Winter Road

I’d barely clocked out of my shift bolting roof screens at Diavik Mine when Trista rang.

“Dad highsided the Husqvarna at the ice races and his back is messed,” she said. “Couple of pins and fused vertebrae. He’s okay, but he’s in a wheelchair for now and can’t manage himself. And Jack,” she raised her voice when I tried to interject, “you’re not going to believe this — Mom has dementia. Early-onset. Dad’s been hiding it.”

“Why would he do that?” I sat on my dorm bunk with the phone.

“Why does he do anything?” she said.

I couldn’t get my head around it. Fourteen hours of hydraulics and circulated air in the mine shaft — I wanted sleep. “Didn’t the neighbours notice?”

“Notice? Probably. But most of them have left. Lots of houses boarded up. And Dad was there to care for her. He hides shit from us, not them.” She sounded tired, and I wondered how long she’d been at the parents’ place. “You know Dad,” she went on. “He gets his first pension cheque last month and still thinks he can tear around like a teenager. Says he lost traction on the rear wheel over-steering into a turn, then the studs caught the ice and the torque flipped him headfirst over the handlebars. Bike came after him, ripped right through his parka. Good thing he held his hands up or he’d have stitches down his face not his forearms. Plus the damage to his back.”

I unlaced my boots and stretched my legs and waited for her to continue. She sounded like she was waiting, too. I didn’t know what to say. I had a hard time picturing Dad in such bad shape — and Mom? My mind started to wander, to lope inward to its own hinterlands. The parents still lived where I grew up, a tiny cluster of trailers at the edge of the Beaufort Sea. No roads in or out except in winter, when you drove the frozen Mackenzie River. I remember Mom’s twelve husky-cross runners tugging the titanium sled over the packed snow at the dog races, or to the traplines. Dad revving his Ski-doo or motocross down the Run-What-You-Have ice track the town plowed on the frozen ocean. Dump fires in summer and the watery croak of the ravens.

“I can’t do this alone.” Trista broke the silence. “I can’t deal with the two of them and the dogs by myself.”

“How about the neighbours? They’ll take the dogs at least.”

“Didn’t you hear me? It’s not the same. Everyone’s moved south. You haven’t seen how bad she is and how sick the dogs look. No one’s been running them — I honestly don’t think anyone’s fed them.”

“All right,” I said, although it wasn’t possible everyone had gone. And I’d seen the community come together over drilling and poverty and childcare, hell, even to organize the tea-boiling race for jamboree. If there wasn’t family, there was always some gossip or do-good to enlist. Of course Trista could still feel no one was helping, and that people were shirking responsibilities — by people she’d mean me. “Fine. I’m coming.”

I hung up. The snow patted the window in gusts. I wished I’d missed the call, or was asshole enough not to go. It had been years, a real chunk of time, since I’d been to the parents’ place. Parents, neighbours — I didn’t want to deal. I suppose the land, too: the planned retirement of the ice road, and the migration south coupled with the melt and refurbishment of that part of the world — I was sad.

I pushed myself to think about next morning’s shift — the blast of the heated air in the mineshafts and the chug of the water-pumps. But I was only trying to think about work, and memories cracked open like the ice late spring — one frozen sheet then boom, fragments on open water.

Trista and I were kids when the local government started its push against rabies. Pamphlets tacked to the hunting board at the Trader’s Co showed sketches of bats, wolves, and skunks in various stages of disease: drooped head, sagging jaw, stiff gait. The presentation slides were graphic, intended to scare, so after the first image of a sick hound — arced body, scummy muzzle — the adults cut us loose. Trista and I and a couple neighbour kids, we bought chips and Coke at the Trader’s Co (the only store in town) and headed to the ocean.

Tides had piled ice along the shoreline of the Beaufort. Long spears of it, both clear and flecked with bubbles, jutted into the air and the sunlight. Beyond that, the sea in early freeze: deep navy, filled coast-to-horizon with small plates of white pancake ice. We walked the beach. Trista pushed her hood back and tugged her braid from her parka. I turned up the shore and opened the ice hut — a small wooden structure, similar to a fishing shelter, built on top of communal storage that had been tunnelled into the permafrost way back in the sixties.

