The 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.”