The Torngat Trilogy Vol. I: Melting Snow: Melting Snow

By Kristen McLean

Melting Snow, a twelve year old Inuit girl, must subsist alone in the arctic wilderness after her entire village is wiped out by the Spanish flu. During this time, she endures hunger, wolves, polar bears, and even her own sled dog who has gone feral. But can she survive an encounter with a tormented ancient enemy after she is rescued?

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9781633158306

Book preview

Stone

Chapter 1—Torngat Region, Labrador, Spring 1910

The seal oil in the crescent shaped basalt kudlik burned fitfully creating dancing shadow spirits to keep the other, less visible ghosts at bay. Melting Snow looked down to her mother's hand that she held. The light from the lamp made it appear as insubstantial as the spirits on the walls. Beside her stood her father and her father's other wife, First Mother, with heads bowed. Her four older brothers shuffled their feet, uncertain how to show their grief.

Throughout all of Melting Snow's five short years her mother had never been as strong as First Mother. Frequently, she would get a cough and be in bed for days but she had never been this sick before. When she coughed, a spattering of blood would fall over the soft caribou skins that she had prepared to keep them warm through the winter wind. She had been getting steadily worse with each day of their trip.

A few weeks earlier, they had headed south to be at the village in time to meet with the itinerant doctor who might help her mother. The healing ship came every spring to treat the Inuit, missionaries, and Métis in the region. Outside the igloo, Melting Snow could hear an unseasonable strong southerly wind turn the usually hard packed snow to slush. It would be impossible to travel with any sort of speed, now. Last night, she had heard her three parents talking. That same wind would keep them from reaching the village before the doctor left on his trip back south to treat other patients. They were only a day away from the village but judging from the placement of the sun on the horizon the ship would most certainly have left by now.

Melting Snow's mother opened her eyes. Though she was only twenty they were wrinkled from squinting against the glare of the sun on summer snow, from laughter, and, now, from illness. To Melting Snow her mother looked ancient but warm like the inukshuks that retained their heat long after the sun sank into the snow. Like those stacked stones, Melting Snow had thought that her mother would always be there, a guardian and guide across the harsh terrain of her life. Sensing her young daughter's concern, second Mother opened her eyes. Daughter, she whispered. You have all your father's heritage to help and guide you when I am gone but the world of the Inuit is changing and if ever you need help outside our land I think my father's people might help you, at least, that is what my mother led me to believe. I have a locket from my father that he brought with him from England that is his family's story. When you are old enough, First Mother will give it to you. She paused weak from speaking those few words, then spoke again, in a voice barely more than a whisper,

Husband, Elder Sister, my love to you both. My spirit will one day come back to you in Melting Snow's children. Take care of them. Second Mother grew still and the after a time her breath grew quieter and farther apart until eventually even that ceased. Melting Snow felt her mother's hand grow cold and she looked to see if an extra shadow now danced with the other ghosts around the icy curve of the igloo's wall.

CHAPTER 2 Torngats Region, Labrador, autumn 1918

Melting Snow smelled the acrid burning of coal so different from the seal oil and the occasional drift wood used in her home and looked up from the red-berries she was gathering. That smell could only mean one thing; the Hudson Bay traders were coming on their twice yearly trip down the coast. They were running late this year and the village had been impatient for their arrival. In only a few weeks, the thickening ice would block the harbor heralding the beginning of eight long months of cold, impassible weather when the village would be completely isolated from the rest of the world.

Melting Snow tossed her straight black hair out of her eyes and gathered her bag of red-berries. As excited as she was to hear the stories that the traders brought, if she failed to bring back enough berries her family would have bleeding gums and black sores all over their bodies by the end of winter. The boat doctor who always came on the spring trading ship called this scurvy. Last year he had told her that the red-berries had a lot of what he called a vitamin and that if they ate them all through the winter they would never get this scurvy. Vitamins were a new discovery, named a dozen years back, he explained. They didn't really understand how it worked quite yet, but people across the sea were trying to figure why some foods were better than others. Melting Snow, however, already knew this. Her people had lived in this region for thousands of years before the first ships ever came to their land and they knew the importance of having berries to go with the raw seal and the tuktu, the caribou that they ate during winter. Still, it was good to hear the Doctor say that she should eat as much as possible of her favorite food. That was much better than taking the icky medicine that he brought each year and that her father insisted everyone in their home must take.

She hurried along the shrub-lined path that led to their summer home. The caribou moss made soft swushing sounds as she ran past the few normally light yellow bake apples, now turned orange with age, and the burgundy colored arctic strawberries that were left on the bushes. As she came to the edge of the hill, she looked out across the glade where her family had spent the last five summers preparing for the winter months. If she thought back hard enough she could just barely remember a time when they hadn't lived in this particular sod house.

She remembered how her father had brought her and her brothers here just after Second Mother’s death from the coughing sickness. Before, her Father, First Mother, Second Mother, her four older brothers and occasionally her father’s brother’s family would follow the herds of tuktu across the tundra in winter and then hunt whales and seals and gather the few hardy plants that grew along the coast in summer and spring. But the death of Second Mother had changed all that. Her father had insisted that they all move to the village where they would have access to a doctor. The fact that the doctor only came for a few days out of every year did not deter him. Second Mother had missed seeing the boat doctor by just a few days. They had been held up farther north by an early thaw that had kept the sleds from a fast pace.

Three years after Second Mother’s death Melting Snow had asked the boat doctor if he could have saved her. He had said No, the coughing sickness was beyond him. The only relief Second Mother could have had was if she went to a place where there was never any snow and only sunshine.

