Chapter 2: Northern Sunset

“Arctic?” Sylvia Foster asked her husband in March of 1970, “Will you be cold?”

“Not particularly,” George replied. “I’ll only be at Colville in the summer, after all. It’ll be warmer than it is outside right now. But I will be lonely.”

There was a solution for that. “Well, why can’t I go along? Would we go broke if I stopped waiting tables for the summer?”

“Not at all. We’ve been saving up the trust payments for expeditions like this. And, after all, we decide how that money is to be used; it’s not like some agency is looking over our shoulders saying, ‘George is the anthropologist, so only George can go.’ Moreover, despite the transport expenses, the cost of living at Colville Lake is fairly low. Of course, that’s ‘cause we’ll be consuming only bare necessities. I just don’t want you living like that. Tents, outhouses, and all.”

“I’d rather live in a tent with you than in this apartment by myself.”

“All right,” George said. “I’ll ask.”

Besides wanting to be with George, Sylvia looked forward to actually seeing what an anthropological expedition was like. There would be a team going, headed by Prof. Vrooman, George’s boss. Vrooman warned her that life in the field would be rough and that she needed to wear fairly modest clothes, but he raised no other obstacles.

What she didn’t tell Vrooman was that she hadn’t known how the “Hare Indians” name was spelled until after she’d been accepted. “I thought that they grew lots of hair,” she told George.

“They used to dress in clothes made from rabbit skins,” he said. “Tribes in that area only have European names. Probably, they only have colonial identities. The people we’ll be seeing probably think of themselves as ‘The people of Colville Lake.’ You know the story of Manhattan Island?”

How could she tell? There were plenty of stories about Manhattan Island. “No.”

“The first Dutch explorers found a bunch of Indians there. They bought the entire island from them for a few handfuls of beads. We used to think that the Dutch had pulled a fast one. Closer investigation revealed that those Indians were just visiting for the day to fish. You might buy the Brooklyn Bridge for a couple of hundred dollars in the same neighborhood as legitimately today.

“Anyway,” he concluded, “European visitors were often much more certain about the limits of membership in a group, ownership of property, and executive leadership than the people who they were describing.”

George bought two matching cassette recorders, with plenty of batteries. She bought a manual portable typewriter. She filled her prescription for pills for four months and packed several boxes of Tampax. The tent, cots, sleeping bags, and a heater were all ordered through the department.

They spent the night of their trip in Fort Good Hope -- Sylvia in a room with the other two women, George with the other three men -- and flew to Colville Lake in the morning. The seven people and their equipment needed three flights.

Colville turned out to be less primitive than she’d imagined. There was a store, and three docks were accessible to float planes. The Indians didn’t live in tents: only the anthropologists did. The Indians had fairly sturdy, although small, cabins.

The first day was spent in setting up. As George had said, the air was warm around them. They had a heater for their tent but didn’t seem to need it. The outhouse was colder, and they hadn’t brought a heater for it.

They had brought a sleeping bag and a folding cot for each of them. For some reason, George had set these up more than a yard apart. She hadn’t come north of the Arctic Circle to sleep across the room from her husband. She moved the cots next to each other.

Back in Boston, the sun had risen in the east and set in the west. She’d noticed it being lower at noon in the winter than in the summer, but not any change in where it rose or set. In Regina, the change of rising place and setting place had been noticeable. (Of course, Regina had streets running east and west, which helped.) Now, as the day drew to a close, the sun swung further and further north.

She took a last trip to the outhouse and started to strip when she came back. George went out when she returned. When he came back, he zipped up the door to the tent. Then he moved the cots back apart and turned them on their sides. The sleeping bags spilled to the space between the cots. George sat down to take off his boots.

“Why did you do that?” she asked. He made a shushing motion with his fingers to his lips. Stripped, he took his pajamas into the sleeping bag with him. She got into her bag. It was chilly.

