From there, everything had gone smoothly. He’d stayed overnight at a Holiday Inn near Dorval airport, then returned first thing in the morning to the departure lounge. At last there were signs that he was entering a different world. A group of men with steaming coffee cups were standing by a plate-glass window, their overalls emblazoned with the logo of an oil company. Two had faces like Anawak’s: wide cheekbones, dark skin and Mongolian eyes. Outside on the airfield, enormous pallets trussed with netting were being loaded into the belly of the Canadian North Airlines Boeing 737. The lifting ramp was still shunting them into the aeroplane when the boarding call went out. They crossed the airfield on foot and climbed the steps at the tail. The seating area was limited to the front third of the plane; the rest of the space was given over to storage.
For more than two hours now Anawak had been in transit. From time to time the plane juddered. For most of the journey they’d been looking down on thick plains of cloud, but now, as they approached Hudson Strait, the grey mass of vapour parted to reveal the dark brown landscape of the tundra below, mountainous and jagged, with snowfields and ice floes drifting on the lakes. Then the coast came into view. Hudson Strait passed beneath them, and Anawak knew he was crossing the frontier. A rush of emotions flooded through him, sweeping away his torpor. In every venture there was always a point of no return. Strictly speaking, that point had been Montréal, but symbolically it was Hudson Strait. Across the water was a world to which he’d sworn never to return.
Anawak was on his way to the country of his birth, to his homeland on the edge of the Arctic Circle - to Nunavut.
He stared out of the window, willing himself not to think. After thirty minutes the water gave way to land and then to a shiny frozen expanse, Frobisher Bay, cutting deep into the south-eastern tip of Baffin Island. The plane banked to the right, descending rapidly. A bright yellow building with a stumpy tower appeared in the window. It looked like a lone human outpost on an alien planet, although it was actually the airport, the way into Iqaluit, ‘place of many fish’, Nunavut’s capital.
The plane touched down and taxied slowly to a halt.
It wasn’t long before Anawak’s luggage appeared. He hoisted the heavy rucksack on to his back and made his way through the terminal, passing a display of wall coverings and soapstone sculptures promoting Inuit art. In the middle of the building a giant figure, sturdily built, clad in boots and traditional attire, held a flat drum above his head in one hand and a drumstick in the other. It exuded vigour and self-assurance. Anawak stopped to read the inscription: ‘Throughout the Arctic there is drum dancing and throat singing when the people come together.’ He went to the First Air ticket counter and checked in his rucksack for the flight to Cape Dorset. The woman at the desk informed him that it was delayed by an hour. ‘Maybe you’ve still got some errands to run in town,’ she said, with a smile.
Anawak hesitated. ‘Er, no, actually. I don’t know my way around.’
She looked surprised. She was clearly wondering how someone whose appearance identified him as an Inuk could be unfamiliar with the capital. ‘There’s plenty to see,’ she suggested. ‘You should wander into town. There’s the Nunatta-Sunaqutangit Museum. It has a wonderful collection of traditional and contemporary art.’
‘Uh…sure.’
‘Or you could try the Unikkaarvik Visitor Center. And it’s well worth stopping off at the Anglican church. It’s the only church in the world to look like an igloo.’
She was an Inuk, small with a black fringe and a ponytail. Her eyes shone as a smile spread over her face. ‘I could have sworn you came from Iqaluit,’ she said.
‘No.’ For a moment he was tempted to say that he came from Cape Dorset. ‘Vancouver, actually.’
‘Oh, I love Vancouver,’ she exclaimed.
Anawak glanced round, worried that he was holding up the queue, but he seemed to be the only person on the onward flight that day. ‘You’ve been there?’
‘No, but I’ve seen the pictures on the web. It’s a beautiful city.’ She laughed. ‘A bit bigger than Iqaluit, I guess.’
He smiled back. ‘I’d say so.’
‘But Iqaluit’s bigger than it used to be. We’ve got six thousand inhabitants and we’re growing all the time. Soon we’ll be the size of Vancouver - well, almost anyway. You’ll have to excuse me.’
A man and a woman had appeared behind him. He wouldn’t be flying alone. He said goodbye and disappeared outside, in case she took it into her head to give him a tour of the city.
