Coppermine (11 page)

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“Anything else?”

“Well …”

“Yes?”

“He warned us that Bloody Falls is haunted by demons and bad spirits. So people don’t go there anymore.”

“Really? This sounds promising.”

THEY DESCENDED
the broad Coppermine in two days with minimal paddling. Steep sand bluffs lined the shore where the river had slowly, methodically carved its path over a hundred thousand years. The weather was fair and a multitude of birds entertained them. Creed’s anticipation grew as they approached Bloody Falls. Here the investigation would begin in earnest.

Creed’s good mood was in stark contrast to that of his companion. Never the voluminous raconteur, Angituk had now fallen into almost complete sullen silence, and it only gradually dawned on Creed that the boy was afraid. Despite his pleasure at returning to the land of his birth, the spectre of Bloody Falls loomed large for him. His association with the whites of Fort Norman had not shaken off his Native superstitions. The tale of “demons and bad spirits” had unnerved him, yet Creed was determined not to indulge the boy with any sympathy for his preoccupations. But neither would he tease him.

APPROACHING BLOODY FALLS
from the south, Creed and Angituk avoided the quickening current on the east, which would suck them into the tumult. They landed at an eddy on the west side and pulled the little canoe up onto the gravelled shore. Taking only a small knapsack with his notebooks, Creed clambered up the shale to the top of the ridge to get a complete look at the place. At first Angituk stayed with the canoe, but as he watched Creed move quickly away, he stood and hurried after him.

In the midst of the flat, monotonous, barren lands, Bloody Falls was a dramatic feature. The expansive river passed through a narrow cut in the high, black-terraced granite ridge. Verdant carpets of grass covered the hillside across the river where muskox grazed. Two golden eagles flew in opposing circles off the clifftops. The oxygen-injected water was alive with char. Bloody Falls was positioned at that rare latitude where both grizzly bear from the south and polar bear from the north came to fish and hunt and fight.

Creed and Angituk climbed up over the top of the ridge to where they could look down into the gorge a hundred feet below, the deep green water squeezed between two massive slabs of granite, the walls cut as clean as any quarry.

“You want to try running this?” Creed teased him over the intimidating roar.

The boy didn’t reply as he looked down into the suicidal frenzy. He stayed close to Creed, looking around from time to time in worried expectation. His thin frame gave an involuntary shudder and he wrapped his arms around himself.

“What’s wrong?” Creed asked him in a voice that sounded more irritated than he felt.

“Don’t you feel them?”

“What?”

“The
inua.
Spirits of the dead.”

“No.”

At the bottom of the final set of rapids, the river spread out and flowed into a wide basin. Beyond that they could see it winding north through many headlands toward the ocean. To the right of them, across the river, was a rocky little plain, out of the wind, close by the best fishing spot at the bottom of the falls—a good place to camp.

“Look.” Creed pointed, speaking above the muted roar of the falls. “That must be the Eskimo camp Hearne wrote about. Right there, on the other side. Where the Chipewyans attacked them.”

Creed sat down and the boy sat beside him. Creed had read the passage in Hearne’s book several times. July 17, 1771. A scout had found the Eskimo camp at the falls. The Indians Hearne was travelling with had put on war paint and sneaked up on the camp under cover of darkness. Hearne had gone with them but stood back from the actual attack. The Indians dragged men, women, and children, all of them naked, out of their tents and speared and knifed them to death. Hearne found the shrieks and groans of the dying “quite dreadful.” He wrote of how one young girl had escaped the attack only to be speared to death at Hearne’s feet. As Hearne pleaded for mercy for the girl, the two Chipewyans laughed and twisted the spears as she writhed on the ground between his legs.

Creed studied the flat, rocky plain across the river. He could almost hear the cries of the dying on the wind.

“Hearne was a son of a bitch,” he found himself saying under his breath. He looked down at Angituk and noticed that the boy was shivering though the air was warm. “What is it?”

“My people.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“They’re still here.” His teeth were chattering.

Creed moved to him and rubbed his thin shoulders vigorously, then put his jacket over them. He was going to say something more but stopped himself. After a moment he stood up. “Let’s go look for this sled.”

