'Oh no.' Jono Toolik wasn't going to let him off so easily. He jabbed a finger at the skin branded qitiqthlimaqtisi, pulled it out and swung it in front of Derek's face like a pendulum. 'This is a threat to my livelihood, I know who did it and I want him arrested.'
Derek knew who did it too, and in an hour from now, when news of the incident had done the rounds in Kuujuaq, everyone else would: Tom Silliq. The Tooliks and the Silliqs had been mortal enemies for about four hundred and fifty years. When they weren't busy pissing one another off, they were recounting tales of the historical injustices perpetrated
Upon them centuries before by the scumbags on the other side.
Derek took a cigarette from his pack, lit it and waited for Jono Toolik to kick off. Whatever he was about to say, Derek had heard it before. He'd um and ah to give an impression of attentiveness and use the time to take a smoke and think about lemmings.
He was probably thinking too much about lemmings. People were beginning to tease him about it, but thinking about lemmings stopped him dwelling on how Misha Ludnova had ruined his life. For three summers she had burrowed into his heart and now she was gone there was nothing left but a hole. Initially, she'd come up to help lead a bunch of summer camps for kids. She'd been hopeless at it, of course, forever complaining about the conditions at camp and the squandering of her artistic talents on children who were more interested in killing caribou than painting them. Despite all this, perhaps in some perverse way because of it, within the first week of her arrival, Derek had fallen hopelessly in love. Her looks had only added to his feelings for her: her long, slender limbs, spring sky eyes and hair the colour of cotton grass in the fall. Even though she'd shown no interest whatsoever in him that first summer, he'd nurtured the hope that she'd change her mind when she returned the next year, as indeed she did. It was during that second summer that Maria Kunuk's boy had nearly drowned while in Misha's care - or, rather, lack of it; there had been an outcry in the village and a call for her to be let go. But he'd stood up for her, pointing out that Kuujuaq was a dangerous place to live and that what had happened had nothing to do with Misha and everything to do with the Arctic. The Kuujuaq council of Elders had imposed a line, and it was not long after Derek paid it that Misha began to take an interest in him. By the time she left at the end of that summer, she'd made him giddy, like a man half his thirty-nine years and he'd been fool enough — or vain enough — to suppose she loved him.
The third summer she came up to be with Derek and to paint. Her real vocation, she said, was as an artist, and she'd persuaded some foundation or other to sponsor her towork on a project 'negotiating the interface between global warming and the disappearance of selfhood', whatever that meant. Turned out the sponsorship was more in the way of an honour than any financial award, so Derek had invited her to move in with him. They'd spent what Derek had thought was a blissful summer together, after which Misha had gone back to Yellowknife and refused to return his calls.
The most painful part of all this was not that he had been used; it was the fact that knowing he'd been used made no difference to his feelings. There is no getting around it, when it comes to that woman I'm a sap. Even now, months since she'd left, he could still see no future for himself that did not involve some continuation of his saphood. Though he was embarrassed to admit this, even to himself, he'd spent far too much of the winter thinking long and hard about how he might win her back and concluded that he had two options. The first was to crack some high profile crime that would get his name in the papers and result in a promotion. He might even be able to persuade his bosses to grant him a secondment to Yellowknife. Being one of only two police on an island the size of Great Britain and a population of a couple of hundred gave you a lot of freedom but it stopped you from plugging into anything bigger than the small-time hustle going on around your ears. No one in Kuujuaq or any of the other tiny settlements making up the population of Ellesmere Island and the surrounding areas had done anything worth investigating. There was that event in Autisaq a few weeks back, the death of the qalunaat hunter – what was his name - Wagoner? - but the case didn't have any of the right ingredients to qualify as high-profile. It wasn't as though Wagoner had been a movie star or some big-time politician. Besides, the council of Elders had made it clear that they wouldn't welcome him opening up the case. He'd read the report and knew perfectly well that the chances of a man being killed by his own bullet ricocheting off a rock were about as slim as a slice of ice in a hot kettle, but he also knew how dependent Autisaq was on its hunting and guiding business and he'd taken the decision not to interfere. A fudging of the facts only became a cover-up when someone challenged it, and no one had.
