Coppermine by Keith Ross Leckie

Author:Keith Ross Leckie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PENGUIN GROUP (CANADA)

Fourteen

Early the next morning, Angituk sat beside the cells in the detachment reading a magazine from a pile beside her. She was not quite used to the isolation of her beautiful hotel room, and though she had enjoyed the bath and the soft bed she couldn’t shake the suspicion that someone would come and claim the room back. She still felt more at home with the prisoners.

She had never seen anything quite like the magazine she was inspecting. But she found the pictures fascinating. All the long thin women wore long thin dresses with their chins high and some with round hats pulled down to their eyes. This was beautiful, she guessed, to white people. Just like the yellow- haired woman on Creed’s arm. Angituk shook away the dark thoughts she had about the blond woman and continued leafing through the fashion magazine.

Uluksuk and Sinnisiak sat quietly in their cell. Uluksuk’s stomach had been giving him trouble for two days. The white food was not agreeing with him and he had thrown up twice that morning, feeling terrible embarrassment. It was the first time in his life food had come up. Angituk had given him wet towels to clean himself and water to drink. Overheated and restless, they had both had trouble sleeping through the night. Uluksuk’s eyes were closed and he seemed to be sleeping now. Sinnisiak was looking at one of the magazines too. It was called Harper’s, and he also marvelled at the skinny white women.

“Uluksuk. Look at this.” The old man opened his eyes, his stomach still giving him pain, and surveyed with disapproval the slender woman in the picture. “This one is obviously starving,” Sinnisiak continued. “Their men must be poor hunters.”

Uluksuk nodded and closed his eyes.

“They would be so cold and bony to sleep with. I can’t see them pulling a qamutik very far. I doubt they could even set a snare.”

Uluksuk nodded again without opening his eyes.

“Maybe good for a rich man.”

There were other compelling pictures in a different magazine. There were men with guns in the mud. Angituk showed them to Sinnisiak.

“Look. This is what Creed told us about. The war across the ocean.”

There were pictures of guns so big it took four men to load the bullets and fire them. There wouldn’t be much left of a caribou with that firepower, Sinnisiak thought. Other photos showed long holes in the earth where men lived like ground squirrels and where the mud was so deep that wagons and horses and men became stuck in it. There were pictures of dead bodies, men without arms or legs or even faces. This was how white men made a war. Angituk and Sinnisiak studied the pictures in silence. It occurred to Angituk that this was the source of the deep sadness she sensed in Creed.

She leafed back to pictures of things to buy: clothes and motor cars, and machines that could be hot or cold by pressing a button. One item that caught her eye was a woman riding something called a bicycle.

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