TWO
Moose Factory, Ontario, June 1951
THEY HAD ANOTHER HOUR OF LIGHT if they were lucky. Lachlan stood beside her and squinted upstream as if by force of will alone the HBC Mercer could be made to appear on the horizon. The hospital dock dipped with the irregular rhythm of every impatient shift of his weight. It wasn’t the first time the survey boat was late, but that wasn’t it: he was not, by nature, an impatient man. The restlessness Hazel knew well, and it was born of a genuine appetite for the work they’d both come here to do. The boat they waited for carried more than a dozen Inuit patients, every one of them with disease-clouded lungs, from Great Whale and a few posts further north.
Yesterday she’d stood at his office door and watched him lift one spectral x-ray film after another
