Another stop. Kunuk is scanning the horizon to scout a safe route forward, picking a path around potentially treacherous spots. For good reason: we pass a cairn, tribute to a Caterpillar driver who fatally plunged through a patch of weak ice.
Finally, silence. The vista is pure azure. It’s not the top of the world by any stretch, but here, somewhere between Melville Peninsula and Baffin Island, I feel the pitiless vastness with a mixture of pride and terror. The line between ice and water is not absolute at the floe edge: there’s a mushy blue-grey margin. Step on it and you slither in; they’ll find you in the summer melt. I’m here. I have no toes, but I’m here. I try wiggling them. If they’re moving, there’s no indication.
“Give me the tummy treatment.”
The tummy treatment, I readily admit to her, is better than sex. We sit opposite each other, like kindergarten playmates. She spreads her legs, the easier to accept my offered ones, pulls off my boots, and stuffs their frozen contents under her parka, onto the exquisite radiance of her abdomen. Such a sigh has never passed from my lips. Five minutes of gradually building ecstasy. I smile, I beam at my saviour. She lights a cigarette.
Jason, Kunuk’s nephew and one of the production’s technical wizards, comes by to offer “frozen sushi.” He snaps off a piece of Arctic char, which thaws in my mouth, then tastes sensational. There’s a bang and a commotion. Kunuk has already shot a seal. Jason hurries over to launch a flatboat to fetch the animal. “You’ve got to get it quick or it will sink,” says Catherine, who happens to be Kunuk’s niece and a film student at Carleton University in Ottawa.
The evisceration is shockingly simple. A large knife slices open the animal’s underside. Bare-handed, Jason opens the cavity and Kunuk reaches in to pull out the wire-thin intestine, which he loops in gory circles as though finishing up with the garden hose. He pulls out his own knife and relieves the carcass of its liver: packed with vitamin A, the organ was once key to survival in this extreme world. He slices off an end and savours it, then offers me a still-steaming morsel. It tastes, in another disturbing but homely revelation, like filet mignon.
The seal’s fur will make a pair of boots, the thick blubber will supply oil for lamps. The bones are popped into a pot of melted iceberg water to flavour a seaside stew. Freshly brewed coffee is burbling on the propane stove, but my feet are starting to go and I must heed them.
The return journey promises to be more comfortable, but Cohn, who has agreed to take me back early, can’t start his snowmobile. Jason gets under the hood and sets to work. One, two, three pulls and nothing; finally, on the seventh, a vroom. Jason looks at Cohn meaningfully: do not turn off the Ski-Doo.
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