Country of Cold (22 page)

At the nursing station Constable Gregoire stopped at the locked door and looked around the frozen blackened night. “Mary, he isn’t here.”

“I guess he decided to go to sleep, Lucien. We don’t really know that anything is wrong, do we?”

“From the tone of his voice I think we should go and see.”

Mary sighed. “Okay.” It was almost four in the morning now.

They knocked on Billy’s door. There was no answer. Lucien turned the knob and they went inside. They lit a kerosene lamp and kicked aside garbage as they walked through his house. His CD player was on repeat, playing Johnny Cash. Empty Export A cigarette packages were everywhere. Half the kitchen table was covered by foil laboriously rubbed onto the Formica. On the wall above the kitchen sink was a picture of Jesus on a piece of plywood and finished in high-gloss Varathane. The bed was unmade and the mattress was
covered with amber oval stains interlaced together. One of Louisa’s dresses lay on the floor.

At Simionie’s house only his wife, Winnie, was home. She didn’t know where anyone was, she said. Louisa’s boy was peering from the kitchen, silently. Lucien addressed the step, ashamed that he was embarrassing this old woman. The dogs were gone. Billy’s snow machine was not around, although tracks circled the house. There were also dogsled tracks leading away. Overtop them, snow-machine tracks.

The last famine was only forty years ago. One year the caribou abruptly changed their migratory path and the hunters waited at the usual river fords and for weeks and months saw only the little ground squirrels, the
siksiks
, and the geese, flying far overhead. It is not clear what precipitated this. Certainly the caribou population had not diminished greatly, for a few years later they were as plentiful as ever, and back in their usual calving and feeding grounds, but for four years they could not be found, vanished in the tundra far away from the people.

Until the famine happened the people had maintained a middle path with the Kablunauks. They had remained on the land, and were self-sufficient, but they bought the rifles and tents and Coleman stoves with pride and pragmatism. If these things were not available, they knew, it would have been harder, but they could have coped.

When the famine was at its worst, the people were too weak to build cairns for the dead. They did as well as they could, and dragged the bodies out onto the tundra and stacked what rocks they could lift onto them. In short order, foxes and dogs got into most of these, and the cracked and bleached bones of children and old people may be seen on the periphery of the inland hunting camps. Around and among them, small and pitiful clumps of rocks sit, as gestures.

With the famine came the end of the people’s time on the land. In another era, with the return of the caribou, babies would be born, and the people would learn once again of their resilience, but this time they moved into the villages that the government built for them. Airplanes and ships brought in tins of corned beef. When the caribou returned the people were only pleased. It was good, but it did not matter as much.

Simionie’s tent was pitched in a small valley, and recognizable for miles, for its many years’ worth of patchings. The sled, the
qomotik, was
carefully stood on edge beside the tent. Rock and snow were all around. Lucien and Mary approached slowly on the RCMP snow machine and shut off the engine. The tent was motionless and silent. The dim early-morning light seemed to absorb the sound.

Inside the tent there was blood pooling on the canvas floor. A sleeping bag lay against one wall, with the
outline of a body within. The lamp was still burning. Small plastic bags of mosses and grasses spilled out beside the lamp. A caribou antler sat beside the lamp, on the floor, in the blood. There was weeping from the sleeping bag, like gravel shaking, worn out and exhausted. A Coleman stove was burning, and there was a pot of foul-smelling tea boiling on one of the burners, clumps of moss and grass, like floating hair, roiling in the pot. Louisa sat up, not recognizing either of them; the bloody sack between her legs swung like a yo-yo when she tried to stand and then she fell. Mary laid Louisa back down in the sleeping bag. She whispered to her to keep still.

Beside the tent the dogs were feasting. The old man’s rifle was nearly covered in snow. It had been lying there since it had fallen out of his mouth. A parabola of bone and blood stretched out over the snow. The dogs growled and fought with one another. There was the sound of clothes ripping.

Billy’s tracks circled the tent and came no closer to the body than thirty feet. Over the horizon, leading away from town, his still-fresh tracks were disappearing in the rising wind.

This was in 1997.

