The Shaman's Daughter

by Christoffer Petersen

  The man looked up once he was finished with the last of the buckets, catching my eye affording me the briefest of nods before inspecting the dogs in the order they finished eating. I approached as he checked each dog’s paws, skin, and teeth.

  “David?” I said, stopping at the limit of the closest dog’s chain. “Constable Maratse?”

  “Iiji.”

  “I’m Petra Jensen. We met once. I’m a…”

  “Constable,” he said, picking his way through the dogs towards me. “I remember.”

  He wiped his hand on his jacket and reached out to shake my hand, pausing to growl at the dog scratching at his legs, and again when he noticed my clumsy fingers.

  “You’re hurt,” he said, lowering his hand.

  “Yes.”

  “Pain?”

  “Some,” I said. “But that’s not important.”

  “Hmm.” Maratse took a last puff on his cigarette and extinguished the butt with a pinch of his finger and thumb. He looked around, then looked at me, narrowing his eyes as he studied my bruises and panda eyes. “How can I help you, Constable?”

  I started to speak, wondered how to begin, and then almost laughed when he was the first to respond.

  “Am I in trouble?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Hmm.” Maratse shuffled his feet as a dog with a stripe of pale fur on its forehead bit at his laces. He knelt and pulled the dog into his side. “Sometimes,” he said, lifting his head as the dog curled his tongue across Maratse’s cheek, “there’s trouble.”

  “I suppose there is,” I said. I caught his eye as he looked up, adding, “And I need your help because of that trouble.”

  “You can’t go to the police?”

  “No.”

  “But we are police.”

  “Yes. But…”

  Maratse curled his fingers around the dog’s ears as it settled in his lap. I shivered in the silence, waiting for him to speak, or for me to tell him what I really needed, why I came to the dog yard looking for a police officer with a history of bending the rules.

  “It’s not that simple,” I said, when he looked up. “The police, our colleagues, are looking for a man.”

  “The shaman,” Maratse said.

  “Yes.” The tightness in my shoulders dissipated, and I nodded – too vigorously for someone with a broken nose and two black eyes. “Tuukula.”

  “It was on the news.”

  “Yes, and Luui…”

  “His daughter.”

  “She’s missing, David,” I said. “We need to find her.”

  “That’s police work, Piitalaat.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Your name. In Greenlandic. Piitalaat.”

  “I know,” I said. I felt the familiar pinch of the frown on my forehead. “But the other thing, about the police.”

  “They should look for her.”

  “And they are, but they think Tuukula has her, or has done something to her.”

  “Has he?”

  “No,” I said with another shake of my head, more pain, enough to make me press my clumsy hands to my head. “He couldn’t…”

  “Hmm.” Maratse stood up. The dog’s chain rattled as it snaked along the packed snow, following Maratse as he walked over to me. “I believe you,” Maratse said.

  “You’re one of the few who does.”

  “That’s because they don’t know Tuukula.”

  “Do you?”

  Maratse shrugged and said, “I know the type,” he said. He turned to point at a snowmobile parked beside the shack. “I need a second to tidy up, then we can look for…”

  “Luui,” I said.

  Part 8

  After a short run into town, Maratse parked outside an apartment block. He left the snowmobile running and showed me into the apartment he was sleeping in, mentioning something about the mess and it belonging to the owner of the sledge dogs he was looking after.

  “Tell me what you know,” he said, as he changed his clothes.

  I waited in the living room, nose twitching at the smell of something rotting in the kitchen. My eyes watered in the heat pumping out of the radiators.

  “Luui went missing three days ago,” I said. “She was staying with her mother – Alma…”

  “Tuloriak,” Maratse said, as he stepped into the lounge. He fastened his belt and zipped his uniform trousers. “I know Alma. She’s had a difficult life. She was getting better.” He grabbed a quilted jacket from the back of a chair and pressed it into my hands.

  “I don’t know her, only that the social worker…” I paused as I caught a flash of something in Maratse’s eye, waited for him to comment.

  “Hmm,” he said. “Difficult job.”

