Authors: William Fiennes
It was 23 May. The swifts would be back at the ironstone house. On Baffin, my green insulated Below Zero gumboots, Capilene thermals, fleece overgarments and puffy down-filled jacket were little proof against the cold. I lugged my bags from the airport to the Discovery Hotel, regarding the Arctic parkas with envy and covetousness. The night was dark for an hour or two, and I slept fitfully, confused by this extended photoperiod. By morning the cloud had vanished. The sky was deep blue, flawless; I needed to visor my sunglasses with a flat hand, as if saluting, to protect my eyes from the fierce Arctic albedo.
During the night a gas explosion had blown out the back of an apartment block in Happy Valley. A crowd gathered, families gazing up at interiors rudely exposed to open air: cookers, televisions, velveteen sofas, dishevelled beds, the edges of floors and walls ragged with torn carpet and mangled steel, a thick black smoke column rising into the blue. Firefighters trained hoses on the smouldering apartments, visors pushed up on their yellow helmets, gas tanks inverted on their backs, valves not at the neck but at the base of the spine, as if to distinguish them from scuba divers. One crew member stood watching, resting: a woman with matted hanks of black hair on her forehead, her cheeks smirched with charcoal. She was smoking a cigarette, staring at the burning house, taking long, deep drags and breathing out grey smoke, thinner and lighter than the smoke churning upwards with constant, liquid volume from the burnt-out apartments.
Nearby, the Cathedral of St Jude was shaped like a snow-house, with windows and a cross at the zenith of its white dome. Inside, behind the altar table, hung purple drapes covered with bright-coloured appliqué decorations: snow geese, beluga whales, walruses, dogteams, igloos. And in front of the drapes hung a marvellous cross: two narwhal tusks, presented by the community at Pond Inlet, fixed to an upright and crossbeam of varnished oak, cusps and furrows spiralling round each tapering ivory shaft from hilt to tip. The lectern was a sled stood up on its feet, with a bible open on the sloping topslat, between the curve of the runners, and a microphone fixed in the prongs of a fish spear.
I remembered another church, its spire the first landmark you’d glimpse above the trees, marking the site like a golfer’s flag, a skip’s broom held upright in a curling house, as the mast stayed by taut steel hawsers marked Matthew’s house in the hills outside Austin – a jutting stone pulpit, white marble cartouches, pendant electric heaters glowing orange over deep-toned oak pews, hollows worked into the floor’s stone slabs by centuries of shoes. The lectern was a brass eagle; a bible lay open like another bird on the backs of its wings (an eagle, children were told, to wing the words to heaven); a snow-haired widow played the organ as if driving a freight truck, deft with pedals and dashboard instruments, checking a rearview mirror for the clergyman’s signals.
*
T
HE 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!’
*
I
N 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
J
EFF
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.’