Journey to the Homeland

	Ray Bonaparte’s flying home in a Cessna. In his bag, he’s got an Inuit-English dictionary and a notebook, but no pen, as he’s sure someone in Nunavut, Canada, will have one.  His pilot doesn’t have one, but a red pen apparently exploded in his shirt pocket a long time ago. Ray also has several black coats, his passport, a Boy Scout survival kit in what looks like a tuna can, a sleeping bag, some photos he doesn’t really treasure, a cigarette lighter, a large duffel bag of clothing….

	In town, Baker’s Lake, which is more modern than he expected, Ray follows his pilot to a bar that serves drinks with Hawaiian names. He sits over a Maui Hula Cocktail, writing with a pen borrowed from the confused bartender. With the aid of the Inuit-English dictionary, he is writing his introductory speech to his long-lost brethren, so they will accept him. His name, his ancestry, why he is coming to the remote reaches of Canada to live with the people he is half descended from.
	There are twelve space heaters and a fire in the bar, and it’s all quite civilized, but still cold.  The Maui Hula Cocktail is warm, almost hot, and that apparently is the preferred state of alcohol here, where the temperature has teeth. He winces as the door opens and a cloud of white frost invades and gnaws at his nose, eyes, and ears, despite earmuffs.
	“Oh really, you’re from India?” he hears his pilot saying to a potential passenger. “So am I! I’m a native, but I got adopted to America when I was young…” The pilot said the same thing to Ray, replacing Indian with Inuit. He said nothing else to him throughout the entire trip. And he never looked Inuit to Ray anyway.
	Ray doesn’t much care for the M.H.C.  First of all, the drink’s getting cold.  Second, it has a little green hula skirt around the glass’s bottom; Ray thinks it looks like seaweed. Nonetheless, he really wouldn’t mind staying in Baker’s Lake, but it’s too close to civilization and the F.B.I.  Ray’s not paranoid, but his only knowledge is from television, so he doesn’t realize that they can’t come to Baker’s Lake in Nunavut, Canada. 
	Growing up, he was the son of a woman who ran an urban orphanage, but he was no orphan himself.  Leaving his room in the very middle of the complex involved scuttling past envious eyes, outstretched tongues, middle fingers, and verbal abuse; this obviously did not encourage him to get out often, even when he moved into his own apartment away from the complex. He encountered nothing to contradict his knowledge from TV.
	Ray stares into his half-empty glass and notice it’s steaming.  The little carbonation-bubbles are jittering around, trying to warm themselves, rubbing against each other and hypnotizing him. Taunting him. They’re saying “it’s all your fault” and such things, but they don’t realize the ladder wasn’t stable at all….
	No, bubbles can’t talk. Ray chalks this up to 24 hours without sleep, as the Cessna’s northwestern flight to the connection in Anchorage had balanced perfectly with time zones, lines of latitude, the International Date Line, and the sun’s movement, so that it stayed in exactly the same spot in the windows through the whole flight. And in Baker’s Lake the sun will not set until November. If he hadn’t left in such a rush, he could have bought those eye-covers on the commercials on the History Channel. Maybe they sold them here for foreigners?
	But Ray will not subject himself to weather to check for a store. He draws his head toward the M.H.C.’s steam to absorb the warmth, but as he’s about to fall in, a voice shocks him up and informs him something in a string of foreign words.  
	The speech Ray is supposed to be writing flashes through his head. The man was speaking Inuit, and Ray recognizes one word that in his dictionary meant “guide.” This person in the red Santa Claus-esque coat would be his guide, then.
	Ray’s pilot walks up behind the man and lays a green-gloved hand on his shoulder. “He’s your guide, Ray, you know? To take you out to that tribe you’re going to live with. I hope you don’t have too much trouble understanding each other.”

	The guide in his Santa Claus outfit loads Ray’s bags into a larger bag and doesn’t complain about how much Americans pack. This surprises Ray, as such complaining is a central tenant of travel in foreign lands.
	 With glove gestures, the guide relates his plan. He will take Ray out to the village and drop him off, then come back for his bags in a second trip. Ray nods while hopping up and down and rubbing his forearms together for warmth.
	Then they’re off. Ray sits behind the guide’s large mass in a snowmobile, the bulk shielding him from the ravenous wind. He has finished the speech while waiting for the guide to get ready. It is folded up in a pocket of his coat, pressing against his chest. (Ray would like to think that it is poetically pressing against his heart, but it’s too far down for that, really.) It’s his introduction to the Inuits of the Lhyok village, in their own language.  As a genuine half-Inuit, they would surely accept him, but would they accept his reasons for returning? He can’t lie about that; then the guilt would crush him into snow. And they would hate him as the story and his lies came out; no, he would be honest instead.
	What if they think he did it on purpose?
