by Sandra Clark
And, mildly comforted, Chuck had made some tentative arrangement to come back in a few days. On leaving, he had given Belinda a brief hug which she had returned in a half-hearted way that did nothing however to ease his disquiet. He told her that if there was anything he could do for her, she was to give the company a buzz on the radio. She had allowed him to hold her close again before take-off, finding a minor solace in his embrace, but her eyes had been close to brimming over when she had involuntarily recalled the magic of that other man's touch.
It had taken only a short time for her to decide that the best antidote was to plunge straight back into work. Her time in Canada was nearly up and there was still work to be done.
The next few days were busy with the sound of the cassette recorder as she played and re-played the tapes, trying to document the main features as outlined by Derek in his assignment briefing. It was a peculiar form of self-torture, she decided, to play so often the particular tapes that contained recordings of a certain voice, and once she had been so overcome with grief and longing when she heard the familiar tones that she had picked up the recorder in both hands and had been about to hurl it despairingly at the wall, when the calm voice of reason had warned her in no uncertain terms of the futility of such behaviour.
'Oh, help me, someone!' she had sobbed into her coverlet that night. 'Please cure me of this futile longing for someone who can never be mine.'
If Mrs Mac had noticed the puffiness of eyes spending too much time in weeping, she said nothing, but her kindly face had a troubled look which was difficult to conceal. Gently she had probed Belinda to try to discover what had taken place in the snow in her few days of physical ordeal, but the girl's replies had been evasive and Mrs Mac had had to resort to putting two and two together.
After dinner one evening, she casually introduced Barron's name into the conversation. Belinda raised her pale face. 'He seems to be called Amaruq out here,' she said. With a valiant effort she tried to conceal the tremors that shook her body on saying his name out loud. She felt she could fully understand now the Eskimo's sense of the magical and powerful associations which a name could possess.
Mrs Mac thoughtfully sugared her tea. 'I asked Mac about the name-change the other day, as it happens,' she went on. 'It seems Barron, or Amaruq as everyone now seems to prefer to call him, fought off a gang of toughs who were marauding and otherwise making a nuisance of themselves up around the Hell's Gate region where the Nasaq have their summer camp.'
'A gang?' breathed Belinda, looking up sharply.
'Three or four of them, so the story goes. Two of them for sure were on the run from the Mounties, one was a well-known bad lot from Invik, and the fourth—well, it seems he was an Eskimo who'd been thrown out from his tribe and bore a grudge against the Nasaq in particular. One of them was apparently killed in the fracas, and the others were eventually pulled in by the police. It was all quite hush-hush. The Nasaq kept themselves to themselves anyway, and when the story leaked out to the other tribes there were such scenes of jubilation, Mac says it would have been more than a white man's skin was worth if he'd tried to step in and lay the blame on any one man.'
'And that man was Amaruq?'
Belinda took the new revelation calmly. It only confirmed something she had known in the deepest recess of her heart for a long time, but it did nothing to alleviate the pain of her present half-life.
All the work she could reasonably cope with alone was drawing to an end and she knew that it would soon be time to say goodbye to the Macs and return to England. She had made no plans to see Chuck and she dreaded the thought of having to fly back to Invik with him. If things had been different, if her emotions hadn't been exploded in all directions by her unforeseen encounter with a man like Amaruq, she knew she could have happily included Chuck in her life's pattern. But that something totally unexpected and out of this world, which she had idly put forward in her earlier musings on the possible reasons for choosing the harsh and primitive way of the Arctic in preference to big city life, had actually happened to her. And it made the undemanding love of a young daredevil like Chuck seem like a great irrelevance. Once scorched by the fires of real passion, no pale substitute would fill its place.
She had already started to pack her files and tapes and there were just one or two things which she had not been able to make out that were left as a final task. Fathom how she would, she could not make head nor tail of some of the words on one of the tapes. It was the drum dance sequence, when the sound levels had been all to pot— there were two songs which were relatively easy to note down, but then the sound of the drum rose to an excited frenzy and the words petered out beneath it. Just hearing it again brought a lump into Belinda's throat, but she steeled herself to go through with it. Somehow she felt it was important to know what the words had been, but she had almost despaired of uncovering the secret when she remembered what Amaruq had told her in the hospital. His advice had been to visit Nuallataq the shaman if she ran into difficulties.
After a few preliminary enquiries, though with a heavy heart, she had armed herself with her cassette recorder once more and set out on the snowy track to the top of the settlement where Nuallataq lived alone among the relics of his art.
It was not the first time she had visited him, but this time she had the experience of the last few weeks behind her, and she felt nervous at meeting those shrewd all-seeing eyes which had the reputation of being able to strip away the protective layer of social convention to reveal the truth lying hidden in the privacy of the heart.
As she stepped inside his house, never before had it seemed so dark and mysterious. By nature a sceptic, she could not ignore the weird power that seemed to emanate from the figure of the old man who sat motionless, back turned to her, in a corner of the room. She knew he was expecting her, but he was sitting with his face to the wall, a hood pulled over his eyes, as he emitted a weird chanting that sent shivers up and down her spine. Quietly, almost as if entering some sacred chapel, she knelt down on a caribou skin blanket placed near the door and began to spread out her notes and recording machine to wait for him to finish.