Inside the hut, a trapdoor filled most of the floor space and the bottom, when we lifted it, was crusted over. A ladder sank into the permafrost like a lure. Of course we went down, all of us. The wooden rungs were slippery, and the walls of the tunnels coated with rime. In the hut people had stored caribou, whale blubber, a frozen seal, tubs of ice cream, fish for sled dogs. One of us lifted the lid of a cardboard box and found the heads of four decapitated dogs. The heads were to be sent south for rabies testing, something that happened regularly, but the stiff fur and the bullet hole between the tan dog’s ears startled us.

The first kids back up the ladder stood on the trapdoor and kept the rest of us in until they got bored. (We had the worst games. It would have been dangerous if we’d locked someone in and forgotten, but we never did.) Later I snuck back to look at the heads. Why not? It was as good a place to hide and smoke as any, and cold even in summer. When the heat had Mom’s sled dogs panting in the shade of their houses, when Dad gave up on his dismantled motorbike because of the clouds of mosquitoes, in the ice hut nothing changed.

Only now, I guessed it had. I went through my drawers and packed a couple shirts and a pair of jeans, and then realized I should probably book a ticket before hitching to Yellowknife from the mine.

At the Diavik human resources desk, I told the girl I needed time off.

“Gotta plug some pups,” I joked. I mean, I was serious, the dogs might have to be shot, but I wanted to keep the conversation light and away from the parents. Not a chance.

She knew all about my family issues, she told me. My sister had called her, and had no doubt gone on and on in detail about the accident.

“So I can have the time?” I said.

“You can have the time.”

I asked the girl to give me the number of the airport.

“No worries,” she said. “We’ve got you on a company plane. Yellowknife to Inuvik, and there’s a supply rig leaving the mine in fifteen if you’re ready now.”

I thanked her, trying at the same time to think if I knew the girl. It seemed out of character that Trista had spilled personal details to a stranger, but she was overwhelmed, so, maybe. The girl and I continued our back-and-forth with her talking like she knew me — knew my family — and me scrutinizing her but unable to place her. Was she from the hometown? There were a lot of people at the mine from the Territories. But she looked city-based: her fluffy bleached hair and sharp nose, the pierced eyebrow she was going to regret if she ever went outside in the cold, and the edge of a blue tattoo — a vine or maybe a snake or the arm of an octopus — creeping around her neck from under her collared shirt.

No, I couldn’t place her, and I had to give up. Which made me wonder if she had me right, or if there had maybe been another accident with another family, and I ended up thanking her again for arranging the plane instead of asking her if we did, in fact, know each other.

The doubt hung around, bothering me while I packed my bag, and I was distracted throughout the drive to Yellowknife with the supply rig. Had I known her, the girl? I held my hands to the heater in the cab of the semi. The driver blasted country music and I relaxed a little. I had to force myself not to chuckle. So I couldn’t remember a face. What must it be like for Mom?

My parents came to the north from the south, which was almost unheard of. Dad was RCMP, and Mom lived for the dogsled races. Which could explain why they led the roundup — town safety, and threat of disease circulating into the sled dogs. Each summer they’d gather a crew, catch and load any unchained dog into a pickup, and then drive the pack to the landfill to be shot. I hated it, although I ended up helping swing the dogs into the pit when I was older and working for Search and Rescue.

But Trista and I, we didn’t think of dogs the way our parents did — as dangerous. Even now my memory of the roundup strays is their scrawny, joyful rutting in the box of the truck on the way to the dump. We didn’t see the land as violent either. Trista and I’d harness a bear dog if Mom had her sled dogs out. We’d borrow the lightest-weight sled we could, and run the fast edge of the floe — where the frozen ocean held the shore. If we couldn’t find a sled, we’d repurpose plastic siding, half an aluminum culvert, or anything else that let us run the mirrored sheen of puddled ice late spring, stupidly happy over fathoms of black ocean.

On the ice, water splashed and pooled teal, like the colour of the Diavik office girl’s tattoo — that tentacle that snuck up her neck from under her white-collared shirt and made me wonder what it was attached to, and how far down it went.