  “Yes, but this social worker…” I took a breath as Maratse helped me into the jacket. “It’s like a witch hunt. I’m not sure it’s helping. She’s got everyone focused on Tuukula, as if he’s some monster.”

  Maratse collected his keys from the dining table, pausing at the word monster.

  “A witch hunt?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I guess it’s a shaman hunt, really.”

  “And her focus is on Tuukula?”

  “All of it.”

  “Hmm.”

  “What?”

  Maratse walked to the door, frowning as I caught his arm.

  “You grunted,” I said. “When I said the thing about all her focus being on Tuukula, that the police were looking for him…”

  “He’s a shaman. Her focus is where he wants it to be,” Maratse said. He nodded at the door and I followed him.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Maratse locked the apartment door, then jogged down the stairs to the snowmobile. He helped me onto the back of it, then said, “Tuukula sent you.”

  “To look for Luui,” I said. “Yes.”

  “While everyone else is looking for him.”

  “Yes…”

  Maratse climbed onto the snowmobile, clicked it into gear, and accelerated onto the main road. “He’s clearing a path for you,” he said.

  “That makes no sense, David. If more people were looking for Luui…”

  “There would be more tracks, more interference.”

  I wrapped my hands around Maratse’s waist as we drove down the hill and into the centre of Ilulissat. My hair caught in the collar of his jacket, brushing my frozen cheeks as Maratse slowed into the bend, then turned left towards a row of small apartment blocks. He parked in front of the second in the row, switched off the engine, and waited for me to slide off the seat and onto my feet.

  “Tuukula is also a hunter,” he said, sliding off the snowmobile.

  “Yes.”

  “He knows tracks.”

  “But this is his daughter, not an animal.”

  Maratse raised his eyebrows in the silent Greenlandic yes, as he waited for me to catch up. I didn’t – couldn’t even. Maybe it was the pain from my nose and eyes dulling my thoughts, but I didn’t understand what Maratse was getting at, and I told him so, told him to explain, and quickly.

  “We haven’t got the time,” I said. “Luui is missing.”

  “She’s his daughter.”

  “I know, but…”

  “She’s his daughter,” Maratse said. “There’s something special about her. He thinks you can find her.” Maratse nodded at the path to the apartment block. “You need to put those two things together.”

  “She’s five, David.”

  “Iiji.”

  Maratse, just like Tuukula, accepted Luui’s age, like it was a matter of fact, not a concern, as if I was missing some key point to all this. And then, as Maratse led the way inside the building and up the stairs to Alma’s apartment, it hit me. Luui was different. Beyond the love, the hugs and kisses he showered on his young daughter, Tuukula treated her as an equal, following her lead as we did when looking for the lost girl in Kangaamiut, or giving her space to console Rassi when we found him in the abandoned cabin on the way to Siorapaluk
.

  “She’s a shaman’s daughter,” I said, as Maratse knocked on Alma’s door. Maratse said nothing, just looked at me, waiting for me to connect more of the dots. “Tuukula said she was travelling. He never said she was lost, only that we need to find her.”

  “Iiji,” Maratse said, as Alma opened her door. “This is the first step.”

  Part 9

  Alma Tuloriak was taller than I expected. She crumpled into Maratse’s arms as he stepped into her apartment. I followed as he guided her to the living room, easing her gently from his chest and onto the couch. The television ran in the background. I took a moment to study the room, and what I could see of Alma’s apartment. I struggled to see what convinced Helga Blixt that Alma was a poor mother, that her apartment was no place for a five-year-old child. I saw a neat and tidy room, typical of so many Greenlander’s homes, with framed photographs on the walls, sealskins draped over the backs of the chairs, a long, embroidered cloth with hearts bordered around a narwhal and the Greenlandic flag. The shelves were bare of books but cluttered with more photographs, and a large one of…

  “Luui,” Alma said, as I reached for the photograph. She added more in Greenlandic, and Maratse translated.

  “Taken when she was four,” he said.

