Permafrost and Precedent

The vibration of the small plane worked its way into my teeth, a low thrum of dread matching the endless, frozen landscape below.

The noise is the first thing that gets to you. Not a clean, powerful roar like a 747 lifting off from Pearson, but a frantic, rattling shudder. It’s the sound of a machine held together by cold-contracted metal and stubborn optimism. It’s a sound that works its way through the soles of my Italian leather boots, up my spine, and settles into my molars as a low, persistent hum. A physical manifestation of anxiety. My own.

Below us, the world is an equation of white and grey. A hostile geometry of snow-burdened spruce, the dark slashes of frozen rivers, and the immense, soul-crushing emptiness of muskeg. For two hours, it hasn’t changed. It’s a print defect, the same square of desolate landscape repeating into infinity. My client, Sterling Resorts, sees this as a blank canvas. A line item under ‘Undeveloped Land Asset.’ They see potential profit margins, a luxury eco-lodge catering to people who want to buy the *idea* of wilderness without the inconvenience of it. They see a balance sheet.

So do I. That’s my job. To see the world as a series of liabilities and assets. Risks to be mitigated. The lawsuit filed by the Aanishenu First Nation is a liability. A significant one. A landslide, they claim, caused by Sterling’s preliminary excavation work last fall, destabilized the slope above the Miskwaa River. It dammed the river, flooded their traditional trapping lines, and destroyed a sacred site they call the ‘Ridge of Whispers.’ Their claim is based on negligence, environmental damage, and cultural loss. My job is to prove it was an act of God. A geological inevitability. Winter doing what winter does.

Winter. Down in the Toronto office, winter is a controllable variable. It means salting the granite steps, a higher heating bill, a memo about appropriate office footwear. Up here, it’s not a variable. It’s the entire equation. I look at the case file resting on my lap, the crisp pages of geotechnical reports, seismic data, and meteorological charts. It’s a neat, orderly narrative of numbers. Probability percentages. Soil composition analyses. It all feels clean, sterile. Abstract. Then I look out the window again, at the brutal, physical fact of the cold, and a hairline crack appears in my professional certainty.

The pilot, a man with a beard like frozen sea foam and a name I’ve already forgotten, banks the plane. The shudder intensifies. A briefcase slides across the aisle. It’s mine. I don’t bother to retrieve it. My reflection stares back from the scratched Plexiglas, a pale, sharp-featured woman swallowed by the collar of a black wool coat that cost more than this entire aircraft. My eyes look tired. They feel tired. Tired of the recycled air, tired of the noise, tired of the endless, punishing white.

My phone has no signal. Of course it doesn’t. I knew it wouldn’t. Still, the instinct to check is a nervous tic, a phantom limb reaching for the comforting buzz of connectivity. There are three hundred emails I should be answering. A discovery motion for the pharma case I need to file by Friday. A junior associate I need to tear apart for a poorly drafted memo. The world, my world, is humming along without me, and the silence in my pocket feels like an accusation.

The file is my only anchor. I open it again. *Exhibit A: Geotechnical Assessment, Nordic Engineering.* I’ve read it a dozen times. The permafrost layer, the report states, was stable. The excavation, a series of test pits for foundation footings, was well within acceptable parameters. The slope’s angle of repose was not compromised. It’s all there, in black and white. Scientific. Objective. Defensible. The landslide was a result of an unseasonably rapid thaw-freeze cycle in late October. Unforeseeable. An anomaly.

An act of God.

It’s a clean argument. A winning argument. I’ve won cases with far less. And yet, the phrase sticks in my throat. It feels too neat. Too convenient. Like a perfectly tailored suit that’s just a little too tight in the shoulders. In the air-conditioned boardroom, it sounded like unassailable logic. Up here, with the groaning engine and the sheer, physical indifference of the landscape, it sounds like an excuse.

The plane lurches, dropping a few feet with a stomach-turning finality. The coffee in the pilot’s thermos sloshes. I grip the armrests, my knuckles white. He says something over the intercom, his voice distorted by static, but the word ‘landing’ is clear enough. The airstrip appears below us, a scraped gash in the snow that looks impossibly short. There’s a single building, more shed than terminal, with a plume of woodsmoke rising from a crooked chimney.

This is it. Fort Albany Creek. Population: 642, according to the file. Home of the Aanishenu. The other side. The opposition. The liability.

The wheels hit the packed snow with a jarring skid. The engine noise changes, a desperate, high-pitched whine as the pilot fights for control. We slide sideways for a moment that stretches into an eternity. I can see individual trees now, their branches heavy with snow, stark and black against the white. Then, with a final, bone-rattling shudder, we stop. The sudden silence is deafening. The only sound is my own breathing, shallow and quick, and the frantic thump of my heart against my ribs.

