Anna

Anna is a woman living near the mission station who acts as an intermediary, caregiver, and moral interlocutor for both the priest and Patrick Sumner. Her Christianized name marks her connection to the mission, but her part in the story is not limited to receiving the priest’s instruction: she carries news between people, makes decisions about what she will say, and presses Sumner to account for what he can do. During the priest’s grave illness, her insistence that survival and responsibility matter gives the story’s questions about chance a human voice.

Identity and place

Anna appears within the community surrounding the mission. In an early scene, a woman brings a pan of stew into the cabin while the priest is working at his table; she wears a deerskin anorak and a black wool hat, and has parallel blue marks tattooed across her forehead and the backs of her hands. The priest shares the stew between two bowls, and the woman points toward Sumner and speaks in her own language. The priest answers her, and she smiles. The scene establishes an everyday relationship of exchange: food, attention to the exhausted stranger, and communication that Sumner cannot understand.

Anna is identified by her Christianized name when two hunters arrive by sledge at the mission. She comes out of the igloo, greets them, and offers food before they speak with the priest. The account places her among the people of the nearby camp, while also showing that she can communicate with the priest and participate in the mission’s life. Her brother is part of that life as well; he attends Sunday Communion with her and later assists when the priest needs an operation.

Interpreter and witness

Anna helps convey information between the local community and the priest. When the two hunters report finding a ruined tent with four dead white men, she later tells the priest that they also found two dead local men at the camp. She relays the circumstances they described, including that the men were unclothed and that one had been killed with a knife, indicating the locations of the wounds on her own neck. The priest subsequently tells the hunters’ story to Sumner and watches his response. Anna is thus part of the chain through which news of the dead reaches the mission and, eventually, Sumner.

Her interpreting is practical rather than merely linguistic. At Sunday Communion, she tells the priest that a woman from the nearby camp is seeking medicine for her sick infant. The priest gives the mother calomel pills and instructions. Sumner then examines the child and treats it with charcoal and water, asking Anna to tell the mother to repeat his treatment. When he asks Anna to present him as an Angakoq who knows more than the priest, she refuses. She does not simply repeat the claim or act as a transparent conduit for Sumner’s authority. He then leaves the choice between the pills and the charcoal to the mother. Anna’s refusal makes the mother’s decision, rather than Sumner’s proposed status, the point at issue.

Care and religious life

Anna is a regular participant in the mission’s religious routine. She and her brother attend the Sunday service, along with occasional visitors from the nearby camp. Sumner helps at the service, though he regards it as a human performance and speculates that the local attendees may find it amusing. Anna’s own view is not stated. The narrative instead gives concrete evidence of her engagement: she attends, helps the priest communicate with others, and reads aloud from Saint Paul’s letters to the Corinthians when the priest is sick.

Her role in the priest’s care is similarly practical. When he complains of stomach pain, she follows his instructions by applying a warm poultice and bringing him remedies from the medicine chest. As his condition worsens, she remains beside him and reads to him. These actions show a relationship in which religious teaching, household care, and medical assistance meet. They do not make Anna simply an extension of the priest: she can carry out his instructions while also asking questions that he and Sumner would rather evade.

Questions for Sumner

Anna’s most direct challenge to Sumner comes as the priest’s illness becomes critical. Sumner explains that the priest has an internal abscess and that, without a hospital or adequate medicines, he cannot save him. Anna reminds him that he had claimed to be an Angakoq, then asks why he is there if he cannot help. She also asks why he survived when everyone else died. Sumner answers that he is present by accident and that there is no reason for his survival.

Anna does not accept that answer as sufficient. She looks at him in disbelief, then returns to the priest’s bedside and kneels to pray. Her response sets two positions beside one another without resolving them: Sumner’s insistence that survival has no meaning, and Anna’s continuing attention to the person who may die. Her questions are grounded in the immediate scene, not abstract debate. The priest is suffering; Sumner has medical knowledge; and Anna wants to know what that knowledge and his survival are for.

Assistance during the operation

When Sumner decides to operate, Anna’s presence becomes part of the procedure. He asks her to bring her brother in from the igloo. As Sumner prepares to treat the priest, Anna begins praying and crossing herself. He interrupts her and instructs her to stand at the end of the table, where she is to apply more ether if the priest shows signs of reviving. Her brother is assigned to stand at Sumner’s shoulder with a bucket and towel. The episode brings the mission’s religious practice into direct contact with improvised surgery: Anna’s prayer continues as a personal response, while Sumner directs her hands toward the practical work required by the operation.

Anna’s importance rests in this movement between roles. She welcomes visitors and offers food, carries reports between the camp and the mission, attends services, cares for the priest, refuses to lend her voice to Sumner’s self-assertion, and then helps him when he attempts a dangerous operation. Through her, the mission is not only a setting for the priest’s Christianity or Sumner’s medical skill. It is also a place where local knowledge, personal judgement, religious practice, and urgent care meet, and where Sumner is made to face the question of what his presence can mean to someone else.