The Swarm (74 page)

‘Cracks in the ice, pressure ridges…' His uncle laughed. ‘Well, this certainly isn't a freeway. Come on, be honest, you must have missed something of this?'

Anawak shook his head. ‘No,' He said and immediately felt ashamed.

 

Anawak had spent most of his life on Vancouver Island, and had dedicated himself to marine biology, so he was bound to feel more of an affinity with nature than with any man-made construct. Yet whale-watching in Clayoquot Sound was quite different from sledging across a featureless expanse of white, gliding over the strait towards the ocean, with brown tundra on the right and the glaciated peaks of Bylot Island to the left. While the climate in western Canada seemed to have been designed with humans in mind, the Arctic was spectacularly hellish: fantastically beautiful, but sufficient unto itself, and fatal to anyone deluded enough to think that humans could conquer it. The settlements looked like a stubborn attempt to take ownership of a land that defied subjugation. The ride in the qamutik to the floe-edge resembled a journey into the unconscious.

Anawak's sense of time had abandoned him after another night in the midnight sun. They were on their way to the earth's primal source. Even someone as rational as Anawak, who could find a scientific explanation for everything, suddenly saw the logic in the old Inuit story of why the polar bear padded mournfully over the ice. Its love for an Inuk woman had clouded its judgement. The bear had warned the woman not to tell her husband about their illicit meetings, but when the hunter returned after weeks of tracking in vain, she took pity on him and told him where her lover could be found. The bear heard her treachery, and while the hunter went to look for it, it crept to her igloo, intending to kill her. Raising its paw, it was overcome with sorrow. Not even her death could undo the betrayal. It trudged away.

Anawak's skin prickled with the cold.

Whenever Nature had allowed man to approach, her trust had been betrayed. Since then, so the legend continued, man had been attacked by polar bears. This was the bears' kingdom. They were stronger than man,
but in the end mankind had defeated them and, in so doing, had defeated itself. Although Anawak had turned his back on his homeland for the best part of two decades, he was well aware that industrial chemicals, like DDT and highly toxic PCBs, were transported by the wind and the currents from Asia, North America and Europe to the Arctic Ocean. They accumulated in the fatty tissue of whales, seals and walruses, which were eaten by polar bears and humans, who fell ill. Breastmilk from Inuit women contained levels of PCBs that were twenty times higher than the amount listed as harmful by the World Health Organisation. Inuit children suffered from neurological impairments, and IQ levels were falling. The wilderness was being poisoned because the qallunaat still couldn't, or wouldn't, grasp the way in which the world worked: sooner or later, everything was distributed everywhere, through the winds and the water.

Was it any surprise that something at the bottom of the ocean had decided to put a stop to it?

After two hours of sledging over the ice they veered right towards the coast of Baffin Island. Stiff from sitting down for so long and from bracing themselves against the bumpy ground, they trudged over the flat ice and up on to the land, past rocks covered with lichen and towards the snow-free tundra. Individual flower buds dotted the mossy waterlogged ground: crimson saxifrage and cinquefoil, colours glowing against the boggy soil. The group had chosen the right time of year to come here. In summer the place would be buzzing with flies.

The ground rose gently. One of the guides led them on to a plateau with a view of the ocean and the snow-capped mountains. He pointed out the remains of an ancient Thule settlement and showed them two plain crosses that marked the graves of German whalers. Some siksiks, or Arctic ground squirrels, chased each other over the plains, disappearing into burrows in the ground. Mary-Ann picked up some stones and juggled them deftly. It was an Inuit sport, as old as the hills. Anawak tried to copy her, but his efforts provoked a roar of collective laughter. The slightest thing, like someone slipping, always had the Inuit in stitches.

After a quick lunch of sandwiches and coffee, they crossed an even wider lead in the ice and headed for Bylot Island. Meltwater spurted in all directions beneath the skidoos' rubber tracks. Pack ice piled up in odd formations, blocking their path and necessitating further detours, but it
wasn't long before they were gliding beneath the cliffs of Bylot Island. The noise of squawking birds filled the air. Kittiwakes were nesting in the rocks in their thousands. Great flocks circled the cliffs. The convoy halted.

‘Time for a walk,' announced Akesuk.

‘We've only just had one,' said Anawak.

‘That was three hours ago, my boy.'

