Scar Tissue on the Tundra

My breath plumed out, a ghost in the morning chill. Ozias, a few paces ahead, stopped abruptly, his hand rising. He didn’t need to say anything. The silence, thick and heavy, already hummed with wrongness. We’d followed the winding path of the old trapline, avoiding the slushy ice patches that clung to the dips in the terrain, our faces tucked into our scarves. Now, the river was before us, or what remained of its clear autumn flow.

It wasn’t a vibrant turquoise, not today. Instead, a sickly, oil-slick sheen coated the slow-moving water, reflecting the dull sky in distorted, smeared colours. A faint, acrid smell, like burnt plastic and something metallic, clung to the air. My stomach twisted. “Well,” I said, the word feeling too big, too clumsy for the scene. “That’s… not ideal.”

Ozias didn’t laugh. He rarely did when we were out here, tracing the edges of what people took. He knelt by the bank, his gloved fingers hovering over the water, not touching. He had that stillness about him, a quiet observation that made me feel like a loud, clanking machine by comparison. "It’s new," he said, his voice low, a rough murmur against the wind. "Didn't see this two days ago. It wasn't here last autumn. Whatever it is, it came quick."

I pulled out my small, beat-up notepad, the pages slightly damp from the condensation in my pocket. “Any idea what ‘it’ is?” I scribbled 'Discoloured water - acrid smell'. My hand was stiff, already cold.

He shrugged, a barely perceptible shift of his shoulders. "Could be a lot of things. Old fuel drums. Some kind of drilling fluid. But it's not natural. This part of the river… it’s a breathing spot, you know? For the fish, for the caribou coming through. It's a pharmacy, if you know what to look for."

He picked up a fallen branch, bark peeled raw in places, and dipped the end into the oily film. The slick clung to the wood like a shroud. He then pointed further upstream, towards a cluster of stunted pines clinging to a rise. "Source is up there. Beyond the old hunting camp."

We started walking again, slower now, our eyes scanning the ground. The ‘E’ in ECO-STAR kept echoing in my head: *Environment*. *What is the environmental context and impact of your idea?* It wasn’t just a checklist. It was this, this raw, open wound in the land. The words from the methodology guide felt stark, almost accusatory, out here: *Our work must be an act of reciprocity, not extraction.* What kind of 'work' was this, then? Pure, unadulterated taking, without a hint of returning anything but poison.

The ground became softer, muddier, with each step upstream. The metallic tang in the air grew stronger, making my nose itch. Ozias stopped again, this time pointing to a faint, broad track in the damp earth, partially obscured by fallen leaves. "See that? Not a quad. Too wide. And not a snowmobile, not yet. Heavy equipment. Tracks almost gone, but still there if you know to look."

He was right. Once he pointed it out, the flattened leaves and compressed earth were clear. A subtle, almost invisible bruise on the land. It made me wonder how many other bruises were hidden from casual sight. My mind jumped from this track to a memory of a lecture on 'non-human stakeholders.' What would the river think of this plan? The caribou? The soil? It felt like a stupid question to ask myself, but out here, with the cold seeping into my bones and the smell of the waste burning my nostrils, it didn't feel so stupid.

"Someone’s trying to be quiet about it," I muttered, adjusting the strap of my bag. "They’re not exactly advertising their presence."

Ozias snorted, a short, sharp sound. "Trying and failing, then. The land remembers, Mira. Always does. You can try to hide a scar, but it'll still itch in the cold."

The Contamination's Heart

The track led us through a thicket of dwarf birches, their leaves a riot of ochre and russet, already losing their fight against the season. On the other side, the scene opened up into a small, relatively flat clearing, mostly rock and thin soil. And there it was: a haphazard collection of rusty barrels, several overturned, their dark, viscous contents weeping into the ground. A strong, sickly chemical smell hit me full force. I gagged, clapping a hand over my mouth and nose. Ozias was already backing away, shaking his head slowly.

"Idiots," he hissed, his voice tight with anger. "Just… idiots. You don’t do this here. You don’t do this anywhere."

I took out my phone, trying to steady my hands enough to take photos. The images felt inadequate, failing to capture the sheer wrongness of it all. This wasn't just a casual littering. This was deliberate. A few steps closer, and I saw a faded, stencilled symbol on one of the barrels – a stylized pickaxe, and beneath it, barely legible, a partial company name: 'NORTHERN… EXPLORATION…' The rest was obscured by rust and sludge.

"Northern Exploration," I read aloud, my voice flat. "Never heard of them around here. No permits for this area, not that I know of."

Ozias kicked a loose stone, sending it skittering across the exposed rock. "Probably not. Probably just trying to see what they can get away with. Or maybe a trial run. Test the waters, literally. This place… it’s been a 'test site' for all sorts of bad ideas over the years. Always people looking to 'develop' it. To 'extract' its 'resources'."

I thought about the 'Listening to the Land' section of ECO-STAR. *Colonial thinking frames the land as a collection of 'natural resources'… an Indigenous epistemology sees the land as a library, an archive of wisdom, a web of active relationships.* These people, whoever 'Northern Exploration' was, they saw resources. Not relatives. Not teachers. Just something to take.

"Seven-generation impact," I murmured, almost to myself. "What’s the seven-generation impact of this? What will this poison do to the water, the animals, the people fifty years from now?" My mind raced, trying to fit this raw, tangible destruction into the theoretical framework. It wasn’t a neat exercise. The ECO-STAR guide felt like a gentle instruction manual, and this was an explosion.

Ozias straightened up, his eyes sweeping the clearing again, then past it, towards the distant, hazy silhouette of the hills. "Not good. Someone needs to answer for this. This isn’t a mistake. This is an attack."

