Free The Big Why by Michael Winter Page A

are a blend of nature and the absorption of cultural ways. The third is will to know a truth. This is my book, this will to know.
30
    The wind was a solid thing. It lifted the house. Bob Bartlett came over to see my progress. He shook his head. If I were to build a house from scratch, he said, I’d leave off the eaves. Eaves are overrated.
    He saw the tent I slept in and laughed.
    You know where that tent’s been?
    He told me. Past the Arctic Circle. Dogs and seal blubber, rotten tins of pemmican have slept in that tent. At various times.
    I feel a bit like an explorer, I said. In this house.
    Bartlett: I’m going in the woods now where there’s a blue bunch and cut me a dory. Game?
    Sure, I’ll come along.
    There was a grain of snow in the air still and this snow got into everything. It was the opposite of coal and yet snow percolated in the same manner. The air bit and had a curl to it that got under your scarf.
    When you entered the woods the wind died down.
    There was a stand of dead spruce. The bark stripped the previous year. They’d used the bark as shingles on a store down by the water. Bartlett had left the trees standing to dry out. Fir, he said, is too greasy to cut in spring. There were a couple on a hill with their trunks bent up to reach the light.
    Those, he said, where theyre not boxy. Are excellent for runners on a sledge.
    We set to chopping out some trees.
    Me: I dont want to drop this on your head.
    Bartlett: Oh no not to worry.
    We chopped out about forty logs.
    Bartlett: I’ll come in later with the pony. I’ll squat the timbers then bring them over to Pomeroy’s.
    We hauled them together in the snow and made a brow by the trail. We sat on the wood and ate sandwiches. My feet were wet and cold. Bartlett started a boil-up with a sulphur match. We had trimmed the branches from the logs and with these, some old man’s beard and strips of birchbark, we made a blaze. Just seeing a kettle on a fire in the snow, that pleased him.
    Bartlett: You just fart?
    No.
    You always smell like that.
    It was sunny and crisp and I asked Bartlett what he was wearing. What he was wearing? He stripped off a foot. He wore swanskin up past the knee. Below this was his sealskin boot. Under that three pairs of wool socks.
    I said, Show me your foot.
    His foot was pink and dry. It was, as he’d say, healthy. He noted the tired heels of my leather boots. We’ll get you set up with some sealskin, he said.
    Feet were important to him, as they are to all travellers. He had seen many toes lost to gangrene, whole sides of feet carved away like soap under a doctor’s scalpel. The gangrene they got was from frostbite. Dry gangrene it was, not the gangrene you got from open, infected wounds. He was very proud not to have lost any toes in the North. I asked him about the Karluk , about what had to be done now.
    The loss of a ship, he said, affects a seafaring man much like the loss of a loved one. It’s hard to talk about it.
    Then he seemed to relent. I’ll tell you another time. That’s a story, that one.
31
    Bob Bartlett invited me iceboating up behind on one of the ponds and I took my sketchbook to make a postcard for Kathleen. They shovelled the snow off the pond, hooked sails on several punts. The punts had skate blades under each corner, with one at the back on a swivel. That was your rudder. They were catamarans and they flew. The pharmacist Jim Hearn had the best one. He let me try it solo and I nearly decapitated myself on the swinging sail.
    Spill your wind boy.
    Shove down your tiller.
    He’s gonna destroy himself.
    He’s on the hand of it.
    They built a fire on the shore and boiled the kettle. Bartlett was in charge of that. A long line of boats, he said, had sunk under him. He seemed unperturbed in a business way by ship failure. He had carried the footless Peary into the Arctic Circle and then Peary had ditched him. I’ve been a miserable sealing captain, never a good haul like Father. The Karluk was money,