As the komatik bumped along on the shore-fast ice towards the bank of pressure ridges signalling the start of the floating pack, a scene from The Frozen North came unbidden into her mind and she heard herself chuckle. It seemed so long since she had laughed at anything. There, in her head, was Buster Keaton desperately trying to mush together his team of teeny nonsense dogs.
Up ahead, a great jumble of pressure ice brought her back into the present. This was one of the things she loved most about sea-ice travel, the way that, if you let it, your progress across the land could become your thought universe, pushing all other thoughts to one side until everything seemed embedded in the journey and movement itself seemed like the only thing that had ever mattered. Was it wiser to travel on the pack or along the ice foot? From what direction was the spindrift coming? Were they entering bear country? Were the tides high enough to break up the ice?
At the first ridge she stopped the dogs, pushed the anchor into the ice then went ahead to look for a route through the jumbled ice steeples and towers onto the pack beyond. Returning, she led Takurnqiunagtuq slowly through, running back to balance the komatik each time it threatened to overturn. It was strenuous work and by the time Edie reached the smooth floating pack on the other side, she was ready for a rest. She threw down the anchor, commanded the dogs to lie down, then kicked a few steps into a nearby iceberg and clambered up for a view.
In the far distance the cliffs of Taluritut rose from the sea ice. The Inuktitut name meant 'tattoo', after the ridged and folded cliffs which looked from a distance like the tattooed whiskers Inuit women used to wear on their chins. So much more expressive than the qalunaat name, Devon. A few kilometres to the north, its windswept edges glowing bruise-mauve in the sea ice, sat Craig Island.
Edie took off her snow goggles, closed her eyes and set her face towards the sun, feeling the first intimations of warmth. How beautiful it was. All over Craig now, under vast hills of blown snow, mother bears would be stirring with their cubs and in a few weeks the eiders would appear, followed by dovekies and walrus. Turnstones, snow geese, knots, snow buntings, and kittiwakes would show up and all at once it would be summer.
On his thirteenth birthday, Edie had presented Joe with a second-hand komatik and a pile of pups. Over the next couple of years the boy put a great deal of his energy into raising and training those pups and by the age of fifteen, he could hold his own against the most experienced mushers in Autisaq. Joe used to race her out here. As late as early July, just before the breakup, he would beg her to harness her dogs and they would take themselves off to the edge of the pack, where the bears hung out waiting for seal. Often, he'd go on ahead of his team and she'd watch him, testing the ice, often just leaping from floe to floe. It was incredibly dangerous but he had a knack of knowing exactly when the floes would merge or split apart, of how to place his body when to open a stride, how far to jump and when to hold back. He used to tease her that he'd learned his timing from the 'greats', by which he meant Lloyd and Chaplin, Keaton and Laurel and Hardy.
She started up again. It was eerily calm now, the wind nothing more than a faint stirring, the sun bouncing from the sea ice and sending up a heat haze. If you weren't careful in all this dazzle, you could be snow blind in thirty minutes. The blindness itself wouldn't kill you but with no sight you'd be reliant on your dogs to get you home safely. Edie could name four or five hunters who would not be alive today were it not for their dogs. Just another reason why, wherever possible, when Edie went out on the land alone for any extended period, she preferred to travel in the traditional way.
In any case, in good conditions, the journey to Craig wasn't all that arduous. Once you'd got over the pressure ridge you were on flat sea ice all the way. The distance from the beach at Autisaq to Tikiutijawilik on Craig couldn't be more than fifty kilometres. But in difficult conditions, it was a whole other story. Looking out across the huge and largely featureless expanse now, she was struck by what a miracle it had been for Joe to have made it back in the middle of a whiteout, hypothermic, frostbitten and confused. A rush of anger came then. On that fateful trip out with Fairfax and Taylor she and Joe had both wanted to take their dog teams. They figured it would be easier to pick up signs of old cairns or burial mounds that way, but Taylor had insisted on taking the machines. He'd used them in Alaska and was absolutely convinced of their superiority over dogs. Edie had pointed out that Alaska was as far south from Ellesmere as California was from Alaska but this didn't seem to impress him. He'd been in such a hurry.
