Yellowknife Didn’t See It Coming

Brutally hungover, Jacques Panache wakes up with a bagel-eating weasel on his lap and two women, who were promised an after-party, at his kitchen table. He needs them to leave — stat. He has repairs to complete and rooms to tidy before his landlord visits, likely to tell him that his decrepit shack is unlivable. Among its problems: a sunken foundation and a sink that empties straight into a bucket. Among the interior clutter: shelves topped with snowmobile parts and a shrivelled orange on a chipped plate. When his enraged buddy Craig pulls into his driveway, Jacques’s day gets a lot worse.

“I heard the whole story,” Craig shouts, as he hurls Molotov cocktails at Jacques’s outhouse. “You’re a dead man.” The crime? Apparently, Jacques, who can’t remember a damn thing from the night before, bartered with a cabbie to get home: one ride for one moose head. But the trade chip was Craig’s prized possession, a trophy of mythic size from a recent hunt. Craig gives “the...