'And you called DeSouza.'
Martie was wordless for a moment, her voice drowned in the tide of her feelings. Autisaq appeared ahead of them now, tiny and frail before the great, ferocious sweep of
Ellesmere.
'I hate what I did, but I tried to make it right in the end.' Edie put down the rifle, closed her eyes and took a deep breath. 'Just land us, Martie, then get the hell out of my sight.'
* * *
Chapter Twenty
The new nurse, Diandra Smitty, met Edie by the tea urn in the waiting room of the Autisaq nursing station. Diandra was a large, blowsy woman, the 'polar opposite' of Robert Patma, as she often liked to say, and the only black white person most of the citizens of Autisaq had ever come across. In the three and a half months she'd been in the role, Diandra had listened to the elders chewing over old wisdom and old cures. Bit by bit she had begun to incorporate traditional practices into the healing on offer at the nursing station, and this had won her a place in Autisaq's affections. The tea urn, too, had been Diandra's idea.
'Hey, Edie,' Diandra said. 'Visiting with the old man?'
Edie picked up her tea and began ladling in the sugar. Diandra always observed how much sugar Edie put in, but she never said anything. Edie liked her all the more for that.
'How's the new volunteer?' Edie said. For the past two months Willa Inukpuk had been putting hours in at the station, helping Diandra with the administration.
'He's doing great,' Diandra said. 'Funny, but some people just are natural-born healers. Willa, he's one of them. Just didn't know for a long time, is all.'
Just then Willa appeared from one of the consulting rooms, saw Edie and threw her a fragile little smile. As the winter progressed, relations between the young man and his ex-stepmother had thawed somewhat. The time Willa had spent working with Diandra had transformed him. Edie had never seen her stepson so purposeful, so comfortable in his skin.
Diandra disappeared back into her office and Edie headed for Saomik Koperkuj's room. In the early days, when it was still touch and go, they'd wanted to air-ambulance him out to a proper hospital in Iqaluit, but he'd point-blank refused to go, said if he couldn't stay on Umingmak Nuna he might as well be dead. His experience hadn't mellowed the old man; he was as ill-tempered and snippy as ever but, luckily for them both, Edie never expected him to be any other way.
Her twice-weekly visits had become woven into the fabric of both their lives. They each knew the score. Her role was to act out that visiting him was a burden, while he pretended to find her an interfering pain in the ass. They both had a whale of a time. Koperkuj knew much more about the old ways than Edie had realized and he'd been keen to pass his knowledge on. Over the weeks, she'd learned how to blow footballs from walrus bladders and cure snowblindness in dogs by running a flea over a hair in their eyes. He'd taught her how to approach a ptarmigan so that it thought you were a seal, and shown her a fail-safe way to jig for sculpin. She couldn't recall a time when she had grown more, both as a hunter and as an Inuk. But, of course, she never said that to the old man.
Just as she reached it, the door to Koperkuj's room swung open and Martie stepped out. Edie knew from Willa that her aunt came regularly into the clinic to visit Koperkuj and get help with her addiction, but the remainder of the time Martie took pains to stay out at her cabin and Edie had managed to avoid running into her. The two women hadn't spoken since the flight back from Craig.
'Hey, Edie.' Martie's voice was soft with regret.
Edie couldn't bring herself to ask after Martie's health so she said the next-best thing.
'How's the old man today?'
'He's cool.' Martie gave a fruity little chuckle. For a moment her eyes shone with their old energy. 'He says he wants to make an honest woman of me. Imagine, after all these years.'
'You gonna say yes?'
'Are you crazy?'
Edie smiled. They passed one another. It was an awkward moment, brimming with unsaid things. Edie took the door and watched her aunt make her way down the corridor towards the waiting area. Just before she reached it, Martie hesitated and looked back.
'Hey, Little Bear, Willa tell you I'm clean?'
Edie nodded. Martie just stood there for a while. She was smiling but her voice sounded choked.
'Can't keep a thing secret in this place.'
'Sure hope not,' Edie said. Then she took a breath and walked through the door into the old man's room.