Too many thoughts. Edie mushed on the dogs and tried to focus once more on the route.
A couple of kilometres from the coast of Craig she saw something stirring on the horizon, a puikaktuq, a mirage, in Inuktitut literally 'rising above the sea'. At first a shining silver cloud, the puikaktuq began to quiver then slowly to coalesce and, as it did so, Edie realized to her amazement that a figure was forming from the cloud. Slowly, slowly the cloud billowed and shrank, gathering an outline, until there was no question in her mind that the outline was that of a young man and, more specifically still, from the way it moved, that what she was looking at was a puikaktuq of Joe: not the Joe of the bones and meat, interred beneath rocks on the muskeg, but the Joe of the spirit world, the atiq Joe, a soft, surrounding presence. There he was, a great Northern Light shimmering on the horizon. The dogs, too, seemed to have sensed something because they set up a furious howling and began pulling excitedly forward. As the komatik raced across the pan, Edie felt the ice crystals forming little boulders in the corners of her eyes, the moisture between her lips freezing, the hairs in her nose pulling at the snot as it froze inside her nostrils until she could sense him all around her, little particles of Joe, tumbling across the sea ice.
Then, just as suddenly as he had come, the puikaktuq disintegrated, the dogs slowed and standing on the shore- fast ice not far away, the figure of a man appeared, and beside him, resolving in the dazzling sun, a small komatik and six dogs. Edie realized that it was this man, not the puikaktuq, who had been the reason for her team's excitement.
Waving and calling, she made her way towards the figure, but got no response. As she neared, she could just make out the shape of Old Man Koperkuj. He was fishing through the ice. He'd clearly been there some time, because there were six fat char lying beside his fishing hole.
'You sent the fish away,' he grumbled, as she anchored her dogs and walked up to him.
Edie apologized. He was quite right to be upset. Had she been observing proper custom, she'd have pulled her dogs up some way off and awaited his signal to approach. The incident with the puikaktuq had made her forget her manners and now she had probably cost him some fish.
Though she'd known Saomik Koperkuj all her life, she'd never had very much to do with him. He lived in a cabin not far from Martie and came into town only to pick up his welfare or trade a pile of furs. One of the original Nunavik exiles and a bit of a drinker, it was said. Rumour had it that he and Martie had something going for a while, but even if that was true, Edie regarded it as nobody's business but their own. All the same, he was an ill-tempered old musk ox, been on his own so long he had forgotten how to be in company. All that snorting and showing his horns. She couldn't understand what her aunt had seen in him.
'You coming to visit the boy, I suppose,' he grunted.
Edie was startled. For a moment she thought he'd seen the puikaktuq too, but then she realized he'd meant the grave.
'Shame about the boy,' he mumbled. 'No call for it.'
Koperkuj invited Edie to squat beside him. 'I was fond of him, he had good ihuma. You don't find that so often these days. When your ancestor, Welatok, was around, maybe, but now, not so often.'
'No,' she said, glad that, unlike almost everyone else, Koperkuj clearly hadn't seen Joe as the unstable kind.
He motioned to the pile of char lying beside his fishing hole, the leister beside them. He'd been hunting hare, too. Two males and a female lay slung over the bars of his komat
ik.
'You hungry?'
Edie nodded. Until then she hadn't realized how much.
She watched while Koperkuj expertly sliced open a char and sorted the guts, laying the edible ones on the ice and putting aside the lower digestive tract, no doubt to take home and wash out. Char gut made good patching for sock linings. As he worked, he passed her the choicest morsels, shining and bloody, and she tucked in appreciatively, relishing the taste of the sea still on the flesh.
The old man had already set up a primus and the fish was followed by hot sweet tea. Edie fetched her thermos of Canadian Mist from the komatik and added a splash to each, the old man nodding encouragement to her to keep pouring.
