Authors: Melanie Mcgrath
In no
time, they were loading the patient, the snowmobiles and equipment on board
Martie Kiglatuk's Otter. Martie was large, at least by Inuit standards, with
skin the colour of an heirloom suitcase and a voice like a cartoon train wreck.
She also happened to be Edie's best friend.
The
plane hugged the shore-fast ice of South Cape and turned west along the
Ellesmere coast. Before long, it had cleared sufficiently for Edie to be able
to watch the land sail by. She was struck, always, on her rare flights, by how
much the Arctic was shrinking back into itself, floe by floe, glacier by
glacier. Witnessing it was like watching a beloved and aged parent gradually
and inexorably come apart. Every year a little more death and dying and a
little less life. In thirteen years' time, when Joe was her age now, she
wondered if anything would be left at all.
The
crags softened then gradually fell away to flat shoreline and the northern
hamlet of Autisaq rose into view like a set of ancient teeth, jagged with age
and wear, clinging on uneasily to the bony foreshore. Behind her, Joe whooped.
Martie
said: 'Seatbelts on, folks, we're coming in.'
Edie
felt a familiar ear-pop as they began to descend and then, muffled, but
unmistakeable, the sound of Joe's voice again, only this time alarmed, and when
she looked back over her shoulder she could see Felix Wagner foaming at the
mouth, his eyes rolling back, his whole body quaking and jerking and Joe
frantically signalling Andy Taylor to hold the wounded man steady while he
filled a hypodermic. Time warped and bent. Edie was aware of the plane's steep
descent and a bunch of fractured shouts and barked instructions. She tried to
loosen her seatbelt to help but could not get a grip on it. Behind her, Joe was
pumping at the man's heart, blowing into his mouth, and the plane was pitching
and diving towards the landing strip. Suddenly, Martie was shouting; 'Seatbelts
on
now,
people.
Tuarvirit!
Quick!' and the two men fell away from
Felix Wagner like old petals.
Moments
later, the familiar skid and grind of the tyres on gravel signalled their
arrival and as Edie swung round she saw Felix Wagner's arm escape from
underneath the blanket.
Martie
taxied to the end of the strip, shut down the engine.
'What
we got?'
Joe
said: 'Trouble.' He was out of his seat, kneeling beside the body of Felix
Wagner, looking crushed. 'The
qalunaat
just died.'
'Iquq,
shit.' Martie glanced out of the window at the welcome party of Sammy Inukpuk
and Sammy's brother, Simeonie, Autisaq's mayor, heading towards them.
'I
guess I'd better go spread the good news.'
The
pilot's door opened and Martie climbed down onto the strip. A moment of
discussion followed, Martie signalled for someone to open the main door and let
down the steps and Sammy and Simeonie came on board.
Simeonie,
slyer and more calculating than his brother, turned to Edie:
'Does
the skinny
qalunaat
understand Inuktitut?'
Andy
Taylor did not respond.
'I
guess there's your answer,' Edie said. She didn't like Simeonie. Never had,
even when he was her brother-in-law
'Did
he have anything to do with this?'
Edie
could see the man's mind already at work, cooking the story, working the facts
into whatever version of the truth best served Simeonie Inukpuk.
She
went through it all in her head. Andy Taylor had two rifles with him, a
Remington Model 700 and a Weatherby Magnum. Felix Wagner had insisted on three:
a Remington, a 30-60 Springfield and a Winchester, most likely a 308. Both men
had discharged their Remingtons in the morning during an abortive hare hunt,
but not since. She briefly considered the possibility that Felix Wagner had
shot himself, but from the position of the wound it seemed so unlikely it was
hardly worth the expenditure of energy in the thought. Then there was the
zig-zag footprint with the ice bear at its centre. A theory suddenly came
together.
Edie
said, in Inuktitut: 'The way I see it, someone out hunting mistook Wagner for
game and took a shot at him.' The hunter was probably on his way back to
Autisaq or one of the other hamlets right now. Most likely he'd lie low for a
few days, then fess up. It had happened before; the
qalunaat
had signed
a release form, absolving the community of responsibility in the event of an
accident. It was unfortunate, but not catastrophic. The elders would shrug
ayaynuaq,
it couldn't be helped, there would be a generous insurance payout to Wagner's
family and the whole episode would be forgotten. The Arctic was full of
dangers. She'd made sure Felix Wagner had understood that.
Simeonie
coughed, glanced at Taylor to make sure the man wasn't following, then, drawing
himself up to his full height, said:
'Speculation
is a white man's disease. Take the other
qalunaat
back to the hotel,
make sure he's got whatever he needs.'
She
nodded.
'One
thing, he hasn't got a sat phone, has he?'
Edie
shook her head
'Good,
then don't let him make any calls.' He turned to Andy Taylor: 'We're very sorry
about this accident, Mr Taylor. We have to ask you not to leave until we've
made some investigations. Small stuff, just details really.'
Andy
Taylor blinked his understanding.
Joe
leaned forward and spoke in a low voice: 'Uncle, none of this is Edie's fault.'
Inukpuk
ignored him, reverting to Inuktitut:
'There'll
be a council of Elders meeting tomorrow to decide what steps to take next,' he
said, stepping out of the plane and back onto the landing strip, something
threatening in his tone.
Joe
shook his head.
'Aitiathlimaqtsi ark.'
Fuck you too.
Back
at the hotel, Andy Taylor showed no interest in making phone calls. He only
wanted to have a shower and get some rest. A man not used to death, Edie
thought, watching him heave his pack along the corridor to his room at the rear
of the building. It occurred to her that she ought to go home and wait for Joe.
