Tim Murphy: Lord of the Stone

I. Lord of the Stone

 

Hard North

 

I opened a bank account at Hudson’s Bay

in Frobisher, now called Iqaluit.

My checks would clear when captains had the wit,

courage and skill to sail up Baffin way,

terrible trip in springtime for a boat.

Our Salmon Thirty Salmon, not too old,

six rows of seats, and then the cargo hold:

my bank account? New meaning for “the float.”

 

The name of the next flight didn’t sound good:

the Pang Screamer, and lenticular cloud

promised a rough ride, and the screams were loud

at each air pocket the ancient plane withstood,

a de Havilland older by far than we.

We hit the strip, slid sideways down the mud

inundated by several days of flood,

Canada’s answer to the DC 3.

 

Two boys were hunting narwhal, hunting well,

boat faster than ours. Rifle at the bow

murdered the small whales. I remember how

they sold the horns later at the hotel.

Two thousand bucks. Swiss tourists wrote their checks,

but I learned something valuable that day

when clouds knotted over Pangnirtung Bay,

nooses for our subsistence hunters’ necks.

 

*

 

I sat on a stern thwart with our boy, a guide

who couldn’t fathom hunting with a dog.

His umiak was skin, not carved from log;

dogs just drew sleds, behind them men would hide

when the north wind came howling down the ice

as they were hunting seals to feed their kids

or knife the freezing sea slush from their skids,

then mush back into blizzard in a trice.

 

Three days later I crossed Le Cercle Arctique:

Guide didn’t know Kablunait ever hunted,

thought we just played our football games and grunted,

and Lord knows I’ve no magnifique physique.

I asked him if he’d ever seen a tree.

He said he’d once flown south to Yellowknife

two years before he met his future wife.

“I feared the trees. That was no place for me.”

 

Into a sandstorm, fording freezing streams

of Parc Auyuituk, two men set forth.

It’s sometimes called Yosemite of the North

or Canada’s Alps. It is a place of dreams

with many lessons only the North can teach,

heaven for boys who dream of Shackleton,

of Robert Scott or Roald Amundsen.

When we limped out, our guide was at the beach.

 

*

 

We’d pitched camp in the shelter of a dune

as wind howled down from Odin and Mount Thor.

shaking our tent with its enormous roar.

This was what Arabs gravely call simoon,

blowing not from the West but from the East.

It was a test of young men at their best

physical strength, two trekkers who could wrest

heavy backpacks, and one too soon deceased.

 

You’ve not much choice, you can fall down and die.

Worst was the barefoot crossing of the streams,

these are not the New England brooks of dreams,

but vengeance from the Norse gods of the sky.

Strip off your boots, your feet will soon be warm

after you’ve walked another mile away.

Canadians, hike Auyuituk for a day

when Odin’s peak is brewing a thunderstorm.

 

There was an artist I’d come far to see,

Lipa Pitseolak, and we found his tent.

Just thirty and his smile was badly rent

for lack of teeth, and nothing there for me,

only drum dancers, not the dreams in stone

he sold New York or London, not the bodice

of Talelayo, the Inuit sea goddess,

carved from a piece of very weathered bone.

 

*

 

He had no English, so we spoke bad French.

Winters he was out on the ice for seal,

and in the tent he brought his kids to heel,

site drained from runoff with a foot-deep trench.

I wondered if he’d ever seen red hair.

I’d flown two thousand miles to see this man.

My guess? The greatest sculptor since Rodin,

carving his dreams from soapstone into air.

 

Frobisher, two Canadians were there,

pulled from their bag a soapstone masterpiece,

salmon and narwhals twining without cease,

an arctic fox, a wolf, a polar bear,

all of the North, vision without a seam,

and back we went to orchard in the South

and the terrors of that summer’s awful drouth,

possessed by Lipa Pitseolak’s dream.

 

I had seen dusk at night, unlike my friend,

for I fished walleye up by Hudson Bay.

There the Nelson and Churchill roll their way

to the salt waters where all fresh waters end.

Grateful that our Auyuituk trek was done,

my friend was crashing, sipping tepid tea,

exhausted by the sandstorms and the sea,

but both of us had seen the midnight sun.

 

Tim Murphy