Unlike Baffin Island's gently sloping tundra, the shoreline of Bylot Island rose precipitously out of the water. The walk turned into a climb. Akesuk pointed to a trail of white bird droppings leading down from a crevice in the rock, high above their heads. ‘Gyrfalcons,' he said. ‘Beautiful creatures.' He made curious whistling noises, but the falcons wouldn't be tempted out. ‘If we were further inland, we'd have a good chance of spotting them. We'd probably see a few foxes, snow geese, owls, falcons and buzzards.' Akesuk smiled ironically. ‘On the other hand, we might not. That's the Arctic for you. You can't count on anything. An unreliable lot, these animals - just like the Inuit, right, Leon?'

‘I'm not a qallunaaq, if that's what you're suggesting,' Anawak protested.

‘Good.' His uncle sniffed the air. ‘We'll spare ourselves the trouble of going any further. Seeing as you're no longer a qallunaaq, you're bound to return. Now, let's head out to the floe-edge - we should make the most of this weather.'

 

From then on time ceased to exist.

As they made their way east, leaving Bylot Island in their wake, the ice became rougher and the runners took even more of a battering. Cold winds had left thin layers of ice on the surface of the puddles, which tinkled beneath them like shattering glass. Anawak spotted a narrow lead and called to the driver, but the man had already seen it - he turned as the skidoo raced over the ice, pulling the qamutik behind it, and grinned.

‘So you haven't forgotten everything,' laughed Akesuk.

Anawak hesitated. Then he joined in. He felt ridiculously proud to have spotted a crack in the ice.

The afternoon light conjured sun dogs in the sky. That was what the Inuit called the peculiar apparitions that formed on either side of the sun, coloured luminous spots created by the refraction of the sun's rays
through tiny frozen crystals in the air. Pack ice had stacked up in the distance, forming steep, jagged barriers. Then smooth, open water appeared on their right. A seal rose up, glanced at them and dived. After a while its head popped back up to stare at them inquisitively. They left the water behind them and headed for a larger pool, which seemed to Anawak to stretch for ever, until he realised that it wasn't a pool but the open ocean. They had reached the floe-edge.

Before long they saw a collection of tents ahead. The procession halted. There were greetings all round - some people knew each other already. The group at the camp came from Pond Inlet and Igloolik. They'd caught a narwhal earlier and had carved it up, leaving the carcass further to the east near the floe-edge, in the direction that Anawak's expedition was heading. Pieces of its skin were passed round, and the talk turned to the hunt. Two men joined them, hunters returning from the floe-edge on skidoos, on their way home. Their qamutiks were loaded with hunting kayaks and the bodies of two seals they'd shot the day before. One man said the seals would follow the retreating ice, arriving at their feeding and breeding grounds earlier than usual. He swung his Winchester 5.6 as he talked, and advised them to be careful. The slogan on his cap read, ‘Work is only for people who don't know how to hunt.' Anawak asked if he'd noticed anything odd about the whales, whether they'd seemed aggressive or had attacked. Apparently they hadn't. Suddenly the whole camp flocked to listen. Everyone was
au fait
with the reports and knew every last fact about the phenomena that had terrified the world. As far as Anawak could tell, though, the Arctic had been spared.

As evening drew in, they left the camp.

The two hunters headed back to Pond Inlet, while Anawak's party continued in the direction of the floe-edge. After a while they passed the remains of the dead narwhal. Flocks of birds were squabbling over the meat. They carried on, trying to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the carcass, but when they finally stopped it was still within sight. The guides set up camp thirty metres or so from the floe-edge. Boxes were unloaded from the sleds, and the radio mast was erected so that they could keep in contact with the outside world. In no time the guides had pitched five tents, four for the travellers and a kitchen tent, all with wooden flooring and camping mats. Three sheets of plywood daubed with white paint served as a toilet, housing a bucket lined with a blue plastic bag and topped with a scratched enamel seat.

‘About time too,' beamed Akesuk.

While the others finished setting up camp, he was the first to disappear into the honey-pot, as the Inuit nicknamed it. The guides detached the skidoos from the sleds and proposed a race. Anawak was shown how to manoeuvre one, and soon they were shooting past each other on the shimmering ice. Anawak's heart lightened. He loved being there.

