Free Consumption by Kevin Patterson

few hung on to their teams, as Emo had, but the status of dogs changed from essential to ornamental in about five years.
    When Emo’s dogs got to the floe edge, ten miles offshore, he called to them to stop and threw out the snow hook. The wind was settling and it was abruptly quieter. He stood on the sled and studied the ice. He could see
nautsiaq
, ringed seals, upwind—tiny black dots to the north. Emo stood on the snow hook, driving it into the thin, packed snow to ensure its purchase. He unwrapped his rifle and slung it over his shoulder. The tide held ice pans against the floe edge like crackers spilled casually on a plate. Between them lay the open, purple, and viscous water, with whitecaps scudding across it leaving streaks of foam and slivers of ice broken free and running.
    Emo walked toward the seals, watching them carefully. They were sleeping, but awoke in turns every few minutes to smell the air, for bears and for men. From this distance the movement was subtle, and difficult to see—the outline of the black dot against the ice seemed to shimmer for a moment. When Emo saw that, he stopped moving. The dogs behind him were silent and watched him attentively.

    That same Saturday afternoon, Dr. Balthazar sat in his office at the nursing station, surrounded by medical charts. He was alone in the place; no one needed tending to. Earlier, the on-call nurse had been there, seeing some kids with ear infections. Balthazar had told her that he had to stay to catch up on his charting and she had nodded “whatever” to him and gone home. For most of the day he had done just that, writing carefully in his almost-feminine script chart summaries of patients he knew well, and referral letters to specialists in the south. But then he began daydreaming. In the empty clinic, it was easy to push aside the charts and imagine a different life. Around him were the records of two thousand acquaintances of his. By this point he had been coming north for three-month stintsfor seventeen years, and he knew almost everyone, except a few of the very healthy men. But the kids, and all the women, and anyone old—over sixty, that is—he knew those people well. Walking through the chart room and sliding his eyes at random over the various names summoned up for him almost two decades worth of maulings and depressions and complicated childbirths: the Katoongie clan and the terrible asthma they had as kids, the fire that had burned the Panigoniaks so badly. And then the Robertsons. He brought Victoria’s chart back to his office and flipped through the earliest records in it, pages that were brittle and crumbling. Soon, the chart would be split into two, with volume one relegated to the basement, where the records going back more than twenty-five years dwelt. But in the meantime, within the spare and data-laden language of the chart—such agony here. He turned the pages over, one after the other, rapt, imagining the girl.
    What she probably remembered most strongly from her operation was the overwhelming smell of the ether the instant they turned it on—the olfactory equivalent of having a flashbulb go off in front of one’s widely opened eyes. She would have thought, What a strong smell, and then stopped counting backwards.
    The anaesthetist had passed a twin-lumened endotracheal tube into her throat, one branch of the tube riding in her right main bronchus and lung and the other in her left. The tuberculous cavity was in her right lung and so the air in it was sucked out through this tube and the lung collapsed upon itself, like a balloon hooked to suction. Ventilation was maintained in the other lung—the anaesthetist hooked that half of the tube up to a ventilator, which wheezed and sighed over the following two hours as the surgeon made a deep incision between Victoria’s ribs, high up on the right side. The intercostal muscles connecting the ribs were exposed, and the surgeon pushed a blunt-tipped clamp through this muscle and