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saddened her, and that sadness compounded her affection for him. When they walked out to the Oiseau River that spring, they held hands and listened for others. They spoke about trivialities, about the immediacies of the day, and she deflected any discussion of anything with implications beyond a week. He was older, and inclined to plan. She wouldn’t have it.
    When school let out, Victoria and Alexander disappeared into the bush. Every morning, they woke and rose together, picking up fishing rods and—in Victoria’s instance—a bag of books, and headed out to the river. Because the fishing was known to be so poor there, they were almost always alone. And there was rarelyany difficulty carrying their catch home. Donelda teased her son about his lack of fishing prowess, asked him if he needed her to show him how it was done. Victoria spoke up then. “He’s getting better. Pretty soon I’ll have him up to speed.” She reminded them both how she had caught char in the Arctic with just a
kavitok
, a fish spear. Both Alexander and his mother suspected she was mis-remembering a little—that she probably had not fed the whole family, as she suggested. The truth was that Victoria no longer knew which of her memories of the north were accurate and which she had distorted.
    Most days she and Alexander lay together on the rock along the Oiseau River in the summer sun, Victoria reading
The Lord of the Rings
, Alexander resting his head on her bare belly. Propped up among the stones at the water’s edge was his fishing rod, the line hanging slackly and running into the current.

    The town was left reeling by the closure of the mine. Johanson and Johnson and all the other Kablunauks boarded an airplane and just disappeared, their wives left adrift. They were not the first to start families in the Arctic and then abandon them, but what was unprecedented was the sense of dislocation the hunters who had become miners knew. They had come off the land and made the disorienting transition from that way of life to the one that involved houses and paycheques and they had negotiated that transition with skill. But now the paycheques abruptly stopped and it was clear to no one what was to be done. Some of the men simply dug their komatiks out of the snow and headed out on the land with their bewildered families. But for most of them the prospect of resuming that way of life was too much. The set of skills necessary to make one’s way on the tundra was extensive and particular. Once they moved into houses, those skills atrophied. Faced with reacquiring them, most simply demurred.
    Winnie, who had resisted moving here, now had no enthusiasm for living on the land. Emo thought they could do it again. But for now, he reasoned, they could live in the house, and he could hunt. It was self-deception and he knew it even at the time. Nomads move because they must. Land like this does not tolerate stationary populations of hunters—even small numbers. The
tuktu
continued to avoid Rankin Inlet. For a year, Emo made long forays out on the land, trying to reach them. But when he found them, rather than camp nearby and follow them, he had to shoot one only and return to Rankin Inlet. He and the dogs usually ate a sizable portion of the meat coming home. The arrangement was a losing proposition from the outset.
    The mining company did not make good on its threat to evict the miners from the houses, it simply evaporated. The government anticipated the difficulties of the miners and to some degree it stepped in to help them. Food relief arrived on ships the following summer, with a bureaucrat to administer it, and that was it, they were all changed utterly.

    Victoria sat in a straight-backed chair at a table in the treatment room off the children’s ward—occupied now by children she had never met. They all stared at her through the window between the ward and the little white room lined with cupboards full of bandages and stainless-steel appliances.