Before the seabirds had even risen from their roosts, Edie started out south along the coast through early morning coastal fog. Usually at this time of year, the fog gave way to low-lying cloud signalling drizzle, but this morning the sun burned it off and the day soon became bright with patches of high cirrus.
They had rounded the headland just south of Uimmatisatsaq when Edie decided to move down onto the beach itself. This was where Joe and Andy Taylor had most likely spent at least part of their time and she wanted to make sure she didn't miss anything.
She and the dogs were making their way along a sloping clamshell-rubbled beach when Edie's eye was drawn to an intense sparkle not fifty metres up ahead. Ice sparkled, snow sparkled, in the right conditions some rocks sparkled; fish skins sparkled, as did the hooves of musk oxen and caribou and the metallic parts of snowbies and komatiks, but nothing Edie could remember encountering before sparkled quite like this.
Bringing the dogs to a halt, she anchored them by the komatik and went ahead on foot. A thin, hard covering of compacted ice obscured the shelly beach in places and made it harder to locate the exact source of the sparkle. Wondering if she'd imagined it, she began an Inuit search, walking round in minutely expanding circles, eyes evenly scanning the small segment of ground immediately in front.
And, suddenly, there it was. A ray of sun had pierced the cloud cover in just the right spot and the sparkle had returned. Edie bent down and picked up a gold earring, plain but set with a brilliantly cut diamond, identical to the one Andy Taylor wore in his right ear. She clasped it in her hand - thank you, sun - and suddenly felt quite weightless, as though she might blow away. A thought brought her back to earth, one of those sudden, painful reminders of the life she had lost. Joe hated her habit of saying thank you. Gratitude is a qalunaat custom, he'd say. Inuit were entitled to help from each other. Gratitude didn't come into it.
She took off her kamiks, then the Gore-Tex socks she always wore, followed by her outer socks stitched from softened caribou leather so that finally she was left standing in nothing but her hare skin liners. Then she began to shuffle across the clamshells and the shale, moving in tight, slowly expanding circles, eyes fixed inside, mind and body focused absolutely on the sensations of the stones on her soft, sensitive feet.
Pretty soon she detected something other than stone, shell, shale or ice, possibly a remnant of cotton grass or a piece of dried lichen. Reaching down, she pushed aside the thin covering of ice around the spot. At first she didn't see anything, but Edie was hunter enough to be able to weigh the evidence of her various senses and to decide that, in this case, her feet were right and her eyes were wrong. She sank to her knees then lowered her body onto the shale to be nearer to whatever was lying there. She had felt it once and she would just have to try to feel it again. It was what she'd do if she were trying to detect the presence of a seal beneath the ice and she figured that this object was like the seal, something that did not wish to give itself up.
She removed her mittens, then her outer and inner gloves, finally the glove liners and began to probe around in the snowy shale, very delicately, so as not to force what she was looking for deeper into the layers of shell and stone. Despite the spring sun, it was still bitterly cold. Without gloves, the tiny, almost invisible hairs on her fingers froze and the moisture on her fingertips bedded in as ice. Then she put her thumb on it. Pulling it gently from the shale, she felt first the hard nub, then the crispy layer around. She had just unearthed a fragment of torn fabric, once most likely yellow, now bleached to a mottled tea colour, attached to what was once a shirt button. The button had cracked and only a thread now held the pieces. There was a stain on one corner, blood maybe. Jumping up, she began circling again, her heart beating out a satisfying thud. Here it was, the moment the paths of the hunter and the hunted first collide.
Not far from this first find, her feet detected something larger, a man's watch, the face so scratched by ice that Edie couldn't make out whether or not it was still working, though it hardly mattered: Inuit rarely wore watches and would never risk one out on the land where, in any case, they were redundant. This was the watch of a qalunaat.
Over the hours that followed, turning her circles, Edie gradually and meticulously accumulated the bits and pieces of a partial human skeleton, the flesh mostly torn off by animals, marking each piece in her mind as she went: a length of femur, a piece of skull, both metatarsals, three finger bones. When she was too cold to go on, she gathered her findings together and went into her tent to inspect them.