The only guaranteed way to get himself back on Misha's radar in the foreseeable future was to follow the second option and persuade the editor of one of the big scientific Journals, Nature, maybe, to publish his lemming research. 'To do that, he needed to be wasting less of his time mediating centuries old feuds and more of it in the field.
Derek Palliser finished his cigarette. The time had come to assert himself. He let himself be pushed around too often. He'd been too passive, too keen not to ruffle any feathers. Now was his chance to change all that. The place to start was right here, right now, by putting a stop to this ridiculous fight between the Toolik and Silliq clans. Drawing himself up to his full height, which was considerably higher than Jono Toolik, he expressed regret about the sealskins but explained that next time he expected the Tooliks and the Silliqs to resolve their petty disputes themselves, without involving the police.
Stunned by this new, less pliant, Palliser, Toolik took a pace back and blinked. His mouth pumped like a beached fish. For a moment Derek thought the man was going to punch him out. But he'd expended so much energy over the years playing along with small town politics, to absolve himself now felt nothing short of revelatory. The two men eyed one another for a minute or two, Jono Toolik's face a smear of disgust. Then, spitting on the ice path beside him, the hunter turned and went back into his house, banging the door to the snow porch behind him.
Derek shoved his hands in his pockets and trudged back to his little office in the prefabricated A frame that served as the Kuujuaq detachment. It was at times like these that he wished he'd taken up that job offer he'd had from a visiting Russian geologist, cleaning oil derricks in Novosibirsk. 'Plenty money for a man who don't mind the cold!' the geologist had said.
Grabbing a mug of tea, he slumped down in his chair and stared into the middle distance. He was not quick to anger, but the midget-sized problems of small-town life seemed intolerable all of a sudden. He felt horribly stuck. Picking up his mug he downed the last of the tea and rehearsed in his mind his resolve to act. At that moment the door yawned open and Constable Stevie Killik burst in, bringing with him a savage blast of icy air.
'That Toolik fellow is a walrus dick,' Stevie said, stamping the cold out of his feet. Derek's sidekick was by nature a mild-mannered man. If he called anyone a walrus dick it was because they were.
'Let me guess, Tom Silliq's had a word with you.'
'Right.' Stevie pulled off his glove liners and went to put the kettle on. 'Want some tea?'
Derek stared into his mug. The emptiness unsettled him. 'Sure thing,' he said finally.
While they waited for the water to boil, the two men swapped stories. Tom Silliq had approached Stevie on the ice road by the cemetery, in a very agitated state, claiming Jono Toolik had sent two of his half-starved huskies to raid his meat store. The dogs had gnawed through most of a haunch of caribou and several seals, torn open sacks of the dog biscuits Silliq kept for his own dogs, and pissed up against a stack of walrus heads, ruining hundreds of dollars' worth of meat and dog chow. When Stevie had asked whether Silliq had actually seen the dogs himself, he said he'd dreamed about them.
'So you told him there was a principle in law called burden of proof.'
'Sure.'
'And?'
'He called me something unre
peatable.' Stevie shook his head. 'Sometimes I don't know why I do this job,'
'Maybe it has something to do with the fact that there aren't any other jobs for about a thousand kilometres in any direction?'
'Not true, D.' Stevie perked up. The two of them spent many happy hours fantasizing about jobs they might have had in some parallel universe in the south. 'They're always needing someone to drive the night-honey truck.'
'Oh, how could I forget the opportunity to wade around knee-deep in Tom Silliq's shit.'
'We both got the experience, boss.'
Stevie disappeared into the kitchenette.
