Three pages? Edie's brain cranked up a gear.
The girl continued. 'My boss said Inuits never forget anything.' A moment's hesitation. 'Actually, he said Eskimos, only I know you don't call yourselves that any more.'
Edie felt her pulse hum, her neurones zapping.
'Tell you what,' she said, 'why don't you Xerox a couple of pages of the diary just before the missing part and fax them over, jog our memories?'
'Really?' The girl brightened. 'That's brilliant.'
'Just send them right on over. I'll be standing by the fax machine.' She lowered her voice. 'Oh, and by the way, it's Inuit, not Inuits.'
As she waited for the fax to stammer through the feeder, Edie considered calling Fairfax, then thought better of it. She didn't know enough right now to be able to ask the right questions.
The first page slid into the keeper. Edie picked it up. The writing did look remarkably similar to the pages she'd recovered from the ice cave: long swirled upstrokes with cross lines thick at one end and thin at the other, like a musk-ox tail, the whole leaning to the east as though it had struggled against a prevailing wind.
The phone rang and Sheila picked it up.
'It's that woman. She wants to speak to you.'
Edie scooped up the pages and made her way to the door.
'I just left.'
Back home, she sat on the sofa with the pages she'd taken from the ice cave and a large glass of Canadian Mist. Though the paper was so damaged by frost and weather that the writing was almost illegible, she could immediately see by the shapes that it was a match for the diary. Edie made herself a brew, poured another slug of Mist in the mug and sat down to examine the pages more closely. Whatever was written there was important enough for someone - Fairfax himself, she presumed - to have brought it all the way up to Autisaq. And for Andy Taylor to have hidden it in an ice crevice. But why?
In the soft light by the sofa she could decipher virtually nothing. An idea came to her. She went to the laundry room where she kept her hunting equipment, picked up the telescopic sight, pulled on her waterproofs, kamiks, dog-skin hat and the pair of expensive snow goggles a qalunaat had given her as a tip and opened the door to the outer snow porch. Outside, the sun flared and in the distance to the south, a journey of two or three sleeps, the cliffs of Taluritut shone like baby teeth. The air was exceptionally dry and clear: a good day for discovering things.
She went over to the drying shed where she kept her sealskins, squatted down against the far side where she could not be seen from the Town Hall, the store or the school, pulled the paper from her pocket and unfolded it onto her lap. Then she drew out the telescopic lens and held it up to the paper. Though it was still hard to make out whole words, faint impressions of ink on the page began to resolve themselves. She returned to the sight, this time beginning, as a hunter would, at the centre and gradually circling around until she came to what she thought might be a 'g' or a 'q'. Going very slowly so as not to lose her place, she moved the sight slightly to the left and saw a ghostly but very definite 'u'. All that remained of the letter to the left of the smudge was a tiny, hovering point, the remnant, perhaps, of an T, 'lug' or 'luq'. She nudged the sight ever so slightly to the left once more and saw what must once have been an 'i', the line clearly broken, in contrast to what sat to its left, an T for sure, and beside that another 'i'. The first letter was larger, a V, with a smear beside it. Vililuq. A word that meant nothing either in Inuktitut or English.
Returning to the paper, she tried to separate the first page from the second and in the process tore it slightly. Even without the tear, though, it was hopeless. The last and final page had remained separate, protected from damp by the presence of the two above it. There was only one paragraph on this page and, below it, a line drawing, or perhaps a map. It looked like no part of any land she knew, but then, she didn't really read qalunaat maps. Of the writing, she could make out only a few words in English, 'waited', 'told', 'dogs' and a single, small phrase: 'which I exchanged for a penknife'.
The pages described a trade of some sort. What had Sir James Fairfax received in return for his penknife, she wondered? She cast her eye along the paragraph. Dogs? That would make sense. She turned her attentions to the slip of paper to which the pages were attached. The handwriting on this was quite different from the rest. It looked newer and had been written in ballpoint pen, by Andy Taylor himself, she supposed. A single word. 'Salt'.