George leaned over so his head was near hers. “Anything you say in a normal tone of voice can be heard,” he whispered. “And anyone walking south of the tent can see a shadow of us on the tent walls.”

“That’s why you dumped the cots?” she whispered back.

He nodded. “Anyway, I don’t think one cot would hold two of us comfortably.” He kissed her.

“You’re devious. We are wearing wedding rings. Don’t Hare married couples sleep together?”

“Yup. And with their kids in the same house, which means in the same room. I just want to exercise a little discretion.”

Well, that was better than his not wanting her. His hands roamed over her nightie as his kiss got deeper. When she broke to breathe, she pulled the nightie over her head and dropped back into her sleeping bag.

George crawled out of his bag and into hers. When he kissed her again, his hands stroked all of her back. Her front was pressed against him, and she could feel his erection against her leg. He kissed her breast while his hands stroked her pussy.

There really wasn’t enough room for petting in the one bag. She helped George fit between her legs. Much more compact that way, and even more compact when he tucked his prick inside her. Well, that was one of the advantages. George kissed her, then leaned up on his elbows so he could get his hands on her boobs.

The palms against her nips and his strokes deep within her pussy excited her. Perversely, so did the need to keep quiet in the tent. She spiraled higher and higher. She grabbed his ass and silenced herself against his shoulder as she came.

Soon, though, the ground was hard beneath her back. When she shoved him, he moved off and to his own sleeping bag. She still felt stiff when she woke in the middle of the night. She put the nightgown back on, slipped into flip-flops, and draped a raincoat over her for her trip to the outhouse. The sun was nearly setting over the lake. Once back, she righted her cot and put the sleeping bag back on it.

Still in the nightgown, she found the sleeping bag cozy almost everywhere as she drifted off to sleep. The exception was the damp spot under her hip.

It was the brightness of full day when she woke up. George was sleeping soundly in his bag in a cot a yard away from hers. Her watch said 6:30.

The cooking stove was outside the tent, which was a little safer and a lot cooler. George had bought some wood the day before, and they had brought some supplies with them on the plane. By the time Sylvia had learned how to cook on a wood stove, it was lunchtime. Dinner was easier. “Want me to get started on the typing?” she asked when they’d eaten.

“Not really. I’m still gathering impressions. The only thing I’ve put down is a sketch map, and the typewriter can’t help that.”

“Well, let me see and copy that.” She did. George’s sketch of the village had names by many of the houses.

That night, they lay in their separate sleeping bags on their separate cots. George stroked her through the nightgown. She fell asleep with his hand on her, but it was removed sometime during the night. The bag was plenty warm without being zipped up, but it was rather stiff under her hip.

There is rather little housework in a tent, and their meals weren’t the sort to require much time -- even fixed on a wood- burning stove. Sylvia took her copy of George’s map with her while she wandered the village. She surreptitiously wrote down the names of the people she met and the family name of the house where she met them. She soon learned that the latter was little use. People were always in and out of each other’s houses, kids even more than adults.

“Cecile, isn’t it?” she said to one girl whom she’d already met in two other places.

“Yeah, Cecile.” The pronunciation was subtly different. “You’re good. I know all these people; but when I go away to school, it takes me the longest time to learn the names of all those strangers.”

“It’s nothing, I used to teach school as a substitute.” Then, not knowing how clear that explanation would be to Cecile. “The regular teacher was sick or something. They’d call me in. I was expected to learn the names of all the children in the room at the beginning of the day. There might be thirty children in the room. Then I might be dealing with thirty different children the next day.”

“You a teacher?”

“I have been. Grade school, though, not your age.”

“Can you explain something to me? I’m being sent back to boarding school this fall, and there’s something in my book I don’t understand.”

“I’d be glad to.”

She was shocked at how little Cecile knew, but she learned that this would be the third year the girl -- who looked sixteen -- would be going to school. Sylvia explained the difficult passage and made an appointment with Cecile to come to her tent the next day. She dug out a Regina newspaper she’d used to pad her dishes.