When the first fish was all eaten up, Koperkuj instructed Edie to go fetch another and as she went to the ice hole, her eye was drawn to the fishing leister sitting beside it, which was marked with a blue stripe and a sticker of a sabre-tooth tiger. It was familiar to her. She gave the leister a closer look. The sticker was the marque of the Nashville Predators ice-hockey team. Joe and Derek Palliser were supporters. The leister was Joe's old one, the one he'd been given a few years back by his father. What was Old Man Koperkuj doing with it? Then she remembered. Hadn't Joe said he was taking the spare out for Andy Taylor? Wanted to show him how the experts did ice fishing. The leister had been in Andy Taylor's gear, which could only mean that Koperkuj had come across it on Craig. She stood up, and, without betraying the turmoil in her mind, calmly walked back with the char.
She said: 'You been ice fishing before this spring?'
'Once, back in April.' Koperkuj wiped his mouth and gave her a wary look, the kind of look a starving fox will give you if you hold out meat for it.
'Good catch?'
He shrugged: 'The usual.'
She passed him the whisky and encouraged him to take a few slugs. He let out a satisfied little chuckle. She knew him well enough to recognize, any direct question about anything, he'd clam up. For a while they swapped hunting stories while she plied him with more booze. She'd have to come in on this one slowly, obliquely, so he wouldn't even notice he was caught.
'Good-looking hares you got there,' she said, cutting her glance to the corpses hanging on the sled bar.
'Oh sure,' he said. 'Round here, hare's easy.' He turned and pointed back to a headland to the south. 'I got those near Tikiutijawilik. But any of the spots south of there are pretty good. You know, where the wind blows the snow off the ground cover.' He named a few places, giving their descriptions in Inuktitut.
'Mind if I take a look?' She went over, ostensibly to admire the pelts, her eyes scoping along the length of the sled.
At the back, balanced on the slats, he'd left a hunting rifle, a Remington 700, pretty new. Identical, in fact, to the one Andy Taylor was carrying when she'd taken him and Felix Wagner out birding.
'You get these hares with that 700?' she said.
He nodded, loose now.
'Sweet,' she said.
Inside, she felt winded. No way an old man like Koperkuj could afford a new Remington. Had Koperkuj come across Andy Taylor's abandoned snowbie? It was possible, but it seemed unlikely. Even the skinny qalunaat wasn't so stupid as to leave his vehicle without taking his rifle. She decided to go off-tack while she gathered her thoughts, get back to the topic subtly once the old man had a few more slugs of whisky.
'Get any big game recently?'
He swayed and reached for the flask. 'Got a wolf a while back. Not on Craig though. The crazy thing is, when I cut him open I found this inside the stomach.'
He drew out a gold chain on which hung a mottled stone the size of a raven's skull and offered it to her. Edie picked up the stone, weighed it in her hand, then let it fall back onto the old man's parka. The rock was weirdly heavy, unlike any she'd come across before.
The old man giggled. 'They're hungry enough, wolves eat anything.'
'Amazing.' Edie did her best to look impressed.
Koperkuj chuckled approvingly. The old musk ox was so pickled now he didn't even cop the fact that he'd just told the world's most unconvincing lie. No wolf would get so hungry it would eat a stone. In which case, how'd the old man come across a gold necklace? Could the stone have belonged to Andy Taylor? Edie ran a theory over in her mind. Did Koperkuj kill Taylor? Not likely. The fellow was an opportunist but he wasn't a murderer. What did look increasingly likely though was that Koperkuj had got up close and personal to the qalunaat and rehomed some of his things. Not that she was going to get any kind of confession out of the old ox. He was drunk, but he wasn't a fool.
A thin wailing started up: Koperkuj was trying some of the old-time songs, beating out a rhythm on a nearby rock, voice like a vixen on heat. A plan hatched in her mind. She plucked her flask from the gravel, flashed Koperkuj a polite smile, then thanking him for his hospitality and wishing him good travelling, returned to her team.
She made land at Ulli, the crescent-shaped shingle beach where once she, Joe and Willa had gone collecting eider duck eggs, tied in the dogs and fed them some pemmican.
Then she scrambled up the scree to the cliff top where the inukshuk for Joe looked out across the ice of Jones Sound and made her way on wind-blown, compacted snow, to the slight dip in the plateau where Joe's body lay under a cairn of small boulders. At some distance, from the safety of a rocky outcrop, a raven watched.