	He remembers with a start that he forgot to include in his speech why he lost his Inuit family name. It’s too late to rectify that now because his speech is all packed cozily into his pocket and he is jammed up coldly on the back seat of a snowmobile. And even then, he doubts that broken words from the dictionary strung together could convey the idea of a mother searching through a history textbook for a famous last name. Bonaparte had the biggest picture she could find in the book, she told him once after some orphan called him Napoleon, and he should be proud of that name. 
	Looking back, Ray can see that Baker’s Lake has departed into the white horizon, but the wind lashing his nose forces him to turn forward again.
	He asks the guide some simple phrases from the Inuit-English dictionary. Are the people nice? The response is consumed by the wind, but Ray thinks he recognizes the word for “Yes.”
	After a few minutes of thinking, he decides that his judgment of the guide’s attire as being like Santa Claus’s was flawed. While the coat may be like that, the gloves were green, and this man was too bulky and swarthy to pass off even his clothes as Santa Claus’s. He doesn’t seem angry, though, or so Ray hopes.
	How long will this trip take? he thinks. He knows it would be useless to ask the guide, as neither of them would understand each other, but he tries anyway, and receives no response. His driver seems busy.
	In a sort of boredom his mind returns to itself, and inevitably leads itself back to the incident. He was really trying to help, but he had the means, motive, and opportunity, so it’s only natural they would think it happened on purpose. As if everyone back at the orphanage didn’t hate him enough already. And the F.B.I. is surely after him. He is just running away from them, what’s the problem there?
	The guide shouts in frustration, piercing the frigid noise of the rushing wind. Now what’s wrong? He starts steering the handles of the snowmobile erratically, like a drunken driver, screaming and occasionally taking his left glove off the handle to hit it.
	Then the sound of the engine starts to choke and coughs out its life. Only the wind now sounds in Ray’s frozen ears. And that not for long, as the snowmobile loses inertia remarkably quickly, sinking into the snow.
	“Dammit!” the guide shouts, an imported curse word, and he hits the snowmobile’s console several times, shouting “Nel, nel, nel!” After a few seconds, he stops his pounding and lets his arms go limp, resigned. Ray gathers that this has happened before. The guide holds five green fingers up and says what might be the word for “hour,” then gestures forcefully for Ray to dismount the snowmobile. 
	Ray hops down and is half-eaten by the powdery snow with a flumf sound. How can he withstand frostbite, hypothermia, and searching F.B.I. helicopters for five hours alone? The snow makes a watery noise on his coat as he pushes through it, and some of it somehow penetrates inside and bites him like fire ants. Not quite like fire, though, because the “fire” part obviously does not apply. Ray decides that thinking about fire ants will not comfort him in the upcoming wait, so he tries to steer his thoughts away.
	After walking some distance he reaches a point where the snow only comes up to his ankles, and he stands there. Around him is a flat bleak white landscape into the hazy horizon, and Ray looks around at it in despair. 
	He retrieves the Boy Scout survival kit from its pocket above the speech-pocket and tries to open it, but his gloves are too thick to allow him to pull the ring on the top. He begins removing one glove, but only comes halfway before wincing and yanking it back onto his hand; then he commences again to try to open the can. When he finally does open it, he sees his hard work’s prize: a little cheap pocket knife, a couple of inch-long metal rods to light a fire with, and a bag of Kool-Aid powder.
	He hasn’t had a drink since the Maui Hula Cocktail, so he fumbles to open the Kool-Aid bag. He tries putting pinches of it in his mouth.
	He looks up and sees his guide standing over him, laughing. The guide says something in Inuit and laughs again, but Ray can see that he is not laughing in mockery. Ray offers him some of the Kool-Aid powder, but he declines. Again, he says something in Inuit, this time a question, and Ray shrugs. He looks confused.
	Ray tries to clear away the snow so he can sit down, but he finds that the real ground is so cold it penetrates even through both of his coats. The guide sits down in the snow and seems perfectly comfortable. Drowsiness overcomes Ray as he sees the guide resting, but he can’t sleep with the sun so up and the temperature so down.
	Yet again the guide asks Ray a question, and this time he thinks he might understand it, although that might be his drowsiness talking. He responds in English.
	“Well, my mother’s Inuit. But she won the lottery. Actually I don’t think she did, because I don’t see how there could be a lottery here. But that’s what she said. Anyway, she got the money and made an orphanage. Everyone says they’ll make one if they get all that money, you know? But no one does, except she did.”
	The guide pretends to understand then nods.
	“Oh, why I am I here?” says Ray, talking up to the sun now, “There an orphan I lived with in the orphanage. I grew up in one, at the very middle of it, but I wasn’t an orphan, see? My mother was Inuit. She won the lottery and built the orphanage. I don’t know her Inuit name. Well, the boy I was talking about was named Iris, and that’s a girl’s name, so people made fun of him. He called me Napoleon because of my last name. Bonaparte. Because my mother was looking through a history textbook for a famous last name and there was a huge picture of Napoleon Bonaparte that took up an entire page, so she thought his last name must be famous, and she changed our family name to Bonaparte.”
