Authors: Melanie Mcgrath
The
door to the snow porch opened and Sammy Inukpuk poked his head round. Not
wanting to give him an excuse to stay, she turned off the DVD.
He
said: 'Hey, Edie,' and noting the debris on her plate, 'any left?'
'You're
out of luck.' She motioned him to the seat on the other side of the TV, but he
sat down beside her anyway. 'TV packed in?'
'Ah,
nope, not exactly.'
He
hovered. 'A beer'd be good.' Then, adopting a cheery tone, 'Hey, did you see
the job Joe did on his snowbie? Looks like new. Phwooee. Must have cost
something. Where'd the boy get the money?'
Edie shot
him a look. Her ex knew well enough where Joe had got the money. She had given
Joe an advance on what she'd been owed for the Wagner trip. After Wagner died,
the wife had refused to pay up, and she hadn't felt like asking Joe for the
money back. Sammy wanted her to know that he was aware she was broke, which
could only mean one thing: he had some kind of money-making proposition up his
sleeve.
About
that beer?'
'Sammy
Inukpuk, whatever you got to say, say it sober.'
He
put on a hangdog look.
'Aw,
Edie, it's been a hard day.' He had a way of making her feel bad and it played
on her that he knew it.
She
went into the kitchen and set the kettle on. While it heated up, she fetched
the key to the cupboard where she kept her booze. Getting the key was a
palaver. She intended it to be that way Whenever people asked, which they
rarely did, she told them that she kept the booze for visitors and guests. In
fact its perpetual presence was a test she'd set herself. She knew she wasn't
yet strong enough to keep the cupboard unlocked but that was her goal. Only
then, when there was booze around that no longer tempted her, would she know
she was truly free of it. She plucked out a can of Bud, locked the cupboard
back up and made herself a mug of sugary tea. Sammy popped the can and took a
long slug.
'I
got you a guiding job.'
This
was good news, and unexpected. Sammy's propositions weren't usually so
substantial. Edie felt a twinge of guilt at harbouring ungenerous thoughts
towards her ex. Somehow when the two of them were together it always resulted
in her feeling bad.
'Fellow
called Bill Fairfax, descendant of that old-time
qalunaat
explorer,
what's his name?'
'Sir
James Fairfax? Is this the fella who was up here before?'
Someone
purporting to be Sir James's descendant had been up on Ellesmere several years
back with a film crew, making a documentary following the explorer's
penultimate voyage. She couldn't remember much about it. Happened during her
lost years.
'Yeah,
that one. He wants to locate his ancestor's body. Reckons it could be on Craig.
Bringing an assistant, just the two of them. Think they might be able to get
some TV company interested.'
On
the surface, this sounded like the perfect gig. Small party, presumably with
some knowledge of local conditions, no hunting involved and she knew Craig
Island as well as anyone. It seemed unlikely they'd find Sir James Fairfax's
body, she thought, but you could never tell. Under all that snow and ice, the
tundra was one great open-air charnel house: bones, antlers, skeletons
scattered all over. Nothing ever rotted or even stayed buried long. There was
no deep archaeology, no layering of history here.
Southerners
often marvelled at the way the recent and ancient past were equally present, as
though there had only ever been one yesterday and everything in the past had
happened on that single day. Only a couple of years ago a group of
anthropologists from the University of Alberta had located the first mate from
some old-time expedition. His comrades had buried him under rocks but decades
of wind and weather had moved the body out from under them and he was found
lying out on the ice, in more or less pristine condition.
All
the same, it was kind of a weird time to look for a man, the ice and snow not
yet melted off, and Edie said so.
'I
told them that,' Sammy said. 'But it didn't seem to bother them.'
'So
long as they know we're unlikely to find anything.'
Qalunaat
ventured
north for all kinds of reasons, often not the ones they supposed.
'Maybe
the body was left in some cave or something, I dunno much about it.'
'They're
paying?'
Sammy
nodded. 'The usual.'
'Why
aren't you doing it then?' She narrowed her eyes, waiting for the catch.
Her
ex looked at his feet. 'I got council of Elders business.' He drained his beer
and belched. 'Any case, you always get first dibs on Craig, Edie.' This was
true, though he was only saying it to soften her up.
Edie
thought about the money. 'Sure.'
She
was still waiting for the catch.
'They're
arriving on the supply plane tomorrow.' He hesitated. 'There's just one thing.'
Edie
wrinkled her nose. Right. The same old Sammy; slippery, never giving you the
whole picture, the Sammy she divorced.
First dibs on Craig, my ass.
'All
it is, Bill Fairfax's assistant . . .'He dropped the ring pull into his empty
can and rattled it around a little.'. .. it's that Andy Taylor fellow.'
The
name came at Edie like an unexpected gust of cold wind. What the hell was Andy
Taylor doing back in Autisaq? Just when she'd squared it with herself to leave
the whole Felix Wagner business alone. Now it was coming right back at her.
'You
know how I feel about that guy. Can't you do this, I'll do the next one?' A
dark slick of anger seeped over her.
'Like
I said, Edie, I got business.' Sammy twirled the ring pull round inside the can
some more.
She
didn't want anything more to do with Andy Taylor. On the other hand, if she
turned this down, she'd have to go to the back of the line for the next gig.
She needed the money and Sammy knew it. He'd backed her into a corner.
'Don't
worry, I fixed it so you won't have to guide him. You'll be working with the
other one.'
'Why?