She'd been bothered by a sense of foreboding, the feeling that she and Joe were
somehow being drawn into something. It was nothing she could put her finger on
yet, but she didn't like the way Simeonie Inukpuk had spoken. Never trusted the
man much, even when he was kin. Trusted him even less now.
She
waited downstairs in the hotel until she could hear the sound of Taylor's
snores, then went home. The moment she reached the steps up to the snow-porch
door, she knew .Joe was already inside waiting for her. In the same way that a
frozen ptarmigan would gradually revive when put beside the radiator, it was as
if the house gradually came to life when Joe was there. She pulled the door
open, peeled off her boots and outerwear in the snow porch and went in.
Joe
was sitting on the sofa staring at a DVD. Charlie Chaplin was playing table
ballet with two forks stuck into two bread rolls. She plunked herself down
beside her stepson and stroked his hair.
'I
can't help thinking this is my fault, Kigga.'
'Are
you crazy? No one's going to blame you, Joe, not for a minute. And if they do,
they'll have me to answer to.' On the TV Charlie Chaplin continued to twirl the
bread rolls into pirouettes and
pas de bourees.
'This was an accident.
Someone from Autisaq, or maybe one of the other settlements. Maybe he couldn't
see, maybe he'd had a bit to drink. It happens.'
Joe
said: 'You think?'
'Sure,'
she said. 'It'll blow over, you'll see.'
The
bread roll ballerina took her bow and Edie flipped off the player. A moment of
regret drifted between them.
Joe
said: 'Only thing is, a man's dead, Kigga.'
She
looked at him, ashamed at her own momentary lapse of principle. She was her
best self when she was with him, he made sure of it.
'Bee
El You Bee Bee Ee Ar.' Edie drew the letters on the whiteboard as she went.
She'd hadn't slept well and was finding it hard to focus, thinking about
Wagner's death and the council of Elders meeting where she was going to have to
account for her actions.
Pauloosie
Allakarialak put up his hand.
Edie
underlined the word with her finger. 'Blubber.'
Pauloosie's
arm started waving. 'Miss, did someone kill that
qalunaat?'
Edie
rubbed her hand across her face. Shit, if Pauloosie knew, then everyone knew.
Edie
pointed to the word on the whiteboard. 'You know what this says?'
The
boy looked blank. Poor kid. Sometimes Edie had to wonder what she was doing,
spending her days drumming into Autisaq's youth words they would almost
certainly never use in English - 'baleen', 'scree', 'glacial', 'blubber', words
so much more subtly expressed in Inuktitut, and prettier, too, written in
script. Of course, the hope of the federal government in Ottawa was that some
of them would go on to graduate from high school and even take degrees in
southern universities, just as Joe planned to do, but it was a rare kind of
Inuk who harboured such ambitions. Going south meant leaving family, friends,
everything familiar for a city where the streets were flustered with buildings
and ears crowded in on one another like char in a shrinking summer pond and
where, for at least six months of the year, It was intolerably hot. Why put
yourself through that in the hope that you might finally land the kind of job
back home that had, for decades, only gone to
qalunaat?
No,
the fact of the matter was that most of the faces before Edie now would be
married with kids by the time they were old enough to vote. Most would be lucky
to get as far as Iqaluit, the provincial capital, let alone to the south, and
the vast majority would never once have occasion to have to spell 'blubber' in
English. And the irony of this was that, all the time they were sitting in rows
learning how to spell 'baleen' in English, they could be out on the land, learning
traditional skills, discovering how to be Inuit.
The
recess bell rang. On her way to the staff room, an idea sprang into Edie's
mind. It was something the headmaster, John Tisdale, would no doubt call
'unorthodox pedagogy', a disciplinary offence, if he found out about it. Not
that Edie cared. She'd been up before him so many times for flouting the rules
- his rules,
southern
rules - that she'd come to expect it. In any case,
she suspected Tisdale secretly approved of her methods, even as he was rapping
her over the knuckles for them. The man had come a long way. A few years ago,
when he'd first arrived with a brief to 'broaden education in the Arctic',
she'd asked him what exactly he thought they were educating Autisaq's children
for.
'To
take their place in the world,' he'd replied. He really had been a pompous ass
back then.
She'd
waited until the look of self-satisfaction had faded a little from his face
then said: 'Maybe you don't realize,
this
is their world right here.'
Tisdale
had marked her down as a troublemaker but Edie hadn't been bothered by his
condescension. She knew it wouldn't last. Pretty soon he'd begin to find
himself out of his depth, then he'd come looking for her with his tail between
his legs.
It
happened sooner than even she had anticipated, after a sermon he gave Autisaq's
parents on the dangers of violent computer games. What a blast! Everyone had
laughed at him. Hadn't he noticed where he was? Up here, violence was embedded
in almost everything: in the unblinking ferocity of the sun, in the blistering
winds, the pull and push of the ice.
In
any case, most Autisaq kids had neither the time nor the money for computer
games; their leisure hours were taken up with snaring ptarmigan and trapping
hare or fox, or helping their fathers hunt seal. They spent most of the time
they weren't at school being violent.
The
day after the talk, the headmaster found a dead fox hanging across his snow
porch, but instead of heading south on the next plane, as many in his position
would have done, he'd knocked first on Edie's door then on others, asking where
he'd gone wrong. He'd stuck it out until, over the years, he'd come to realize
that 'broadening education in the Arctic' included him.