Solomon Gursky Was Here (7 page)

Ephraim stood up and pissed and threw the dogs some jackfish. “Do you hear that in the hills?” he asked.

“Is it a wolf?”

“The Chipewyans, who will kill anything, just out of spite, even small birds in their nests, never harm the wolf, because they believe it to be an uncommon animal. Me, I'm no Chipewyan. Come,” he said, offering his hand.

But Solomon, sliding free, wouldn't take it. He was longing to, but he couldn't.

“I'm going to show you something,” Ephraim said.

Ephraim slid a long knife free of their sled and planted it upright in the snow. He melted honey over the fire and coated the blade with it, the honey freezing immediately. “The wolf will come down later, start to lick the honey and slice his tongue to ribbons. Then the greedy fool will lick the blood off the blade until he bleeds to death. Do you understand?”

“Sure I do.”

“No, you don't. I'm trying to warn you about Bernard,” Ephraim said, glaring at him. “When the time comes, remember to spread honey on the knife.” Muttering to himself, he heated a kettle of snow to make tea. “There's gold to be found here. We're sitting right on it.” Then he reminisced about his boyhood in the coal mines in a manner that assumed Solomon had been right there with him in the pit, also chained to a sledge, sinking to all fours, mindful of scuttling rats as he dragged his load along to the gob. Remembering the pithead girls, Sally of County Clare. Cursing old enemies Solomon had never heard of, obviously put out when the boy failed to pepper the broth with invective of his own, instead looking baffled and just a little scared. “In Minsk,” Ephraim said, “and then in Liverpool, your great-grandfather was a cantor and when he sang
Kol Nidre
no synagogue was large enough to seat all of his followers.”

Long before they reached their destination, they rode into their first gale. Ephraim sat down on the sled, wrapped himself in skins, and said, “You'd better build us an igloo now.”

“But I don't know how.”

“Build it,” Ephraim said, tossing him the long knife.

“You do it,” Solomon said, kicking the knife away.

“I'm going to sleep.”

Crazy old bastard, Solomon thought, but he retrieved the knife. Tears freezing against his cheeks, he began to cut snow blocks. When he was done, he shook his grandfather as hard as he dared, waking him. Once inside, Ephraim lit the
koodlik
. He sat Solomon on his lap warming the bright burning spots on his cheeks with the palms of his hands and then he tucked him in under the skins on the snow platform and sang him to sleep with one of his songs, not a profane song but one of the synagogue songs he had learned at his father's table.

Strong and Never Wrong is He,

Worthy of our Song is He,

Never failing,

All prevailing.

The boy safely asleep, Ephraim was able to gaze fondly at him. Warming the back of his hands against his chosen grandson's cheeks
and then retreating to a corner to get quietly drunk.
I'm ninety-one years old, but I'm not ready to die until I see him face to face
.

Standing over his grandson in the igloo, wearing his black silk top hat and
talith,
Ephraim, soaked in rum, spread hands stiff with age and pronounced the blessing his father used to say over him:
“Yeshimecha Elohim keEfrayim vechiMenasheh.”

As far as Solomon was concerned Ephraim was unpredictable, cranky. A quirky companion. On the rare occasion gentle, but for the most part impatient, charged with anger and contradictions. One day he would be full of praise for the Eskimo, an ingenious people, who had learned to survive on a frozen desert, living off what the land had to offer, forging implements and weapons out of animal bone and sinew. The next day he would drunkenly denounce them. “Their notion of how to cure a sick child is for the women to dance around the kid singing
aya, aya, aya
. They have no written language and the vocabulary of their spoken one is poverty stricken.”

Before slicing frozen meat for breakfast, Ephraim would lick the knife with his tongue, which immediately adhered to the blade, and then he would wait for the heat of his body to warm the knife sufficiently for blade and tongue to separate. If he tried to cut with a cold knife, he explained, the blade would rebound or maybe even break.

Each time they broke camp it was infuriatingly clear to Solomon that rather more food had been consumed than they could possibly have eaten together. Obviously, the selfish old bastard was gorging himself in secret. He was most irascible when unable to remember the names of old friends. He tended to repeat stories spun from his jumbled memories. Even wearing his reading glasses, a curse to him, he had trouble making a sewing needle from a ptarmigan bone and had to fling it away, a bad job. Five hours sleep was enough for him and on occasion he would shake Solomon awake early, claiming he had something urgent to tell him. “Never eat the liver of a polar bear. It drives men mad.”