The drive over the company ice road from Lac de Gras to Yellowknife was a routine whiteout of snow and cloud for 373 kilometres. I didn’t know the rig driver, and after we lost the radio we filled time with small talk that made me wish Dad had nearly killed himself in summer instead of winter.

When the road from the mine is thawed, which is most of the year, the company flies its crew between Yellowknife and the Diavik excavation site over the tundra. The view from the single otter — green in spring; red, pink, and purple near the end of summer; a real fiery autumn. Big stretch of crowberry and bearberry heath, moss, and lichen, splashed with lakes that throw the sky back at you. Blue creeks and waterways run everywhere, since there’s nothing to stop them in that flat, treeless place. And then Diavik itself: that open-pit mine — an outlandish, chalky hole corkscrewed in the centre of Lac de Gras. That first time I saw it, it blew my mind — that the water doesn’t fill the pit is a feat of engineering. Astonishing.

The driver dropped me in Yellowknife. I had time before I had to be at the airport, and I needed a drink. The bar was crowded with one of the young mining crews — I guess it was payday.

“Next round is on me,” I said. Why not. The kids were fresh from their first three weeks and, following their solo shifts, stank with the relief of company. In that crowd I felt I owned the city — the dirty snow, the gravelled strip, the saloon, the stuffed muskox that eyed us from the loft above the bar. I carried a couple pitchers to the table.

“How’d you end up at the mine?” someone asked.

“Before this I was Search and Rescue,” I said.

“How long at Diavik?” They topped my pint.

“What, maybe fifteen years?”

There was a pause, and then a kid asked, “How old are you anyway, man?”

A few years into my forties. That’s nothing — barely started. I paid for the pitchers and tried not to take it personal. So they couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to leave the north. Hell, I barely understood, and I definitely couldn’t explain it. Fuck them.

“Like,” I said. “What about the time I decided to snowshoe the lake? The air was cold and blue around the horizon, pink-and-orange twilight overhead. So pretty I didn’t watch where I was going. It was forty below and remote as shit. What was there to run into?”

The kids were onto pint three or five. They leaned toward each other and yelled above the music and noise of the bar. I rambled on and pretended I didn’t notice no one was listening.

“I ran into a caribou, what was left of it, caught by the legs in the ice. Wolves’d stripped the flesh from its back and rump. I had a view of the spine and ribcage, since, by some miracle of balance, the animal had frozen standing.”

“You want another?” The waitress cleared the empty pitchers and gauged the mood of the mine crew around the table.

“Keep it coming,” I said. That caribou on the lake, it carried a huge rack on top of its gnawed face. If you haven’t seen them, caribou antlers spread at the tips like they’ve been pressed with a spoon — big scoops of bone flatten into a palm, edged with any number of points, and this pair held palms at the top, mid, and brow. A spectacular set, each splayed palm twice the size of my hand. The breadth of the rack gave me a headache, how an animal could walk around with a pair like that.

I raised my voice. “In case anyone thinks Diavik is the ass-end of civilization, it isn’t.”

“Keep it together, dude,” someone said.

But isn’t the ass-end. Same way the parents’ place isn’t the ass-end of nowhere. Not quite. Wintertime, Diavik’s ice road extends beyond the mine. Keep trucking north from the hole in Lac de Gras and in thirty-eight kilometres you’ll hit Misery. I’m serious, Misery Lake. Misery Camp — a satellite of Ekati Diamond Mine. Check the maps. And 220 kilometres further, yet another mine spirals into Jericho Lake clawing even more diamonds from kimberlite. Beyond that there’s the islands, and a few kids who’ve never seen trees.

Outrageous, sure. Maybe even fable-esque, but not shit. Not ass-end.

You want fable-esque, let me go back even earlier than the dog heads and the rabies scare to when I was four or five, and my parents told us about where they were from. Most people in our town grew up there, were born at home or in Inuvik or Whitehorse hospital. Dad, his family sprouted so far south I couldn’t picture it: Edmonton.

“What’s it like there?” Trista asked. We were raking hay in the summer dog yard. The dogs draped themselves behind their houses, dug under the frames, and collapsed anywhere there was shade — it was mid-July and the sun had been up nine weeks straight.

