Ilatsiak - 10

Ulotsaq sat alone on his sled. His three dogs were ragged and worn, his caribou clothing dirty and missing much of its fur where it had been worn away with use. He must be cold, thought Ilatsiaq. Where’s the the boy and the woman who usually travel with him? He watched him swing off the sled as it reached the rough ice shelf in the tide zone. As the dogs moved through the gleaming hummocks of ice, Ulotsaq pushed and pulled, swinging the sled to avoid bumping into ice blocks which would bring the dogs to a halt. Finally through, he sat back on the sled and let the dogs pull him up the slight slope to where Ilatsiaq sat waiting. He looked tired, worn out and old. Ulotsaq got up and walking over, gave Ilatsiaq’s hand a single shake. Neither spoke. Turning, Ulotsaq walked to the closest snowhouse, pushed the skins forming the entrance aside and disappeared inside. Ilatsiaq heard a woman inside offer him some warm seal soup. Then silence. His dogs curled up where they had stopped. They too had come a long way on little food.
Ilatsiaq wondered what was going on. It wasn’t usual to see Ulotsaq so far away from the people he usually wandered about with, but this was far to the west of his usual haunts. And that he was alone was also troubling. Something must have happened. Something that reminded him of a time he didn’t like like to think about. It was too long ago and now lay muddled in his tired brain, images and thoughts and emotions all jumbled and twisted together. How could anyone make any sense of it now. Still there it was, back again to haunt him. Perhaps he should not have come to this place. He began thinking of leaving even though the others would not want to.

* * *
Patsy watched his father moving through the kitchen dawn. He was easy to see. The sun had been up now literally for weeks, and wouldn’t set until sometime in August. He watched his father as he fussed with this and that obviously searching for more tea.
“Looking for the tea, Father?” he finally said, grinning to himself because he knew he would never break down and ask. Sometimes he wondered why the old man had bothered to marry his mother, he was so damned independent. But then, he really did need her. Independence didn’t guarantee his survival completely, especially as he got older, more set in his ways.
“Where has your mother hid it this time?” he wasn’t going to admit he didn’t remember where it was usually kept. “Why can’t things be left out where they can be handy...”
Patsy got up and pretended to search for the ‘missing’ tea, suddenly finding a small metal tin of the stuff hidden behind several boxes of rock hard ship’s biscuits on the wooden shelf to the left of the only window in the building. Passing back in front of the window, his eye caught sight of his father’s boat frozen into the ice out in the bay. He handed the tin to him. “Have you met Ilatsiak? He’s an old shaman. The one who came in with the Bathurst people the other day? He’s quite different. Funny guy... strange almost. I get the feeling there’s something going on between him and that loner who came in yesterday. Have you seen him?”
The Captain shook out a handful of tea from the tin and lifting the lid off the kettle, dumped the whole fistful into the water. Patsy watched his tea brewing technique, again for the umpteenth time. “Typical,” he thought. “Who taught him to make tea? He just adds more and more tea and water until at the end, the kettle becomes filled completely with soggy leaves. Then he finally cleans it out and the process is started over again.”
Patsy’s father added a few scoops of water from the barrel of melting lake ice to the kettle, topped it up and then placed it back on the stove in its usual position. It would slowly simmer away all day, the tea reaching a strength unknown to most tea lovers in the rest of the world.
“Old man? What old man?” Patsy’s father finally joined the conversation. “You mean the old man, the one who sits outside his tent and stares into the bay all day?” he suddenly said, looking up from his chore.
“Yes. He was talking about your boat yesterday. He said it was too small.”
“Too small? It’s the biggest boat he’s ever seen!” The Captain looked up quickly, laughing at the odd remark. “Biggest boat he ever saw, was no bigger than a glorified rowboat!” Klengenberg, shook his head, laughing all the while. “What a strange thing to say!”
“When I asked him what other ships he had seen though, he quickly changed the topic and asked where I had come from, how I could speak Inuktitut and things like that.”
“Now that I think about it, you know, he might have seen other ships, I suppose. Some of the old guys, I quess made it this far, maybe a few whalers and the explorers, you know Collinson was through here, I think. Got to Cambridge Bay, east of here, on Victoria Island. I wonder how old he is?”
“Hard to tell. He could be really old, eighty or more. I suspect he’s older than he looks. Just as I was leaving he said ships used to have two and three masts, not just one! See what I mean about being strange?”
“Yes, that would be odd. Where did he see these ships?” the Captain was intrigued now as well.
“ When he said that, I stopped and looked back at him, but he just waved me away. He didn’t want to tell me more.” Patsy raised his shoulders and eyes as he spoke.
“I think I’ll see the scientists talk to him. Might be an interesting fellow to talk with. There are lots of old stories in this country going back to the old days of the explorers and so on. Must be people still around who remember seeing them.”