Iqaluit.
It was all so long ago. Some things looked familiar, but he had no recollection of most of what he saw. The clouds seemed to have stayed behind in Montréal, and now the sun shone down from a steel-blue sky, making it pleasantly warm. It was at least ten degrees, thought Anawak, and felt overdressed. He pulled off his down jacket and tied it round his waist, then trudged along the dusty road. There was a surprising amount of traffic. He couldn’t remember there being so many four-by-fours and ATVs, small multi-axial buggies ridden like motorbikes. The street was lined with timber houses built in characteristic Arctic style with little stilts to raise them off the ground. Any building that rested directly on the tundra would melt the permafrost and start to sink.
As Anawak made his way through the town, he couldn’t help thinking that God’s hand must have descended over Iqaluit, shaking a clutch of buildings like dice and scattering them at random. Gigantic edifices made of windowless harsh white panels loomed up like abstract cubist structures among olive-green or rusty-red barracks. The school resembled a marooned UFO. Some of the houses glowed in deep shades of petrol blue or aquamarine. Towards the centre of town he came across the Commissioner’s House, a cross between a cosy country villa and a space dome for astronauts. He tried to remain detached from his surroundings, but since the seaplane accident he had lost the ability to cloak himself in indifference. The crazy architectural hotchpotch conveyed nonchalance, even merriment, that he couldn’t shut out.
The depressive Iqaluit of the seventies had vanished. People seemed friendly, greeting him in Inuktitut. He responded tersely. Without stopping he walked through the streets for an hour, popping in briefly to the Unikkaarvik Visitor Center, which boasted an even larger sculpture of a drum dancer.
When he was a kid, there’d been plenty of drum dancing. But that was a long time ago, when things were still OK…if they ever had been.
He went out on to the street where the glaring sunshine was oppressively hot. He passed to the right of the Anglican church - a stone igloo with a spire - then went back to the terminal where he sat down on a bench with a newspaper. With the exception of the couple, no one else was waiting for the flight. He held up the newspaper to cut himself off from the world and skimmed the articles without absorbing their content, then tossed it aside.
Eventually the young woman from the ticket desk came to collect them. They filed out through a side door, then walked on to the aircraft manoeuvring area, where a small twin-engined propeller plane, a Piper, was waiting. Anawak and his fellow passengers climbed the two steps to the cramped interior. There were only six seats. All the baggage had been stashed under netting at the rear of the plane. The cockpit led straight in to the cabin without any partition. They taxied on to the runway, waited for another Piper to land, then took a short, fast run-up and lifted off shakily. The terminal shrank and vanished, Frobisher Bay glittering far below. They flew west over mountains carved by glaciers and capped with snowfields and ice sheets. To their left, rays of sunshine glistened on Hudson Strait, while to the right, they sparkled on a lake, whose name Anawak suddenly remembered: Amadjuak.
They had gone there sometimes.
It was coming back to him at giddying speed. The memories appeared before him like silhouettes in a snowstorm, drawing him into the past, where he didn’t want to go.
The terrain levelled out, then gave way to water. The flight continued over the sea for twenty minutes, until rugged land reappeared through t
he cockpit window. The seven islands of Tellik Inlet came into view. A thin line cut into one of the islands: Cape Dorset runway.
They touched down.
Anawak felt his heart spring forward. He was home. As the Piper taxied slowly towards the terminal, he felt loath to get out.
Cape Dorset, capital of Inuit art and home to 1200 people: the New York of the north, as it was half jokingly, half admiringly called.
That was the modern Cape Dorset.
Back then things had been different.
Cape Dorset: Kinngait, or ‘high mountain’ in the Inuit tongue, was situated in the Sikusiilaq region, ‘where no ice ever forms on the sea’, so-named because even in the harshest winter, temperate currents prevented the water freezing round Foxe Peninsula on the south-west extremity of Baffin Island. Names flooded back. Mallikjuaq, a tiny island near Cape Dorset, a nature reserve full of marvels - fox-traps from the nineteenth century, ruins from ancient Thule culture, burial sites that were the source of countless legends, and a romantic lake where they had camped. Anawak remembered the stone kayak-stands. He’d loved it there. Then he pictured his parents, and remembered what had driven him out of Nunavut, when it was still part of the Northwest Territories and didn’t have its own name.