“For starters,” Dad said. He had his motocross pulled apart in the open shed. “The sun sets each night, even in summer. Rises year round.”

“No way,” I said. “There’s no way.”

We had no doubt he was pulling our leg, and couldn’t understand why he insisted.

“I know,” he said, “the sun doesn’t always do that here. But trust me, they wouldn’t believe this place exists either.”

I caught a taxi from the bar to the airport, slightly drunk and disgruntled by the attitude of the younger crowd. To top that off, my flight was delayed and I had nothing to do. I scrolled through the contacts on my phone and decided to call an ex-common law, but hung up when I heard her voice. My ex, Rachel, she’d had a kid when I moved in with her, and he used to come in the bathroom and pee while I was showering. No big deal, I’m no prude, but it was all stops and starts with the kid’s urine stream. I asked him what was up and the kid showed me. He’d pinch his foreskin closed and pee into it until it ballooned, and then let the piss splash into the toilet bowl.

My ex called back thirty seconds after I pocketed my phone and said, like old times, “What the fuck gives you the right to hang up on me, fucker?”

“Rachel, you sure you got the right guy?” I asked.

“Call display, Jack,” she said. “What do you want?”

“I wasn’t thinking straight,” I said. I told her Mom had Alzheimer’s and I wanted to reminisce. She didn’t say no, so I went on. “That pee trick. Where’d Joey learn that?” It hadn’t come from me — I’m circumcised.

“How the hell should I know? Kids pick things up.”

“I guess that’s why the bathroom stank.”

Why’d I say any of that? Maybe the same reason that, after we found the box of decapitated dog heads as kids, I kept sneaking back to the ice hut and staying as long as I could. Which was a long time in the winter, when I could layer myself in a parka and snow gear, and a very short time in the summer. It was so weird I wanted to make sure I remembered it right. That it’d been real.

Rachel hung up on me this time, and I’d barely set down the phone when it rang again. It was my parents’ number. I didn’t pick up. It would be Trista wanting to know why I wasn’t in the air yet.

Outside the airport windows mechanics rose in bucket trucks and sprayed pink, foamy liquid over the wings of the plane. The flight wasn’t anywhere near ready. I wanted a smoke, but I’d quit years ago. That’s something that follows you — old habits. I could chart my life into smoking, quitting, craving. Shake up the order and the list would still be accurate.

I first smoked when I visited the dog heads as a kid — and thinking about that made me a little excited to see Trista. To rehash all the shit we pulled, everything we thought we got away with, who’d ratted on who. The time Trista and I had the guns taken away for popping ptarmigans — one shell from a 12-gauge and the fat birds exploded in gratifying puffs of white. I almost hit callback on my cell to chat with her, but I didn’t want her to tell me how far gone Mom was. Not yet.

Maybe, I told myself, maybe she remembers the old stuff. Like, finding me when I was eight in the ice hut next to the box of heads. After she shouted me from the hut she lifted the twelve-dog sled (lightweight, aluminum) from its hooks and had me hop the lead dogs (Hill-Billy and Cash) to the front lines, harness them, and drive into the night with her.

When it grew dark she had headlamps and then when the dogs grew tired she footed the brake. Secured all twelve husky-cross runners on a long chain pegged into the ice and fed them caribou joints and fish. She lit a fire, spread hay for the dogs, and stepped each into a sleep-sac. They curled into balls. When I woke, a light skiff of snow covered them, and she sat by the fire boiling a massive pan of kibble. I’m not sure what she wanted to teach me, but the labour of basic movement under all that winter clothing — I was exhausted before we’d left the yard.

After I boarded the flight I realized I had nothing to read but the safety guide — orange and grey cartoons of women and men inflating lifejackets on a flaming plane, expressions absurdly tranquil. Before Diavik I’d worked Search and Rescue out of the military base near the hometown, and there was nothing calm about it.