We spent another hour documenting the site, taking samples of the water and soil, careful not to contaminate ourselves. The cold pressed in, numbing my fingers even through my gloves. The thought of leaving the barrels here, slowly leaching their toxicity into the sub-arctic ecosystem, was unbearable. But we couldn't move them alone. Our job was to report, to gather evidence. And then, for someone else to act. Or so I hoped.

As we packed up, Ozias spotted something else, half-buried near a cluster of sharp rocks. He nudged it with his boot. It was a thick, hardened piece of plastic, a part of a casing, perhaps, from some heavy machinery. On its underside, faint but clear, was a serial number. "Bingo," he said, a grim satisfaction in his tone. "This tells us a lot more than 'Northern Exploration'."

I leaned over, peering at the sequence of letters and numbers. It looked like a manufacturer's code. "Okay, so we have a serial number. We have a general idea of the company. And a huge mess. What's the next step, Sherlock?"

He gave a wry smile, but his eyes were still serious. "First, we get this number back to the lab. See if we can trace it. Second, we talk to some people. The hunters, the elders, anyone who’s been up this way recently. They see things. They hear things. They know the land better than any map."

The path back felt longer, the air colder. My mind was buzzing, no longer just with the metallic tang of the pollution, but with the specific contours of the problem. This wasn’t just about catching a culprit. It was about understanding the motivation, the 'O' – Opportunity – they saw in this land. What 'extra opportunities' did these people imagine existed outside the law, outside reciprocity? And the 'S' – Solution – my idea for creating value for a customer. Our 'customer' right now was the land itself, and the people who lived on it. Our solution had to be more than just cleaning up a mess. It had to be about preventing it from happening again, about reinforcing the idea that this land was a library, not a warehouse.

"We need to be careful," I said, tucking my hands into my armpits for warmth. "If they’re bold enough to do this, they might not appreciate us poking around."

"That’s why we’re smart about it, Mira," Ozias replied, glancing back at the toxic scar tissue we were leaving behind. "We don’t go barging in. We listen. We observe. We map the ecology of their idea, just like we map the ecology of this place. We figure out their roots, what they consume, and what kind of poison they're destined to become. And then we cut them off."

His words carried a weight, a quiet promise. I shivered, but it wasn’t entirely from the cold. The trail ahead, though familiar, now felt like the first step into something larger, something far more complex than a simple investigation. It was less about what was here, and more about what was coming.

Grounding the Investigation

Back at my small, cluttered desk in the community centre's spare office, the collected samples lay inert, accusing. The digital photos on my laptop screen were stark, unflinching. My fingers, still stiff, typed out a preliminary report. Ozias was already on the phone, quietly reaching out to his network, his voice a low rumble through the thin walls. He knew the landscape of trust here better than anyone. I knew how to sift through permits and regulations, how to trace corporate registrations.

Our skills, though different, meshed. The 'T' for Team in ECO-STAR. *What knowledge, skills and contacts do you need to deliver your idea?* We had some, but not all. We needed community intel. We needed an elder's perspective on the patterns of resource exploitation they’d seen over decades. We needed scientific backing for our samples. This wasn't a solo act. No innovation ever truly was, especially one rooted in protection and healing.

I printed out the photos, pinning them to a corkboard beside a faded map of the territory. The red circle I drew around the contaminated site felt inadequate, too small to contain the enormity of the violation. My gaze drifted to the list of banned names tacked to the wall, a reminder from the project coordinator about proper terminology for land-based initiatives. No 'resources,' only 'relations.' No 'wasteland,' only 'place needing healing.' It felt almost absurdly academic in the face of what we’d just witnessed, but the spirit of it was right.

Ozias hung up, turning to face me. "Old man Dubois saw a heavy transport heading towards that area, off the main road, late last night. Looked like a flatbed, carrying something tarped. Didn't think much of it at the time. Happens, sometimes. But he thought it odd, the time of night."

My brow furrowed. "Late last night? So they hit it and ran. Quick operation."

"Too quick," Ozias corrected. "Too clean. If they just wanted to dump, they'd leave more tracks. This feels like they were testing something, then bugging out. Like a probe. Seeing if anyone noticed."

He picked up one of my printouts, a close-up of the serial number. "We cross-reference this with local heavy equipment suppliers. Anyone who's recently sold or rented a piece of kit with this kind of casing. Then we talk to Jean at the Band Council. She’ll know if any permits for exploration have even been discussed, even informally."

"And the elders?" I asked, tapping my pen against the desk.

"Especially the elders," he affirmed. "They’ll have the historical memory, the seven-generation context. They’ll tell us what this place means, and why it matters beyond the immediate damage. This isn't just a crime scene, Mira. It’s an intervention into a living system. We need to understand the full system to fix it."

The 'A' – Advantage – of ECO-STAR flashed through my mind. *What do you offer that no one else is offering?* Our advantage, perhaps, was that we weren't just looking at the legalities. We were looking at the land itself, at the long conversation it had been having for billions of years. We weren't just investigators; we were interpreters of a language many had forgotten.

"Right," I said, a fresh surge of purpose cutting through the earlier cold dread. "So, first, that serial number. Then Jean. Then a visit to Elder Maeve. And maybe a few calls to environmental agencies, just to light a fire under them."

Ozias nodded, pulling on his jacket again, ready to brave the chill once more. "Sounds like a plan. Just remember, it’s not about finding a single 'bad guy,' Mira. It’s about understanding the whole story. The one the land is telling us."

I looked at the map again, at the red circle, and imagined the stream, not as a victim, but as a witness. A quiet, patient witness, waiting for us to truly listen.