Ephraim, the first old man Solomon had ever looked at nude, was an astonishing sight. A wreck, a ruin. What remained of his teeth long and loose and the colour of mustard. His jaw receding. Those arms, surprisingly strong, although spindly, the muscles attenuated. His
narrow chest a mat of frosty grey hair. His sunken belly slack. A red lump bulging like an apple out of one hip, pulling the flesh taut. “My very own pingo,” he called it. A ruby tracery of veins disfiguring one leg. His disconcertingly large testicles hanging low in a wrinkled sac, his penis flopping out of a snowy nest. Old wounds and scars and purplish places where he had been sloppily sewn together. His back reamed with welts and knots and ridges.

“How did it get like that?” Solomon asked.

“I was a bad boy.”

Some mornings Ephraim wakened frisky, eager to plunge farther into the tundra. On other mornings, complaining of aching bones, he lingered on the sleeping platform, comforting himself with rum. Drunk, he might mock Solomon, listing his inadequacies, or prowl up and down the igloo, unaware of his grandson, arguing with himself and the dead. “How was I to know she would hang herself?”

“Who?”

“Don't pry into my affairs.”

He made considerable ceremony out of winding his cherished gold pocket watch before retiring each night, a watch that was inscribed:

From W.N. to E.G.

de bono et malo.

One night he shook Solomon awake, raging, “I'd like to see him face to face, like Moses at Sinai. Why not? Tell me why not?”

They ate arctic hare and ptarmigan. Ephraim taught him how to handle a rifle and hunt caribou, shaking his head when so many bullets were wasted. But once Solomon had brought down his first bull, shot through the heart, Ephraim astonished him with hugs and tickles and the two of them rolled over together in the snow again and again. Then Ephraim slit the caribou open, careful not to puncture the first stomach. He scooped out hot blood and drank it, and indicated that Solomon was to do the same. Back in the igloo, he cracked some bones and showed Solomon how to suck the marrow from them, then sliced chunks of fat out of the rump for both of them to munch. Afterward Solomon, overcome by nausea, fled the igloo.

A week later they camped on the shores of Point Lake and the Coppermine River. Ephraim told him that so far only five leaders of Israel had lived a hundred and twenty years: Moses, Hillel, Rabbi Yochanon ben Zakai, Rabbi Yehuda HaNassi and Rabbi Akiva. “I'm already ninety-one years old, but if you think I'm ready to die you're bonkers.”

As they moved further along the Coppermine, Ephraim's mood seemed to sweeten. There were nights when the old man entertained his grandson with stories, the two of them lying together under the skins, the light dancing in their igloo, but other nights Ephraim drank too much rum.

“How would you find your way back if I died in my sleep?”

“Don't worry about me.”

“Maybe you were a fool to come out here with me. I wouldn't even be good to eat. I'm just a bag of bones now.”

Solomon withdrew from him under the skins. “I don't want to be teased any more,
zeyda
.”

“I could be mistaken in you. Maybe I should have brought Bernard with me. Or Morrie.” He grabbed Solomon and shook him. “Morrie could be the one to watch out for, you know. Damn. You don't understand anything.”

“If you hate me so much, why did you bring me here?”

Startled, stung, Ephraim wanted to protest, he wished to tell him how much he loved him. But he choked on it. Something in him wouldn't allow it. “Why did Saul throw that javelin at David?”

Once they reached their destination, the shores of the Polar Sea, the old man and the boy built an igloo together and hung their clothes out to dry on a line stretched over their
koodlik;
then Ephraim tucked his grandson between the skins spread on the sleeping platform. “It was the dying Orkneyman,” he said, “the boatman I met in Newgate prison, who led me and now you to this shore.”

Ephraim celebrated their safe arrival by drinking a bottle of rum and singing songs for Solomon. Synagogue songs. Then he told him a story. “Long, long ago not only the north, but most of the land was under ice, maybe a mile thick. When the ice melted there was a deluge and the waters swept over the lands of the Eskimos, the Loucheux,
the Assiniboines and the Stony people. Many were drowned before Iktoomi took pity on them and decided that he must save some. Iktoomi saved one man and one woman, and one male and one female of each kind of animal. He built a large raft and they floated on it over the flood waters.