Mostly I’d duct-taped my seatbelt together in a helicopter and leaned from the craft, on the lookout for a missing hunter’s orange safety vest, a stream of smoke that rose in the distance, or the upturned hull of a trawler or skiff on the choppy ocean. Sometimes young idiots jumped ice floes with their Ski-doos. I’d done it when I was a teen — worked up enough speed for a leap and revved over open water, hydroplaning to the next bit of ice. If the Ski-doo didn’t reach the floe, we were on recovery.

The plane hit turbulence and the nervous flyer beside me, a huge man who must have been way too hot in his parka, jerked his hand from the armrest and gripped my fingers. He kept his eyes screwed shut and didn’t acknowledge the action, so I sat there and let him squeeze, and tried to think of anything besides the way my stomach lurched with each jolt of the plane.

Some of Search and Rescue had been good: I’d worked with Cindy. Five feet tall, pointed chin, black hair she wound in two buns above her ears that gave her face a kittenish shape. She’d volunteered at a fire department way south — Watson Lake, practically British Columbia — at the squat end of the Yukon. That led her to High Arctic Rescue Training at the military base outside my hometown, which led her to me. The first summer, when we were both in Basic Firearms, the deerflies slashed and sucked blood like a bitch. She was worried about tularemia, anthrax, eye worm, et cetera, and it was hot — the sun wobbled around the horizon like a helium balloon low on spunk. I suggested the ice hut.

Some thoughtless hunter had plucked geese in the corridor. Feathers and bits of blood were frozen into the gravel and on the walls. My family’s locker was okay, sparkly ice crystals coated the roof, but it was more like being in a deep-freeze than it was romantic, and when Cindy opened a cardboard box, she found — I shit you not — the same dog heads I’d obsessed over as a kid. One grey, two black, one tan.

She didn’t say anything, so I lit a smoke. Then remembered she wanted me to quit (lung cancer — she knew about the asbestos workers from Cassiar and said it was unholy hell) and I put the cigarette out in the tan dog’s eye.

When she calmed down enough to listen, I explained about the routine dog culls, that the town couldn’t let strays pack up. I said strays, but I meant sled or bear dogs that had slipped the chain and soured. Wild, feral animals plagued with mange and starvation — nothing friendly or rehabilitatable about them.

And once I started talking about the culls, I remembered those particular dogs. How had I forgotten? The first dog had turned up quietly — stretched in a green patch of dwarf birch by the Trader’s Co late August, its matted coat thick with flies. Town shot the nose off the second on the gravel strip outside the food bank. Third I couldn’t recall. But the fourth was a frothy-mouthed bitch the town ran down on Ski-doos and blew to pieces. There were kids to think of. I guess no one sent them south for testing. No one got around to it.

Cindy must have forgiven me, because later on we pushed a canoe into the Beaufort and dropped a fishing line. She twisted around to look at me in the canoe, her shiny black buns a little lopsided, the long-sleeve shirt she wore to fight bugs and sunburn one of those old-fashioned ones. You know the type, the colourful plaid cotton that was so popular in the mid-eighties. “Why are they still there?” she asked.

“The heads?” I let the fishing line spin out. Who knew? The town must have forgotten about them. I forgot. I wouldn’t have brought her down there if I’d remembered.

Baby-blue sky and clear ocean, the yellow canoe, the speckled red lure, Cindy’s shiny twists of hair. My eyes followed the weight and jigging spoon down, way down — I could see depth that hadn’t been there a moment ago — and then the glint of red fell too far into the black.

My flight landed in Inuvik in the early morning, and the aircraft marshals waved us off the tarmac with their orange beacons. I hustled to the bathroom. My hand-holding neighbour from the plane pushed past me and locked himself in a stall. I spit in the sink and washed my face, but the sounds and smell from the cubicle didn’t encourage relaxation.

“You all right?” I asked. No response. I went to the desk and put in a request for a rental, one with chains that could travel the winter road north to the hometown.

“Are you okay?” the boy at the desk asked.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Turbulence.” But I wasn’t sure that was why I felt like shit, why my face was grey and had greenish bags under the eyes, the eyes a bit red and more yellowed than I was comfortable with. There was more to it than the flight; it was a mind trip heading home. I knew what would happen when I arrived.