Derek went over to the fax machine and flipped through the pile of faxes. The High Arctic Police Service was the smallest of several indigenous forces, independent of the RCMP, but licensed to use certain centralized RCMP services like supplies and police labs. Once a quarter the Royal Canadian Mounted Police headquarters in Ottawa sent out routine faxes requesting various administrative forms and reports, which the Kuujuaq detachment routinely ignored. The current pile dated back three years. No one at RCMP HQ seemed to notice. From time to time Derek went through them to make sure he hadn't missed anything urgent. The act of flipping and scanning the pages gave him thinking time.
Whoever's dogs had broken into Tom Silliq's shed, the complaint called for action. In his new, more forthright guise, Derek felt motivated to take some. Make a stand. People couldn't be allowed to leave their sled dogs untethered at night. The animals weren't house pets. On more than one occasion huskies had got out and mauled young children. Derek was damned if that was going to happen on his watch.
When Stevie reappeared with the tea, he instructed his constable to post a couple of notices at the mayor's office and at the store pointing out that, with immediate effect, all dogs allowed to roam free in the community at night would be mistaken for wolves and shot.
Stevie nodded and switched on his computer. Moments later he looked up. 'Hey, boss, remind me how to create a new file?'
Derek raised his eyes to heaven and went over. After years of petitioning he had finally persuaded the RCMP supply centre to send up a couple of computers. He'd immediately fallen in love with them because they cut the time he spent doing administration in half, which gave him more time for his beloved wildlife patrols. After Misha left, he'd set up a satellite internet connection and discovered a world of lemming research at his fingertips: Finnish surveys of population cycles, a paper from Norway on snowy-owl predation, some US stuff on the implications of global warming on subniveal wintering. That was when he'd realized that his interest in lemmings wasn't simply a personal quirk. There were plenty of others interested in them too, proper scientists, people with more qualifications than he'd ever have. Aside from being fascinating in themselves, the hardy little rodents were a barometer of climate change. People could snicker, but lemming research was on the cutting edge.
Derek had tried to encourage Stevie to share in his new love for technology, but, despite being younger than Derek, Stevie had never really got it. In his view, computers were basically sinister, like the spirits of rogue ancestors. Constable Killik understood they were part of the police landscape now, but it wasn't a part he was keen to frequent.
Derek brought up a blank page and returned to his desk.
'By the way,' he said, 'what did Tom Silliq call you?'
'You won't like it.'
Derek gave him a look that said, go on, amaze me.
'He said I allow myself to be bossed about by an Indian lemming fart.'
Derek laughed bleakly. For a small minority in Kuujuaq, he'd always been an object of derision on account of his mongrel blood: part qalunaat, part Inuit and, almost unforgivably, part Cree, the Inuit's natural enemy. He'd grown up with the idea that he was someone who probably didn't belong anywhere, but that didn't mean he liked being reminded of the fact. He drew out his carton of cigarettes then, thinking better of it, got up from his desk and went into the radio room to make his usual morning calls. He didn't want Stevie to see he was rattled.
Since the cutbacks the Kuujuaq detachment had been given the communities of Hell Gate, Jakeman Fiord and the scientific station on Devon Island to police, in addition to the original beat of Kuujuaq, Eureka and Autisaq. There wasn't much at Hell Gate or Jakeman Fiord - a couple of tiny weather stations, a few hunting camps open mostly in the summer, and, at Jakeman, a small geologic survey, but he was expected to make contact with someone from each community at least once every other day and to be prepared to fly out at short notice should anything untoward happen.
Other than the death of Felix Wagner, nothing untoward had happened in quite some time and Derek's calls had taken on a slightly desperate air. It was not that he was willing anything bad to befall any of the five Arctic settlements and the science station under his wing, it was just that the lack of an event calling for his intervention or assistance fed the feelings of impotence and redundancy that had already been brought on by Misha's departure.
To amuse himself, he'd invented a series of rubrics to determine in which order to make the calls: alphabetical one day, then the next in reverse order of the number of vowels in the name. Today, he decided to go for a simple reverse alphabetical, which meant starting with Jakeman and working his way to Autisaq.
He sat down in the caribou-leather radio chair and donned the headphones.
'Hey, Derek,' a voice crackled through the static from Jakeman, 'you're wasting your time again.'