The cold hits me the second the door opens. It’s not just cold. It’s a physical force. It steals the air from my lungs, crystallizes the moisture in my nostrils, and stings my cheeks like a thousand tiny needles. It’s a dry, predatory cold that feels like it wants to get inside you, to find your bones and settle there. My expensive wool coat feels like tissue paper. My boots, so practical on the slushy streets of Yorkville, are a joke. I step down onto the snow, and the cold seeps through the thin leather soles instantly.

A man is waiting by a battered-looking blue pickup truck. He’s tall, broad-shouldered, wearing a faded parka with the hood down, revealing a thick mane of black hair tied back at the nape of his neck. His face is weathered, handsome in a way that seems carved from the landscape itself. He watches me struggle with my briefcase and my rolling carry-on, his expression unreadable. He makes no move to help.

“Anna Sterling?” he asks. His voice is deep, calm. It doesn’t seem to belong to the frantic energy of my arrival.

“Anna Hayes,” I correct, my voice tight. “I represent Sterling Resorts.” A pointless clarification. He knows who I am.

He gives a slow nod. “Mark David. I’m counsel for the community.”

Of course he is. I expected a crusading lawyer from a downtown firm, flying in to play the hero. Not this. Not someone who looks like he belongs here. It’s a tactical disadvantage. He has home-field advantage in a way I can’t possibly comprehend.

“The rental I arranged…” I begin, looking around the empty expanse.

“Engine block cracked. The cold,” he says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. He gestures with his chin towards the passenger side of his truck. “You’re with me. Throw your things in the back.”

My luggage is brand new, a matching set in graphite grey. The truck bed is rusted and coated with a layer of dirty snow and what looks like woodchips. I hesitate. He waits, his patience a form of pressure. Finally, with a sigh that turns into a cloud of white vapor, I heave my bags over the side. The expensive plastic makes a hollow, unsatisfying thud.

The cab of the truck smells of gasoline, woodsmoke, and something else. Something wild, like pine needles and damp earth. The heat is on full blast, but it barely makes a dent against the chill radiating from the windows. The seat is cracked vinyl, patched with silver duct tape. He starts the engine and it turns over with a reluctant groan. As we pull away from the airstrip, I realize I’m clenching my jaw so hard my teeth ache. I force myself to relax it, muscle by muscle.

“The community hall is set up for our meeting,” he says, not looking at me. He drives with a casual, one-handed ease, his other arm resting on the open window frame, seemingly oblivious to the sub-zero temperature. “The elders want to be present for the preliminary discussion.”

“That wasn’t part of the agreed-upon protocol, Mr. David.” My voice is sharp, the lawyer’s reflex kicking in. Control the proceedings. Stick to the schedule. “This is a preliminary counsel-to-counsel meeting to establish discovery timelines.”

“This is how we do things,” he says, his tone unchanged. “We don’t separate legal matters from the people they affect. It’s their land. Their river. Their story. They deserve to be in the room when it’s being told.”

“The courtroom is where stories are told,” I retort. “This is where we exchange documents.”

He finally looks at me, a quick, assessing glance. There’s a flicker of something in his dark eyes—amusement, maybe. Or pity. “You think this is about documents?”

I don’t answer. I turn my gaze back to the window. The town is a scatter of small, brightly painted houses, their windows glowing with warm, yellow light. Snowmobiles are parked in driveways where minivans would be back home. The snow is piled high, sculpted by the wind into fantastic, curving drifts. It’s a different world, operating on a different set of rules. Rules I don’t know. This is his territory. He’s letting me know it.

The community hall is a long, single-story wooden building. Inside, the air is thick with the smell of brewing tea and stew. About a dozen people are there, mostly older men and women, sitting on folding chairs arranged in a loose circle. They watch me as I enter, their faces lined and impassive. Their silence is heavier than any boardroom shouting match.

Mark introduces me. “This is Anna Hayes. From Toronto.” He says it like he’s announcing a diagnosis.

I offer a tight, professional smile that feels like a grimace. I set my briefcase down on a long folding table, the clasps clicking open with a sound that seems obscenely loud in the quiet room. “A pleasure to be here. I trust we can have a productive conversation.”

An old woman with a beautifully intricate network of wrinkles around her eyes speaks, her voice soft but carrying. She speaks in a language I don’t understand, a cascade of liquid, musical sounds. She gestures towards the window with a hand gnarled by age.

Mark translates without looking at her. “Sarah says the spirits of the Ridge are quiet now. She says the landslide took their voices.”