I’d bang on the door, wait for Trista to open it, and haul my backpack into the living room. Some of the furniture would be different — probably a satellite dish, a flatscreen — but the house would still have the same dusty, burnt smell of newsprint and kindling, and like whoever vacuumed used too intense a setting on the shag carpet. Dad in a wheelchair in his housecoat, both his legs propped on an ottoman, greenish-yellow bruises over his shins and knees. He’d have lost weight in the hospital and his skin would hang off him. He’d take my hand and then, seeing me note the stitches down his forearms, he’d lift his arms to shield his face.

“Studded tires coming right at me,” he’d say. “Ripped straight through the parka.”

“Don’t brag,” I’d respond, and he’d excuse himself: “They got me on opiates.”

I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to ask about Mom.

All that thinking about what waited, when I could do nothing to fix it.

“Here’s the keys.” The boy at the rental counter handed me a fob. “You’ll find the truck in the lot. Chains are in the box if they aren’t on the tires already. There’s a key for the storage on the ring.”

Mid-winter the Mackenzie was three feet thick and black and the only vehicles I passed were plows or water trucks sealing faults. Not much snow, but what powder there was had been scraped clear of the ice and piled along the sides of the frozen river. The pickup’s headlights lit the fog, and then the sky caught a lick of sun and glowed rosy to the south. Ravens perched on fishing boats dry-docked along the banks. A couple of foxes scoured for hares and roadkill with the lanky, airy gait I remembered alongside the dogsled trails. The radio played eighties classics, interspersing the songs with chatter about an NHL charity game in Whitehorse, and then an update on the berm construction Tuk to Inuvik — an all-season highway over the permafrost. I’d seen it leaving Inuvik: stockpiled geotextile rolls and silvery culverts.

Of all the modern marvels.

The all-season road had been talked about for decades, opposed by the south because of the price, and in the north we had mixed feelings. Win some, lose some — the new road would be a bit of both.

Back when I was in the hometown, and right into my Search and Rescue years, you flew in or waited for the freeze. Water one day, ice the next, and vice versa. You had to watch yourself. Like when that overloaded rig cracked through the ice road — eighteen-wheeler bent at the coupling and hung on by the front axle and rear wheels long enough for the driver to pray his way out of the cab. The town patted the man’s back, handed him a coffee as the tractor raised its nose and slipped backwards into the water. Nothing to do about it, and the rig vanished into the black without a burp, the whole picture eerily quiet.

It was a shock, but we went on. That same year: first haze of green in May, we harpooned a beluga. Cut and dried slabs of blubber and skin on the rock shore of the Beaufort. Cubed the fat into muktuk and stored it in the ice hut. Yellow warblers returned and perched in larch and white spruce that managed stunted growth in sheltered valley dips even this far beyond the tree line. Buds turned to meaty leaves. Hares and foxes shed their winter colour and the muskoxen gathered with undercoats hanging from their backs in mossy strips.

Summer. The last piles of snow collapsed and the entire town became a puddle. Water reflected the sky, heather bloomed and the horizon took on a yellow-white sheen. Fireweed, green-keeled cotton grass, Arctic huckleberry. The sun careened around the horizon. Mosquitoes and blackflies rose from the tundra in clouds.

Another roundup, we shot strays at the dump and swung them by the legs into the landfill. Anything that looked sick rather than starving got decapitated (carving knife between the vertebrae base of the neck) and tossed to a box. Once it was done, we’d empty a canister of mixed-gasoline on the pile and light it up.

Then fall, then winter. Then another spring. And again, the ice breakup — sudden, impressive, and loud. Groans for weeks, and then a boom that thundered over everything. The ice gave and flowed.

Rose-coloured shit, I told myself, navigating the pickup around the cracks in the frozen Mackenzie.

The Mackenzie ice road hit the Beaufort and I drove the last leg of the winter road over the ocean. And then I was there. The hometown. The sign marking the weight capacity of the ice was pocked with bullet holes, and a couple mangy strays tugged at a muskrat hide. Dry-docked boats by the frozen shore. All the buildings on stilts above the permafrost, all the stilts buried in snow. Trailers coated in frost. Aluminum utilitdors, silver and pink in the twilight, snaked electric and plumbing and phone between houses. Insulated with foam and yellow fibreglass, those tubes are full of voles, and come summer the couple tattered cats that’ve survived the foxes will spend sunny days on top of the warm metal.