	The guide half-smiles and tries to find the stranger’s foreign language interesting.
	“I didn’t like Iris. He started calling me Wellington after a while. He would yell ‘Hey Wellington! Time for Waterloo! Gonna kill Napoleon! I can’t wait!’ when I walked by, and I pretended not to hear.”
	The guide strokes his black stubble, faking fascination but really thinking about how to restart the snowmobile’s engine.
	“I left the orphanage eventually. I moved into an apartment and tried to find a job and worked for a while as a toll booth attendant. Then my mother gave me a job as a janitor back at the orphanage. That was ridiculous, and I felt like a complete failure. One day I was out painting the orphanage’s outside wall by Third Street and the guy who called me Napoleon was there too, since he had become the head cook of the orphanage and everyone there was supposed to help paint. Even the orphans were there. New ones that I didn’t know, that didn’t hate me, so I was vaguely happy. But then Iris showed up.”
	The guide is eyeing Ray’s survival pack for usable items.
	“I don’t think he recognized me at that point. He just called me ‘hey you.’ So when his ladder started wobbling I asked him if he needed me to go down and hold it, but he said no…but then he was looking my way and not focusing all on holding himself on that ladder, and he went down…there were cars in the street….”
	The guide sees the pained expression on Ray’s face and emulates it to show empathy.
	“I think he recognized me as he was falling. I watched him going down for those few seconds, shouting. Then there were cars in the street…all the orphans thought I did it, and maybe I did, because he was busy recognizing me. So the new orphans hated me now. They called the F.B.I. that night and got them onto my trail, I’m pretty sure. I told my mother and she gave me a bunch of money and told me to run away…now I’m here.  I didn’t do anything.  But they always hated me, the orphans, that is.  When I was living there, I almost wished to forget my mother and just be one of them, so they wouldn’t hate me. Now the Inuits won’t hate me. They have no reason to. I’m one of them, right?” Ray pauses then adds in Inuit, “what about you?” as he closes his eyes and tries to sleep.
	“Our people came from the land of gold,” responds the guide in Inuit, “where we lived in the land of incredible warmth, and around us the ground was black, the color of love and happiness. It was always warm, and our leader was named Qechuk, it is said. He shone like the sun in golden light, giving warmth and keeping the black lands forever steaming their generous heat. Then there was a war within our tribe, and my people sided with the wrong side. Our evil leader took Qechuk up to a mountain and trapped him inside the peak in ice and robbed us of his warmth. Then the black lands became white and cold, and we were sundered from our friends because the sea sprang up between us. This is the tragic history of our people.”
	Ray has understood none of the story, but he nods.
	
	Six hours later, the snowmobile is operating again. Ray tried in the six hours to sleep, but the cold kept him awake while the guide tinkered with the snowmobile.  Now they’re off again, and it’s as if the delay never happened.
	Craning his neck now, Ray can see some green tents in the distance, and suddenly the snowmobile stops. They’ve arrived. The village features a circle of what appear to be green army tents, with a token igloo at the head of the circle. Beyond the circle are many more green tents scattered like litter, with another token igloo in the distance. Within the circle, discarded metal cans stick out of the snow and other litter probably lies below it. Despite his guide’s affirmation hours ago, Ray doesn’t think this tribe looks very friendly, and a foreigner trying to explain how he murdered a house painter on accident seems doomed to spend all his days outside. 
	Despite certain failure, an attempt should still be made, though, thought Ray. He lets his guide lead him into the igloo in the circle, which seems bigger on the inside than on the outside. 
	Inside, several children in blue coats with fur white fringes are sitting in a semi-circle along one side of the igloo, and a man is standing by the opposite wall, talking to them, apparently telling a story. Ray perceives that he is interrupting, and he starts to back out, but the guide blocks the exit. 
	Upon seeing him, the children start giggling. The teacher man hushes them, then tells Ray something incomprehensible. The children start laughing again, now pointing at his black coat.
	When his guide bows to the man and mumbles a rather long meeting that sounds like it has been memorized through frequent use, Ray realizes that this man must be the tribal leader or chief of some sort, although he seems to be only in his twenties. Now, then, he would have to give his speech.
	The chief interrupted him, pointing to his coat with a hint of a grin, chuckling and trying to explain something, but Ray doesn’t understand. 
	Ray tries to ignore his embarrassment over whatever this is, and pulls back the hood of his coat to show he is not afraid to show his face. Now he would be accepted or rejected. He would either stay here with these people or go back to Baker’s Lake and live off Maui Hula Cocktails, or back to the orphanage…. He gropes around in his pocket for his speech, finds it, unfolds it, and begins reading.