  “I was at her fifth birthday,” I said, smiling at Alma. “Her kaffemik.”

  Alma hugged her arms around her chest, forcing a smile onto her lips as she looked at me, only to turn her head at the start of the news on the television. She reached for the remote and turned up the volume.

  Helga Blixt filled the screen as the camera crew focused on her. Flash photography blitzed in her glasses as she pinched the frames, adjusting them before addressing the media. I saw Gaba twitching in the background and imagined him struggling with Blixt, dominating the search for Tuukula and…

  “The child, Luui Angakkuarneq,” Blixt said, as the press briefing began.

  “It’s live,” Maratse said, lowering his voice as Alma leaned in towards the television. “In the Ilulissat community centre.”

  Blixt cleared her throat and continued, stating that, “Tuukula Angakkuarneq has been spotted in a small dinghy heading for the settlement of Oqaatsut.” Gaba fidgeted behind her as she spoke, jaw clenched as he gritted his teeth. “Police are on their way and will apprehend him within the hour.”

  “That’s not…” Gaba took a step forward, biting his tongue as Blixt raised her hand to stop him.

  “The search for the child continues, although, at this time…”

  Maratse plucked the remote from Alma’s hand and switched the television off.

  “Coffee,” he said, gently pulling Alma to her feet. He helped her into the kitchen, nodding to me to go down the hall and, “Look in Luui’s bedroom.”

  I swallowed as I entered Luui’s room, pressing my clumsy hands to my chest as I saw the row of plastic horses lined up on the windowsill. Her bed was unmade. I slipped my hand under the sheets as if I was checking the heat of a car engine, hoping they were still warm, that she wasn’t gone. But the sheets were cold, the bed empty, and the room was bare.

  Apart from the drawings peeking out from under the bed.

  I knelt on the floor and tapped the curled edge of the top drawing onto the carpet in front of me. It was the same drawing that Blixt had shown on the slides in the briefing. Luui’s so-called monster had a large, round body, a lump of a head with a gaping mouth, and extraordinarily long arms punctuated with thin fingers – three on each hand.

  “Spirits,” Maratse said, as he entered the room. He knelt beside me and pressed a mug of strong coffee into the V of my hand.

  “Not monsters?”

  Maratse wrinkled his nose – no.

  I sipped my coffee and stared at the long-armed figure, wondering why Luui didn’t draw horses, or stick figures of her mother and father, friends, and all the usual stuff kids drew when they were five years old. I laughed as a thought distracted me.

  Maratse frowned. “What is it?”

  “I was just thinking of the sight tests we had as kids. At the clinic.” I turned to look at Maratse. “You must have had them too.”

  “Pictures in a light box on the wall?”

  “Exactly,” I said with another glance at Luui’s monster. “The doctor would ask if we could see the car, if it was on the first line.”

  “Iiji.”

  “Then the house, if it was on the second line.” I took another sip of coffee, thinking about what was on the third line. “It got tricky when they asked if we could see the tree, and what line it was on. Do you remember?”

  “I remember. There was no tree.”

  “Because,” I said, turning to look at Maratse, “we didn’t know what a tree looked like. There are no trees in Greenland – at least, not big ones.

  Maratse held his hand flat, palm down, no more than a bucket’s height above the floor. “Bushes,” he said. “No bigger than that.”

  “But the Danish doctors thought we had poor eyesight, because we couldn’t see the trees. They never asked us if we knew what a tree was. There are lots of trees in Denmark, but what would a Dane call that,” I said, pointing at Luui’s drawing.

  “A monster,” Maratse said.

  “Exactly. Because they don’t have spirits in Denmark – not this kind.” My cheeks hurt as I smiled, but I didn’t care. Things were suddenly making sense, or, rather, I was making sense of the things around me. “Tuukula said Luui was travelling.”

  Maratse reached for the drawing. He studied it for a second, then folded it into his jacket pocket. He took my coffee mug and carried it to the kitchen.

  “David?” I said, following him.

  I waited as he spoke quietly with Alma, nodding as she gripped his hand, before turning to me.

