The Middle of Everywhere (10 page)

“Not quite,” I tell him.

“Lenny told me I should make you play with me. He said it'd be good for your belly.”

Steve sighs. “Lenny thought he was being funny.” Steve says this loudly so Lenny will hear him. Tom is squatting next to Lenny. Jakopie is sitting on the floor too, in the same position. I don't understand how the Inuit can stay sitting like that for so long. My legs would kill. Jakopie is whittling a piece of caribou antler. I wonder what he's making, but I'm still too queasy to ask.

Joseph hands me a mug of steaming tea. “It's Labrador tea,” he says, winking. “Good for your belly.”

I bring the tea to the couch. There are burn holes in the vinyl, but I figure it'll be better than sitting on the cold floor. Sitting down on the couch is more work than I expected. My thighs ache from running with the dogs. When I finally sit, my body starts to relax. Squatting on the floor to eat might be an Inuit custom, but couches and chairs are more my style. Besides, somebody went to the trouble of inventing those things, so why not take advantage, right?

“I think your old man's pretty cool,” Lenny says, without turning to look at me.

Cool isn't the first word I'd use to describe my dad. Goofy, maybe. A little boring. But not cool. Definitely not.

But I don't want to tell Lenny that. “He's okay,” I say.

“He tells good stories,” Lenny says.

Yeah, I think, if you don't mind the puns or how he tries to turn everything into an educational opportunity.

“Yeah,” Tom joins in. “Like that story about how he spent the night on a rock ledge when he was a kid. That was pretty cool.” Tom slaps his thigh.

I take a sip of tea. It tastes like leaves and dirt. Still, compared to ptarmigan liver, it's delicious. “Rock ledge?” I say. “My dad slept on a rock ledge?” I can't picture Dad anywhere near a rock ledge. Where would he go to do his morning stretches?

“Yeah,” Lenny says, and now his voice starts to sound a little more excited. “He was with a friend from school and they were out on a day hike. In New York State, I think he said. Only there was a bad storm, and him and the friend got stranded. They ended up sleeping on a rock ledge. Your dad said it wasn't more than about two feet wide.” Lenny uses his hands to demonstrate. “He said if he rolled over, he would've fallen off and died. Your dad said he was scared out of his mind, but he also said that, when he thinks back on it, it was one of the best nights of his life—sleeping under the stars and all.”

I can sense one of my dad's lessons coming. Something about how sometimes time has to go by before you can appreciate the stuff that happens to you. Or maybe something about how it's easier to get through tough times when there's a friend with you. But Lenny doesn't say anything about lessons. “When your dad told us that story, he made us feel like we were right there with him. Shivering on the ledge, afraid to turn around, you know?”

This time, when I take another sip of tea, it gets caught in my throat. I gulp to make it go down. “Funny,” I say, “my dad never told me that story.”

THIRTEEN

T
he inukshuk towers over the tundra, and with so little else to see except snow and rocks and bushes, we spotted it when we were still some distance from Short Lake. Now, with the sun's last rays reflecting off it, the inukshuk will make a great picture.

I have to take off my caribou-skin mitts to get the camera out of my parka's inside pocket. I'm glad I thought of packing the camera case inside a sock inside a plastic bag, otherwise, the lens would be frosted over by now. We left Jean's cabin just after 11:00 am for the second leg of our trip, and now it's after 2:00 pm. The dogs are slowing down. Even P'tit Eric is panting.

The sky is beginning to grow dark. There are navy and gray swirls of cloud building their way up from the horizon. In an hour or so, there won't be any light left at all. This time of year, Nunavik doesn't get more than five or six hours of daylight. At least I wasn't up here in December. I'd have lost my mind. “No wonder bears hibernate,” I say out loud.

“Not polar bears,” Tom mutters. He must have heard me talking to myself. He's off the
qamutik
too, stretching his legs.

My fingers are so cold they burn. But I want to take a picture of the inukshuk for my mom. I tell the others about the little inukshuk in our yard in Montreal, how we made it from stones Mom bought at the gardening center.

“What's a gardening center?” Etua asks.