Taylor staying in the settlement?'
'Not
exactly,' Sammy said. 'He and this Fairfax fellow want go out in two separate
parties, one to the west by Uimmatisatsaq, near where you were before, the
other around Fritjof Fiord in the east. I told them you would take Fairfax to
Fritjof. Joe already agreed to take Taylor.'
Edie
felt startled. All this time Sammy had been cooking this up and now he'd
somehow cajoled Joe into agreeing to it, without even asking for her opinion.
'Wait
up just one second, Sammy Inukpuk,' she said. 'You're not letting your son out
with that man. Andy Taylor's a panicker, he's inexperienced, unreliable.' The
look on Sammy's face darkened.
'You
don't get to tell me how I should treat my son.
You
abandoned
us,
remember?' He stood up and swept to the door.
She'd
seen this before, Sammy trying to take the moral high ground. It was as though,
in his eyes, that was all she had become, some kind of flaky, no good bolter.
She made a grab for her pigtails and saw him bite his lip. At least he knew how
much the A-word hurt her.
'Three
days, six max,' he said, shaking his head at her.
She
went after him, reached the internal door to the porch and yanked it open. The
cold felt like a bad dream. 'Sammy?'
He looked
up from tying his bootlace.
'This
goes wrong, I won't forgive you.'
He
finished his lace, stood up and waved her away. 'I'm not asking you to trust
me, Edie, not any more, but try to have some faith in your stepson.'
She
felt herself blush, a sense of shame needling her belly. Sammy was right. Joe
was a highly competent guide and he knew Craig almost as well as she did. It
wasn't as though Andy Taylor was a bad man. He was just high maintenance was
all.
'Sure,'
she said, in a chastened tone. He winked at her and smiled. She waited while he
opened the door and stepped out into the cold.
'Sammy?'
'Yeah?'
'You
owe me a beer.'
The
following morning, Edie drove the snowbie along the shoreline then took the ice
road up beside the school towards the landing strip. As she bumped along the
ice, she turned over the details of the trip. It was late enough in the spring
season for the ice to be just beginning to destabilize but it hadn't begun to
rot in earnest yet. That wouldn't happen for another three months. Some leads
would have opened up in the shore-fast ice but so long as she and Joe were
careful, the routes should be pretty unproblematic. Taylor and Fairfax were
expecting to be out on the land for three days. That might stretch to five if
they got weathered out, but at this time of the year blizzards were
short-lived.
Before
long, she caught the sound of the plane humming in the far distance but the sky
was a drab blanket patched with low and clumpy clouds and she couldn't see it
yet. It would be bumpy up at fifteen hundred metres today. She hoped Andy
Taylor and Bill Fairfax were good flyers.
She
passed the lonely little cemetery thinking about the bodies of Sir James
Fairfax and his crew, lying out on the tundra somewhere, far, far from home.
Like her great-great- great-grandfather, Welatok, buried out near Etah in
Greenland, a different country, his spirit rootless and unreachable.
Here
in Autisaq, the tombstones were completely obscured by snow, but relatives had
stuck plastic flowers in the ground and the cemetery looked like some weird,
otherworldly art project. When the time came, she wanted to be buried in the
proper Inuit way, under a pile of stones out on the tundra, with an
inukshuk
or a low stone cairn marking her place.
It
struck her then that those of his crew who had survived him might have erected
some kind of marker for Sir James. If there
was
a marker, it was odd she
hadn't seen it. Then again, perhaps she didn't know Craig Island as well as she
thought.
The
Twin Otter nudged out from behind clouds. Edie had checked the manifest the
night before and knew that Aunt Martie was at the controls. When she wasn't
drinking, there was no finer bush pilot across the High Arctic. Martie was one
of only a handful of Inuit pilots, and the only woman. She'd had to be twice as
good as any of the men just to get her licence. Sure, she was eccentric, a bit
of a loner even, but she'd handed a lifeline to Edie so many times she'd lost
count and, despite her own struggles with booze, she'd always tried to keep her
niece away from drink. Edie respected and loved her all the more for that.
Martie
was bringing in the plane from behind the mountains so she wouldn't get caught
up in a patch of turbulent wind. Banking into a sharp turn, she swooped back
and brought the Otter in level. For an instant it seemed to hover above the
surface of the landing strip before coming into a long, controlled skid along
the gravel. The plane stopped right outside the tiny prefab that served as a
terminal. Moments later, the door opened and a tall, slender man emerged down
the steps, visibly stiffening in the cold. Behind him followed Andy Taylor,
looking shaken. The instant Taylor hit the gravel, he doubled over and was violently
sick. Bill Fairfax turned momentarily, wrinkled his nose in disgust and walked
on towards the terminal building. So, thought Edie, the relationship between
the two men was strictly business.
Fairfax
was an elegant, chiselled man in his fifties. He was wearing traditional
caribou mukluk boots, a sure sign of a man in the grip of Arctic nostalgia. As
he walked, the nap on his sealskin parka caught the light and lent him the
appearance of something radiant and mystical. The gossips who hung around the
back of the Northern Store would be having fun over that outfit for weeks.
Edie
went over, introduced herself and apologized for Joe's absence, explaining that
he was busy assisting Robert Patma in the nursing station. At close quarters her
charge bore a remarkable resemblance to his ancestor, whose portrait Edie was
so familiar with from the school history book. The match was exact enough to be
unsettling, as though an old spirit had appeared in modern guise to sort out
some unfinished business.