Eventually the chant slowed and with a slight pause before turning he said her name once, sharply. Belinda held her breath. As the sound faded she imagined it took on the timbre of Amaruq's voice, the quality and tone of it. She brushed her hair back angrily. She must really have got it bad, to be so smitten that she was even hearing his voice! She held her breath as Nuallataq turned to look at her.
There was nothing but twinkling kindness in his eyes as she falteringly told him of her present difficulty in making out some of the words on the drum dance tape. Without speaking, he gestured to the tape to have it switched on. Belinda pressed the button and once again the throbbing of the drum rang out. The sound seemed to fill the little hut, bringing it alive with the sounds of the past, and when they eventually faded and the tape had clicked to a stop, Nuallataq leaned forward with a wicked smile.
'Magic, isn't it?' He spoke rapid, strongly inflected English that was difficult to follow at first. Now he was grinning up at the girl. 'White man's magic to separate the sound from the spirit.' He let a long slow breath empty his lungs, then he settled back more comfortably among his furs. 'This is the song of the white man Amaruq,' he said, shooting a sudden glance at her from beneath beetling brows.
'But it can't be—that's not his voice at all,' protested Belinda in puzzlement.
'His song partner is singing, because it would not do for a man to sing his own praises.' Dreamily the old shaman repeated the Eskimo words while Belinda noted them down. They made no sense to her, but that was not her concern. All Derek had told her to do was to make phonetic notations of anything she couldn't understand.
When the old man had finished he bowed his head. Feeling that this was a sign that he wanted her to leave, she started to pack away her things into the holdall. When she had finished she rose to leave, but he looked up at her and held up his hand.
'To make separations is sometimes the way to survive,' he told her, 'otherwise there is no practical purpose for such behaviour. Everything is one.' After uttering these words he closed his eyes and seemed to go into a trance, and Belinda crept out of the hut as silently as she could.
All the way back to the house she pondered over Nuallataq's cryptic words. Probably in accordance with his allotted role he felt he had to deliver this kind of apparently significant lesson, it would be expected of a man in his position, but Belinda had the strange feeling that there was something else behind his words, something she could not quite lay a finger on.
When she got to the house she became aware of a familiar figure shrouded in outdoor furs standing in the kitchen, and when he turned she saw it was Taqaq, fresh from his visit to his people up at Sanderson's place. She greeted him warmly, giving him a sisterly hug and enquiring after his doings with interest. He told her things had gone well, that he had got married to the girl, and had left her temporarily with his own people while he came to Two Rivers. Somehow his presence seemed to ease her inner pain a little, as if his recent proximity to Amaruq, if a separation of fifty or sixty miles of barren snow could be called that, was some how capable of bringing Amaruq himself that little bit closer. She carefully skirted any mention of his name, however, and Taqaq seemed too busy telling her about his new wife and his plans for the future to seem to want to know more than the barest details of what had befallen her after he left her with Amaruq in the snow house.
'I'm here to take delivery of a snowmobile,' he told her. 'It's time modern technology was introduced up there. They make hard work for themselves. I'm also in business as a messenger,' he added with a slightly mysterious look in his eyes. 'Anybody got any messages they want taking back?' He looked expectantly at her, but as if she hadn't heard, she was already across the kitchen to the door leading into the hall. Her face held no particular expression when she said to him, 'I'll just dump my tape recorder in my room, then I'll join you again and you can tell me more about this snowmobile.'
Once in the privacy of her room she quickly emptied the holdall of its contents, placing the recorder in its now accustomed place on the pine table. She located the correct file for the drum dance notes and was just about to put the afternoon's phonetic transcription of Amaruq's song into it, when she paused. The notation made no sense to her yet, but if she tried she could pick out odd words here and there. She peered closer—nanuq was a word repeated several times. So it was something about a polar bear. What she had expected, it would be a hunting song of some sort. She scanned the page for other familiar sounds, but it was no good. If she wanted to know more she would have to do some work on it. Perhaps she would have a proper look later on. Here would be her final link with Amaruq. The song would tell her some of the things he had been reluctant to reveal to her. Who knew, it might even give some clue about his mysterious past, before he came to live among the Eskimo. On another impulse Belinda felt like tearing the sheet of paper into shreds. What did it matter now what she learned about him? It would be just another sharp turn of the knife. She brushed her hair before going down again.
There was an air of excitement in the room as she came in. Mrs Mac looked up with a smile. 'Ikluk's just had a little boy!' she called out above the hum of conversation. Mac was already opening a celebration bottle and handed Belinda a glass. It was as if her world had fallen apart. Although it was something she knew was soon to happen, to experience the fact that the man she loved was now a father was something that drained the colour from her cheeks and made her heart pound suffocatingly. As if in a dream she endured the conversation of her companions, but eventually she could take no more. With a feeble excuse she left the room and half ran, half stumbled across the hall towards her own room. As she reached her door she heard Taqaq's voice behind her.