The races continued until one of the men from Igloolik was declared the overall winner, and their thoughts turned to food. Mary-Ann shooed them out of the kitchen tent, so they stood outside, leaning up against the sleds and huddling together to fend off the cold. A young woman started to tell an Inuit story of the kind that was told and retold but never the same way twice. Anawak could remember such stories lasting for days.

It was getting on for midnight when Mary-Ann served dinner - grilled Arctic char, caribou chops with rice, roasted Eskimo potatoes, and to wash it all down, litres of tea. The kitchen tent was supposed to accommodate everyone, but it was unquestionably too small - Akesuk was furious, and cursed the man from whom he'd hired it - so they took their plates outside and balanced them on the sleds and boxes,

One after another, the travellers retired to bed. Then at half past one in the morning, Akesuk reached into the depths of his bag and brought out a bottle of champagne. He winked slyly at Anawak. Mary-Ann turned up her nose and said goodnight, so Anawak and his uncle were left alone, with the exception of the man on bear-watch, who was standing on a mound of pack ice with a rifle at his feet.

‘In that case we'll have to drink it by ourselves,' said Akesuk.

‘I don't drink.'

‘Of course.' Akesuk looked at the bottle mournfully. ‘Are you sure? I packed it specially. I was waiting for the right occasion. And the occasion…Well, you've come home, so I thought…'

‘I don't want to lose control, Iji.'

‘Control of what? Of your life or of this moment?' He stowed the bottle away. ‘No problem. There'll be other occasions. Maybe we'll catch something big. Who knows? We might get a beluga or a walrus. How about a walk before we turn in?'

‘Good idea.'

They strolled down to the floe-edge. Anawak let his uncle take the
lead. The old man had a better sense of where the ice was stable and where it might break. The Inuit had hundreds of words for every possible kind of snow or ice, but not one that meant ‘snow' or ‘ice' in general. Right now they were walking on elastic ice. Salt separated from water as it froze, so icebergs were formed entirely of fresh water. Pack ice and drift ice contained traces of salt - the faster the water froze, the greater the salinity of the ice. That increased its elasticity, which was good in winter because it prevented it cracking too easily, but problematic in spring when it heightened the risk of break-up. The mere shock of falling into the cold water was enough to kill someone, but the greater danger was of being swept beneath the ice.

They found a spot near the floe-edge and leaned up against a block of pack ice. The silvery sea stretched in front of them. Anawak spotted the steel-blue bodies of graylings flitting just beneath the surface. For a while they let the minutes tick by, and suddenly, as though Nature had decided to reward them for their patience, two spiral-ridged tusks rose out of the water like a pair of crossed swords. A couple of male narwhal appeared a few metres from the floe-edge. Their rounded mottled heads came into view, then the dark grey bodies dived down. In less than fifteen minutes they'd be back. That was their rhythm.

Anawak watched in fascination. Narwhal were hardly ever seen off the coast of Vancouver Island. For years they'd been threatened with extinction. Their tusks, which were actually modified teeth, were pure ivory, condemning them to centuries of slaughter. They were still on the list of endangered species, but the narwhal population in Nunavut and Greenland had crept back up to ten thousand.

The ice made soft creaking and groaning noises as the water rose and fell. Birds were still squawking around the remains of the dead narwhal. A gentle light bathed the mountains and glaciers of Bylot Island, casting shadows on the frozen sea. The sun hugged the horizon, pale and icy.

‘You asked whether I'd missed this,' said Anawak.

Akesuk stayed silent.

‘I hated it, Iji. I hated it, and I despised it. You wanted an answer. Now you know.'

His uncle sighed. ‘You despised your father,' he said.

‘Maybe. But you try explaining the difference to a twelve-year-old, whose father and people seem as wretched as each other. My father was weak and constantly drunk. All he did was whine and drag my mother
down till she put an end to it all - she couldn't see any other way. Everyone was killing themselves back then. Name one family that wasn't in mourning for someone who'd taken their own life. All those stories about the proud Inuit, the self-sufficient Inuit - well, there wasn't much evidence of it back then.' He faced Akesuk. ‘If your parents are reduced to wrecks in the space of a few years, get addicted to drugs, lose the will to live, how do you cope? What do you do when your mother hangs herself and all your father can do is get drunk. I told him to stop. I told him that I could get a job, that I'd do anything if he stopped drinking, but he just stared at me and went on as usual.'