Edie had a familiarity with bones. If you were Inuit, you couldn't not. All her life, she'd been flensing them of their flesh, chopping them to get to the marrow, to make soup or to give to the dogs. When they'd been boiled and cleaned, she'd carved them into seals and birds, or whittled them into needles. Bones had been her drumsticks, boot jacks, ear picks and head scratchers. If you counted antlers, they'd been coat hooks too. And her experiences with bones hadn't been confined to animals. In the summer, as the snow retreated from the land, it left behind it the strewn remains of humans as well as creatures. Nothing on the tundra rotted much. After you buried a body under piles of rocks, the ice and the wind would eventually liberate it, if the foxes, wolves and bears hadn't already done so. The whole history of human settlement lay exposed there, out on the tundra, under that big northern sky. There was nowhere here for bones to hide.
Animals had been at these, which explained the pattern of their scattering. They seemed almost unnaturally clean, though Edie thought perhaps that was because April and May were hungry months and a number of scavengers had been over them. A few were splintered and on one or two of the larger bones there were teeth marks consistent with fox. She picked out a fragment of skull, from the top back of the head, she thought. In the midst of it was a small hole, about the size of a nickel, almost perfectly round. The unmistakeable entry wound of a bullet.
So here it was, proof all of a sudden that Andy Taylor hadn't simply got lost in the blizzard and died of hypothermia but that someone had killed him.
But who? She thought of Old Man Koperkuj but dismissed the idea. Koperkuj avoided people whenever he could. For the first time, the thought occurred to her that Joe and Taylor might have had some kind of falling out, but the instant it came into her mind, she chased it away, ashamed of herself. Joe was no more capable of shooting a man than Bonehead.
She picked out a piece of femur and turned it over in her hands. The first faint bloom of algal growth had already begun to appear over the surface. Though the growing season could not really be said to have started, the snow covering had insulated the bones from the worst of the cold, as it did lemmings and bear cubs, and all snow-buried things. The algae had grown a little more densely in the hairline cracks and indentations of the bone. The difference was very subtle but it had the effect of creating a faint frilling over the bone. Out of curiosity, she scraped at the markings with a finger. The algae concealed a tooth-like pattern. The marking had been scrubbed by weeks under the shifting snow, but to a hunter, it was absolutely unmistakeable. Someone had cut at the bone with a serrated hunting knife.
She could see now that the same pattern was picked out very faintly in algae on some of the other fragments too. Edie sat back on her haunches, floored. The murderer must have dismembered the body before it had frozen solid and become more difficult to work. But why? The only reason she could think of was that this way, if the body was ever found, it would look as though Taylor had just died in the blizzard and his bones had been scattered by animals.
Edie pulled out her primus, put on a brew and tried to think the situation through. There was no question in her mind that she would have to hand at least some of the bones over to the authorities. Things could turn out very badly for her if someone came across some other fragments and it was subsequently discovered that she had said nothing. In any case, if she was careful, it might actually be in her interest to report her find before the snow cleared from the land
and anyone else went looking for the body. Still, she needed to exercise caution. In Autisaq, the rumour mill had always been infinitely more powerful than the facts and if anyone got wind of the knife marks and the bullet hole, they would jump to conclusions. The one thing she didn't want was for this find to be used to implicate her stepson.
It made sense to hand over only those bones on which there was no evidence of bullet holes or knife cuts. The bones would be positively identified as belonging to Andy Taylor and it would be presumed that the qalunaat had died of exposure during the blizzard. Simeonie would ensure that no one went looking for the remainder of the skeleton and she would buy some time to discover who had killed Taylor, and from that learn something about Joe's state of mind as he stumbled back into Autisaq that day.