Saomik Koperkuj was sitting up in bed watching a DVD. During the weeks and months of his convalescence, Edie had gradually introduced him to the greats of silent comedy and now they had a kind of routine going where Koperkuj would tell a story or two about the old days then they'd watch a silent short together. Koperkuj was particularly fond of Buster Keaton, said the comedian reminded him of himself as a youngster. He'd nicknamed the man Kituq, thought it made him sound Inuk. Liked it better that way.
'You run into Martie?' he asked.
'Yeah.' She took the old man's nailless hand and squeezed it gently. Koperkuj stared at the screen in front of him and grunted. Then he squeezed Edie back.
'I can't stay long this time, I have to get to the airstrip.' She wanted to catch Derek Palliser before he got wrapped up in official police business. 'I don't know if there'll be time for a story.'
He sat up in bed, his face still a mess of scars he called his war wounds. He didn't seem to care too much about them.
'Saomik, mind if I ask you something?'
He'd never spoken about what he'd done with Andy Taylor's body, only that he'd been out hunting when he heard a shot and finding Taylor lying dead, removed the stone from around his neck.
'You gonna ask the question whether I mind or not.'
'Why did you cut up Andy Taylor's body?'
Koperkuj's lips tightened into a scowl. He'd said all he wanted to say about that time.
'Man was dead,' he mumbled. 'And the dogs was hungry.' He glanced at Edie and when he saw she wasn't shocked, a look of relief came over his face. 'There, I said it once, don't intend to say it again.' He folded his arms, as though to emphasize the point. 'Now tell me, how's that Pauloosie boy?'
Not long after DeSouza's death, Edie and Derek had confronted Simeonie Inukpuk over the monies going into the Autisaq Children's Foundation. The newly elected mayor didn't even try to deny he'd been accepting bribes from the oil companies to be pro-resource development. He'd embezzled government funds too. A deal was struck and shortly afterwards the Autisaq Children's Foundation appointed Mike Nungaq as its executive officer. The Autisaq Children's Rockhounding and Camping Club had its first expedition not long after. It was followed by a computer club and there was talk of raising money for an indoor swimming pool. Edie was reinstated to her teaching job at the school. A few times, she'd taken the whole class down into Saomik Koperkuj's hospital room for some lessons in traditional
Inuit knowledge. The kids loved the old man, and in his gruff way Koperkuj returned their enthusiasm. His particular favourite was Pauloosie Allakarialak. Reminded him of himself at the same age, he said. Under the old man's tutelage, the bewildered, wounded boy of a year ago had completely disappeared. This new Pauloosie had started writing Inuktitut song lyrics. Now he was talking about becoming Autisaq's first Inuit rapper.
'He's good,' Edie said.
'Tell him to come by sometime,' the old man said. 'I prefer his company to yours.'
'That's a relief,' Edie said. 'Been looking for any excuse not to have to come.'
'I never asked you to.'
'I only do it to get the Rev Whathisname off my back about not going to church.'
'Won't do you no good,' Koperkuj said. 'You're going straight to hell anyway.'
She left the old man with some homemade blood soup and scooted up to the airstrip. A group of people in business suits and parkas were hanging around the terminal, trying to squeeze various pieces of native handicraft into their luggage before the flight out arrived. Simeonie was standing in their
midst, attempting to marshal the proceedings. He acknowledged her with a nod. They weren't exactly friendly with one another but, since the confrontation, he'd been surprisingly polite, fearful, she supposed, that she might expose him in public.
Derek Palliser was talking to Pol Tilluq up by the luggage scales. He spotted her, waved an arm in the direction of the suits and mouthed the word 'consultants'. Edie shrugged and mouthed back, Ayunqnak, it can't be helped.
Since the events of more than four months ago, she'd barely seen the police sergeant. He'd spent some time convalescing in Iqaluit, then been flown down to Ottawa to receive a commendation from the government. After that, he had returned to Iqaluit for a while to work with the prosecution lawyer for Robert Patma's trial, which was scheduled for the summer. The Ottawa Citizen had printed his picture on page seven and the Arctic Circular had carried a long article about his lemming research and named him Northern Communities Policeman of the Year. Misha called not long afterwards. He'd been wrong to suspect she had anything to do with Beloil, he said, but he didn't invite her back to Kuujuaq.
