Andrea Barrett - The Voyage of the Narwhal

They carried offerings of duff and dried apples, as well as knives and needles and files and beads to barter. Over the hills they went, into a rough and scrubby land bare of trees and veiled by a light drizzle. As they walked Erasmus listened to Joe, who was trying to teach Zeke some things about this group called the Netsilik. Now and then Erasmus bent to gather pebbles; he’d been lax, he felt, about examining the area’s geological structure.

“You might want to be a bit more…cautious,” Joe was saying to Zeke. “About asking directly for information; it’s not these people’s nature to respond to pointed questions, they dislike being cross-examined. And if I could let them know that we’ll barter for everything they tell us, that they’ll be rewarded?”

“Fine,” Zeke said impatiently. “Fine, fine, fine.”

Erasmus and the others could hardly keep up with him. In the treeless, featureless landscape, the six tents forming the camp stood out starkly. A bunch of dogs, tied away from the tents, howled like wolves.

“They’d eat the tents in an instant if they were free,” Joe said as they approached. All around, on the rough stony ground, were dog carcasses, bits of rotted meat and blubber, and broken bones. Thomas Forbes tripped over something and Dr. Boerhaave, bending down, said, “I believe that’s a human femur.” The bone was still shrouded in bits of leathery skin.

Thomas leaped backward, stumbling on the shallow pit in which the bone had been interred. The flat pieces of limestone meant to cover the body were small and quite light, Erasmus saw, and had clearly been pushed aside by a hungry fox or a dog. Thomas cursed and then bent over, very pale.

Joe said, “It’s not what you think. It’s not that they disrespect their dead: but they believe that a heavy weight placed upon the deceased’s body hinders the spirit from moving on. Of course the dogs uncover them, the dogs are always hungry.”

“Savages,” Thomas said. Later he would disappear for a day in the company of a young Netsilik woman, recently widowed, whatever discomfort he felt with the tribe’s habits apparently overcome. But now Erasmus saw Thomas look with dislike on the man who emerged from a strong-smelling tent to greet them. The stranger had a sparse moustache and a tuft of hair between his chin and his lower lip; the bottom of his nose was bent to one side, as if it had been broken but not set. When he spoke, Erasmus heard the word kabloona.

“White man,” Joe translated. In the light rain they stared at each other. The tent, Erasmus saw, was too small for them all to sit inside. They seated themselves on stones just in front of its opening.

Everything smelled of caribou. Behind him Erasmus could see how the rain saturated the hides, which hung heavily on the poles; how the rain dripped through the tiny holes drilled by warble flies when the animals had still been alive. Here too there were animal skulls, scores of skulls, jaws and eye sockets tilted among rocks and lichens. Zeke and the man who’d welcomed them—Oonali, he called himself—did all the talking, with Joe acting as interpreter. In return for the clasp knives and tobacco Zeke offered, and after Zeke had made it clear that he’d be honored to see Oonali’s hunting outfit, Oonali brought out a bow and some arrows that Zeke admired.

“I’d love to bring these home to the Toxophilites,” he said to Erasmus. “Wouldn’t that be something?”

Erasmus was scratching steadily in Lavinia’s journal—he couldn’t write fast enough, he couldn’t get down all the details. He sketched the bow: fir strengthened with bone and made more elastic by cunning springs of plaited sinew. He didn’t sketch the curiously twisted bowstring or the slate-headed arrows, as Zeke had by then arranged to trade a pair of axe heads for the entire outfit. Next to him Dr. Boerhaave scribbled similarly, while Ned, who’d stuck his head beneath the door flap, turned his head slowly from one view to the next. Whalebone vessels and walrus-tusk knives, spoons made from what looked to be hollowed-out bones.

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