“On the seventh day Iktoomi told the beaver that he must try to dive right to the bottom and see if he could bring back a chunk of earth. O, that poor beaver, he dived and dived but he couldn't reach the bottom. So the next day Iktoomi sent a muskrat into the water to see if he could bring back a bit of mud. The brave muskrat dived very deep and they waited and waited. In the evening the dead body bobbed to the surface of the water near the raft. Iktoomi took it on board and found a little mound of mud in the muskrat's paw. He brought the rat back to life and took the little bit of mud and moulded it with his fingers and as he did that it grew and grew. Finally he put the mud over the side of the raft, and it went on growing into solid earth so that soon he could land the raft and all the animals. And the land still went on growing and growing from where he had moulded it.

“When all the animals were ashore and the land was still growing, he waited till it was out of sight and then he got hold of the wolf and told him to run round the earth and only to come back and tell him when the earth was big enough to hold all the people. Now the wolf took seven years in his voyage and in all that time he couldn't complete his tour of the world. He crept back home and fell exhausted at Iktoomi's feet. Iktoomi then asked the raven to go out and fly over the bit of the world that the wolf hadn't seen. Now the raven in those days was absolutely white, that's the way it was with him, and he flew off to do Iktoomi's bidding. Or so it seemed. But instead of flying as he was told to do, he got hungry, and seeing a corpse floating by, he swooped down and began to pick at it. Then he flew home again and when Iktoomi saw him he knew that he had been eating a dead body because his beak was full of blood. So he seized hold of the raven and said to him: ‘Since you have such a dirty nature, you shall have a dirty colour.' Right then the raven was turned from white to black and that colour he remains to this day.”

Ephraim slipped between the skins with Solomon, the two of them embracing to keep warm. In the morning he said, “We will wait here until my people find us and then you will no longer have to warm yourself in bed against a bag of bones.”

“How will your people know we're here?”

“The first man made by the Great Being was a failure,” Ephraim said, “he was imperfect, and therefore was cast aside and called
kubla-na
or
kod-lu-na,
which means white man. Then the Great Being made a second try and the result was the perfect man, or
Inuit,
as the people call themselves. They will find us and they will hide me here until I die.”

“You mean you aren't taking me home again?”

“You can have the dogs. The sled. One of the rifles and half of the ammunition. When my people come they will also load you down with seal meat.”

“How will I find my way home?”

“I taught you what I know. How to read the stars and how to hunt.

An Eskimo boy could do it.”

“I'm not an Eskimo.”

“I can get two of the people to lead you back as far as the tree line.”

“I should have killed you while I had the chance.”

Ephraim unstrapped a leather bag from the sled, dug into it, and extracted an ancient pistol. “Here,” he said, tossing it to Solomon. “Go ahead.”

HMS
Erebus
was engraved on the pistol butt.

Six

Moses, still searching for his salmon fly, had to acknowledge that he didn't need the Silver Doctor. He could buy another one next time he was on the Restigouche. But, on the other hand, if he continued to hunt for it for another hour—say, until eleven
A.M.
—it would be too late to start work. The day shot, he then might as well retreat to The Caboose to check out his mail and maybe hang in for a drink. Just one, mind you. So he lifted a large cardboard carton out of the hall closet and emptied it on the living-room floor. Out spilled a Hardy reel, his missing cigar cutter, a Regal fly-tying vice, years of correspondence with the Arctic Society, and his collection of notebooks, documents, and maps that dealt with the Franklin expedition.

Moses had been a member of the Arctic Society until his disgraceful behaviour at a meeting in 1969 had led to his being declared
persona non grata
.

The first item he retrieved from his Franklin papers was an interview, published in
The Yellowknifer,
with a granddaughter of Jock Roberts. Roberts had sailed into the Arctic in 1857 with Captain Francis Leopold M'Clintock. M'Clintock was seeking survivors of the lost Sir John Franklin expedition, a search that engaged the attention of the British Admiralty, the President of the United States, the Czar of Russia and, above all, Lady Jane Franklin. A ballad, popular in London at the time, ran: