It is a starving season. The fall caribou hunt was a marginal success. Hunters waited at the time-honored crossings, hunkered behind rock blinds, but the deer never came. Only a few meat caches are full, and the wolverines pillage one of those. The oil lamps run dry.
People sit in a dark stupor, in semi-hibernation, for days at a time.
A young woman dies in childbirth. Elders walk out of the igloos in the night and don't come back. Late in the season, still months from spring, the people abandon camp and straggle toward the wan hope of a distant fur-trading outpost. The ice rafts up under the lash of wind. The sun is buoyant, high in the sky.