Edie went back inside the house. She realized she was a little drunk. Nothing made any sense. She needed to take better care of herself. Something to eat would help. She was delving about in the cupboards when Sammy appeared and sat himself down on the sofa. She thought about asking him to leave, then decided against it. The standoff with Simeonie made her feel in need of company.
'I got rye,' he said. She brought two glasses over, tossed back her glass and waited for the alcohol to hit her belly. Nothing felt warmer than whisky.
'Here's to qalunaat,' Sammy said. 'Those people pay.'
She said: 'They behave themselves?'
Sammy made a waving motion with his hand. 'A coupla pups. They just wanted to see Uimmatisatsaq.'
And go eider hunting, right?'
'That's what they said, but when we got to Craig, they didn't seem too interested. They were, like, digging about in the shale, in the rocks. Rockhounds, I guess.' Sammy helped himself to another drink. 'Whatever.' He patted the sofa next to him. 'They paid and they're gone.' He grabbed Edie's waist and pulled her towards him. The smell of his breath was as good as love. 'Come on, woman,' he said, 'let's celebrate.'
It wasn't till a long while later, when they were in bed, that Edie became aware of the smell of burning food. She stumbled to the kitchen and took the pan off the heat. Sammy was up and in his thermals; he grabbed her from behind and gave her a good squeeze.
'I worked up an appetite in there,' he said. 'What you got?'
They sat on the sofa, ate leftovers, and played around some more. When they were finally exhausted from their efforts, Edie made a brew, stuck The Gold Rush on the DVD and they huddled together beneath a caribou blanket on the sofa in silence, watching Big Jim McKay and Black Larsen fight it out for Jim's gold strike, then Larsen tumble to his death leaving Big Jim, his memory lost in the fight, to stumble about the Frozen North trying to remember where he'd left his gold.
'I guess that's what they call a cautionary tale,' Edie said.
She looked over but Sammy was already fast asleep. Reaching across him, she shook the rye bottle, out of habit only, since there was nothing left inside it.
As she went to put it back on the table, she disturbed something under a pile of papers, and a white plastic ballpoint pen fell out. Recognizing it as the one she'd taken from Wagner's pocket a couple of months before, she picked it up and as she did so, she noticed the word 'Zemmer' written along its side in tasteful dark green lettering.
Her mind turned a somersault. The so-called pizza takeout place. Suddenly, she felt frighteningly sober. Whatever Zemmer really represented, it had to be the link between the two dead qalunaat.
She shook Sammy awake.
'You need to leave.'
He caught her expression and didn't protest. At the entrance to the snow porch, she went back inside, picked up his bottle of Canadian Mist and asked him to take it.
She watched him trudge down the pathway and felt a twinge of sadness but also, somehow, better.
The sky was hedged with high cloud and the sun came and went through the gaps. She bundled on her kamiks, dogskin hat and outdoor parka and went to feed the dogs. On her way back into the house it struck her that whatever Sir James Fairfax had traded with Welatok in exchange for a penknife it couldn't have been dogs because Sir James, like most qalunaat explorers of the day, refused to use them.
Retrieving the pages, she grabbed her telescopic lens and went out into the deserted street. This time she found what she thought she was looking for at the very end of the second page, the letter
ing bunched up where Fairfax had been trying to conserve paper. There, phonetically written but correctly this time, was the word 'uyaraut': a precious stone, and in the same sentence - she could hardly believe she hadn't seen it before - the word 'Craig'.
Just at that moment, she felt the sharp prick of an ice crystal on her face, then the welcome watery coolness. Another arrived, then another. One had landed in the middle of the top page and melted slightly, washing the smear around the V in the word 'Vililuq' and clarifying what had before been an unreadable smudge. The word was fainter than before but there was no mistaking it. Wilituq. She sat back. Was it too far-fetched to suppose that Wilituq was Fairfax's version of Welatok?