The next task was to find Taylor's snowmobile in case it carried clues and neutralize the evidence to fit in with the natural death story. It made sense that the vehicle would be somewhere not far distant from the body. It was harder to lose a snowbie than a body, so the fact that none of the S&R expeditions had located it suggested it had been hidden away somewhere or was sitting under a mound of wind- driven snow. Edie doubted the latter. There hadn't been a great deal of snow since April and the prevailing winds tended to drift it on the east-facing slopes.
In her mind she followed Craig's southern coastline from east to west, as though she were kayaking it, past rocky outcrops, beaches, cliffs and landings, alighting anywhere accessible to a snowbie. She was half way to Bone Beach, as she now thought of this spot, when she remembered the ice cave.
It was Joe who had found it, three or four years ago, a roof of sikutuqaq, multi-year ice, enclosing the two walls of a narrow passage between two cliffs, hard to spot from land and impossible from the air. Those who were not as familiar with Craig as Joe was wouldn't have any reason to know it was there. In the winter, the entrance was blocked off with snow, in the summer it tended to be obscured by outcrop- pings of willow and sedge; but Joe had started to use it as a shelter from bad weather. Edie fed the dogs and made herself another brew with extra sugar. She would snatch a little rest and get going again sometime after midnight when the sun was in the north, and the ice conditions were at their best. Three hours' sleep, then onwards.
The smell of metal at the cave's entrance made her pulse race. She switched on her flashlight. A snowy owl flew up towards her, then swished along and away. At the back of the cave something large glinted in the torchlight. It was Taylor's snowbie, the trunk open, the sides covered in owl guano where the animal had been preparing its nest. Beside it, scattered on the shale, were a tent, some waterproof waders and diving gear. Nothing had been torn or attacked, merely tossed aside. It looked as though someone had gone through Taylor's stuff in a hurry. Old Man Koperkuj maybe.
Above her, the old, grey ice squealed as it shifted against the rock walls. Already, the rime on the vehicle was beginning to melt near where the owl had been roosting. Edie flashed the light around the walls of the cave, searching for cracks, but it appeared to be sound for now.
She was about to direct her flashlight back towards the snowbie when her eye was drawn to a contrasting patch in the ice. Up close, she could see that there was an area of compacted snow pressed into the surface of the ice, the marks of fingers still on it.
She took out her ulu, the crescent-shaped knife carried by Inuit women, and prodded the spot until a few pieces of snow fell away. Working her way around it with the ulu, she uncovered a Styrofoam cup. Inside it was a plastic bag. She pulled out the bag and looked at the contents. Three sheets of paper had been fastened together with a paperclip that had rusted and bled. On each sheet, one edge was worn, the other razor sharp, as though it had been cut from a book. The paper itself was thick and ridged and each page was covered in tiny, precise handwriting in ink that had once been black but had faded brown. A combination of rust and damp had eaten away most of the words; with the flashlight, Edie could pick out only a few fragments, but nothing that made any sense. On top of the pages was a strip of what looked like ordinary notebook paper that someone had torn out. On it, written in another hand in ballpoint pen, Edie made out a single word in English: salt. She folded the paper and put it in her pocket, inspected the snowbie and decided then and there to head for home.
On the way back to Autisaq the puikaktuq appeared again. For a moment it was unmistakeably Joe. There was something about the expression on his face that shook her.
When she got back home she poured herself a stiff drink, then another. If Taylor had meant to shelter in the ice cave, why was his body so far from it? Had he known whoever shot him? Was he trying to hide the pages of old paper and the note reading 'salt'? The more she thought about it, the more she felt herself being sucked into something she hadn't bargained for and didn't understand.
The next day the puikaktuq invaded her dreams and she woke afraid, tears running down her cheeks.
By the time the school bell rang to signal the end of the day, she was seriously worried. She'd done nothing with what she'd found out at Craig and she felt as though she might be going crazy. She thought of going to Koperkuj, who had a reputation for being a shaman, but she didn't want to see him again just yet.