My training takes over. My mind immediately categorizes her statement. Hearsay. Speculative. Lacks foundation. Emotionally manipulative. Inadmissible. “I understand this is an emotional issue for the community,” I say, my voice clipped and formal. I direct my words to Mark, a strategic error I only realize after I’ve made it. I’ve dismissed her. “However, our discussion today needs to focus on the legal framework. On the geotechnical evidence. On the established facts.”

Mark’s jaw tightens almost imperceptibly. “The fact is that the river my grandfather taught me to fish in is gone. The fact is the caribou no longer cross where they have for ten thousand years. The fact is our children can’t be taught the stories of the Ridge because the Ridge isn’t there anymore. Those are facts, Ms. Hayes. You just don’t have a form to file them on.”

“Mr. David, my client acted on the advice of qualified engineers—”

“Your client acted on the advice of the lowest bidder,” he cuts in, his voice low but sharp. The overlapping dialogue I’d read about in negotiation textbooks. A power play. “They drilled test pits in late September, when the ground was already starting to freeze. They disturbed the active layer above the permafrost, created channels for water to seep in where it shouldn’t. Then you got your ‘unseasonable’ thaw. The water pooled, it froze, it expanded. Basic physics. You call it an act of God. We call it kicking a sleeping bear.”

His argument is narrative. It’s emotional. And it’s dangerously effective. I can feel the weight of the elders’ eyes on me. They don’t understand my English, but they understand the tension. They understand the dynamic. I’m the outsider. The invader.

I need to regain control. “Your theory is compelling, Mr. David. But it’s just that—a theory. You have no evidence to suggest my client’s actions directly caused the slope failure. The Nordic Engineering report is conclusive.”

“The Nordic Engineering report was paid for by your client,” he counters smoothly. “It’s not evidence. It’s an investment. We have our own report coming.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Oh? From whom?”

“From them,” he says, nodding towards the circle of elders. “Their report is a thousand years old. It’s written in the memory of the riverbank. It’s a story about how when you take from the land, you have to give something back. Your client took. They gave back nothing. The land rebalanced the debt.”

This is impossible. I came here for a negotiation, a clinical exchange of legal positions. Instead, I’m in a philosophy seminar. My entire arsenal—precedent, case law, rules of evidence—is useless here. He’s fighting on a different battlefield entirely, one where the rules are unwritten and I’m the only one who doesn’t know them.

I take a deep breath, forcing the frustration down. “Okay,” I say, changing tactics. I open my briefcase and pull out a file folder. “Let’s talk about quantum. Your statement of claim is… ambitious. The monetary damages you’re seeking for cultural loss are unprecedented.”

“How do you put a price on a memory, Ms. Hayes? What’s the market value of a sacred site? Give me a number. Your firm is good with numbers.”

The room is silent. I can feel the sweat trickling down my back, despite the cold that seems to radiate from the floorboards. He’s cornered me. Any number I say will be an insult. To say it’s priceless is to concede his point.

I look from his unflinching gaze to the faces of the elders. They are not hostile. They are simply watching, their expressions patient, as if they have all the time in the world. And it occurs to me, with a sudden, chilling clarity, that they do. Their connection to this place is measured in millennia. Mine is measured in billable hours. It’s not a fair fight.

An old man, his face a roadmap of deep lines, speaks. His voice is a low rumble, like rocks shifting underground. He speaks for a long time, his hands moving to emphasize his words. He looks directly at me, as if I could understand.

When he’s finished, Mark translates. “That’s Joseph. He says he’s not a lawyer. He’s a hunter. He says when you track an animal, you don’t just look for its footprints. You look for broken twigs. You listen for the sound the wind makes when it moves through the space where the animal just was. You feel the warmth it left on the ground. He says you’re just looking at the footprints. You’re missing everything else.”

I close my file folder. The click of the cardboard seems to echo in the room. The air is thick with the unspoken. The legal arguments, the case law, the entire scaffolding of my professional identity feels thin and brittle. Joseph’s analogy hangs in the air, simple and profound and utterly devastating to my position. I’ve come here with a map, but they are the territory.

“I think,” I say slowly, my voice sounding strained to my own ears, “that we’re not going to get very far with documents today.”

Mark gives a slight, almost imperceptible nod. A concession. Or maybe an acknowledgement. “No. I don’t think we are.” He stands up. “Tomorrow. I’ll pick you up at seven. There’s something you need to see.”

“What?”

“The footprints,” he says, a ghost of a smile touching his lips. “And everything else.”