He picked up his rucksack and clambered out of the plane.
A man ran over to greet the couple. The reunion was effusive, but that was nearly always the way: the Inuit had any number of words for ‘welcome’, but none for ‘farewell’. No one had bidden Anawak farewell when he’d taken his leave nineteen years previously, not even the weatherbeaten old man who was left standing alone on the airfield as the trio of friends moved noisily away. For a moment Anawak had difficulty recognising him. Ijitsiaq Akesuk had aged noticeably and now sported a thin grey moustache on his once clean-shaven face. But it was him. The creased face widened into grin. He hurried towards Anawak and threw his arms round him. A stream of Inuktitut words spilled from his lips.
Then he switched into English. ‘Leon, my child. What a handsome young scientist you are.’
Anawak let him finish embracing him, and thumped Akesuk half-heartedly on the back. ‘Uncle Iji. How are you?’
‘Oh, as well as can be expected, considering the occasion. Did you have a good flight? You must have been travelling for days - all those places you must have been just to get here…’
‘I had to change planes a few times.’
‘Toronto? Montréal?’ Akesuk let go of him and beamed. Like many of the Inuit, he had gaps in his top teeth. ‘Montréal. You travel a lot, don’t you? What a joy. You’ll have to tell me all about it. You’ll stay with us, now, won’t you? We’ve got everything ready for you. Is that all your luggage?’
‘Er, Uncle Iji—’
‘Iji - you’re too old for “uncle” now.’
‘I booked a hotel.’
Akesuk took a step back. ‘Which one?’
‘The Polar Lodge.’
There was fleeting disappointment on the old man’s face, but then he beamed. ‘We can cancel it. I know the manager. No problem.’
‘I don’t want to put you to any trouble,’ said Anawak. I only came to bury my father in the ice, he thought, and then to get the hell out of here.
‘It’s no trouble,’ said Akesuk. ‘You’re my nephew. How long are you staying?’
‘Two nights. I thought that would be enough, right?’
Akesuk frowned. He took Anawak’s arm and pulled him through the airport. ‘We’ll talk about that later. Aren’t you hungry?’
‘Very.’
‘Excellent. Mary-Ann’s made caribou stew and a seal soup with rice. A real feast. When was the last time you had seal soup, hmm?’
Anawak allowed himself to be whisked away. A line of vehicles was parked outside the airport and Akesuk headed purposefully towards a truck.
‘Throw your rucksack in the back. Do you remember Mary-Ann? Of course you don’t. You’d already left by the time she moved out here from Salluit. We got married. I hated being alone. She’s younger than me - which isn’t a bad thing, I might tell you. Are you married? Goodness me, there’s so much to talk about after all these years.’
Anawak shuffled around on the passenger seat. Akesuk seemed determined to talk him into submission. He tried to remember if the old man had always been so chatty. Then it occurred to him that his uncle might be feeling as nervous as he was. One retreated into silence; the other talked.
They trundled along the high street. The hills cut right through Cape Dorset, dividing it into hamlets. In addition to the main hamlet of Kinngait, there was Itjurittuq in the north-east, Kuugalaaq in the west and Muliujaq in the south. Kuugalaaq had been their home. Akesuk, his mother’s brother, had lived in Kinngait.
Anawak wondered whether he still lived there.
They seemed to be driving through the entire town and his uncle commented on almost every building. Suddenly it dawned on Anawak that Akesuk was giving him a tour. ‘Uncle Iji, I know all these places,’ he protested.
‘Rubbish! You’ve been away for nineteen years. All kinds of things have changed. Do you remember that supermarket?’
‘No.’
‘You see? It wasn’t there back then. It’s new. There’s an even bigger one now. We always used to go to the Polar Supply Store - you can’t have forgotten that, surely. That’s our new school. Well, I guess it’s been there a while now, but it’s new to you. See that, on the right? The Tiktaliktaq community hall. You wouldn’t believe all the important people who’ve come here to hear the throat singing and drum dancing. Bill Clinton, Jacques Chirac, Helmut Kohl. Kohl was a giant - he made us look like dwarfs. Now when was that? Let me see…’
And so it went on. They drove past the Anglican church and the cemetery where his father was to be buried. Anawak saw an Inuk woman crouching outside her house, working on a sculpture. The enormous stone bird reminded him of Nootka art. A two-storey blue-grey building with a futuristic lobby turned out to be the hamlet office. Nunavut’s decentralised administration meant that any decent-sized community had its own council office. Anawak resigned himself to his fate, not least because he realised that the Cape Dorset of his childhood was nothing like the place before him.
