PRINCE ALBERT, SASK. — -51 C
That's what the wind chill was here just around the time the father dropped the toddler and the baby somewhere on a path between two houses on the Yellow Quill reserve, 400 kilometres to the southeast.
At least it would have been quick.
It is almost impossible to convey such cold to those opening up their newspapers in warm kitchens and coffee shops in other parts of the country.
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Your nostrils lock on first breath. In the time it takes to plug your car in, your hands turn to spanner wrenches. For the vehicles that will start, the frost inside is often thicker than that outside. Once the squared tires start pounding down a plowed road, there will be smoke as thick as toothpaste squeezing out the tailpipe. At four-way stops, the exhaust is so thick it seems capable of crushing a fender all on its own.
This is not the coldest ever, but it is not far off.
"Colder than Siberia," claimed the headline in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix. It was -59 C in Uranium City with the wind chill, -57 C at Meadow, -54 C at La Ronge.
Two degrees lower in Uranium City and it would have hit the all-time low for the province, -61 C in little Broadview, a record set years ago.
The coldest temperature ever recorded in Canada, without wind chill, was at Snag, Yukon: -63.9 C on Feb. 3, 1947. The few men staffing the auxiliary airfield recorded that their breath froze instantly, fell like white powder and made a small tinkling sound like glass as it hit the ground. They threw a pan of water in the air and it fell like gravel, the droplets having frozen instantly.
We are speaking here of cold unknown even to brass monkeys.
The dangers of such weather have been known for as long as cold air masses have butted their way down from the North Pole. The Inuit and the first nations learned to cope, but it is said the Vikings bailed because of such bitter cold. Jacques Cartier spent the winter of 1535-1536 on the St. Lawrence shore watching a quarter of his men die, some from starvation and scurvy, but most likely more from the cold than anything.
Half a millennium later, the threat beyond the thick, weather-stripped Canadian door remains.
Vernon Quewezance, a native pastor with the Plains Tribes Pentecostal Fellowship, heard the news on the radio and thought about last month, when a 14-year-old girl from the Moosomin First Nation walked away from a party on her own and was later found frozen to death, no explanation capable of explaining why.
"As much as we can," he says while trying to call through to friends in Yellow Quill, "we reach out to them."
Such stories are too common in the West. Saskatoon still reels from that frigid night, -28 C, back in 1990 when 17-year-old Neil Stonechild, drunk and disorderly, was dumped off by police on what was then laughingly called the "starlight tours" and found five days later, frozen stiff with only one shoe on.
Inquiries can punish those who do wrong, but they cannot bring back those who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Weather can be so unforgiving it may explain why Canadians are so quick to celebrate improbable survival against such odds. It happened nearly seven years ago in Edmonton, when little Erika Nordby slipped outside unnoticed wearing only a diaper and T-shirt and was frozen solid when her frantic mother finally found her - only to survive miraculously thanks to having fabulous medical facilities close at hand.
Santana and Kaydence Pauchay, the two little sisters at Yellow Quill, had no miracle and desperately deserved one.
"Cold," Robertson Davies believed, "breeds caution." In this tragic case, not enough.
All about the frozen stretches of this province, they were talking about how quickly it can happen and how unfortunate, in this case, no one was there to prevent it from happening.
"Such a waste of life," says Chief Richard Fiddler of the Waterhen Lake First Nation, east of Meadow Lake. "You don't know at this point what happened but you do know it was just little kids. The radio says one had on only a diaper and shirt.
"It's so cold you don't even want your kids going out to play if they're fully dressed. Everybody's completely frozen in here. Nobody's moving."
Joe Durocher, who runs a general and grocery store far north in Canoe Lake, spent the day trying to thaw out propane tanks.
"I didn't even know they could freeze up," he says with astonishment.
The news struck Durocher particularly hard, with two youngsters of his own at home.
"You have to make sure they stay inside," he says. "As soon as you step outside, you've got frostbite."
"We have to take care of each other at times like this."
No one, sadly, was there to take care of the babies when they fell. And no one is denying that alcohol was likely a major factor. But the weather cannot entirely be ignored, says Jim Durocher (no relation), who runs SaskNative rental housing in Saskatoon and comes from Green Lake, far to the north.
"The old-timers will tell you," he says, "that the first thing that happens with hypothermia is you get disoriented - you don't know what you're doing when you're that cold."
Cold so powerful and quick it can freeze a tear before it leaves the eye.
But that does not mean that no tear falls.
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