Tag Archives: Kivalliq

We are not alone

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These mornings it’s too hot to walk or run. I open the car door and the dog jumps onto the back seat. I drive a couple of kilometres up out of the fishbowl of the village, over the hill and down into the next valley. At this hour, the dog and I are the only domesticates. But we are not alone.
I head for the trail that runs west along the tributary, following it towards the point where it joins the great flow of the main river. The hills rear up all around – the bare grey bedrock, the golden sunburnt undergrowth, the twisted olive and almond trees. Above, like a cutout backdrop, the sky, so tangible in its blueness – surreal, unreal, real.

A rustle in the undergrowth and I catch a brief glimpse of a blackbird. A butterfly, statue-still on a dead leaf, flutters to life, suddenly surprising the dog. Sound and movement – the one indistinguishable from the other – reveals a snake, sluggishly departing the patch of path where it’s been indulging in a morning sun bath. It slithers up the hillside, its tail disappearing under an asparagus bush.

I leave the trail and descend to the riverbank. The dog, ahead of me, turns back and tilts her head, asking if are we going to swim or stay on the path. ‘Go on,’ I say, and I hear her splashing into the water even as I am still gingerly picking my way through the brambles, getting snagged on my shoulder and on my hip, and popping a couple of blackberries in my mouth.

I step out of my shoes and take my dress off over my head. As I step down, feeling the water on my toes, my eyes are drawn upwards to the towering hill on the other side of the river, beyond the narrow floodplain. I hear hooves on rock and see movement. I’m transported back more than twenty years to the Kivalliq, to an evening when I sat on an esker at dusk and heard a chorus of clicking behind me. Before I had a chance to turn around, I was engulfed in a sea of caribou – does and bucks and calves – their hooves click-click-clicking as they gently snorted and snuffled their way past me. I didn’t move for fear of frightening them. I sat and I saw and I heard and I smelled and I felt them. Now, on this little riverbank on the other side of the world, I hear the click of hoofs on rock as a small herd of four slender female deer and two calves high step up the hill.

I fully immerse myself in the warm water that is so refreshing after the heat of even this early hour. I cross the river, the dog swimming alongside or leaving me to swim alone, and coming back to me again. I hear a splash to my right but see nothing. I focus on that patch of river, treading water for twenty, thirty seconds. My concentration is rewarded. A 30 cm silver fish throws itself out of the water, for the briefest of moments suspended in the air, the sun reflecting on its glistening silver side. Then ‘splash’, it is gone. Another thirty seconds pass and it reappears – same arc, same glistening body, a few metres further along its journey.

The dog has had enough of swimming. She goes to the riverbank to torment frogs. I imagine them hiding in the rushes, laughing at her foolishness, laughing at their ability to hide from her. On mornings when the tide is high and the water comes up to the rushes, I hear one or two of them plop into the water. The dog never gives up. She also never catches one.

In addition to the frogs, she likes to vigorously roll around in the silt and sand on the riverbank, turning her white fur a dirty brown, gathering up a collection of grit to deposit in the house later.
When I finish swimming, I step into my shoes and walk for a while in just my swimsuit, drying off before I put my dress back on. There’s a pool of water under the bridge, close to where I’ve parked the car. I’ve seen this whole valley completely submerged but now, at the height of summer, the river has dried up, leaving pools of varying sizes and depths. This one by the bridge is the first and the biggest, occasionally reconnecting to the tributary when the tide is especially high.

I search for a stick to throw so the dog will go in for a final swim to wash off the grit. Before I throw the stick, the pool is still – not a ripple, not a breeze moves it. From the corner of my eye I catch a glimmer. I look down. A crab the size of a saucer, iridescent silver and blue, scuttles along amongst and finally disappears under a rock near my feet. I’ve seen surprisingly large fish in this pool, and snakes, and schools of smaller fish, but I’ve never seen a crab here before and I’ve certainly never imagined there would be one so big. I am in awe.

