Read The Shaman's Knife Online
Authors: Scott Young
The Shaman's Knife
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Scott Young
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Just before I flew out of Goose Bay in Labrador early that Monday morning, I heard a brief news item on a radio another passenger was carrying. “Two brutal murders have rocked the Arctic Inuit settlement of Sanirarsipaaq, northeast of Cambridge Bay on Victoria Island,” the announcer led off, and went on to say that a middle-aged Inuit hotel cook and her grandson had been murdered during some kind of a drunken brawl. A possible third victim was a very old Inuit woman whose role in the matter was not immediately known. She had been found unconscious in an icy ditch just outside what the news reader called “the murder house,” and had been flown to hospital in Yellowknife with a possible fractured skull.
The young lnuk carrying the radio turned. I'd been testifying in a murder case in Nain and had been described rather colorfully on local radio. As an RCMP inspector who was also a full-blooded Inuk, I was bound to get a lot of attention in Nain, which was almost entirely of my own people. Speaking in our tongue, Inuktitut, the young man with the radio said, “That sounds like a job for you, Matteesie.” If I'd had a little more time I would have called headquarters. We'd been on the same light plane earlier, starting from the gravel runway at the Inuit settlement of Nain and flying south to the big air base at Goose Bay to catch this fast charter I'd heard was going directly to Ottawa, due there in three hours or so. But I'd be home before eleven. Then I could get details.
In Ottawa I took a taxi to my home in the old Glebe district intending to take on a quick infusion of tea, change my clothes, and go to the office.
A note on the door read: “Getting my hair done. Back soon. XXOO. Lois.”
In the kitchen the light was flashing on my answering machine. I pushed the button. The message instructed me to call my office immediately. I made a pot of tea, put milk in my cup, waited a minute for the tea to steep, poured, sipped, and was about to call the office when the phone rang. An operator said, “CBC News, Inuvik, person to person for RCMP Inspector Matthew Kitologitak.”
“Speaking.”
“Go ahead, miss.”
Then the jolt came. “Inspector Kitologitak?” Maxine asked.
I knew her voice better than almost anyone's. I thought of her as she would be now, just starting work in her cubbyhole at CBC Inuvik, two hours behind our time zone. The streets there would be just beginning to liven up after several hours of mid-April's long daylight. Her grandfather had been Scottish, other ancestors Slavey Indian. Her long black hair had a little gray in it, her skin was dark, and she was getting a little thick in the body, as I was. About five feet six, as I was. In all the years we'd been close to one another, Maxine had never before called me at home.
“Do you have a minute?” she asked, her voice ultra-impersonal. “It's about the murders in Sanirarsipaaq.”
The case in itself couldn't be the reason she was calling me. There is a distinct pecking order in such matters. Local RCMP detachments tend to feel proprietary about their own murders. They like to provide the news media with their own versions of enlightenment, evasion, or nuances between. They often managed this without help. Usually I wasn't called in until normal procedures had been exhausted.
But through Maxine's attempt at impersonality I could hear an emotional note in her voice. “I wanted to tell you in case nobody else had, that the . . .”âshaky pauseâ“uh, old lady who got hurt outside the house where the murders happened is your mother.”
I choked out, “How in hell . . .?” then gave silent thanks that she hadn't said
was
your mother.
“She was medivacked to Yellowknife Saturday night,” Maxine went on. “She's in hospital now. When I got her name yesterday and only then knew she was your mother, the doctor looking after her, a guy I know, Quinn Butterfield, told me there's no actual fracture but it's a bad concussion, maybe some minor internal bleeding but anyway a mighty headache . . .” She hesitated. “I tried your office and was told you were in Labrador. I just wasn't sure you'd heard . . .”
I had a strong feeling that there was another line she thought but didn't speak: “or you'd have been here by now, Matteesie.”
“What held up anyone else getting to you was that I guess the police in Sanirarsipaaq didn't know from her name that she was your mother. Especially her being a stranger there, a visitor.”
