Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  Nelson thought about his grandfather. He had moved up from the States at a time when half of western Canada was going the other way. He had logged and mined in the Rockies until war broke out. Then he joined the Corps of Signals. ‘I had to volunteer for the Canadian army,’ he used to say, ‘to dodge the American draft.’ After the war he had settled in Grande Cache, Alberta, still in sight of the mountains, married a local woman and took a job down the mine. Nelson remembered a gentle old man who walked with a limp from the shrapnel he’d taken at Hamburg. After his wife died he had come to live with Nelson’s family in Grande Prairie. He was always very quiet, apart from his habit of whistling some old regimental march tune. There was also the cough that had killed him.

  Bert had been close to their grandfather; they had worked together building Bert’s first ham radio. What else had Granddad told Bert while they were messing about with their wireless gear?

  Between the old man and Nelson there had always been a silence. Nelson was always in trouble, and the old man had a horror of arguments. He would go into the corner whenever Nelson’s parents confronted their son, his father yelling, his mother in tears, and Nelson, desperately seeking a way to escape, to avoid having his failings explained to him, would look around the room and see the horror and confusion on the old man’s face, and Nelson would think: he can barely stand to look at me. All that he’s done in his life, and this is what he gets for a grandson. At least he has Bert to make up for me.

  Nelson used to think that it would have been better for the old man if Bert had been called Arthur, like his missing brother, and he himself had been Albert. Now he finally saw the truth of it: I was the Arthur alright.

  Whatever happened to the first Arthur Nilsson? Had he starved to death in a remote mountain cabin? Had he frozen to death on the trail? Had he fallen in a river, been eaten by a bear, murdered by a partner, wasted by TB or cancer? Did he die in a prison or charity hospital and get buried in an unmarked grave? Or had he finally come down from the mountains to live a quiet, dull little life in some settled town or city, married maybe, maybe with kids, and had simply chosen, for reasons of his own, never to reach out to the younger brother who’d had his grandson named Arthur? The only thing that Nelson could say for sure about the late Arthur Nilsson – thanks to that note from the film company – was that he hadn’t fought a running war with the police and army above the Arctic Circle in the depths of a terrible winter. He hadn’t gone out in a hail of defiance on the ice of the Eagle River.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I never liked the name Arthur. I always said Nilsson. And then later I changed even that.’

  She reached across the table and put her hand on his. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘You have to live your own life.’

  If you really think that, he thought, then you haven’t been paying attention. You haven’t been joining the dots.

  ‘Your brother must have been very upset when he got those emails from the TV company. After all the energy he’d invested in this Mad Trapper thing. Then to be told he’d been wrong all along . . . It could easily have pushed someone . . .’

  She decided to leave it at that.

  Fay went and stood over the desk. They had left the smartphone unplugged when they fled the apartment and its battery had died. She wondered if it had rung again after they’d left, still trying to snare them. But there was no point worrying about that now. They had unplugged the landline. What more could they do?

  Bert’s laptop was still fully charged. Fay could switch it on, log in as a guest user and cruise the internet all she wanted, but Nelson’s brother had set his own password-locked profile to hide his private business. Maybe, if Bert’s body didn’t show up somewhere in the thaw, the police would find a way to get into the computer. But Fay and Nelson could do nothing more with it.

  She looked again at the large maps of the Yukon Territory and the Mackenzie delta pinned over the desk, at their cellophane overlays covered with crosses, scribbled notes, dates from the 1920s and 1930s, all written in wax pencil.

  It was now obvious to her that Bert had used the maps and the surviving police reports to trace the movements of Arthur Nelson and/or Albert Johnson. The thickest cluster of crosses lay in the valley of the Rat River, centred on a place which Bert had marked in pencil: Destruction City. There, the Xs were so small and so close together that they looked like dotted lines.

  Fay looked at the map for a while longer. Then she picked up a blue wax pencil and began to join the Xs in the order of their dates.

  They made an outwardly expanding spiral, centred a few miles north of Destruction City.

