Country of Cold (13 page)

He sensed the change in her mood and that he had been talking too much. He hit balls for a while and then handed the club back to her. In the clatter and whirr of flying golf balls there was almost no speech, as there was now no speech between Daphne and Rick. She finished
off the bucket and said she had to go home, she had things to do. This was only a week after they had eaten breakfast together at Harmon’s Drugs.

She did not go to the Olive that night, as she had promised. She stayed home and the next morning she slept late, as was her custom, and when it was time for her to get up she rolled over again and shut her eyes. She kept on doing that until she heard the hum of the drive-home traffic in the street. Then she listened to the radio beside her bed until it was dark out.

She showered quickly in the washroom at the end of the hall and dressed there too. She pulled on her clothes and went outside. She was hungry, and walked down to the McDonald’s on Portage Avenue, where she ordered a Big Mac and fries, and a Coke. She wrote a note as she ate. Then she put on her coat and walked over to Rick’s apartment. She slipped it under the door. His apartment caretaker saw her do this and they exchanged frowns.

The note had her phone number on it and asked him to call her, and said that she didn’t want to go to the Velvet Olive.

He met her at the Harmon’s Drugs lunch counter the next afternoon. “Is anything the matter?” he asked.

“Here’s the deal,” she said. “We’re both losers. Everyone who works with us thinks this. Our parents suspect it, and so do we. Neither one of us is great. And
when you tell me that we are,
I am
, what I do, then what you are telling me is that I am nothing. Because I am doing nothing. And actually, I’ve noticed that.”

“Whoa.”

“Whoa what?”

“Honey, you’re not a loser, and …”

“Honey, I am
, and it’s okay, and you are too, and that’s okay. Just don’t rationalize it for me anymore, okay?”

“I won’t think of myself like that, even if you have to, for some reason.”

“Okay. In any event, maybe it is time to stop doing nothing. I’ve been thinking about getting work here and moving into a proper house or something, maybe down on Wolseley Avenue.”

“That’s a great idea.”

“Yeah, well, it’s about time anyway. I don’t want to philosophize anymore about all this. I just want to do this, and go forward, okay?”

“Sure,” he said, leaning back.

“Good.” She exhaled.

“I’m not sure why you needed me to come down here and hear this, though.”

She stared at him blankly.

“I mean, after all, what you do is your business, and what I do is mine.”

She kept staring.

“And if you don’t like how I see the world moving forward, then fine.”

She blinked. He stood up. She couldn’t think of what she should say. She had gotten way ahead of herself, but she thought also that this was the last chance she had to be absurd without being ridiculous. She couldn’t think of what to say.

“See you around,” he said, and left.

Three months later, near the end of March, she ran into him at the Bay. It was a sunny day and the snow was melting quickly. Spring had come in the course of an afternoon two days earlier and it had turned abruptly from too cold to intoxicatingly warm. In the air one could smell damp and mouldy grass for the first time in half a year. The whole city was happy and walking down the sand-covered sidewalks with their parkas unzipped smiling like they were deranged. She spotted him in the luggage department. “Going on a trip?” she asked, as she sidled up to him, perusing a rack of the less expensive canvas-sided models.

“Hey,” he said. “There you are.”

“Yep.”

“I haven’t seen you around anywhere.” She shrugged. “Where are you going?”

“Pittsburgh.”

“Why?”

“Mr. McMahon’s office gave me a call the other day.”

“No way.”

“Scout’s honor.”

“Whoa.”

“It’s maybe just a temporary thing—someone on his circuit blew their knee out.”

“How’s your back?” she asked.

“Much better. Or, anyway, better enough.”

“So when are you going?”

“In a few days. I have to move out of my apartment here and take care of some things.”

“Wow. This is so great. What’s your handle going to be?”

“I dunno. They didn’t think much of ‘Rick the Stick.’ I think they just tell me what it’ll be.”

“That’s probably best.”

“Yes.”

“So I won’t hold you up then. You’re probably swamped with things to do before you go.”

“It’s pretty busy, yes.”

“So, listen, best of luck,” and she stuck out her hand. “Best of luck,” he repeated distractedly, shaking her hand.