Edie elbowed her way through the crowd towards him. He flashed her a smile and got a stupid grin in return.
'Hey, Police. Spare a moment later?' she said. 'I got a favour to ask.'
He gave her a look of mock despair.
'I'm just crazy about you, too, Sergeant Palliser,' she said.
The remainder of the day, she taught class, ate a hot supper of caribou tongue at home and packed her trailer. Around five she called in at the police office. Derek was clearing the last of the papers on his desk.
'You ready?'
'As ready as I'll ever be, not knowing where we're going or what we're doing.'
She winked at him.
'Trust me,' she said.
He laughed. 'Right.'
They took the snowmobiles out over the pressure ridge near to the shore and onto the ice sheet of Jones Sound. It was biting cold now, fifty below with wind chill, but the ice was the best travelling they'd had all winter: still, firm and settled, and the moon was high and bright, the stars littering the sky like so many snowflakes. Three and a half hours they journeyed south. Eventually, with the outline of Craig Island looming from the dark ahead, Edie stopped beside a large berg, whose northwest side had collected great banks of snowdrift, compacted in the wind. She swung from the vehicle and went over to check.
She shouted over to Derek: 'Three-layer snow.'
The policeman brought his vehicle in closer and switched off the engine. 'You planning on making a snowhouse?'
'What else do you do with three-layer snow?'
Edie fetched her walrus-ivory snowknife and began sawing out blocks.
'You know what night this is?' she said.
He thought about it for a moment and shook his head, stumped.
It was the last night of the Great Dark Period, a night most High Arctic Inuit spent all winter looking forward to, the end to four months of twenty-four-hour darkness. Just before midday tomorrow, the sun would rise for the first time, if only momentarily. It would be the first they had seen of it in more than a hundred days.
They found a good spot for a house, far enough from the berg not to be in danger of shattering but near enough to be protected a little from the prevailing winds, and loaded the blocks of snow she'd cut out onto the trailer. The snow- house took them three hours to build. When it was up, Edie crawled inside, tamped the floor, laid caribou skins, put up lamps and cut a window glazed, in lieu of seal gut, with a piece of plastic. They drank hot tea and rested for a while, sitting on the skins, Derek smoking, neither of them saying much.
Edie went out onto the ice, taking her walrus knife with her, and beckoned for Derek to follow. Cutting a hole in the ice, she squatted down beside it. For a while she was silent, running the events of the past months over in her head. Then she reached for the thread of seal leather around her neck, untied it and handed it to him. He took it and laid it on the palm of his hand. It was the first time he'd seen the stone.
'Doesn't look much, does it?' was all he said.
She said: 'I want you to throw it into the sea.'
He reached over the hole in the ice, lifted the necklace above it and dropped the stone. They heard a tiny splash, then nothing. It began to snow, thick discs of infinite, microscopic complexity, tumbling down from high, patchy cloud.
'I'm tired,' she said suddenly.
He nodded. 'Let's get some sleep.'
They returned to the snowhouse and slept for a long while. When they woke, Edie brewed hot tea from berg ice and heated the seal stew she'd brought.
That week, the Arctic Circular had reported that the oil spill in the Okhotsk Sea had proved worse than Zemmer had predicted. The oil company's shares were on the floor and environmental groups were calling for the company directors to be prosecuted for breach of their fiduciary duties to the people affected by the spill. Zemmer had scaled down its exploration operations. The corporation wasn't likely to be back in the Arctic again for some time. Beloil, too, had taken a heap of bad press after someone posted footage of two of its employees robbing graves on YouTube. Its chairman, Belovsky, had publicly promised to get to the bottom of the incident. In the meantime, Beloil was laying low.
'I guess there'll be other oil outfits up here,' she said, spooning up the stew. 'Bringing bigger machines, more money.'
Derek agreed that in the long run, they were unstoppable.
'And in the short run?'
'I've been thinking about that.'