  Constable Carter had been right: the Trapper hadn’t been running. He’d been searching for something. That’s why he stayed around the Rat River valley even after he tangled with the police. It was only after he found whatever he’d been looking for that he tried to escape to Alaska.

  What did my grandfather have to do with all this? Had he come north with Meares to join the hunt for Johnson? She remembered Constable Carter’s description of Johnson’s last moments, of the stranger who whispered in his ear, of the metal boxes removed from the dying man’s pack. Perhaps Meares and her grandfather had come to help Johnson, to try and save him from the police. They had turned up just too late.

  This was too big a deal for some drifter from Wisconsin.

  Nelson sat on the couch, the letter still in his lap. He spoke at last. ‘You’re wrong about Bert being disappointed by this letter. He never got it, remember? Anyway, he already knew that Johnson wasn’t my uncle. Moses Isaac had told him that already . . . What I don’t understand is why he was pleased when he heard that. He must have worked for years on this thing. It must be why he moved up here in the first place. And it turned out he’d been wrong all along.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said, teasing it out for herself, ‘he started out looking for Arthur Nilsson and then stumbled across Meares instead. Maybe he saw that photograph in Eagle Plains, like we did, and used his government security access to check out the people in it, including my grandfather.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So maybe by the time he found out that Albert Johnson wasn’t your uncle, he wasn’t bothered any more. He was already after bigger game.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like Room 38.’

  ‘Room 38 . . . ? I thought that was the name of Bert’s secret archive. Where he got all that stuff in his files. He wrote it on the covers.’

  ‘I think it was something more than that. It was mentioned in Crozier’s letter, and the note to Meares from Captain Oates’s diary. It sounded like something or someone they worked for in secret. Something that they had to keep hidden.’

  ‘Like a spy thing?’

  ‘Maybe . . . Or some kind of secret society. Like the Freemasons. There was a lot of that sort of thing back then.’

  ‘A conspiracy. A bad thing.’

  She studied again the pattern of Xs on the map. Destruction City. Jack London’s story about a lost cabin in the forest, metal boxes hidden in a grave, the initials on an old pistol, F.R.M.C.

  Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier had disappeared in the snow, leaving his name on a part of the planet that very few people would ever see. No one had witnessed his passing. Just like poor young Bellot, she thought. And Eskimo Joe. And Captain Oates. Roald Amundsen. And maybe my grandfather. Bert Nilsson had gone without trace. Were they all bad people? Had they vanished, or escaped?

  ‘Whatever it was,’ she said, ‘it kept its secrets. I don’t know if that’s bad.’

  Aklavik, North West Territories

  The village of Aklavik could be reached by car only in winter when the government ploughed an ice road across the frozen delta. It twisted and wound through countless unnamed islands, humps of black spruce trees proud of the snow. On one of these accumulations of silt Lieutenant John Franklin, no longer young, had raised t
he silk flag sewn for him by his first wife, the Romantic poet Eleanor Porden. Already unwell by the time he left England, she had asked him to plant it for her when he reached the Arctic Ocean. He had kept his part of the deal. But by then she was already dead.

  It seemed to Fay, sitting in the passenger seat of Bert Nilsson’s Equinox, that if she looked through the willows on the island fringes, if she stared hard enough into the trees, it would not be at all surprising to see a scrap of bright silk hanging from a spruce pole. And if I did, she thought, should we stop the car so we could look at it? Their wheels hummed smoothly on the black-and-white ice, drawing them, she guessed, to a final unravelling.

  Nelson set the car into the long smooth bends between the snow banks thrown up by the ploughs. There were no turn-offs, no forks, just a groove in the snow guiding them onward. A rain of fine crystals burned in the headlights, as if the car were moving through a field of drifting stars. The sky itself was silver and blue, almost ready for the sun to rise. Sometimes, crossing a sound between islands, Fay could see all the way to the southern horizon. There was a band of bright red on the mountains.