Two days passed, and on the morning of the third day she woke, still drunk, to find her sheets in such disarray she wondered if her spirit had been attacked in the night. She phoned in to school to say she would be late and took herself down to the nursing station. There were only a few people in line at the morning drop-in and she didn't have to wait long.
Robert Patma ushered her into his room. He seemed surprised to see her. She had never been a great one for doctors and had only called on him once during the three years he'd been in the post. He threw her a sympathetic look and asked what was wrong.
'I don't know,' she said. 'I can't sleep.'
'It's a big thing you've been through. You just need to let everything settle.'
'I'm seeing things.'
For a moment Robert looked taken aback. Then, gathering himself, he leaned forward, concern written across his face: 'What do you mean, you're seeing things?'
'Puikaktuq.' It sounded stupid and in the moments that followed she tried desperately to think of ways of taking the admission back.
She glanced behind her to make sure the door to the consulting room was closed. People would think a bad spirit had possessed her, or that she was going crazy. Her voice lowered to a whisper.
'I saw a mirage out on the land, then it followed me. Now it's with me all the time.'
Patma was lost in thought for a moment, then he said: 'This puikaktuq, did it look like Joe?'
She nodded, then corrected herself. 'Sometimes, then not.' She shivered. 'Am I sick?'
Patma shook his head. He didn't seem so great himself, she thought. He looked like he needed a sleep. 'Uh nuh, you're not sick and you're not going mad. I think what you're describing are probably bereavement hallucinations. They're very common.'
'Did you get them?' she asked.
Robert sat back.
'When your father died?' Was it his father? She couldn't remember. So much had happened since then.
He frowned. 'My mother,' he said.
'Yes, of course,' she said. 'I'm so sorry.'
He acknowledged her with a slight nod.
'You need to get some rest, Edie,' he said. 'All this, it's a big shock.' He considered for a moment. 'Look, I guess you know Joe had problems, Edie.' He looked up. 'I mean the gambling.'
The sudden change of subject floored her.
'It doesn't make any sense to me.'
'Me neither,' he said. 'We were pretty close.' He reached for her hand but didn't quite clasp it. 'But you know, Edie, sometimes you just gotta accept things. It happened, it was a tragedy and we're all just going to have to get used to it.'
She noticed his hand was shaking.
'Those hallucinations will move on just as soon as you do.'
All of a sudden she felt uncomfortabl
e, wanting to be out of there. She stood up.
At the door he called her back and in a sterner tone, he said; 'I could give you something to help you sleep, but you'd have to quit the drinking.'
* * *
Chapter Eight
Derek Palliser had been watching lemmings stir for weeks and by the middle of June, what he'd seen had convinced him a swarm was gathering. None of the lemming experts had predicted it but, the way Derek saw things, that was because they'd got the business of population dynamics back to front.
It had started when he'd been out walking Piecrust one day at the beginning of May, very early in the year for lemmings to have roused themselves from their winter quarters underground, and detected fresh lemming droppings among the willows scraped clear of ice by caribou. Next time he went out on the land, he took a notebook and began writing down the position of the runways and nests, marked by sprigs of the dried grass the lemmings had used to insulate their winter quarters, and by tiny piles of fibrous droppings, and sometimes only by Piecrust's excitable barking.
It was still early in the breeding season and already the lemming population was showing signs of exploding. On the river banks he began to see more fox spoor than usual and twice, while walking along the cliffs on Simmons Peninsula, he'd spotted pile after pile of jaeger pellets consisting entirely of lemming fur and bones. Droppings littered those parts of the muskeg where the sun had cleared the ice and the willow buds had been nibbled to nubs.
In a few weeks from now he expected the pressure on food resources to be so extreme that the lemmings would begin to eat their young. After that, they'd begin gathering in great living sheets, hundreds of thousands of them, all pressing forward in the search for new terrain. As they began to swarm, the pressure of numbers would send those on the periphery cascading over cliffs and ledges, and the meltwater streams would become seething bridges of live and drowning rodents, each successive wave trampling over the other in their push for new ground.
White Heat Page 14