I throw the stick far out into the middle of the pool. The dog, delighted, swims out to retrieve it. When she brings it back, she drops it and walks away; it is her way of telling me she doesn’t want to play this game anymore. We get in the car and come home.

Snow memory

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I remember this time of year about a decade ago. We were living in rural Cambridgeshire, about four miles from Cambridge. It had snowed heavily overnight and the flat southeast English landscape was blanketed in white. I couldn’t wait to get out of the house and go for a walk. I left by the back gate and headed across the fields. The land around our house was owned by Trinity College, one of the Cambridge University colleges. It was heavily cultivated and, although the fields were accessible, walking was restricted to signposted tracks or to field perimeters. As I walked, the sky grew more overcast and it started to snow again. After twenty minutes I was well out of sight of my house and the quiet country road on which we lived.

Instead of the joy I had anticipated feeling at being out in the snowy landscape, I felt unease. This walk along the familiar hedgerows was one I took regularly, and it was not uncommon for me to encounter a hare or a deer. Indeed, on this particular day I found fresh hare prints in the snow. But, somehow, I felt decidedly uncomfortable. I was on a circular walk and at this point I was equidistant between going on or turning back.

I was aware that I had quickened my pace and I was perspiring under my winter clothes. I had the sensation of being a hunted animal as I kept furtively glancing around. Suddenly, the reason for my fear became clear to me – polar bears! There, in the bucolic, highly-managed, symmetrical landscape of rural Cambridgeshire, something had subconsciously brought me back to the Kivalliq. It wasn’t simply the snow. I had been in the snow at least a couple of times since I had last lived in Arviat, and I hadn’t feared an encounter with a bear. But that day, there was a certain quality to the light, a certain texture to the air that tricked my brain into thinking there might be a bear around.

Despite being in a landscape where the largest carnivore I could possibly encounter was a badger, I found myself feeling the way I had that spring day seven or eight years earlier when I had walked out to Huluraq. Arviat was more than a 40 minute walk behind me and all around was the flat west Hudson Bay landscape, where the undulating snow-covered land reached a snow-covered finger, Huluraq, out onto the frozen seascape of Hudson Bay. As I turned to make the slow snow-hampered walk back home I saw two sets of prints in the snow – a mother polar bear and her cub. My blood ran cold. I was unarmed – although I doubt that, armed, I would have stood any better chance. I had no idea how old the prints were. They looked fresh enough, clearly defined and without an accumulation of blowing snow.

The walk back to Arviat was the longest of my life. I expected at any moment that the last sound I would hear would be the fluey-sounding grunt of a mother bear coming up behind me, turning me into a meal for her cub. I walked as fast as my cumbersome clothes and boots and the terrain would allow me. There had been other encounters with bears, some where I’d felt threatened and some where I’d felt awe and gratitude for being in the presence of such a creature. But no encounter was as frightening as that non-encounter that day near Huluraq.

And then, years later, what should have been a pleasant walk across a snowy English landscape turned into an anxiety-filled power walk, as I raced to escape from my subconscious fear. I realized at the time how ridiculous I was being and I forced myself to slow down, relax, bring myself back into the moment. But in a very short time I found myself once again anxiously speed walking towards my little chocolate-box English cottage.

I’ve often thought of that snowy day in Cambridgeshire and the subtle sensations that caused my mind and body to subconsciously make connections between past and present. We all subconsciously make these connections all the time as our senses trick us into time travel. The smell of a 2-stroke engine immediately transports me to the west coast of Hudson Bay; the theme music to BBC Sports Roundup puts me back in the busy little kitchen of my childhood at 5pm on a Saturday evening, me, my cousins, our parents, aunt and granny and the smell and texture of fried bread; tin-foil wrapped ham sandwiches take me back to the Canal End of Croke Park.

It’s not simply memory or nostalgia. Rather, it is a triggering of the senses that awakens reaction, muscle memory, feeling, sensation, emotion. Perhaps it’s the closest we get to time travel as we are transported backwards through time to catch glimpses of what were, perhaps, the moments that defined us. We may not have known at the time but those would be the moments that would remain, imprinted on our souls.