The freight comes by rail to Churchill and is then loaded onto barges during the brief shipping season, for transport to the little hamlets of Kivalliq. For most of a century, Churchill has been the supply depot for this part of the Arctic. Because of this relationship, there is a sense of commonality between Churchill and the little Inuit towns upcoast. People know of one another. Women go to Churchill to deliver their babies, and become familiar with the people who live there. The nurses in Kivalliq call Churchill for help when things go very badly.

The schoolteacher’s disappearance was therefore discussed in those little towns. Mary and Daphne each learned of it and wondered what she had wanted. More isolation? They had heard the story of her husband’s death, and interpreted that in a limited and
clinical manner. Something about pathological grief responses. They had no idea what the old woman would want in the bush with winter imminent.

By the following spring she still had not returned to town and there had been no word from her. It was May and the river ice was going soft. It was no longer safe to travel and would not be again until the ice was out. Everyone seemed quick to conclude that she was dead.

When a regiment of the Canadian army is in the field, it uses a system of nicknames to refer to its components over the radio net, in order to shorten broadcast times. Aerial reconnaissance becomes Hawk Eye; military police, appropriately, becomes Strong Arm; intelligence becomes, less plausibly, Ponder Box. The medical support elements of a combat regiment are Starlight, suggesting, perhaps, the cool soothing illumination that a soldier in the mud might long for.

The battle school of the Royal Canadian Artillery is in the southwestern corner of Manitoba. This is short-grass prairie: thin sandy soil, languorous pool halls, and lots of squint-eyed understatement. Cattle country partly, and away from the hills there is wheat, sunflower, and barley. Towns every forty miles or so—a Chinese food restaurant, a bar, a garage. Spend a month out here and you’d need a reason why.

On the base, the hills are pocked and divoted by half a century of field artillery exercises. The army is different from the farmers; the farmers neither like nor understand the soldiers and the money they waste. To the farmers, the army is a part of the country that doesn’t make sense. The army is from Toronto and from Newfoundland, and a distressingly large part of it comes from Quebec. Montreal, even—Captain Joly, the regimental medical officer, had drunk
café au lait
on tree-lined boulevards and read that day’s
Le Monde
among men and women sinuous and sleek. None of whom could imagine this place even in their worst nightmare. Try to describe it to them and they just look at you and ask how you allowed yourself to wind up in such a place anyway.

The thing is, he would have told them, he told himself as he drove to work every morning, if you give a blank cheque to somebody, you shouldn’t be surprised when they cram as many zeroes onto the thing as they can before cashing it. While still in medical school, Joly, anticipating imminent affluence, developed a taste for expensive clothes and restaurant meals. He ran up his credit cards until he was entirely insolvent and about to be evicted, so he signed up with the army; they paid for books and tuition, and gave him a salary—he agreed to work for the military wherever it wanted him, for three years. The recruiting guy talked about Cyprus or Germany or even the base right there in Montreal, and Joly had nodded eagerly. “When does the salary start?”
he had asked. All the zeroes added up to southwestern Manitoba.
“Tabernacle,”
he had said over and over again as he drove west staring at the flat black-and-green fields that never seemed to end.

Along with the battle school, the base quartered the Third Regiment of the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery. In the regiment there were four hundred men and a half-dozen women between the ages of eighteen and forty. If any of them had any significant medical problems they wouldn’t have been posted to the regiment—combat readiness and all that. Joly’s responsibilities fell to applying ice to twisted ankles, putting a cast on the occasional broken fist, and prescribing tetracycline, admonishment, and condoms to embarrassed young men. He was finished work most days by 9:30 a.m. and spent the remainder of the morning listening to the radio and reading the newspaper. In the afternoons he slept on his examining table. In the evenings he sat alone in the library of the officers’ mess and wrote letters home. At night he dreamed often of the ocean and of the mountains. Standing before the mirror in the mornings he would shut his eyes trying to preserve the flaming iridescent colours of the night before. Some days he would pass the whole morning at his desk motionless, with his eyes shut and his hands folded on the desk in front of him. The medics worried about him continually.

