Ian McGuire - The North Water

They carry him, wrapped in hides and palely shivering, back onto the sledge and take him south, past the frozen lake and the summer hunting grounds, to the mission. The red painted cabin is set on a shallow rise, with the frozen sea below it and the tall mountains behind. There is a large igloo standing adjacent, with a line of black smoke rising through the opening in the roof, and a set of tethered sledge dogs curled asleep in front. The hunters are greeted on their arrival by the priest, a bright-eyed, wiry Englishman with graying hair and beard and an expression earnest but fiercely skeptical. They point to Sumner and explain where they found him and how. When the priest looks doubtful, they trace a map of the shoreline with their fingers in the snow and point to the place. The priest shakes his head.

“A man can’t just appear from nowhere,” he says.

They explain that, in that case, he is most likely an Angakoq and that, until now, he has been living in a house at the bottom of the sea with Sedna the one-eyed goddess and her father, Anguta. At this, the priest becomes irritable. He starts telling them again (as he always does) about Jesus, and then goes into the cabin and brings out the green book. They stand by their sledges and listen to him read in clumsy Inuktitut. The words make a kind of sense, but they find the stories far-fetched and childlike. When he’s finished, they smile and nod.

“Then perhaps he is an angel,” they say.

The priest looks at Sumner and shakes his head.

“He’s not an angel,” he says. “I will guarantee you that.”

They carry Sumner inside and lay him on a cot near the stove. The priest covers him in blankets, then crouches down and tries to shake him awake.

“Who are you?” he says. “What ship do you come from?”

Sumner half-opens one eye but doesn’t attempt to answer. The priest frowns, then leans forwards and examines Sumner’s frost-blackened countenance more closely.

“Deutsch?” he asks him. “Dansk? Ruski? Scots? Which one is it now?”

Sumner gazes back at him for a moment without interest or recognition, then closes his eye again. The priest stays crouching beside him for a moment, then nods and stands up.

“You lie there awhile and rest yourself,” he says, “whoever you are. We’ll talk more after.”

The priest makes coffee for the hunters and asks them more questions. When they have gone, he feeds Sumner brandy with a teaspoon and rubs lard into his frostbite. When Sumner is settled, the priest sits at a table by the window and writes in the green book. There are three other thick leather-bound volumes by his elbow and now and then he opens one, looks into it, and nods. Later, an Esquimaux woman comes in with a pan of stew. She is wearing a deerskin anorak cut longer at the rear and a black wool hat; she has V-shaped blue lines tattooed in parallel across her forehead and the back of both hands. The priest takes two thick white bowls from the shelf above the door and pushes back his papers and books. He spoons half the stew into one bowl and half into the other, then gives the pan back to the woman. The woman points at Sumner and says something in her native language. The priest nods, then says something in reply which makes her smile.

Sumner, lying motionless, smells the hot food. Its soft scent reaches him through the nerveless weft of his exhaustion and indifference. He is not hungry, but he is beginning to remember what hunger might be like, the particular, hopeful nature of its aching. Is he ready to return to all that? Does he want to? Could he? He opens his eyes and looks around: wood, metal, wool, grease; green, black, gray, brown. He turns his head. There is a gray-haired man sitting at a wooden table; on the table there are two bowls of food. The man closes the book he is reading, murmurs out a prayer, then stands up and brings one of the bowls over to where Sumner is lying.

“Will you eat something now?” he asks him. “Here, let me help you.”

The priest kneels down, puts his hand behind Sumner’s head, and raises it up. He scoops a piece of meat onto the spoon and brings the spoon to Sumner’s lips. Sumner blinks. A wave of feeling, dense and unnameable, sweeps through his body.

“I can feed you better if you’d open up your mouth a little,” the priest says. Sumner doesn’t move. He understands what is being asked of him but makes no effort to comply.

“Come on now,” the priest says. He puts the very tip of the metal spoon onto Sumner’s lower lip and gently presses down. Sumner’s mouth opens a little. The priest tips the spoon up quickly, and the meat slides onto Sumner’s lacerated tongue. He lets it sit there a moment.

“Chew,” the priest tells him, making a chewing motion himself and pointing up at his jaw so Sumner is sure to see. “You won’t get any of the goodness out if you don’t chew it right.”

Sumner closes his mouth. He feels the meat’s taste seeping into him. He chews it twice, then swallows. He feels a sharp pain and then a duller ache.

“Good,” the priest says. He scoops another piece of meat and does the same again. Sumner eats three more pieces but lets the fourth drop out onto the floor unchewed. The priest nods, then lowers Sumner’s head back down onto the blanket.

“We’ll try you with a mug of tea later on,” he says. “See how you do with that.”

After two days more, Sumner is able to sit up and eat by himself. The priest helps him into a chair, puts the blanket over his shoulders, and they sit together on two adjacent sides of the small wooden table.

“The men who found you consider you what they call an Angakoq ,” the priest explains, “which means ‘wizard’ in the Esquimaux language. They believe that bears have great powers, and that certain, chosen men partake in them. The same thing is true of other animals too, of course — deer and walrus, seals, even certain seabirds, I believe — but in their mythology the bear is the most powerful beast by far. Men who have the bear as their genius are capable of the greatest magic — healing, divination, and so on.”

He glances at the stranger to see if there is any sign that he has understood, but Sumner looks impassively down at his food.

“I’ve seen some of their Angakoq s in action and they’re naught but conjurers and charlatans, of course. They dress themselves up in gruesome masks and other audacious gewgaws; they make a great song and dance in the igloo, but there’s nothing to it at all. It’s nasty heathenish stuff, the crudest kind of superstition, but they know no better and how could they? They’d never seen the Bible before I got here most of them, never heard the gospel preached in earnest.”

Sumner looks up at him briefly but doesn’t pause from his chewing. The priest smiles a little and nods encouragement, but Sumner doesn’t smile back.

“It’s slow and painful work,” the priest goes on. “I’ve been here alone since the early spring. It took months to win their trust — through gifts at first, knives, beads, needles, and so on, and then through acts of kindness, giving help when they needed it, extra clothes or medicines. They are kindly people, but they are very primitive and childlike, almost incapable of abstract thought or any of the higher emotions. The men hunt and the women sew and suckle children, and that forms the limit of their interests and knowledge. They have a kind of metaphysics, true, but it is a crude and self-serving one, and, so far as I can tell, many don’t even believe in it themselves. My task is to help them grow up, you might say, to develop their souls and make them self-aware. That is why I am making the translation of the Bible here.” He nods at the piles of books and papers. “If I can get it right, find the correct words in their language, then they will begin to understand, I’m sure. They are God’s creatures after all, in the end, just as much as you or I.”