  “Come,” he said, as he headed for the door.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To see a man – Kuutak Josefsen.”

  “About what?”

  Maratse stopped at the door and tapped his pocket. “About monsters.”

  Part 10

  Bone dust swirled in tiny tornadoes across the floor of the workshop as Maratse opened the door. I followed him inside, nose twitching at the smell of burned marrow, sawdust, and oils. Three men sat on dusty stools, leaning over workspaces crowded with handsaws, thin knives, and cotton rags. Hobby drills suspended from the ceiling on long cords buzzed and whined as the men filed teeth in the mouths of bug-eyed monsters, and I struggled to blink the image of deranged dentists out of my mind. I coughed in the dust, turning the head of the closest man. He let go of his drill and the buzzing stopped. The other men continued working.

  “Qilingatsaq,” he said, pressing a powdered palm into Maratse’s hand, gripping it as he greeted him.

  “Kuutak,” Maratse said. He let go of Kuutak’s hand and gestured at me. “Piitalaat,” he said, as Kuutak held out his hand. Maratse wrinkled his nose and Kuutak lowered his hand, offering in its stead a polite smile.

  “You want to buy Tupilaq?” Kuutak asked in Danish. He arranged three figures carved in bone on the surface of his workspace. “Reindeer,” he said, tapping the first one. “And narwhal.”

  The figures carved in narwhal tooth were creamier than the first one, smaller and more intricate.

  “We’re not here to buy,” Maratse said. He pulled Luui’s drawing from his pocket. He gave it to Kuutak. “Do you know what it is?”

  Kuutak licked his lips, and I caught a glimpse of missing teeth framed in a thin face.

  “Who,” he said. “Not what.” Kuutak reached for the angle lamp above his workspace, turning it to shine the light on Luui’s drawing. “Long arms. Big mouth. Thin fingers.” Kuutak dipped his head, licking his lips as he thought. “This is mo.” He handed the drawing to Maratse. “Helper spirit.”

  He spun on his stool, then beckoned for us to follow him across the workshop to a row of shelves filled with small figures – more Tupilaq – each of which had a price written on a dusty yellow post-it
tucked beneath its feet. Kuutak chose one of the Tupilaq. He turned it towards us, tracing the arms with the tip of a cracked nail.

  “mo has long arms. Difficult to carve. But here…” He tapped the front of the figure. “Big belly, like the drawing.” He tapped the teeth. “Big teeth.” Kuutak flashed me a gummy smile and grinned. “More than me.”

  “Yes,” I said, grinning back, liking Kuutak more every second we spent with him.

  “But where do we find mo?” Maratse asked.

  “You don’t find him; you call for him. He comes and watches over you.” Kuutak put the Tupilaq back on the shelf. “I don’t know much more about him.”

  “But maybe someone else does?” I said.

  “Imaqa.” Kuutak nodded. “There is a man. He will know.”

  Maratse waited a second, and then asked, “Who is it, Kuutak?”

  “Ah, Qilingatsaq…” Kuutak took Maratse’s hand. “Do you really want to know?”

  “It’s important,” I said. “A girl is missing.”

  “The girl?” Kuutak gripped Maratse’s hand as he turned to look at me. “The shaman’s daughter?”

  “Iiji,” Maratse said.

  “Okay.” Kuutak let go of Maratse, nodded once, then strode across the floor to grab his jacket. “You won’t like it, but maybe he can help us.”

  “Kuutak,” I said, as we followed him to the door. “Who can help us?”

  “Tuumarsi,” he said, with a glance at Maratse.

  “Tuumarsi Lyberth?” Maratse asked.

  “Aap.”

  Maratse swore before turning to me. “I know Tuumarsi Lyberth,” he said. “He’s a difficult man.”

  “Difficult? How?”

  “He doesn’t like visitors.”

  “That’s not quite right,” Kuutak said. He waited for Maratse to say more, then continued when he didn’t. “He just doesn’t like you.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Okay,” I said. “One of you needs to help me here. David?”