Sir James Fairfax had traded a penknife with Welatok for what the Inuk described as a precious stone. All at once she thought back to her encounter with Saomik Koperkuj on Craig and to the jewellery he had claimed to have taken from a wolf: a gold chain on which had been suspended a strangely heavy stone.
The following evening, after school, she bought a half- sack of beer in the Northern Store, then packed a bag and took off along the ice foot east on her snowmobile. At the little cove where dovekies sometimes gathered, she left her snowbie and scrambled up the cliffs and along the short path across the plateau to Saomik Koperkuj's cabin.
She opened the door and peered in. No one at home. Advancing into the cabin, she spotted a hunting knife on the table and picked it up. Making her way to the curtain at the back where Koperkuj slept, she tweaked it open and peeped inside. Suddenly there was a creak from behind. She drew back, startled. The old man was standing inside the door with Andy Taylor's Remington in his hand.
He said: 'Get lost.'
For a moment, he didn't seem to know who she was, then recognizing her at last, he lowered the rifle. The expression on his face remained the same.
'Not in the mood for visitors, Saomik Koperkuj?' Edie dropped the hunting knife in her bag, reached in and pulled out the beer. She was relieved to see the necklace was still hanging around his neck. 'Maybe this'll help.'
The old man's face softened for an instant, then resumed its brittle expression.
'What are you after?'
She flipped the ring pull and handed him the can.
'I'm taking some qalunaat hare-hunting later in the summer,' she lied. He stared at her, his eyes narrowed. 'I thought you might be able to give me some tips.'
He nodded, seeming content with her explanation, and took a long drink. She pushed the remaining cans nearer.
'Look,' the old man said grudgingly, 'I got nothing against you personally, I just don't like people.'
They sat for a while in silence while Koperkuj made his way steadily through the can.
'Maybe I'll find a wolf and a necklace like yours,' she ventured.
The old man plucked the stone round his neck and held it up.
'This is a lucky necklace.' He helped himself to another beer, levering off the ring pull with his walrus snowknife. The booze had loosened the old man's tongue. 'I didn't actually get it from a wolf.'
'Oh, really?' Edie did her best to sound neutral.
Koperkuj chuckled. He was enjoying this. 'You think a wolf would really eat a stone? Women! Uh nuh. I found this at Craig, on the beach there, near Tikiutijawilik.'
'You did?'
'I'm telling you,' he said. 'Right there on the beach.'
'Well, isn't it odd, the things that wash up there,' Edie said. 'I could use some luck, I should borrow it,' trying to look as though she was having the idea for the first time.
Koperkuj met her gaze.
She took out the little sealskin pouch she'd sewn and handed it over to him.
'I'll give you this for it.'
He looked at her.
'Open it.'
His old, arthritic fingers fussed around the tie. Finally he peered inside, turning the pouch upside down so Andy Taylor's diamond earring tumbled out on the palm of his hand. Edie watched for any sign of recognition, but there was none.
'What is it?'
'What does it look like?'
'Uyaraut,' he said.
'More than uyaraut,' she said.'Qaksungaut, diamond.'
The old man peered at the stone more closely. His eyes blazed.
'How do I know it's real?'
'Go ask Mike Nungaq.'
Mike was the community rockhound. In another world, in another life, he'd have been a geologist, but there was no call for Inuit geologists in Autisaq. Still, anyone find anything they thought they might be able to sell, they brought it to Mike. 'It turns out to be a fake, you can come get me and break my legs.'
Koperkuj fingered the stone. He was wavering.
'You can keep the gold chain,' she said.
'What's so special about this stone that you want it?' The old man was running it up and down the chain with his hand.
Edie shrugged. 'Nothing special. Just caught my eye is all. You know women, we always want something.'
The old man nodded at the truth of this. Eventually, he said:
'OK. As a favour to you. But I keep the chain and the qaksungaut.''