Mom's inukshuk is about a foot and a half high. This one is about twenty times bigger.

“Nice camera,” Tom says. “It's one of those slrs, right?”

“Uh-huh.” I don't know if Tom has ever seen an slr camera before.

I hand it to him. “It's auto-everything.”

Tom whistles as he peers into the lens.

“See the screen? That's what your picture's gonna look like. Go ahead—try it out.”

“You sure?”

“I'm sure.”

Tom points the camera at the inukshuk and shoots.

“You need to press down harder.”

“I don't want to break it.”

“You're not gonna break it.”

“You sure?”

“I'm sure.”

Tom whistles when I set the camera to
Display
and he sees his picture.

“See,” I tell him, “you shoot better with a camera than I do with a rifle.”

When Tom laughs, I feel good, but then it occurs to me I just made a pun. I hope it doesn't mean I'm turning into my dad.

Etua has come to join us. “Here, Noah,” he says, “I have something for you.” He hands me two worn gray stones. They look like quartz.

“Where'd you find them?” I ask him.

“Near the cabin. I'm going to save them for your mom, for her inukshuk,” he says.

“Great idea. Great Spiderman idea.”

Etua's chest puffs up. “I'll try to find more,” he says.

Just then, Joseph and his dog team pull up next to where we're standing. I feel him watching me, noticing my camera. “Inukshuk is Inuktitut for ‘standing man,'” he says.

The inukshuk really does look like a standing man with huge stumpy legs like Kajutaijug's.

“We build inukshuks as markers. That one has been here for as long as I can remember. Inukshuks are meant to say to hunters, ‘You're on the right path.'” Joseph gazes out at the inukshuk.

“The right path, huh?” I say as I shoot another picture.

I'm not so sure I'm on the right path. Mom sent me to Nunavik to get closer to my dad, but here I am, on a winter camping trip with a group of people I didn't even know a week ago. Right now, I feel as far away from my dad as I did when I was in Montreal and he was up here.

“That's it,” Joseph says, pointing in the distance. “Short Lake. I can hear the fish—well, almost.” He chuckles.

Though the lake is blanketed with snow, you can tell it's a lake because it's as flat as a tabletop and there are no rocks or bushes jutting up from its surface. I can just make out a small forest of spruce trees in a valley near the lake's edge.

When we're back on the dogsleds and have traveled a little farther, I see what looks like a miniature town. Only instead of houses, there are canvas tents, clusters of four or five of them set up in small inlets around the lake. The spruce trees seem to grow in clusters too. The people who set up the tents must have tried to take advantage of whatever shelter the trees provide from the wind and snow.

I count nine tents. Every tent has a chimney, so the tents must be set up for the season. Puffs of blackish gray smoke are already billowing out of one tent. There's a snowmobile parked outside too. No wonder they made better time than us!

“I don't get it,” I say to Tom as we help Steve unload supplies. “If the idea of winter camping is to get away from town, how come you guys come all this way just to make a new town?”

Tom looks surprised by my question. “Out here, people need to stick together,” he says.

“Come on, guys!” Steve calls. “Let's move on the unpacking! I'm going to need your help setting the lines. I promised the dogs fresh Arctic char for breakfast!”

I grab a cooler from the back of the sled and follow Tom to one of the tents. We crouch to get through the opening, but once we're inside, the tent is roomier than I expect. It doesn't have a window, but I can see out by looking through the narrow crack where the door zips up. In the distance, I spot someone out on the lake, fishing, probably.

The air inside the tent smells like spruce. That's probably because the floor is covered with spruce needles and bits of twigs that crunch under our feet when we bring in the supplies. There are foam mattresses piled up at one end; at the other end, I spot a black metal stove hooked up to a tin chimney. “We built that stove,” Tom tells me when he sees me eyeing it. “It was an IPL project.” I also see dice, a deck of cards with frayed edges and a felt bag that looks like it might have dominoes inside.

“Hey, Noah,” a girl's voice calls from the opening of the tent.

What's Geraldine doing up here? Against the snowy landscape, her hair looks even darker.

“Hey, Geraldine, don't you work at the Northern on the weekends?”

