All the Way Read Free Page A

centuries.
    After the rest of the group wakes—the southerners have slept wrapped in their outdoor clothes, shivering, while the Inuit have slept stripped down to their underwear, sweating—Barney Tootoo surveys the horizon as we motor down the lake in our boat. He points to stone markers on a hillside. “That’s where the caribou herds come down to cross,” he says. Later, he spots a lone caribou in profile, standing on a distant rise. A rifle is readied and the caribou is put in the crosshairs, but it’s too far away to take a shot.
    We cruise farther along the lake and Barney points to a stone inukshuk, which may have been assembled there five days ago, or five years ago, or five hundred years ago. Its meaning, though, is clear to him. In this bay, which to my eyes looks identical to myriad other bays we have sailed right by, somewhere in time someone experienced good fishing. We drop anchor and within five minutes a twenty-pound laker is flopping around on the floor of the boat.
    As the air begins to cool in late afternoon, though the sun is still high and bright in the sky, Terence finds a warm place to nap tucked inside the boat’s bow. Jordin stays outside, scanning the water, casting for fish over and over again, following his father’s lead, every moment one of learning, of reading the landscape, of greater understanding. How often has this scene been repeated with other fathers and other sons, stretching back to when men first arrived here?
    Jordin was right. This is where the story begins. On the land. This is where it has to start.
    Stephen Brunt

ONE
    O n the land is where you understand how simple life is. It really brings you back down to earth. It’s so humbling and so peaceful. You go to Toronto or New York and everything is moving at a hundred miles an hour. You come up here and you put your phone away and nothing else matters. You are in the moment. You have to be.
    When you’re out on the land and meet people out there, it doesn’t matter if our families are feuding back in town. Out there you help each other out. All of that other stuff is left behind. It’s like when I go to the rink and I leave everything at the door. I leave all of my personal issues outside when I walk into the arena. It’s the same as here—when you go out on the land, you leave everything behind, all of your fricking problems.
    The land is my dad’s getaway. He’s my go-to guy because he knows how life is out there. That’s his comfort zone. When I go out with my buddies it’s awesome, but it’s not the same as beingwith my dad. You don’t have that same sense of peace. My dad always knows what’s going on.
    We first went out on the land when my brother, Terence, and I were little kids. My mom used to go too, but now she’s not all that gung-ho about it. She likes going to our cabin, which is a fifteen- or twenty-minute quad ride from the house, where we net the char, but really going out on the land is my dad’s thing. His parents lived out on the land until probably halfway through their lives. They would follow the caribou herds. Then they moved into the community in Churchill, Manitoba.
    These days, people don’t actually live out on the land full time, but in the spring they will go out for a month to camp when the weather is nice. In the winter it’s just too harsh. I couldn’t imagine what it was like fifty, sixty, or seventy years ago, when they were actually living out there all year round.
    Being out here is part of our culture and lifestyle in the north. You go out with people who know the land and eventually, as time goes on, you learn the ropes—and you have to learn, or you’ll get into trouble. In summer, if you go off the trail, you won’t know where you’re going unless you remember landmarks. That’s what people do when they go out hunting. In the winter, it’s totally different. The