Read Online Consumption by Kevin Patterson - Free Book Online Page B

open sky. The dogs were hungry and eager to move.
    He whistled to the lead dog, a bitch named Kanyak, for whom he felt an affection that rivalled any other in his life. She threw herself against her lead and the sled flew forward. The other dogs, jerked into alignment by the tautened leads, began panting into the wind. The old man ran alongside for fifty feet and then knelt on the komatik, one hand on a walrus-skin whip, the other holding a line tied to the cross struts. The dogs knew the way.
    They passed the wooden Peterhead motorboats, pulled up on shore the autumn before. Snowdrifts concealed their length, revealing only ten of their twenty-five feet. The oldest of them had been built in the 1950s and had been kept going through a succession of engine replacements and shorings-up. The cedar planking had been repaired with spruce two-by-fours, carved to fit, to the point where they had become like the Bay Boys, creations as much of this place as they were of their origins, although still made of wood and hence foreign. Snow was piled even in the wheelhouses, swept in from between dried planking and ill-fitting windows. For twelve weeks every summer these boats charged across Hudson Bay, down to Churchill for goods brought there on the rail line, or north to Coral Harbour for
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, bloody and bellowing, tusks stabbing the air as they died.
    Emo’s own father had travelled to Newfoundland in 1925 to ferry such boats back to the trappers grown briefly—disorientingly—rich from Arctic fox. In the summer when the foxes were mangy and shedding, the men hunted
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from these boats too, and filled caches along the coast with dried meat and lamp oil and ammunition, for the long winter hunting trips. To find the caribou, the hunters had to move fast, and if they carried food for the dogs withthem this was difficult. Coming home, they were laden with meat, and the problem was less acute but, of course, neither was it necessary to move at any speed.
    Snow machines had come to the Arctic in the late 1960s and early 1970s, just as the last of the people had come in off the land. The sequence of decisions—to move into a house, and to kill the dogs—had been constant in each of the hamlets along the coast until no one lived on the land. Whale Cove, Repulse Bay, Chesterfield Inlet, and Coral Harbour had all grown inexorably, accreting like crystals in a supersaturated solution, the barrenlands emptying as the towns swelled. Twelve people and two families to a house, and tuberculosis running through each of these hamlets like a rumour. Life in the settlements was as difficult in many ways as life on the land had been. An iglu, or even a small river valley, would only ever have held one family, after all.
    The death of the dogs had been hard. The sled dogs had lineages as carefully remembered as those of the hunters who depended on them. They could smell approaching bears at night and find their way home in blizzards so blindingly dense that all that could be done was to trust them. In the course of half a dozen years they had nearly all been shot—if you lived in a house, a snow machine was an altogether less cumbersome thing to take care of. You could leave it for two weeks or three, and it would still be waiting for you and ready to run. If you still lived on the land, the business of keeping the dogs active was simply part of the day, and anyway it was lonely out there and the companionship of the creatures, surly and unpredictable beasts though they were, was valued. If you lived on the land, the business of carrying gasoline and oil was difficult—but not if you lived beside the Hudson’s Bay Company depot in town. This thing that made it so much easier to travel quickly on the land made it impossible to remain on it.
    Following the move into towns, some put their dogs on islands in the bay in the summers, with seal carcasses. The old men shook their heads over this; it wasn’t how they had been raised to treat dogs.
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