My mother's travels were a family joke. She'd been on the move much of her life. Like a lot of the old nomadic Inuit, or Eskimos, as she still called herself, travel was in her blood. At mother's ninetieth birthday party in the settlement where she lived near Holman there were about eighty of us in all, five generations. When I spoke about this party later to a rather lofty anthropologist of my acquaintance in Ottawa he told me kindly that when describing such gatherings I should use the term “kin group,” which I do like the ring of. At the party one of my half-sisters said, “Now that you're ninety, you'll
have
to stay home where we know where you are!” Mother just cackled.
If she'd been hurt there in the Holman area, over on the west side of Victoria Island, where I often visited, someone would have got in touch with me immediately. Anywhere elseâwell, I am Matthew Kitologitak. She is Bessie Apakaq. The Inuit system of more or less picking our own surnames baffles some people, especially the whites, but it's one of our traditional ways that we've been able to hang on to. It's not based on patronymics, like in Russia, or matronymics, if that's a word, but simply allows the individual to take the name he or she wishes. My uncle Jonassie Kitologitak had been a famous hunter in the western Arctic, an idol of mine, so I took his name as my own. It was not the kind of tidy arrangement that governments, at least theoretically, dote on. This name business naturally confused the authorities. Amazingly enough, those in charge resisted the natural temptation to set up expensive new government offices staffed with party hacks and defeated candidates to work out genealogical tables in an attempt to keep things straight. Instead, in 1941 some deputy minister must have ruled that the simple way would be to print numbered metal tags and give each Eskimo one to be known by. If old number E5-9 died, his number would be retired, just like Gordie Howe's. . . . In a few decades the system went back to the old puzzle of surnames, which is where we are now.
None of that really went through my mind, except as a ping from one of those microchips that each of us carries in mind and memory, a mere flash in time beforeâback to Ottawa, kitchen, telephone, my tea getting cold.
In Maxine's work for CBC News, no doubt in her first checks, she'd been talking to the detachment at Sanirarsipaaq. Steve Barker was the corporal in charge there, not a guy I liked a lot. He saw himself as sort of the great white father. I heard him say once, “This is my town. What I say goes.” An attitude that natives never warm to.
“Steve Barker got any idea who did it?”
“Well, you know him. Doesn't trust reporters. He told me I could quote him that they were
working
on it. Expecting to make an arrest soon. The usual. Great headline, right? âThey're working on it.' He spelled B-A-R-K-E-R for me so we'd pronounce it right on the news . . .”
My smile was a little rueful. I didn't relish what might lie ahead if Barker and I had to work together, as would likely be the case if the phone message to call headquarters was what I expected, an order to get up there fast.
“But I know another guy there,” Maxine said. “Alphonse Bouvier. He's a corporal sent in to take over when Steve Barker goes on his holidays to Hawaii, which he's going to do as planned, or his wife would kill him. She has all her new bathing suits bought . . .”
“When does this happy event come about?”
“Right away.”
“No kidding?” A nice sense of relief.
“No kidding. Anyway, when I phoned Steve back to check something and got Bouvier he told me they didn't have a clue at all, yet. Everybody they'd checked out right after it happened had an alibi. But about your mother, to be fair, when I'd been talking to Barker first late Saturday he was in a big rush, getting rid of me fast because the medivac plane was just about to land and a storm was blowing outside . . .
“Neither of us knew then that she was your mother, of course. When I asked her name he said he wasn't even sure yet but gave me the name of the relative she'd been visiting for the last few weeks, um, Annie Kavyok. I phoned Annie and that's when I knew it was your mother who was hurt.”
“Anything else you can tell me?” She said there wasn't.
I keep flight times to the north in my head. There was one by Canadian Airlines to Edmonton at noon and on to Yellowknife after a stopover in late afternoon. I could catch it if I moved fast. “If you hear anything more, I should be at the Yellowknife Inn or the hospital around ten or a little after.”
“How be I call you after you've seen your mother? Something for the morning report?”
“Sure.”