“I’m gonna go,” she said.

“Me too,” he said,

“I’m working again, now.”

“I know.”

“You know?”

“That’s what you said you were going to do when we last talked.”

“Right, but I actually did it.”

“I thought you would.”

“You
did?”

“Yeah. I mean, why not? It was time, wasn’t it?”

“It seems it was.”

“I’m gonna go,” he said.

“Yes. You should give me a call sometime.”

“Sure. These days are pretty busy, but I will when I have a chance.”

“I moved.”

“Do you have a pen?”

“No.”

“Me either.”

“It’s listed.”

“Okay.”

A year and a half ago she had been fly-fishing in the Partridge River when the snow had started falling, early September and hardly a surprise. She had caught three char in the space of a couple of hours and so perhaps she hadn’t watched the sky as closely as she ought to have. By the time she had her gear loaded up on her ATV and was headed back to town, the tundra was already disappearing beneath the snow.

An old story, and one she had heard about a dozen times in the two years she’d been up there, about how quickly the weather changes in the early autumn and
how Kablunauks all think it feels far too much like summer to blizzard—but it does and in an instant the bright and exquisite summer tundra disappears and that is it, winter is there and nothing halfway about it.

But by the time she had gone a couple hundred yards she knew she was in trouble. She had been off the trail for a least a few minutes when she finally acknowledged that she couldn’t see a thing. She brought the ATV to a stop, shuddering with fear as she let it idle and looked around, into the wind and the snow. She had a tarp, and a warm coat. She called the nursing station on her VHF. She was barely able to make out a reply. They were barely able to make out her. It didn’t matter. One look out the window would tell them what the trouble was.

She pulled the tarp up over the ATV on one side and weighted down the edge with rocks. It made a sort of lean- to and she pulled in her pack and her gear with her. She was out of the wind, at least, which is a very big deal in circumstances such as these. Her idea was to stay awake and warm by doing abdominal crunches beneath the tarp.

She got to 250 when she fell back, exhausted. That would keep her going for at least a little while, she figured.

When she awoke it was early morning and the sky was quiet. She wasn’t sure why she had awoken; what she had always been told was that if one fell asleep in the snow, one simply became colder and colder until one’s heart stopped. She was very stiff. She was too cold to
shiver. It was as if her body had known the trouble she was in and stirred her one last time. The wind had stopped. When she crawled out from under her lean- to and stood up, the sun was glowing orange against the sparkling plane of snow all around her.

It took her a few minutes to get the ATV going, but when it coughed into life she finally exhaled. She loaded her gear back on and revved the engine. She wasn’t sure exactly where she was and the land looked very different under the snow. She drove slowly in the direction she had been headed when she stopped. She came to a stream she didn’t recognize, and realized that she was headed upstream, inland and away from town. She turned around and followed the current of the stream. After twenty minutes it met the Tagak River, which she knew. Another two hours after that she saw the lights of the airport on the horizon. She followed them into town. The ATV belonged to the nursing station, and so she drove there and put it away in the garage. The station was lit up, she noticed, and she walked to the door.

Inside was bedlam. Dozens of people had been out fishing when the storm hit and most were still on the land. All the nurses had been called in and were attending a stream of mild frostbite and hypothermia. Mary, one of the long-timers, noticed Daphne and nodded to her. She nodded back.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Yeah. How are things around here?”

“Lotsa little stuff. The people who’ve come in so far mostly weren’t out there long enough to get into trouble. A lot of folks still on the land, though.”

“How many do you think?”

“Nobody is sure, exactly.”

“Kablunauks?”

“Including you, only a couple, as far as we know.”

“The locals will probably be okay.”

“Probably, except for the teenagers.”

Daphne showered there, at the nursing station, and put her char into the freezer in the lunchroom. She thought to herself that it was time to take an actual holiday, get to Cuba or something.