“I got this weekend off to go fishing with my dad. Our tent's just down there,” she says, pointing to the one that has smoke billowing out of its chimney.

“Awesome,” I tell her.

I notice that Geraldine's smile is a little lopsided. “Uh-huh,” she says. “Awesome.”

FOURTEEN

I
t's only when I'm wrapped inside my sleeping bag that the images from Tarksalik's accident come back: her body flying up in the air, the red pickup truck taking off, her blood on the snow-covered road.

I'm amazed that I didn't think about the accident all day. I was too busy fighting the cold, helping with the dogs and the fishing net. We worked into the dark, and now I hardly have the energy to turn over. Winter camping's even harder work than I expected.

Just fall asleep, I tell myself. I can hear Tom snoring lightly on the mattress next to mine. He even sleeps in squatting position—his legs folded under him, his chest and head stretched out in front of him so that his forehead touches the mattress. Lenny sleeps on his side, southern-style. The two of them conked right out. If only that would happen to me too.

I wish I could talk to my dad. Steve has a satellite phone—a clunky thing that must weigh three pounds—but it's only for emergencies, so I haven't had the heart to ask whether I could use it to call Dad and see how Tarksalik is doing. Besides, I can imagine the look Lenny would give me if he hears I'm still worried about the dog.

If I talked to my dad, maybe I'd also say something about that night he slept on the rock ledge. Maybe I'd ask why he never told me that story and why he told the kids in George River more about himself than he ever told me. But who am I kidding? I'd never say any of that to my dad. I'd ask about Tarksalik and then maybe we'd talk about the weather or how many assignments he's got left to mark.

My triceps ache. It must be from helping Steve cut holes in the ice so we could set the net. He said nighttime is best for catching fish, since the fish don't see the net. I'm starting to understand that surviving in the North means finding ways to outsmart nature.

We used a
tuuk
, a long wooden stick with a sharp metal end, to cut through the ice. It's harder than it sounds, since the ice is, like, three feet deep. “You think this is thick,” Tom told me when I complained. “It's nothing compared to how thick the ice was when my dad first took me fishing. Back then, the ice was at least five feet deep this time of year. You can thank global warming that we don't have to dig so deep anymore.”

Lenny, who was about to take his turn, scowled. “Global warming,” he muttered under his breath. “The rest of the world screws up and we pay the price. It's not right.”

I passed Lenny the
tuuk
. “You blaming me for global warming?” I felt my ears grow hot. That always happens to me when I'm angry.

“I didn't say nothing about you,” Lenny said, but when he started cutting really hard with the
tuuk
, I got the feeling he did hold me personally responsible.

When Lenny hit water, he leaned back and shouted, “Yes!” His face looked different—relaxed. Then he started chipping away at the ice, his arm moving like a jackhammer. “We need to make a hole that's about two feet wide,” he said. “Get the clicker.”

“What's a clicker?”

“It's a
nulujiutik
,” Tom said.

“Thanks a lot,” I told him. “That really helps.”

Tom grinned. “Here,” he said, “it's this.” He showed me a bright orange wooden plank about four feet long and six inches wide.

“That thing's so bright it hurts my eyes,” I told him.

“The color makes it easier to spot under the ice.”

Tom turned the plank over. Underneath was a green wooden arm that swung up and down. “This clicker is one of our greatest inventions,” Tom said. “When the plank floats underneath the ice, all you got to do is pull on this rope here.” He pointed to a long length of rope attached to the green arm. “That brings the arm flush against the plank and pushes forward this little metal claw. The claw grabs the ice and propels the whole thing away from you.”

Tom tapped his hand against a metal plate fastened to the underside of the plank. “The tapping on this metal plate makes the clicking sound,” he explained.

“And you use that to set the fishing net?”

Tom raised his eyebrows. “It's hard to explain,” he said. “You've got to see how it works.”

I helped Tom tie a long line of rope onto the metal ring at the end of the clicker. Once Lenny's hole was big enough, we slid the clicker and the rope under the ice. Then we knotted the other end of the rope. It was tricky, but with three of us working together, it went okay.