Andrea Barrett - Voyage of the Narwhal

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.

The camp was almost empty that afternoon: “The men are out hunting,” Joe explained. But soon three women gathered around Oonali’s tent and stood shyly gazing at Erasmus and the others. They were comely, Erasmus thought, despite the tattoos on their cheeks and hands. Less than five feet tall and plump, with tiny hands and glossy hair. He tried to sketch the black patterns twining up their arms while the women crowded around and laughed at his efforts. Zeke rose and offered each a steel needle.

The women made noises that seemed to indicate pleasure, promptly depositing the needles in little bags attached to their breeches. Each bag was made from the skin of a bird’s foot with the claws still attached: charming, Erasmus thought. As he turned to ask Joe’s help in bartering for one, the women reached toward Zeke and fingered his brass jacket buttons.

When Zeke pulled back, the women bent to Erasmus, still seated on his stone. He froze while the hands played over his chest. The slightest tugging, much more gentle than the crowding Fiji Islanders of his youth; it was the buttons they coveted, he realized, even more than the needles. Back in the brig, thanks to all his lists, he had a large tin of spares. With his knife he sliced off his three lower buttons and offered one to each woman.

Zeke frowned at him — but it was the buttons, Erasmus thought, that turned the tide of the afternoon. Four little boys pushed up to him, reaching for his journal and stroking the smooth white paper so insistently that he finally tore two blank pages from the back and handed them over. The boys grinned and ran away with their treasure; from the corner of his eye Erasmus saw them crowded on a stone cairn some way from the tents, tossing shreds that spun in the breeze like butterflies.

The women brewed vats of tea, which they served in bowls.

Dr. Boerhaave, turning one round in his hand, said, “I believe this is made of the base of a musk-ox horn.” As he bent and sniffed at the horn with his long, square-tipped nose, hair drifted from the tent and into everyone’s tea, catching in their teeth as they drank. An older woman with heavily tattooed hands arrived, bearing a dish of boiled caribou. Erasmus made a strangled noise when she offered him a portion on a metal spoon.

“Quiet,” Zeke said.

He reached for the spoon and examined it: silver, shapely, as alien here as a palm tree. To Joe he said, “Tell Oonali that yesterday, I asked if he’d ever seen white men’s ships. And he said no. Ask him if perhaps he’s forgotten to tell me something?”

Oonali said nothing at first. Joe stood to one side, translating, while Zeke asked quick questions, his anger ill-concealed. Had they seen any white men? Had they seen two ships? Where had the spoon come from? Did they have more like it? Had they ever met a kabloona named Dr. Rae, who’d traveled east of here several years earlier, and who’d bought spoons and other white men’s goods from some Esquimaux?

Joe struggled to keep up with the flow of Zeke’s words and made, Erasmus thought, conciliating gestures toward Oonali as he translated. Then Oonali, who had been calmly eating, spoke.

“We have not seen such ships,” he said, or so Joe translated his words. “But we have heard a story, from some Inuit we met hunting seal several winters ago. These men told us that, during the previous winter, they found a ship abandoned in the ice. They climbed on this ship but found no one there, only one dead man on the deck. They wished to see into the spaces below, but the passages to the lower part”—here Joe paused, looked at Zeke, and said, “Hatchways? Must be hatchways”— “were sealed over. These men told us that one side of the ship was wounded, and that they pulled wood away from there until they’d made a hole. Inside they found many useful tools and much iron, which they took so it wouldn’t go to waste. They had many spoons, like this one. I traded two good hides for this.”

“But you didn’t see the ship yourself?” Zeke said.

“No ship,” Oonali replied.

“You haven’t seen any white men?”

“I have never met one, although I have heard about them. You are my first to talk with.”

Zeke, excited now, drew his copy of the Rosses’ map from his jacket. “We’re here,” he said, indicating the bay where they were anchored. “This is the Great Fish River, here”—he asked if Joe knew the Esquimaux name for the river, which he did—”and this is the western shore. Can you indicate where the ship was seen?”

Erasmus and his companions leaned around Zeke and Joe and Oonali, forming a circle. They all knew Parry’s and Ross’s tales of men who could outline long stretches of coast with remarkable accuracy. Esquimaux traced maps in the snow, carved them in wood, built them from little piles of pebbles. Drew them when offered pencil and paper. “I’ll give you a knife,” Zeke said. “If you can show us anything.”

Oonali gazed at the paper. “Where the seals are good,” Joe translated, as Oonali touched a finger to a bay and spoke.

Oonali touched an inlet, then the mouth of a river. “Where my friend was lost. Where the fish are caught in the rocks.”