She said: 'Joe, it's Kigga.'
A wind blew up and the raven took off on it. For a while, Edie squatted by the cairn trying to conjure the places Joe might have taken Andy Taylor, the hideaway little nooks he and Edie explored when he was a boy, places the old man might know about too. If Koperkuj had run into Taylor's body it was likely that he would have come across it in one of his regular haunts.
She decided to make camp a few miles to the north of Tikiutijawilik near Uimmatisatsaq. The beach there was shallow and the tide relatively small, protected somewhat from northwesterly winds. It was on this western coastal fringe that Bill Fairfax and Andy Taylor thought they might find evidence of Sir James Fairfax's camp. It was also the first of Koperkuj's hare-hunting grounds. After that, she'd head south and make a search of all the hideouts she and Joe had explored together. It was possible that Joe had pointed them out to Taylor or even that the qalunaat had found one of them himself. It was a real long shot, but right now, long shots were the business she was in.
Once she pitched camp, Edie pulled out her thermos and drank tea, while the light spun from south to north and the bright stare of the midnight sun shed its shadows from her spot around the fire. The swell of land above the beach at Tikiutijawilik, low though it was, looked out across a stretch of relatively flatter coastline before the land rose up at Uimmatisatsaq and the cliffs proper began at Ulli. From that spot, using binoculars, Edie had a view of the customary landings all the way to the northern tip of the island.
Already the snow was becoming soft and wet in places, impossible for a snowbie to negotiate and difficult enough even with a dog team. Ten years ago, Edie wouldn't have needed to think about that, but breakup started earlier now and the ice was so much less predictable. In a couple of weeks from now, she supposed, the melt would begin in earnest and she wouldn't be able to travel on the land. Then, in late July, leads would start opening up in the sea ice and any travel across large distances, such as that between Ellesmere and Craig, would become very dangerous until breakup proper in late August or early September, when the sea became navigable by boat. So if Edie couldn't find traces of Andy Taylor now, she would have to wait three months for another opportunity.
She gave the dogs cooled weak tea and carved off pieces of the frozen seal she'd brought, then settled into her sleeping bag. For a while the clatter of guillemots and dovekies kept her awake, but not for long. When she woke, the southern sun was beating through the canvas, heating the air in the tent. She went out onto the snow and stretched in the fragile warmth of late spring. Over a breakfast of the fish she'd traded with Koperkuj for dog pemmican and more sweet tea
, she decided to explore the area directly around Tikiutijawilik then head south where the land rose up to cliffs, shaggy with greenish talus cones, whose placid, iced feet protected the shore-fast ice from tide cracks and where there was good travelling ice. There were no maps for this kind of a search. If Andy Taylor was to be found, it would not be at a set of co-ordinates. It would be on the land.
It was very late when Edie finally called it quits. It had been a frustrating search. Some time in the afternoon Bonehead had started signalling the proximity of bear. Edie thought it odd, since by this time of year the bears were usually to be found up on the east coast of Ellesmere, taking advantage of the rich supply of seal and beluga at the sina, the floe edge where the ice pack met the North Water, or west at Hell Gate, but in recent years, as the ice began to break up earlier, their routes had become less predictable. For several hours she'd had to slow the dogs right down and scan the horizon with her binoculars just in case.
Eventually, when neither bear nor tracks appeared, Edie mushed on the team but the delay meant that by the end of the day they had covered less ground than she'd hoped, and hadn't come across a single clue to the whereabouts either of Andy Taylor or his snowmobile. The incident had made her think though. If there were bear in the area, it was possible that Taylor had been killed and eaten. Sitting in the lea made by the tent she mugged up a brew and made a note to herself to look out for bear tracks or for the tracks of foxes who often followed behind in the hope of some good scavenge.
She ate a supper of three guillemot eggs she had found in an abandoned nest, cracking the shells in the palm of her hand and throwing the contents into her mouth raw, then wrapped herself in her caribou sleeping bag and set her internal alarm clock to wake her early. Sometime in the night she dreamed of the puikaktuq again, but by the time she woke she was conscious only of its shadow on her mind.
White Heat Page 13
