This island we ourselves call Southampton, after the third Earl after that name who was Shakespeare's patron. The old man in old grayish kamiks had never read Shakespeare and never would. His was a low flat world of green, blue, yellow and gray, with blue sky and white ice-horizons. He owned a great deal of knowledge about ice, clouds, the Bible, motors and animals. On this island at certain seasons the people stand with their hands over their eyes and scan for polar bears before they sit down. The old man in old grayish kamiks still had very good vision, or maybe it was just that he never stopped paying attention, but he often saw polar bears before his grandchildren did. Perhaps it was because they did not get to hunt very much. First of all, many of the new generation worked at desk jobs in other towns; and secondly, fuel for the Peterhead was very expensive. The younger ones had never been walrus hunting. He was the one who told them how, when and where.
Two evenings before, the ice had been coming in and people were out shooting narwhals — rare to see any in Coral Harbour; the last time had been seven years ago. Now a whole pod of narwhals was here, which was strange with pleasing and ordinary strangeness, like the adventures of the three children who squatted, catching bigheaded green minnows in the puddles at low tide, exulting over each: Little big big one! — Their fingertips went cold. It had been overcast, but at around nine that night the sun came out and gilded the boats where a crowd was winding a net with fish in it. The sky tanged with salt like a single harpsichord string, a taut clean note of smell, sea-smell, no chord of rot or musk. Mosquitoes jumped and crouched. And the grandson who always got in trouble went to the old man and asked if they would be going out for walrus tomorrow, but the old man looked at the sky and shook his head.
The next evening three figures went poling very slowly out in an aluminum canoe, the nose tipping down almost to water level with every stroke of the tall one, and then they vanished behind a sailing ship in the middle of the harbor. A young woman rode a bike with her baby in the armauti of her parka. Her girlfriend came running after her, laughing. She swung off her bike and walked off beside her friend. Their footsteps were very crisp in the brown sand. That was when the youngest grandson went to the old man and the old man said: Tomorrow.
So it was that on that subsequent morning of excellent weather the old man in old grayish kamiks throttled his Peterhead slowly out of the harbor. The blocky blind-windowed houses grew small. There was one roof that had a rack of caribou antlers on it. These silhouetted themselves into the stalks of some strange weed, blended with the power wires behind them, and vanished. The two fuel towers retracted into the wide low land, and the town became the merest cluster of pastel-colored protrusions. The young boys with dogskin-ruffed parkas lay dozing on the cabin hatch, while the grandson who always got in trouble helped the old man string wire. The old man called him "the bad boy" because his parents had named him with a white man's name and the old man hated to speak English. The bad boy was not so very bad. He used to cut holes in beached boats and smash the windows of shacks, but he was still trying to finish high school and he loved his grandfather very much. He called the younger boys, in ascending order of age, One-Nut, Two-Nuts and Three-Nuts. He was Four-Nuts. He sat down among the bow's rusty chains that resembled guts.
The old man sat on top of the pilothouse, letting his legs hang down and steering with the sole of one foot inside an old grayish kamik. His kamiks were made of sealskin, which is waterproof footwear and not too warm for summer, and the duffel liners rose up above the tie and went almost to his knees. He sat, and you might have thought he was resting, but he was not. His foot was steering, and his eyes were watching for animals and ice, and his hands were busy taping wire with black electrical tape. The young men strung this wire up the mast cables. They saw a seal, but let it go because they were hunting walrus first.
Is this your seventeen magnum? one grandson called to another. — They were loading the rifles now. — Hey, what should I use, a softpoint or a hollowpoint?
