, massed cloud; pewter-tinted light; the threat of storms. We kept to the shorefast ice of Hudson Strait, hurtling westwards into thick fog. I still felt the pull, more powerful now, of an intimate gravity, as if that force and not the snowmobile were conveying me homeward, not a hard fall but an easy sailing back towards the centre. And when I glimpsed figures standing on the ice, vague in the fog, I assumed I’d dreamed them up, delirious, mirage-ready. But there were people: fifteen or twenty Inuit, five families coming home from a fishing expedition, in Snow Goose parkas and Sorel glacier boots, chatting, smoking cigarettes, stamping their feet to keep the blood moving, fixing the ski on a snowmachine or topping up fuel or securing ropes on qamutiiks, with children running between the sleds, playing tag in the gales that howled in off the Arctic Ocean. My hood was up, my parka zipped as far as it would go, and I looked out through a horseshoe of coyote fur at this impromptu fête on top of the sea.
Engines roared against the wind’s howl. We joined the convoy, twelve skidoos in all, sleds laden with tents, bedding rolls, supplies, red fuel cans, dead char and geese, lashed down under blue and orange tarps. Some of the qamutiiks carried long plywood boxes with women riding in them as if sitting up in their own coffins. The fog enveloped us, as white as the snow. The fixed relationships of ground and sky, vertical and horizontal, were suddenly effaced, leaving nothing but whiteness, as if we were in free fall, plummeting through cloud, feeling for ripcords. Each skidoo’s headlamp probed the fog, light flashing off the silver reflector stripes on the backs of Snow Goose parkas. The headlamp beams linked one skidoo to the next, so that we travelled as a tube of light and heat through the fog, over the shorefast ice, and then inland, up and down hills, until we crested the last ridge of Mallik Island and saw, glimmering faintly, the lights of the town.
Next morning, the twelve-seater Beechcraft took off from Cape Dorset’s airstrip and climbed over Hudson Strait. The ice had broken up: the water far below was deep blue, strewn with gleaming white scrims, plates and bergs. I was exhilarated. I had an end in sight. I wasn’t patient. I wished the distance would collapse in a blink, a fingersnap. I flew from Iqaluit to Montreal and from Montreal to London, aware, minute by minute, of arrival closing in. I kept anticipating, leaping ahead, feeling my body lag behind. I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I tried reading a book, but my mind wouldn’t hold still, my attention wouldn’t cleave to the lines.
The names of airport shops, the weight of coins, newspaper typefaces, voices, forms o
f address, the look of cars: I remembered these. I didn’t take the train into the city. I caught a bus, the Flight, bound for the Midlands. It was June, midsummer, the trees in full leaf, the grass rich and luxuriant, and so much green, green everywhere, the whole country glutted with sap and pigment. The Flight cruised through the cutting in the Chiltern Hills, and on the far side, just as we came out into the Vale of Oxford, I saw a bird, a raptor, with white patches under its wings, and a deep-forked, rust-coloured tail. It held its wings steady, the black primary feathers at each tip spread like fingers, soaring on updrafts created as wind deflected off the north-facing slopes. I knew what it was. A red kite, Milvus milvus – I’d never seen one before, but I remembered my father telling me that a few red kites had been bred in captivity and released close to the cutting, that if you were lucky you might see one from the motorway, it had white patches under its wings, a rust-coloured belly and tail. I couldn’t wait to tell him about the red kite. I wanted to tell everyone on the bus about the red kite.
At the bus station, when the taxi driver asked me where we were going, it took me by surprise, the pleasure of speaking the address, the shape of the words in my mouth. And then everything occurred in inevitable sequence: three roundabouts as we left the town, a red-bricked terraced row, a stand of pines, a school, and then signs, rooflines, the road’s gradients and curves, the dairy buildings with their heavy sliding doors, the toll cottage, the almshouses, the fields in familiar patterns: Little Quarters, Morby’s Close, the Shoulder of Mutton, the Great Ground. The colour of the ironstone. I looked over to the right, expecting to see cricket-bat willows along the Sor Brook, and there they were. Nothing had shifted.
The taxi turned right off the main road, slowed for an elderly woman out with her dog, crossed the Sor Brook by a stone bridge and pulled over at a passing place. I wanted to walk. I walked along the single-track road, carrying my two bags, a spring in my step. I could hear the brook rushing. Rooks were cawing. Sheep were grazing in Danvers Meadow. The spire appeared above the trees. The weathercock’s tailplumes were glinting. I came to the yew by the churchyard gate. I saw the crowns of chestnuts, sycamores and limes, the white stone chimneys, the stone slate roof. Gravel crunched underfoot. Swallows swooped overhead. The rook caws grew louder as I walked up the drive to the house.
Author’s Note
Thank you to the many people who showed me kindness on my journey to Foxe Land. Thank you to Deborah Rogers, Peter Straus, Laura Andreae, Mary Mount, Alicia Yerburgh, Dominic Oliver, Lydia Rainford, Rebecca Senior, Ann Godoff, Susanna Porter, Amanda Urban, Irène Andreae, Kate Wallis, Sonali Wijeyaratne, David Fitzherbert, Rebecca Stratford, Mark Espiner, Jane Kirkpatrick, Judy Bogdanor, Matt Ridley, Ulric Van den Bogaerde, Ingrid Wassenaar, Alex Monsey, Tom Bowring, Laurence Laluyaux and Stephen Edwards. For the sake of clarity, I have taken liberties with Captain Foxe’s spelling when quoting from The North-West Fox. Quotations from The Odyssey come from the translation by Robert Fagles. The Snow Geese draws on the books and papers listed below.
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