He made his way through the list, taking a break for a cigarette at Eureka. Nothing happening anywhere. His final call was to Autisaq. A familiar voice answered.
'Joe Inukpuk. Haven't heard you on radio in a while.' Derek smiled to himself. He'd always liked that boy. They bonded over their support for Jordin Tootoo, the first Inuit pro ice-hockey player, who played for the Nashville Predators. On a trip south one time, Derek had bought Joe a Predators thermos and hat with the sabre-tooth tiger logo. The boy had worn the hat until it fell apart.
'I've been busy at the nursing station, sir.'
'Aha,' Palliser said. Word had got around that Joe was hoping to go into nursing training. Unusual for an Inuk. Still, he was to be admired for his ambition, not just for himself, but for his community. It was time the territory of Nunavut started training Inuit professionals instead of relying on southerners working short-term contracts.
'See the Predators game?'
'Oh man, it was a smash,' Joe said.
'Tootoo, what a star!'
'Too, too much.' It was their little joke, one Joe had first alighted on gleefully at the age of fourteen. They'd been telling it regularly in the six years since.
'Everything OK where you are?' Derek remembered this was supposed to be an official call.
A pause on the line. 'Sure.'
Derek heard voices in the background. The boy didn't sound sure. 'Really?'
'Just one thing, sir.' There was a hissing on the airwaves, interference probably, either that or Joe was whispering.
'My stepmom, Edie Kiglatuk? She'd like a word.'
'Go ahead and put her on,' Derek said. He always enjoyed talking to Edie and he was conscious, after the Samwillie Brown case, that he owed her.
'Can she call you at the end of the day?' Interference again. Some technical problem at the Autisaq end was jigging the connection; it was getting hard to hear the kid.
Derek said: 'But everything's OK, right?'
Joe said: 'Business as usual.'
They signed off and Derek Palliser went back to his paperwork. Something about the conversation with Joe began to gnaw at him. He had an idea that Edie was going to bring up the Wagoner affair. Why else would she contact him?
The remainder of the morning passed uneventfully. At lunchtime, Derek went to the store, bought three packs of instant ramen noodles and sat at his desk eating them while Stevie went back home for lunch with his family. Afterwards, Palliser made coffee and checked briefly on his lemmings. The weather had perked up since
the early morning; the sun now blazed through thin, high cirrus and it was a balmy -25C, perfect for a trip out on the land.
He'd see if he could finish his paperwork in time to go for an evening ride to the polynya at Inuushuck cove. A pod of beluga had holed up, taking advantage of the clear water to rest before carrying on their travels. He'd seen bear tracks there and was curious to know if the animal had returned.
As he was thinking, the door to the snow porch swung open and Derek could hear the sound of boots being stamped to rid them of ice. A few moments later, Stevie appeared.
'Good lunch, D?' He spotted the empty ramen packets and tried to change the subject. 'Turning out to be a great day.' He walked across the office and peered behind the Venetian blinds. 'I thought, with the weather being so soft and all, we'd set up the barbecue for supper. The kids would love it if you came too.'
'Thanks.' It was so obviously a mercy call. Stevie meant well, but being pitied by your own constable, that sucked. 'I'm real busy with this research, though. Next time, eh?'
'Oh sure, D.'
They passed the afternoon in administrative duties. At five, Stevie rose from his desk and said he was going round to post the notices about wandering dogs and knock on a few doors to spread the word. After he'd gone, Palliser went back to his quarters on the southern side of the constabulary building, took off his uniform, heaved on his Polartec all-in-one, pulled his sealskin suit over the top, threw on a few pairs of mittens and some hats and made his way out to his snowmobile.
It was one of those beautiful, crystal-clear Arctic evenings where everything seemed picked out in its own spotlight. The sky was an unimpeachable blue and before him stretched a fury of tiny ice peaks, unblemished by leads. In the distance the dome-shaped berg, which had bedded into the surrounding pack for the winter, glowed furiously turquoise.
White Heat Page 5