  The river widened and there was Aklavik, a line of lights on a ridge above the Peel. Clapboard houses built on piles above the permafrost. Steaming stove-pipes. Scrubby birches and alders. A ramp of dirty snow leading up from the river. Poles and pylons and webs of sagging wire. Two swaddled figures on two skidoos – men or women, old or young, who could say? – shot down the ramp as the Equinox climbed it, each towing a toboggan loaded with gear. A shit-truck drew sewage from one of the houses, its engine running loudly to power the pump, but there was no one on the street to give them directions. They had to find the cemetery by themselves. It lay off a side street, a half-acre of crosses and headstones where alders and willows peeped from the snow.

  There was a hand-painted sign by the split-log lychgate.

  Albert Johnson arrived in Ross River August 21, 1927. Complaints of local trapper brought the RCMP on him. He shot two officers and became a fugitive of the law with howling huskies, dangerous trails, frozen nights. The posse finally caught up with him. He was killed up the Eagle River, Feb 17, 1932.

  ‘Ross River is in the Yukon. They think Albert Johnson and Arthur Nelson were the same man,’ said Nelson.

  ‘Maybe they were. All we know is that Johnson wasn’t your uncle. There could have been two Arthur Nelsons.’ Or three, she thought.

  Stepping off the street’s compacted snow, Nelson was suddenly in powder up to his thighs. Floundering among the crosses, he called back over his shoulder. ‘Imagine wading thirty miles a day in this. I guess this is what it was like to be Arthur Nelson.’

  You are an Arthur Nelson. But Fay was distracted by something across the street. It was an upright cartoon figure, a life-size wooden cut-out of a man with a pack and snowshoes slung on his back. He was holding a rifle. There was a hole where the face should be so that you could, if you wanted, stand behind the cut-out and have yourself photographed as a comic book Mad Trapper. From where Fay stood, the hole framed only the blank sky beyond it.

  ‘I’ve found it,’ called Nelson.

  He had trampled down the powder snow, making it easier for her to follow him to the grave. It was contained by a rectangular picket fence filled with snow to a foot from the top. Digging with his gloved hands, Nelson uncovered a plain wooden cross. Two words were written in poker-work letters: ‘Albert Johnson?’

  They stood together looking down at it.

  ‘Well,’ said Nelson. ‘What did we expect?’

  ‘It was worth having a look.’

  Fay turned away and took in the little cemetery. Even the undisturbed snow couldn’t hide its matter-of-fact, bedraggled sense of itself. If anyone had left flowers on these graves they were deep under the snow. Plastic flowers maybe, that would bloom again each spring.

  The man called Albert Johnson had cheated the grave they had buried him in. He would always be someone else, somewhere else. What an escape act.

  She took Nelson’s arm and drew him away, retracing their steps to the gate.

  A police truck came down the street, cruising in low gear. It drove on past the cemetery, passing the spot where the Equinox was parked, and then it stopped and backed up until it was just outside the lychgate. The driver’s door opened and Sergeant Peake got out. He leaned against the side of his truck and waited for them to come out of the gate.

  ‘Let me guess,’ he said. ‘The Mad Trapper, right?’

  The walk through deep snow had left Fay a little breathless. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not a hard guess. I don’t suppose either of you has anyone of your own buried in these parts.’

  You’d be more surprised than we would, thought Fay. ‘We’re just visiting his grave.’

  ‘Distant Early Warning. The Mad Trapper’s grave. There aren’t a lot of tourist attractions up here. You take what you get, I guess.’

  Fay didn’t like the way Peake was smiling at them. He seemed to be settling in for a proper conversation. Or was it something more? ‘I think I’ve seen everything now.’ She made an effort to smile back at him. ‘It’s time for me to leave.’

  ‘I heard you tried to leave already. Laurie from the snowplough radioed your names in, from up in the mountains. In case you got stuck. She said you were heading south in a beat-up old Ford.’ He took a slow look at Bert’s Chevrolet Equinox, parked at the side of the street.

  Nelson spoke up. ‘We were turned back at Eagle Plains. Fresh snow around Tombstone Mountain.’