The next morning, the cold is even more intense. It’s a solid thing, a presence that presses in from all sides. The sky is a pale, bleached-out grey. Mark is waiting for me outside the small, surprisingly comfortable guest cabin the community maintains. The truck is running, its exhaust pluming in the still air. He doesn’t offer me coffee.

We drive in silence for a while, away from the small cluster of houses, following a road that is little more than two packed-down tracks in the snow. The trees thin out, giving way to a wide, open expanse of rolling hills and frozen swamp. The scale of it is hard to process. The sheer, unadulterated emptiness. It makes the city feel like a child’s toy.

“Where are we going?” I finally ask, my voice tight.

“To the Ridge,” he says. “Or what’s left of it.”

He turns the truck off the main track onto a smaller, less-defined trail. The ride becomes rougher, the truck bucking and swaying over the uneven ground. After another twenty minutes, he pulls over. “We go on foot from here. It’s another kilometer. The trail is gone.”

He gets out and pulls two pairs of snowshoes from the truck bed. They look archaic, wooden frames laced with gut. He hands a pair to me. “Put these on. You’ll sink to your waist otherwise.”

I look down at my boots. They are ruined. Scuffed, stained, the leather stiff and cracking from the cold. I feel a ridiculous pang of loss for them. They were a symbol of my other life, a life where the ground was always paved and predictable. I fumble with the bindings of the snowshoes, my fingers numb and clumsy in my gloves. Mark watches me for a moment, then wordlessly kneels and secures the straps for me. His hands are deft, efficient. He doesn’t say anything. The gesture is not kind, not exactly. It’s just practical. A problem to be solved.

Walking in the snowshoes is awkward, a wide, shuffling gait that feels unnatural. But he was right. The snow is deep, a soft, bottomless powder. The silence is absolute. There are no birds. No traffic. No hum of electricity. Just the rhythmic crunch of our snowshoes and the sound of my own labored breathing, puffing out in white clouds in front of my face.

The landscape is beautiful, in a stark, unforgiving way. The snow isn’t just white. It’s a hundred different shades of blue and grey and lavender in the shadows. The air is so clean it hurts to breathe. I am completely, utterly out of my element. A foreign body in an organism that doesn’t want me here.

After what feels like an hour, Mark stops. We’re on the edge of a wide, tree-lined crest, looking down into a valley. “This was the Miskwaa,” he says, his voice quiet. The river. Except it’s not a river anymore. It’s a long, frozen lake that shouldn’t be there. And on the far side of the valley, the source of the problem is sickeningly clear.

It looks like the earth has been torn open. A huge, raw scar of mud, rock, and splintered trees cuts down the side of the hill. It’s a visceral wound in the white flesh of the landscape. The scale of it is staggering. It’s bigger than a football field. Bigger than any photograph could convey. The sheer violence of it is breathtaking. Millions of tons of earth, just… gone.

My carefully constructed legal arguments, my geotechnical reports, they all evaporate in the face of this. This is not an abstract concept. This is a physical reality. A catastrophe.

“Our survey markers from the excavation are up there,” I say, my voice barely a whisper. I’m not sure why I say it. To defend myself? To connect my sterile world of documents to this raw, terrible place?

“I know,” he says. He points to the base of the slide, where it meets the newly formed lake. “And that’s where the Ridge of Whispers was.”

There’s nothing there now. Just a chaotic jumble of uprooted trees, frozen mud, and massive, house-sized boulders. All buried under meters of snow.

“The elders are coming,” he says, checking his watch. “They wanted to be here. To speak to you here.”

I can hear the whine of engines in the distance. A few minutes later, three snowmobiles appear, cresting a nearby hill. They carry the elders from the meeting yesterday: Sarah, Joseph, and two other men. They dismount and walk towards us, their movements slow and deliberate in the deep snow. They don’t wear fancy snowshoes, just thick, insulated boots into which they barely sink. They know how to walk on this land. I’m just a clumsy trespasser.

They gather at the edge of the precipice, looking out at the devastation. No one speaks for a long time. They just look. Their faces are etched with a grief so profound it feels like a physical force in the air. This isn’t just a piece of land to them. It’s a relative. A family member who has been brutalized.

Joseph is the first to speak. He points with a mittened hand towards the slide. He speaks in his own language, his voice raspy in the cold air. It’s not angry. It’s sad. A eulogy.

Mark translates, his own voice low. “He says this is where the creator rested after shaping the hills. The winds would get caught in the rocks and the trees, and if you listened, you could hear the stories of the beginning. It’s where boys became men. You would come here to fast for four days, to listen for your name on the wind. My father did it. I did it. My son… he will not.”