Creed continued slowly along the high ridge on the west side of the falls. There was an ancient path worn smooth into the granite by a million feet over thousands of years—Eskimo, Cree, Dene, Chipewyan, but no more than a small handful of white men. There were some scrub trees and bushes growing here in the rocky clefts, watered by the mists that issued up from the rapids. It occurred to him that the path would be a difficult one for a heavy sled. There must be a lower path to circumvent the falls, and he was scanning the bushes down the slope when he heard feet running. The boy slowed suddenly as he neared, and walked up to him, trying to hide his anxiety at being apart from him in this place. He stopped a few feet away, put his hands casually in his pockets, nodded an acknowledgement, and gazed around with as much nonchalance as he could manage.

“I was thinking they wouldn’t bring a sled up here on the ridge,” Creed mused. “There must be a path farther down the—” He focused on something. “There it is.”

Sure enough, down the slope on a level, grassy pasture sat a weathered qamutik. The priests’ sled. Creed loped down the grade toward it. Angituk stood there conflicted, looked around, then slowly followed.

The weeds had grown up around the old sled. Scattered in the grass and bushes were the remnants of a canvas knapsack, blankets, a sweater, and trousers. Creed reached down through a thistle bush and brought up an old, weathered leather-bound notebook. On the second blank, gilt-edged page were the handwritten words:
Property of Father Jean-Baptiste Rouvière.

On the other side of the qamutik, beneath the protection of two layers of flat rocks, he could make out the partial skeletal remains of a human body. He carefully removed all of the stones. What was left of the man lay face down, his bones and mummified skin and tissue held together by two tattered layers of long woollen underwear. The external clothing had been stripped off. Wolves and wolverines had dug under the rocks and torn at the extremities of the body, and were it not for the protective stones the body would have been scattered long ago. In several places gnawed bones were visible, and most of the left leg and arm were gone. Creed noted first what looked like a knife hole through the fabric just under the rib cage and a large black bloodstain around it. The skull had been traumatized at the back by some instrument creating a deep depression.

Kneeling beside the corpse, Creed noticed it was encircled by an oval of smaller stones. He tried to raise the skeletal body slightly to see the face. The body was lighter than he’d expected, dried out. The eye sockets were long empty, but the leathery skin and beard were mostly intact, stretched very tight over the skull, the teeth protruding. On the parchment skin that held the neck bones together below the chin, Creed noted a wide incision that would have pierced the jugular and opened the windpipe. On a tattered bit of what was left of the shirt was the embroidered name
Père Le Roux.

Creed sensed Angituk behind him. “Looks like we’ve got a murder to investigate.”

For the first time it occurred to Creed that another officer or two on this patrol might have been a good idea. He turned to look at Angituk, who was staring at the skeletal remains with equal measures of fear and fascination. The boy spoke in a whisper. “Spirits of the Dead are the most dangerous. They hate us for being alive.”

Angituk began to back away slowly from the corpse. Creed felt a surge of anger and impatience. He stood and grabbed the boy roughly by the arm.

“I’ll just bet they do. I think if I was stabbed and had my throat cut and my head bashed in, I’d be angry too! Look at him. Look at what your people did!”

He held the boy for a moment and forced him to look at the corpse. Then he let him go. The boy backed away a few steps, terrified, shaken, rubbing his arm where Creed had held him, unsure what to do. Creed took a deep breath and withdrew his notebook from the little knapsack. He started to sketch the murder site, drawing in the sled. He stopped before he’d gone far and turned again to the boy.

“All right. I want you to walk in circles around the sled, increasing them by five feet each time you go around, and see what you find: personal possessions, books, clothing, or maybe the other priest. You understand?”

The boy looked miserable at the burden of this assignment, but he took a deep breath and did as he was told. He walked in ever-growing circles around the sled and the body, studying the ground through the high grass, hoping desperately to find nothing. Creed returned to his sketch, taking care with the position of the body and labelling the placement of other things he found: Rouvière’s notebook, two spent rifle shells, a piece of blanket. He paced off distances. Angituk walked, murmuring an eerie little song, an
irinjelo,
a monotonous dirge in a minor key, a song meant only for dead ears.