  ‘So then you came all the way back to Aklavik?’

  Fay wondered where this was going. ‘We went to Inuvik first.’

  Peake nodded slowly, as if mulling it over. ‘You’re staying at the Northern Villas, I think you said.’

  ‘Not any more.’ Fay felt her temper rising. If he asks me where I’m staying, I’ll tell him to go fuck himself. It’s no business of his. But then she remembered Nelson’s delicate position. She prepared herself for the question. But it didn’t come. Instead, the sergeant nodded meaningfully, as if a private box had just been ticked for him. Then he pushed himself away from the side of the truck, getting ready for business.

  ‘I’m glad I ran in to you. I’m looking for old Moses Isaac. Has either of you seen him?’

  ‘We saw him yesterday,’ said Nelson. ‘In the seniors’ centre at the hospital.’

  ‘Sure. Eunice told me you’d been in to visit him. But have you seen him since? He’s gone missing.’

  ‘Missing?’

  ‘He got up and walked out of there last night. No one even saw him go. Didn’t even have a coat on him, as far as anyone knows. I’ve come over to Aklavik to ask around, in case he’s shown up at any of his relatives’. But they’ve heard nothing. It’s not looking good. They’re searching the woods back in Inuvik.’

  ‘That’s terrible.’

  ‘So I guess you haven’t seen him since the hospital?’

  ‘No. I’m really sorry.’

  The sergeant looked from Fay to Nelson, as if waiting for them to say more. ‘So,’ he said finally, ‘the Mad Trapper, eh?’ He stamped his feet a couple of times on the ice to knock the snow of his boots, to show he was ready to go. Then a thought seemed to strike him.

  ‘You ever hear,’ Peake said, looking from one to the other, ‘what they say about dying? That everyone dies twice: once when you die physically, and the second time, for real, when the last person who knew you passes away.’ He nodded towards the grave of the unknown fugitive. ‘Old Moses was the last living person who’d ever met Albert Johnson. If Moses is gone, then the Trapper’s finally gone too. You picked a good day to come here.’

  Fay saw his point. But maybe, just maybe, there was more to it than that. She’d never met her grandfather, and yet she thought she could somehow feel love for him. ‘The thing about Albert Johnson,’ she said slowly, still w
orking it out for herself, ‘is that nobody ever knew who he was. Which is why he can’t really be dead. He got away with it. He slipped through a crack.’

  She would have expected the policeman to laugh or to look at her funny. Instead, he nodded his head a couple more times, digesting her words, and then he held out his hand. ‘You could be on to something there. If you’re heading south I won’t see you again. It was nice to meet you.’

  Fay shook his hand. Then Nelson spoke.

  ‘Sergeant. There’s something that I need to tell you.’

  The policeman released Fay’s hand and turned to look at Nelson, it seemed to her reluctantly. ‘Oh yeah? What’s that?’

  ‘I’m worried about my brother. He’s been missing for days.’

  ‘Your brother?’

  ‘Albert Nilsson. He’s a teacher at the high school.’

  Fay watched the play of expression on the policeman’s face. She thought she saw several emotions. One was amusement. She did not see surprise. The sergeant settled on a smile.

  ‘But you’re Albert Nilsson.’

  ‘No, I’m not. You mistook me for him when we met in Tuktoyaktuk. I’m his brother. Arthur Nilsson. We look very alike. I want to report him missing.’

  Nelson stood with his feet slightly apart, his hands rammed in his pockets. His chin was raised just a little too high, so that he stared down his nose at Sergeant Peake. This is how he fronts up when he’s in trouble, thought Fay. This is how he looked as a boy.

  ‘Missing? Really?’

  ‘As far as I can tell he just walked out of the apartment and left everything behind him. Even his coat. Just like Moses Isaac.’

  The policeman patted Nelson on the shoulder. ‘Thirty days of night, eh?’ He turned to go. ‘We all get a bit squirrelly here at midwinter. We can all use a laugh.’

  Nelson stood his ground. ‘I’m not joking. I’m not Albert Nilsson.’