My throat is tight. I try to formulate a response. An expression of sympathy. An acknowledgement of their loss. But the corporate-speak that comes to mind—‘We regret any inconvenience,’ ‘Our condolences for your perceived loss’—is so grotesquely inadequate that I remain silent. There are no words. There are no documents for this.

Sarah steps forward. She doesn’t look at me. She looks at the broken land. She begins to sing. A soft, keening melody that seems to be pulled from the earth itself. It’s a song of mourning, ancient and heartbreaking. It’s the sound of a culture being erased. The sound of a connection being severed. The other elders join in, their voices weaving a fragile harmony against the immense, indifferent silence of the winter.

I feel a tremor start in my hands. I clench them into fists inside my gloves, but it doesn’t stop. This is what my client’s ‘calculated risk’ looks like. This is the human cost on the other side of the balance sheet. It’s not a number. It’s this song. It’s the look on Joseph’s face. It’s the son who will never hear his name on the wind.

I came here to fight a lawsuit. To argue facts and figures. To win. But standing here, on the edge of this wound, listening to this song of grief, the concept of ‘winning’ feels obscene. Mark was right. I was just looking at the footprints. I was missing everything. The broken twigs. The warmth left on the ground. The sound the wind makes when it moves through a space that is no longer there.

The song finishes. The last note hangs in the frozen air and then disappears. The silence that follows is more profound than before. It feels heavy, sacred.

Mark turns to me. His face is hard, his eyes burning with a cold fire. “Do you see it now, Ms. Hayes? Do you see what your client’s tidy little report left out? This is our evidence. This is our testimony.”

I can’t meet his gaze. I look down at my ridiculous boots, half-buried in the snow. They seem to belong to another person, a woman who lived in a world of clean lines and clear rules, a world that no longer makes sense. “Yes,” I say, the word a small puff of white in the vast, cold air. “I see.”

We don’t talk on the way back. The silence in the truck is different now. It’s not hostile. It’s heavy with the weight of what we’ve seen. I stare out the window, but I’m not seeing the landscape anymore. I’m seeing the raw earth. I’m hearing that song. The neat, orderly case file I had constructed in my mind has been torn to shreds.

Back at the cabin, I decline Mark’s offer of dinner. I need to be alone. I need to think. The sun is setting, painting the snow in shades of pale pink and orange. The beauty of it feels like a punch to the gut. I pull on my coat, the inadequate wool a familiar, foolish comfort, and walk. I don’t know where I’m going. I just follow a packed-down trail that leads away from the cluster of houses, towards a vast, open expanse.

The trail ends at the shore of a huge lake. The one from the maps, not the one from the landslide. It’s frozen solid, a sheet of white stretching to the horizon, meeting the bruised purple of the twilight sky. The scale of it is humbling. It makes me feel infinitesimally small. A single, dark speck in a world of white.

I stand there for a long time, the cold seeping into my bones. But for the first time, it doesn’t feel malevolent. It just *is*. It’s a fundamental truth of this place. The silence, too, is different. It’s not an absence of sound. It’s a presence. It’s full of the faint creak of ice shifting, the sigh of the wind in the distant trees, the whisper of snow falling. It’s the sound of the world breathing in its sleep.

I had come here seeing this place, this winter, as an obstacle. A problem to be managed. A line item on a risk assessment report. An adversary. But standing here, I realize I was wrong. It’s not an adversary. It’s a provider. A teacher. A foundation. It’s the sacred provider Mark had spoken of, the bedrock of a culture I had dismissed as anecdotal. It’s a living thing, with a voice and a memory.

The case isn't just about a landslide anymore. It's not about winning or losing for Sterling Resorts. That all seems so small now, so incredibly, laughably insignificant. It's about that song Sarah sang. It’s about the memory of the riverbank, the story of the wind. It’s about a debt that has been called due. A part of my brain, the old part, is screaming about fiduciary duty, about my obligations to my client. But a new voice, quieter and more persistent, is asking a different question. Not ‘How can we win?’, but ‘What is the right thing to do?’

I look out over the frozen expanse, at the first stars beginning to appear in the darkening sky. They are sharp and bright, like chips of ice. I think about the neat, clean world I left behind, the world of contracts and depositions, and it feels like a foreign country. A place I’m not sure I can return to. Not as the same person who left. Something has shifted in me, a tectonic plate deep beneath the surface of my well-ordered life. A fault line has appeared. Hope, strangely, isn’t about winning this case anymore. It’s about something else entirely. It’s about the possibility of justice, real justice, that has nothing to do with a courtroom. The ice groaned under the weight of the coming night, and for the first time, it sounded like a voice.