Great efforts were made to make Joly feel a part of the military fraternity. Functions were held at the officers’
mess on a weekly basis. They were for the most part obligatory-attendance affairs and Joly would mingle to the extent required. The medics at the hospital were instructed to call for him at the slightest provocation. “The least little thing,” he would emphasize.

“Gotcha, boss,” they would reply. Suspicions grew, in the minds of those sober enough to keep track, that it was not pure chance that the only work he did most weeks was during the commanding officer’s anecdote about the pilot, the 155mm round, and the zucchini.

At these gatherings, two groups formed that were utterly insoluble in one another. The regimental officers fancied themselves the real army, the Reason You Are Here. (Joly raised his eyebrows at that.) The base officers were mostly sensible men and women with legitimate skills—engineers, accountants, that sort of thing—who had found themselves with families and limited options and no choice but to ride out their time until they got posted somewhere with a movie theatre within an hour’s drive. Both of the groups were baffled by the other. Joly was baffled by everybody, of course. But only until his beeper went off, and then you couldn’t catch him with a radar gun.

Monique Lefevre was seventeen and from the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. When she graduated from high school she asked her friends what they were going to do. Mostly, they shrugged. There were a few
who planned to move to Montreal or Quebec City and there were a few more who were going to get married that summer, but on the whole, her friends had the same problem she did, the same problem anyone has who comes from a small place with few jobs and no roads out: she could leave and be a long way away and lonely until she had made a new home someplace else and was changed irrevocably, or she could stay home and smoke cigarettes in the coffee shop with her friends and be very bored, at least until she was so bored that she generated her own problems to preoccupy her until she was old.

She saw an advertisement on the television about the military. “Be all that you can be,” it said. The idea had never occurred to her. She phoned the toll-free number and they sent her a plane ticket to the recruiting station in Quebec City. She wrote an exam and showed them her high school transcript. There was some consternation, as she did not qualify for any of the technical trades. She had not taken physics or chemistry, and her reading comprehension had not shown itself well in their little test. They asked her if she liked the outdoors. Sensing their hopes, she said yes. They asked her if she was interested in a non-traditional occupation. Again, she said yes. She asked if she couldn’t be a clerk, or an electrician. They said no, not according to her aptitude test. She asked if she could write it again. They said no. It had taken a day and a half just to get there from the
Magdalen Islands. In the cubicle next to the one she was in there was a just-graduated medical student receiving his first posting.

Monique Lefevre arrived in Manitoba in January, in time for basic training. This was the height of bad luck. But Manitoba is where basic training for the artillery is done, for francophone and anglophone artillery soldiers alike, and this was the next available course. As the bus from Winnipeg pulled into Shilo, 110 miles removed from even that slim piece of civilization, Lefevre pushed her forehead against the glass and stared. The glass was intensely cold, and when she leaned back from it again her forehead was white and numb.

She and the others were greeted at the bus exit by a man clad in a green parka and wind pants that made him look like Bonhomme Carnaval dipped in paint. He shouted in one long exhalation that they were welcome in Shilo, that the francophones should line up here, the anglos there, that it was very late at night and they would be shown to their rooms, questions would have to wait until morning, answer when I call your name,
réponds quand j’appelle ton
nom, Jean Claude Alois, James Astwood…

From the window of her room Lefevre could see down the road behind the barracks. The snow was plowed into drifts nine feet high. The few vehicles moving—a pizza delivery car, a military police car on
patrol—were visible only when immediately across from the building. They seemed to emerge from within the snow, rumble and squeak along the road, and then disappear into it again, as if they were whales coming up for air. There was winter in the Magdalens but it was nothing like this.

In the morning they began running. They ran from the mess hall to clothing stores to the orderly room to the gymnasium. From the movies she had seen, she had expected much worse. And much better-looking men than these: the other students were from every small town from Jonquière to Smithers. They were not the bright lights of any society they had ever belonged to; this was evident in the glances around the room, the mutual deference, and the clumsy conversations. They were all between seventeen and twenty-two and there was enough acne between them to keep any number of skin-scrub salesmen happy for life.