Suddenly he heard himself say, ‘Let’s go to the harbour, Uncle Iji.’
Akesuk turned the wheel briskly. They sped down a steep road in the direction of the sea. Timber houses in all sizes and colours were dotted in no apparent order over the dark brown landscape. A few patches of hardy tundra grass were scattered here and there, with the occasional stretch of snow. Cape Dorset’s harbour consisted of little more than a wharf and some loading cranes where, once or twice a year, the supply ship would dock with its vital cargo of goods. Not far from there you could walk across the tidal flats of Tellik Inlet at low tide to get to the neighbouring island, Mallikjuaq, the territorial park with its burial sites, and the kayak-stand, and the lake where they used to pitch camp.
They stopped. Anawak got out, walked along the wharf and stared out across the blue polar water. Akesuk followed him a little way, then let him go on alone.
The view of the wharf had been Anawak’s last glimpse of Cape Dorset before he left - not on the plane but on the supply ship. He’d been twelve. The ship had carried him away with his new family, who were leaving the country full of hope and excitement about the new world ahead of them, while mourning the paradise in the ice that had long since been lost.
After five minutes he walked slowly back to the truck and climbed in without a word.
‘Yes, the old harbour,’ Akesuk said softly. ‘Our harbour. I’ll never forget it. The way you left, Leon. It broke our hearts…’
Anawak looked at him sharply. ‘Whose hearts?’ he asked.
‘Well, your—’
‘My father’s? Yours? The people down the street?’
Akesuk started the engine. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go home.’
Akesuk still lived in the same little house in the settleme
nt. With its light blue walls and dark blue roof, it was attractive and well tended. The hills rose behind it, stretching for several kilometres until they reached their apex in Kinngait, the ‘high mountain’, whose rock was scarred with veins of snow. It looked more like a landscape of sculpted marble than a high mountain. In Anawak’s memory the Kinngait range towered into the sky, but the comb of rock in the distance invited competent hikers to explore it on foot.
Akesuk went to the back of the truck and hauled down the rucksack. Although he was slight, he didn’t seem to notice the weight. He held it in one hand and opened the door with the other. ‘Mary-Ann,’ he called, ‘he’s here!’
A puppy made its way unsteadily to the door. Akesuk stepped over it and disappeared into the house, returning seconds later with a plump woman, whose friendly face was propped on an imposing double chin. She hugged Anawak and greeted him in Inuktitut.
‘Mary-Ann can’t speak English,’ Akesuk said apologetically. ‘I hope you haven’t forgotten your language.’
‘My language is English,’ said Anawak.
‘Well, yes, it is now, of course.’
‘I still understand a fair bit, though - enough to know what she’s saying.’
Mary-Ann was asking if he was hungry.
He answered in Inuktitut, and she smiled, then picked up the dog, which was sniffing at Anawak’s boots, and made signs for him to follow. There was a line of footwear in the hall. Anawak bent down automatically to remove his.
‘I see you’ve still got your manners,’ his uncle joked. ‘They haven’t turned you into a qallunaaq.’
Anawak glanced down at himself, then followed Mary-Ann into the kitchen. He saw a modern electric cooker and gadgets of the kind used in any well-equipped household in Vancouver. It was worlds away from the impoverished state of his family’s old home. Next to the window was a circular dining-table, then a door leading out on to the balcony. Akesuk exchanged a few words with his wife, then pushed Anawak into a cosily furnished lounge. A cluster of heavy armchairs were grouped round a stack of equipment, including a TV set, video recorder, radio and CB transmitter. The kitchen was visible through a hatch. Akesuk showed him the bathroom, then the laundry and the larder at the back, the bedroom and a little room with a single bed and a vase of fresh flowers on the bedside table. Arctic poppies, saxifrage and heather.