Lois had appeared silently (we have thick rugs) in the kitchen doorway. She must have heard some of what I'd said. Probably the part about me being at the Yellowknife Inn that night. She was dressed to go out, wearing a suit that showed her off very nicely. The skirt just touched her kneecaps and her hair had been sculptured the way she liked it. She was holding her gloves. She never drives without them. Then I remembered where she might be going. This was Monday, the day some of the RCMP wives got together for lunch, drinks, sometimes bridge, a lot of gossip.
“Yes,” she'd often say after I got home and told her the office news, “I knew that yesterday.”
“What's that call about?” she asked now. “Obviously something in the
bloody North
again,” speaking in audible italics.
“Yep, it's something in the â
bloody
North
' again,” I said. Lois had met my mother once soon after we were married, but apparently didn't really warm to a toothless old Inuit woman with a tattooed face and only one eye. Anyway, in all these years, nearly twenty of them, Lois had never campaigned for a rematch.
I told her what had happened to my mother. In the middle of it Lois shook her head and winced as if she were hearing her own words again, bitter words spoken most likely from habit when she might, even briefly, have given me a chance to explain before she spoke.
We had once cared for one another very much, and maybe, in a way that only seriously disaffected but still-together married people could understand, we still did. She said, “Oh, Matty, I'm sorry I was bitchy about it.” She hesitated for several seconds, shaking her head. “It's just that . . . it seems you're always
going
somewhere . . .”
“I know,” I said soothingly. “It's
okay
, Lois.”
But she had regained her equilibrium. How dare I tell her what's okay, right? She doesn't need a pat on the head, right? “Don't patronize me!” I rolled my eyes, knowing how much she hated it when I did that. That line about patronizingâI couldn't help it. Civilization has come a long way since I was a kid, if a five foot six Inuk from Herschel Island could legitimately be accused of patronizing anybody. Even if it is just a dumb buzzword. Why is there no such word as
matronizing
? If there were, would it ever be used as an epithet? I wondered sometimes if it would have been better if we'd had children. But the time when we might have, the right time, had passed years ago without us really noticing. With modern means of contraception there are not many accidental births that in time become blessings. Each other was all we had. That had turned out to be not enough.
I thought of putting the phone down and making peace the Canadian way (peace at any price) by saying I was sorry, too; sorry for what I wouldn't know for sure, and it would take too long to figure it out, and anyway it would be for something I really had no control over.
So to hell, I'm not
that
Canadian.
I shrugged and began to dial. She turned away. As the airline answered, I was hearing our front door close. I booked a seat on the noon Canadian (it was 11:22 now), then called a taxi. Luckily, my big unpacked bag from the Labrador trip had what I'd need. I didn't have time to call the doctor, my first impulse, or the office.
When I got to the airport's departure lounge and did call, the doctor was unavailable. Then my office confirmed that I'd been right in suspecting that I'd be assigned to the case. I told them the flight I was on, didn't mention that I would have been going anyway because of my mother. That would have taken time. As it was, I was the last passenger to board.
On the flight west I didn't feel like reading or drinking or talking, and this left me with a lot of time to look out of the window and think. I was a kid again on the shore watching my mother in a kayak fighting a whale she had harpooned. I was out on the winter trail getting ready to move, the komatik overturned to repair and smooth out the mud on the runners and then, if we had warm water or tea left from breakfast, wiping the mud with what would become a slick thin layer of ice to make the komatik run easier for the dogs. If we had no warm fluid, my pee would do. “Why do you think boys are constructed as they are?” my mother once asked, and answered triumphantly, “It is for peeing on sled runners.” I had a friend. Some mornings we used to stand at opposite ends of a fourteen-foot runner and try to have our streams meet in the middle.
Tears came to my eyes at the thought of her injured head, hating to think of her in pain and danger. There'd been the scare a few years ago of the cataract operation on her single eye, but that had worked out all right. I'd been there for the operation in Inuvik. When the doctor said it was successful, Maxine had put a brief item on the news and on the “Northern Messenger” radio program so that all through the north relatives and friends would hear that Aunt Bessie, as dozens or maybe hundreds affectionately called her, was still in business, and would be home near Holman soon.