He pulled the stone from the chain and handed it to her. It was small, no larger than a fox's heart and more or less the same shape, a liverish colour embedded with tiny sparkles and unusually heavy. She'd never seen anything like it before but now that the stone was in her possession she felt both strangely powerful and a little afraid, as though, after months following old tracks, she'd finally come across something fresh and new. The object in her hand seemed less like a stone and more like a key.
She found Mike Nungaq bent over the cereals row at the far side of the Northern Store, pricing up a consignment of cherry Pop-Tarts. He greeted her and asked how she was, his expression clouding over as he realized she'd come into the store for more than just groceries.
'Etok's up at the airstrip with a cargo of resupply,' Mike said with a sigh. 'In case you're wondering.'
She wrinkled her nose, conscious that she was stretching the limits of their friendship. 'Can we talk?'
'I was hoping you wouldn't ask that,' Mike said. 'Come on then.'
He led the way past the stacks of special offers, flipped up the countertop and ushered Edie into the back. They sat down at a scruffy Formica table.
'This about the election posters?' Word got round fast. 'Or about Elijah running against Simeonie?' Edie blinked.
Mike's brother was a notorious deadbeat, as likely a mayoral candidate as Pauloosie Allakarialak.
The storekeeper blushed a little around the ears. 'You want to know, Simeonie talked him into it.'
Edie let out an involuntary snort. 'An unelectable rival. Smart.' She grimaced. 'Sorry.'
'The man's my brother.' Mike looked at his shoes and shrugged.
He got up and poured some tea from a thermos into two mugs, then spooned six heaped teaspoons of sugar into one of the mugs and returned to the table with a fragile smile. Edie sensed she was on probation. The thing with Elijah had rattled him and she'd been insensitive.
'I found a stone,' she said, pulling a package from her pocket. 'I could use your opinion on it.' She pushed the package across the table. He plucked the stone from its wrapping, weighed it in his hand and held it close to his face. Edie saw him register the hole where the gold chain had threaded through it then bite his lip, as if to hold back the next question.
'Heavy,' he said.
Getting up, he fiddled about in a chest of drawers at the other side of the room and came back with a magnifier, then he sat with it clamped in one eye, turning the stone over and over in the fingers of his right hand while Edie drank her tea and looked about the room. A bubble of order marked the place where Etok worked. There was a trestle table and above it a series of shelves, neatly stacked with box files. On the table itself sat a desktop computer and a filing stack, each section neatly labelled. Etok had pinned up a poster of a tropical sunset bearing the inspirational legend: 'For every door that closes, two more open.' On the far side
was a peg on which she had hung a magnificent sealskin parka, trimmed in fox.
Mike replaced the stone on the table.
'You want an expert opinion or you want mine?'
'Yours will do for now,' Edie said.
'Did you notice how heavy it is? And this dark brown varnish?' Mike pointed to a small black patch on the stone. 'See here? This is a fusion crust. It's where the rock melted when it entered the atmosphere.' He looked pleased with himself. 'This is a meteorite, the only source of metal up here in the Arctic before the Europeans arrived.' He poked inside where the hole had been drilled. 'Look, this light, chalky interior matrix here?' He leaned in close to give Edie a better look. 'The best meteorites, from the Inuit point of view, were solid iron nickel, but those are rarer. Most of them are like this, stones with metal embedded.'
Rising from the table, he went over to the small kitchenette and pulled something from the fridge door. When he returned, Edie saw it was a fridge magnet of a palm- tree-lined beach with a woman dressed in a bikini kissing a man wearing some kind of tiny briefs. Mike looked slightly sheepish.
'One of Etok's friends in Iqaluit sent it to her. They went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.'
Mike touched the picture lightly to the stone and lifted it. The stone clung for a moment, before falling with a thump.
'Magnetic, see?' he said. 'Iron-nickel. The thing about them up here in the Arctic, because they're so rare, is that so long as you know something about the geology of the area, you can trace every meteorite back to where it fell from the sky almost exactly.'
'Like GPS.'
White Heat Page 17