“Spirits of the Dead,” he sang to them. “Please don’t bother me. I am no one really. I only wish you well. I am sorry you are dead, spirits …”

With the little Kodak 3A autographic camera Creed had brought, he took systematic shots of the murder scene. The boy was expanding his circles as ordered, now thirty yards away. Creed felt a little badly for airing his temper at him.

Angituk continued in Inuinnaqtun: “Good Spirits of the Dead. I am not worthy of your interest. If you are interested in us, you should look at the white man, who is much more worthy of your attention. If you like, go and see about the white man. Deal with him, but please leave me alone. I am nothing.”

“What are you singing about?”

“Nothing. I must make a noise with each breath so the spirits can’t enter and strike me dumb.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Creed mumbled, but unconsciously he too slowly began humming a note with each breath exhaled.

Creed sat down to make detailed notes in his book about the wounds he’d found on the priest. He was in the midst of describing the throat slash when the distant chanting stopped and the boy called out in a voice wavering with fear.

“Corporal!”

The boy stood frozen, sixty yards away, staring at something on the ground in front of him. Creed stood and walked quickly through the high grass, resisting the urge to ask questions. Judging by his expression the boy wanted to run, but he dutifully stayed beside his discovery. Creed came up to him and there, lying on its back, seen through the narrow gaps in two layers of flat stones that had been placed on top of him, was the weathered skeletal corpse of the second priest, Rouvière, in similar condition to the first. Creed removed all the stones as before. This one too had been partially eaten by animals, his right and most of his left leg gone and his left arm missing below the elbow.

Creed noted substantial trauma to the front of the skull. His outer clothing was gone and, like Le Roux’s, his mummified body was held together by two layers of long woollen underwear. There was a large hole in his chest, an exit wound. Creed turned the body over, looking for the entry wound and the black bloom of dried blood. He found it high on the back, to the right of the spine.

Creed looked up at Angituk. “The bastards shot him in the back, probably running away.” He felt another surge of anger. “What kind of a son of a bitch would shoot him in the back?” Angituk moved away from him. Creed took a deep breath to quell his emotions. “I’ll need two or three days here. Set up the camp over there beside the sled.”

The boy looked more fearful than ever. “Beside the sled? Not down by the river ...?”

“No. I want it right beside the crime site.”

“But for water and fishing and … escape ... we should be by the river. Not here.”

“Just do what I told you.”

The boy looked miserable.

WITH THE SUN LOW
on the horizon, Angituk finished the last of the three
inukshuks,
four-foot rock statues on the perimeter of the camp, complete with moss headpieces for the wind to move and create the illusion of life that would ward off the bad spirits so prevalent in this place. He kept busy collecting sweet heather for the fire, snaring a beautiful ermine whose pelt was now stretched out and drying, and finding four plover eggs for the morning meal. He had set up the tent at the centre of the pasture and had a small twig fire going, over which was roasting the skinned carcass of a fat ground squirrel he had snared. He went back to feed the little fire with the dried bushes he’d collected and one good chunk of dry driftwood he’d found on the shore. He chopped it into small chunks with the Corporal’s hatchet.

Angituk had enjoyed this trip to the Coppermine very much, more than he let on. But he wanted to move on from this evil place. The Corporal was a pleasant and generous employer and didn’t waste words in the manner of other white people, as if somehow silence would bring them closer to death. So Angituk had worked hard for him, kept him fed and warm and safe. The squirrel was sizzling. They would eat it soon. There was time now to read a few pages of Kipling. As he opened the book, Angituk looked over to where Creed was working beside the second body, writing intently in his book. The boy studied him a moment.

CREED CONCLUDED
the second autopsy to the best of his ability with the basic medical training he had. He was amazed that after more than three years anything of the corpses remained, but he reasoned that for eleven months of the year the bodies were frozen. The stones offered protection too. And in summer, fish and squirrels were in abundance in this location for all predators and for the lesser animals that cleaned up after them.