The policeman outlined his plan. At the time of the National Parks Act, back in the 1920s, when most of the rest of Ellesmere and its outlying islands had been designated as National Park, Craig had been left out. It was an anomaly which made the island very vulnerable. But Derek had been thinking, if he could persuade the National Parks board that there were special reasons for redesignating Craig then, at least for the foreseeable future, they might issue a pending order over the island. If that happened, no one - not the Town Hall or the Nunavut legislature or even the federal government would be able to issue resource exploration licences for the island - until the redesignation issue had been sorted. Even with evidence of the existence of a gas field on Craig, no one could buy their way into a drilling operation there.
'So I'm thinking, the summer Wildlife and Parks expeditions make audits of Ellesmere's rare and endangered animal populations,' Derek went on. 'But when it comes to more common wildlife, they rely on my reports.'
She laughed. 'Not lemmings!'
He grinned back. 'Lemmings, yes, on which, if you remember, Edie, I'm something of an expert.'
'I do believe I had forgotten,' she said, cutting him a wink.
There were two species of lemming, he said, the common collared, Dicrostonyx torquatus, and the North American brown, Lemmus trimuscronatus.
'There are all kind of sub-species and variants, but for our purposes, let's just say there are two.'
'And what are our purposes?'
Derek held up his hand.
'I'm coming to that. Up here D. torquatus is very common, but L. trimuscronatus is rare everywhere, so rare in fact that it's on the IUCN list of threatened species.' Derek smiled. 'To this point in time, there has never been a sighting of L. trimuscronatus north of Baffin Island.'
Edie considered this fact for a moment. She raised her palms as if to say, 'And?'
'As Wildlife Officer for Ellesmere Island, I'd obviously be duty bound to report to the Canadian Wildlife and Parks Service any sightings of L. trimuscronatus on Craig Island, even if they were unconfirmed.'
All of a sudden, Edie could see where this was going.
He held up his palm to indicate that he wasn't finished.
'There would have to be demographic, environmental and habitation studies. And what with the research period confined to a couple of months in the summer, who knows how long they might take?'
A laugh escaped Edie's lips.
'You're almost as cunnin
g as those oil men,' she said, admiringly.
'Even a lemming brain has its uses,' he said.
They beamed at one another, then she stood up and reached out a hand.
'Come on, Police,' she said. 'Let's go outside and wait for the sunrise.'
* * *
Acknowledgements
I was greatly assisted in the early development of this book by a grant from the Arts Council England. Thanks also to Simon Booker and Dr Tai Bridgeman, who read a number of drafts and had many useful suggestions to make. I am grateful to my agent, Peter Robinson, to Stephen Edwards, Margaret Halton, Kim Witherspoon and the staff of Rogers, Coleridge and White and of Inkwell Management. Very many thanks are also due to Maria Rejt, Sophie Orme and the team at Mantle and to Kathryn Court, Alexis Washam and the team at Penguin USA. Any errors are mine alone.
A note on Inuktitut and on places in the book
Many of the places in this book including Ellesmere and Devon Island, part of the Queen Elizabeth group in the Canadian High Arctic, and Qaanaaq and Etah in Northwest Greenland, are real. Others, such as Autisaq, Kuujuaq and Craig Island, are inventions. There is a real weather station at Eureka on Ellesmere Island and a scientific research station on Devon Island, but any resemblance between these real-life facilities and/or their personnel to the fictional ones described in this book is entirely coincidental.
Inuktitut is a highly sophisticated, polysynthetic Eskimo-Aleut language spoken by Inuit across the Arctic region. It is broken up into a number of regional dialects which form a linguistic chain. Each dialect is mutually intelligible to neighbours but not those far away, so an Inuk from Greenland may not be able to communicate easily with another from, say, Alaska. Some dialects are written in the Roman alphabet, others in a syllabic- alphabet created by missionaries in the late 1800s.
Inuktitut consists of morphemes, the smallest units of meaning, which, in relation to one another, build into compound words. These compound words may be the equivalent of a whole sentence in Indo-European languages, e.g. pariliarumaniralauqsimanngittunga, which means 'I never said I wanted to go to Paris.' Additional morphemes can be used to change the nature of the root morpheme, so qinmiq means dog, qinmiqtuqtuq going by dog team.
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