Scars are like stories written upon the flesh. We all bear them, each a reminder of a past event. Unfortunately, their nature is such that they never tell happy stories, which is why we keep our scars to ourselves, and we rarely ask about those of others.

If you look at the little finger on my right hand, for example, you will see a thin, somewhat curved scar. If you had seen it before it became scarified, you would be looking at a wound that nearly took off the fleshy pad of my finger. I got that at the hirluaq, in my early teens.

The hirluaq was next to our house. It was a storage shed that my parents used for extra equipment. My siblings and I dreaded setting foot in it, especially in the dead of winter, since it was lightless, airless, cold, like a kind of place where all the unwanted things of life came to rest.

While cramped, it was always large enough to fill with imagined terrors. It could, and did, hold anything, and it was a cold trip there to retrieve powdered milk, cereal, a needed tool, or an item of clothing. The only task I disliked more than retrieving things from the hirluaq was hauling bags of combustible items (wood, paper, etc.) down to the dilapidated shacks by the creek. So it was the hirluaq, the somewhat lesser of two evils, for me.

The storage shed was a dark world in miniature, having its own smells, those of rotting canvas, dried fish, gasoline. The outer porch I could handle, having personally carted over most of what lay there: several boxes of camping equipment; on the left, the tackle box filled with biscuits and left-over frozen meals; over in the corner, the camping tent; next to it, a harpoon and fishing spear; hanging above that area, the gas lamp; to the right, caribou skins; near them, my father’s outdoor clothing; underneath that, pots and pans.

The lock to the hirluaq door was invariably frozen, which meant prying it open, flashlight under chin. The door opened to reveal a long, narrow area leading deeper into the place. No simple shed, the hirluaq had originally been meant as a small home. As a shed, it was absolutely tomb-like.

One evening, I was sent out to fetch some powdered milk from the hirluaq. I had learned to get in and out of that place as speedily as possible, but sometimes there was an inevitable searching around in order to find what one wanted. This was one such occasion.

Our year’s supply of powdered milk was kept in a large barrel, and fetching milk entailed filling a pitcher-sized container that I held in hand. As I groped about in the dark, trying to find the barrel, I kept thinking: Why was I always sent out alone on these missions? Surely my sisters were smaller and better able to crawl around between the unidentifiable, shadowy masses herein.

Yet, after some fumbling about, I eventually found the barrel and managed to pry the freezing cold lid off. I was resolved to fill my container as fast a possible, but I was nervous, casting furtive glances around the place. That was when my eyes locked upon something bulky, roughly man-sized, thickly bundled and lined up along one wall, as though it had been deliberately shoved out of the way.

Oh my God, I thought, where did they store people waiting for burial? It was too cold, in mid-winter, to bury them properly. They would have to put them somewhere, wouldn’t they? It was one of my father’s duties, as a lay preacher, to perform the last rites for the deceased. Had he recently mentioned that someone had passed away?

My brain began to race, and it seemed as though the air thinned noticeably. Could the air even reach me in here? But I was still staring at that inert bundle, and thoughts were battering at my mind. If I stood with the dead, was there a soul also in here with me?

&#0147Ataatavuut qilangmiittutit&&#0148 I recited the Lord’s Prayer in Inuktitut to myself. Could the dead hear our thoughts?

Sorry, sorry I didn’t mean to intrude on your place, I thought at it.

That was around the time my flashlight began to dim.

(Continued in part two)