I parked outside the Trader’s Co and threw my bag over my shoulder. I trudged through the snow over the Ski-doo trails up the hill, past too many boarded houses, to the parents’ place, where I stopped. They must’ve tossed caribou antlers on the roof every single year they lived there, and the trailer looked fortified for the apocalypse. Dad’s busted motocross sat in the shed beside the Ski-doo. A satellite dish (I was right, they’d installed one) pointed due south. And in the yard, Mom’s dogs. Fifteen to twenty husky-cross chained to square-frame doghouses. Tan and black, pale-eyed, most curled and asleep on straw and snow. A torn ear, a raised head. Walking closer I saw most had yellow crust in the eyes. Shit stains down the legs.

I stood for a while. If I had Cindy’s number I’d have called her. She’d probably hang up on me like my ex had, but I only wanted to make sure they remembered everything we’d been through. The embarrassing fuck-ups I used to wish I could forget. I mean, if we can laugh over it, we should be okay, right?

I watched the dogs squint through pus and chew their sores.

Until then — until I saw the condition of the dogs — I’d kept telling myself the situation wasn’t as bad as Trista claimed. Same as Dad had done with Mom’s illness, probably. Probably what kept him from calling for help — he couldn’t get past the sadness.

I can forgive him that.

From the look of the animals, I guessed I would suffer a bit of heartbreak inside the house.

I climbed up the frozen stairs and banged on the parents’ door. Trista opened it and we hugged. I handed her a bottle of Malbec I’d snagged in Inuvik.

“Wait here.” She set the bottle aside, zipped into a parka and joined me on the steps. “I got to fill you in on the damage before you see them.”

“That bad?” I said.

I didn’t want to interrupt her, but I couldn’t bring myself to listen either. In the yard, Mom’s skinny dogs gnawed frozen char. Trista must have fed them. And watching the dogs eat I suddenly remembered when the other stray from the ice hut had turned up: a grey bitch, milky at the teats, wandering slowly from the eastern lake area. The dog’s stiff gait, her relentless stumble along the rocky shore. The ice hut, I wanted to ask Trista. When you got the fish did you see the box with the dogs’ heads?

“Okay,” Trista squeezed my arm.

I grabbed the doorknob.

It’s been thirty years since Trista and I were kids, but I remember this one winter when the snow came late. Dad and I ski-dooed the trapline with two neighbour boys, baiting foot traps with stink salmon. I scratched together the scattered, powdery cover — more frost than snow — at the river’s outlet to hide the traps. We’d thumped a couple snared foxes earlier that morning and had a rogue, cherry-coated male and one white vixen lashed to the Ski-doo trailer. The light bounced a warm orange over the ice — the sun scraped around the south horizon and set fire to colour, every red enriched and backed by blue shadow. We lowered our hoods, the neighbour boys’ toques bold yellow against the wolverine trim on their parkas. Dad and I planted marker logs near the traps and loaded the bucket of stink salmon on the trailer. Below — honest to god, I remember this as clear as the ice under us — we realized we could see the silty rocks of the riverbed and good-sized sheefish swimming in the brackish water. Course we broke out the auger and then took maybe thirteen fish total. Each time we dropped the lure we hooked and pulled a flopping, tinny fish onto the ice.

Mom was a long shadow on the horizon, running her titanium sled, six dogs off the gangline. Trista followed on the four-dog behind — there’s no sound when you run, nothing but the breath of the dogs and the hiss of the sled over the snow. They caught us unawares, and helped haul the catch home.

Later we barbecued and ate. The white, flaky meat sweeter than halibut. While Dad cooked, I hung the two foxes from the shed by their rear legs and wrapped their noses in paper towel and duct tape. Cut a slit around each ankle and peeled the skins from the carcasses like a sock.

Standing with Trista, opening that door —

No, the fish is what I want to leave you with. Never saw anything like it again. We kept reeling one after another, saying, as their tails flashed in the sun and pounded the ice, “Would you look at that.”