Melting Snow could not comprehend such a place. How could she live? Surely, polar bears, whales, caribou, and the puiyit, the sea animals, could not possibly survive in such a place! What would she eat or wear? When she had asked this of the boat doctor he had just laughed and tousled her long shiny hair. Not everyone can live in a paradise like Labrador. People find a way to survive even in the worst environments, he had replied.

She shook herself out of her revelries at the sound of her oldest brother’s shouting. Melting Snow, hurry up we need to get all of the skins down to the ship so we can get the best deal for this winter’s supply. Help me arrange this pack on my back. Then, go in and help First Mother and Father. She rushed to her brother’s aid, carefully laying down the bag of red-berries, and lifting the pack filled with his summer’s worth of hunting and fishing. The entire pack went from midway down his thighs to a foot over his head. From behind he looks like a walking furry tree! She giggled to herself as he waddled toward the village. Then, she picked up her bag of berries and ran toward her home.

The house itself was built into the far side of the hill looking south and away from the bitter ocean winds that would sometimes come that way during the winter months. The front wall of the house was built of large, rough stones piled higher than her head. The Moravian missionary had told her such boulders were dropped by the mile thick ice sheet that had covered the land thousands of years ago. When the sheets had melted, they had dropped the boulders they had picked up farther north, the way gulls, in their greed, would drop a bit of old fish when they had grabbed too much on the beach. The cracks between the boulders were filled with grayish green caribou moss and smaller cobbles to keep out the wind. Mosses covered the man-made parts of the house while the room that had been excavated from the hillside was supported by driftwood that had washed ashore during storms. The largest piece of wood was half again her height of just under five feet and supported the entry way. It was here that First Mother had sewn together several large caribou skins to form a door that could be tied back to let in the light and fresh air on good days or block ice and snow on bad days. Along the side of the hill, which acted as the actual roof of their house, drying racks were laid for stretching pelts of various animals that had been caught throughout the year.

Melting Snow entered through the tied back skins and placed the bag of red-berries on the wolf skin covered shelf to the right of the door.

Panik, daughter, said First Mother to her in greeting.

Takubvik, apple of my eye, said her father. Give the red-berries to your mother to dry and help your brothers take down the last of the furs. Alornerk will stay with you at the boat so that for once you will be the one who is always under foot. her father joked.

Melting Snow smiled back at him. Alornerk meant ‘always under foot’ in Inuktitut, the language of her people. It was the way of her people, the Inuit, to always joke and never show anger since the tundra continued to give life only to those who cooperated with the land, the spirits, and each other. Melting Snow gathered up the berries she had just placed down on the shelf and took it to the food preparation area where First Mother sat. She picked up a bag made of several pelts of seal skins and some lengths of sinew. She scrambled up the hill stopping on the natural granite shelving where the hide stretchers were placed. Bits of mica that dotted the boulders clung to her fingertips and glittered in the sunlight. She brushed them off watching them sparkle like the first snowflakes of autumn as they fell to the ground. Then, she began to untie the knots that held the hides in place on the stretchers. The holes near the edge of the hide were small. The skin had been pierced by a burnt and sharpened bone awl that had made minimal damage to the skin. This was important since damage to the hide made it less valuable to the traders.

The awl that had made those small precise holes was her favorite tool. Her brother, Biisaiyowaq, clever one, had made it for her just last spring from the leg bone of a red-throated loon that he had trapped on the small pond near their sod house. He had seen the loon’s nest the day before and placed a snare on the side approaching the pond while the loon was away hunting. The loon was a beautiful creature with its pearly gray feathers, its bright golden eye, and brick colored marking shaped like a tear on its throat. Biisaiyowaq’s traps were always successful and he had shared the eggs from the nest with her. Later, after the family had each eaten a bite or two from the loon, Biisaiyowaq had taken the bones and begun to make tools from them. He placed two leg bones in the seal oil fire until they were black. Then, he split them along a natural crack that the fire had revealed creating a very fine point. Finally, he polished the split leg bones with the remaining wing bones and wrapped it in a bit of caribou hide making sure there were no edges to cut open the hand while working. Three of them he offered to First Mother but then he turned to her with a smile and said

"You are almost a woman, now. You should have a woman’s tool and gave her the awl made from the loon’s leg.

Normally, Inuit would not hunt loons. But this year the gulls, ducks, and geese they would generally hunt had been dying in droves. Carcasses would wash ashore their bodies eerily perfect, only the light of life was gone from their eyes. They weren't the half eaten remains from a seal nor broken necked from storms. Neither the Scotsmen, trappers and traders who had settled in Labrador over the last two centuries, nor the Inuit would have anything to do with these birds now. The shamans said the deaths were being caused by Torngarsoak, the great spirit of sea animals, for no longer following the ways that propitiated the spirits. The trappers said it must be some kind of disease the birds had contracted and who knew if it could pass from bird to human, if you dared eat it.

So, the carcasses that were found were left untouched. The geese and gulls weren't hunted and it promised to be a lean winter with lots of dried salmon for dinner. As much as she loved the fresh salmon during the summer, Melting Snow was quite sure she would grow quite tired of seven months of eating only dried salmon and red-berries. Of course, there was always raw seal meat in the winter to help break up the tedium of the dried salmon.

Yumm! She thought sarcastically.

Melting Snow finished untying the sealskin hide. Most of the seals had been caught, skinned, and stretched last spring but a few old ones had been caught stranded on an ice flow. Their old tough skins would make good boots even if there was too little fat on them to produce much in the way of oil for lamps or the margarine that the white people would eat. The summer had been spent preparing the fats from the late spring hunt of the seals and the one whale they had caught into barrels of oil. Those were the ones that Assiminik had already strapped to a grass sled for transport down to the village.

There were several red fox furs. Their previous owners had been trapped this summer