'Belinda,' he called. 'Wait a moment!' Blinking back the tears, she turned to him, wanting nothing more than the privacy of her own room and the darkness where she could hide in pain. He came up to her. 'I shall be leaving early tomorrow morning,' he told her.
'I'm sorry,' she broke out. 'I feel dreadful—a headache. I'm sorry we haven't had much of a chat.'
'I'm sorry too,' he rejoined. 'By the time I return in the spring you will be in England, yes?'
'I guess so.' Belinda tried to smile, but her face felt stiff with unshed tears.
'I meant what I said to you earlier,' he went on. 'I'm here to be a messenger if you want me. Amaruq is working his traplines only fifty miles or so from where my people live.'
Belinda touched him briefly on the arm. 'No message,' she said. 'I'm sure there'll be more important news to take back to him than anything I can possibly say.' Taqaq looked strangely at her for a moment. Not trusting herself to control the tears that threatened, she pushed open the door of her room. 'Goodbye, Taqaq. Thank you for your help. Perhaps we'll meet again.'
She stood for a long moment with her back against the door. In the distance she could hear the hum of conversation and sudden bursts of laughter, but her own room was silent with the kind of silence that only emphasised the emptiness she felt inside. She flung herself into bed and lay for a long time tossing and turning, listening first to the gradual fading of the talk in the room below, then to the sound of people walking away from the building, and finally to the only sound that was left, the night wind as it howled yearningly through the copse of sitka pines.
The night seemed full of silence now. Belinda listened for as long as she could before flinging herself out of bed with a sigh of exasperation. Wakefully she paced back and forth across the room. There seemed to be nothing that would make her sleep. With a final sigh she let herself be drawn towards the file on her work table. 'All right,' she told herself angrily, 'so be it. One more turn of the knife. I may as well translate the damn song and get it over with. Anything's better than lying here, torturing myself with the way he looks, the sound of his voice. I'll translate it. Then it will be well and truly the end. I absolutely refuse to give another thought to him after tonight.'
With that she opened the file, took out her pen, and began to read. It was towards dawn by the time she had managed to work her way through the piece. Because there were three parts to most words, a stem, a suffix and the grammatical termination, she had started to list them in three separate books. It meant that she had to look each word up three times before she could begin to make any sense of it. As she had guessed, it was a hunting song, but there was more to it than that. It now told how Amaruq and his joking-brother—yet another structural relationship, she noted—had been hunting out on the ice floes in early spring when they had surprised a polar bear in its birthing den. Before they could retreat the huge beast had come charging out at them bowling over the dogs, and smashing the sled. Amaruq had fallen and the bear, picking him as her victim, had turned with a roar to the attack. The other man had dropped his gun in the confusion and was unable to fire, but with no thought for his own safety he had thrown himself between the bear and Amaruq, armed only with a short knife. This had given Amaruq time to fire his gun and he had felled the bear with one shot straight between the eyes. The tragedy of the story was that Amaruq's companion had suffered horrifying abdominal wounds, and although Amaruq had driven the dogs non-stop for over twenty-four hours in the hastily repaired sled, his hunting companion, a man called Intuq, had died from internal bleeding only five miles from the trading post.
Belinda's face showed conflicting emotions as she read through these words, and, oblivious to the fact that the settlement was now already beginning to come to life with the onset of morning, she set about translating the last few lines with fierce concentration. Eventually her task was finished. It was already breakfast time. But she sat back as if to take in the full impact of what she now read. For a long time she did nothing but look at the words she had written. Then she sprang into action.
This time, if there were tears they were not tears of grief.
In a moment or two she was ma
king for the door, the translation clutched in her hand. She was sure there were no mistakes. Carefully she had checked the last part of the story.
It told how, in a desperate race against time, Amaruq had driven the sled with its wounded man across the ice towards help, and how the dying man, realising that the end was near, told Amaruq that his wife was to have a child, and how Amaruq had made a promise to care for his wife and child, to find the wife a new husband when the period of mourning was over, and how the child would ensure that the memory of his father's bravery would never die. Tears of relief and sorrow, and a mixture of many other emotions, coursed down Belinda's cheeks as she pulled on her jacket. In no time she was at the door of Taqaq's lodging.
By the look on his face he had been expecting something like this, for she had scarcely set foot inside before he had told her precisely when he expected to reach the trap-lines at Sandersons and how long it would take before someone could get back to the settlement.
'Of course,' he added with a grin, 'if that someone travelled back by snowmobile, just supposing they managed to get hold of one, it would take only two sleeps at most.'
Belinda hugged him impulsively, a cry of relief quickly superseded by a look of apprehension. 'That presupposes that anyone would want to get back here in that much of a hurry,' she said.
The next two days dragged by in an agony of slowness. Chuck's plane was due to alight on the little landing strip ready to fly her out of the settlement early on the third morning, allowing her enough time to catch the daily scheduled flight from Paulatuk, to arrive in Toronto in the early evening of the same day. But it was the narrow track curling round the edge of the lake and out into the tundra beyond the settlement and not the strip to which Belinda's eyes continually strayed. She could find no way of stopping herself from again and again wandering over to the window at the front of the post-house to gaze out with eyes dark with yearning for a sign of any new arrival at the camp.