Sarah was eight and her brother Robert nine. They had been out hunting with their uncle Lukie Oktuk when the snow started falling. They were much farther out than Daphne had been, fifty miles up the Meliadine River, and there was no thought given to travelling in that weather. Lukie Oktuk pitched his tent and blocked the wind with their ATV. Then he shovelled snow around the tent and they all crawled inside. He stepped outside to light a lamp, and when he came back into the tent the warm orange light of the lamp set aside any gnawing worry the three of them might have had.

They each took off their boots and then crawled into their sleeping bags. Lukie told his niece and nephew a bedtime story about
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
.
(They all remembered with their mind’s eye, the scene being evoked—they had watched the video together two weeks ago: Harrison Ford panting gamely as he swings from jungle vine to jungle vine; who could imagine a place actually like that, what would it smell like?) When the stone goblins had all been decapitated, Lukie turned the lamp low and they all went to sleep. The wind was howling outside and the nylon fabric of the tent shivered with each gust.

The lamp went out sometime in the course of the evening, and with it out, the tent became cold very quickly. Robert was the first to awake, and he crawled out of his sleeping bag and took the lamp down off the hook Lukie had hung it from. He opened the fuel cap and found the fuel bottle Lukie had set beside the tent door. He filled the lamp carefully and replaced the cap. He lit a match and touched it to the wick. The wick flared brightly and he turned it down.

The tent was abruptly colder, not warmer, Robert noticed, and he looked away from the bright flame of the lamp to see how this could be. The walls of the tent were peeling back like tissue paper. Drops of burning nylon splattered down on the tent floor, and all three sleeping bags were alight. Sarah was screaming and Lukie awoke, looked around twice, and stood, his hair catching fire as it brushed the tent. He put his arms into Sarah’s burning sleeping bag and pulled her out; he swung her into the crook of his left arm and his right
arm caught Robert by the waist. They charged out of the tent and into the snow. Lukie pushed Sarah facedown into the snow and rolled her in it. Then he did the same to Robert.

In the night Robert, Sarah, and Lukie watched the tent burn down as they stood in the tundra in their underwear. The fire was finished in minutes. They approached the tent when it had died down and tried to find something to wear. The sleeping bags were mats of partially melted and burned feathers. The boots were all destroyed too; there were a total of three mittens that could still be worn, and Lukie put two on Sarah and one on Robert. The rifle was undamaged, in its hard plastic case, and the ammunition had not exploded.

Lukie started up the ATV, which had not caught fire. He put the rifle in the komatik and put Robert in the front of the seat and Sarah between them. He drove to the river ford where the caribou had been crossing for the last three days. The caribou were bedded down, and as the ATV approached, the more nervous females lifted their heads and lowed. There were dozens of them visible, even in the thin moonlight. That year’s calves huddled under the snow close to their mothers. Lukie drove to within a hundred yards of one cluster of animals. Then he stopped the ATV and opened the rifle case.

He dropped most of the shells he tried to feed into the magazine, his fingers were so numb by this point. He rested the rifle against the seat of the ATV and aimed for
the largest animal. He fired. He lifted his head and rotated the bolt of the rifle, drawing it back and sliding it forward. He lowered his head and fired again. The caribou rose to their feet, looking around confusedly in all directions. He fired again. Three animals remained standing as the others trotted slowly away. They all coughed repeatedly. One lowered her head and appeared to vomit, then slumped onto her forelegs, kneeling, and then lying. The other two walked around in small circles before collapsing. Lukie drove the ATV over to the dead caribou and skinned them quickly. The bodies, ungutted and otherwise whole, lay like pink anatomic models in the snow as Lukie wrapped Sarah and Robert in the still bloody and glistening hides, before wrapping one around himself.

He turned the ATV downriver and drove as fast as he could. He could feel Sarah shivering between his legs and he crouched over her as completely as he could. By the time he could see the lights of the airport on the horizon she had stopped shivering.

When Daphne was called to the treatment room, she was still towelling herself off. Her first thought was that she was sure it could wait until she put on some clothes, for crying in the sink. When the janitor pounded on the door of the shower again, she pulled her sweatshirt over her shoulders and stepped into a pair of sweatpants. She looked out into the hall and he was standing there,
bouncing up and down in little steps. He waved her down the hall.