Coppermine (13 page)

“It was your bright idea to run the damn thing.”

“You could have said no.”

Creed found the sealed bags and pulled out dry clothing and towels for both of them. Though he was in great spirits, Angituk’s lips had turned vermilion and the trembling of his thin body was causing Creed concern.

“Here, get into some dry clothes before you catch pneumonia. We’ll spread things out on the rocks to dry and camp here tonight.”

They stood on the pebble beach in the Arctic sun and peeled their wet clothes off. As always, they discreetly faced away from each other. Creed shook his head in amusement, climbing out of his corduroy trousers and long underwear.

“Our
isuma
’s still working,” Angituk declared.

“More luck than wisdom,” Creed concluded. “So. You still want to try those rapids again?”

“No. Thank you. I guess that was enough,” the boy said.

“When we were caught against that big rock, I was sure that was us gone. I mean, it should have crushed us. I’m amazed it didn’t. Then what’d we do without a boat?”

“Going backwards was the worst for me. Like a bad dream,” Angituk exclaimed.

Creed laughed, turned toward Angituk, and glanced at him. “I still remember your face just as we were—”

Creed suddenly stopped speaking. Angituk still had his back to him. Creed stared at the boy, his mouth open in mid-phrase. They were both naked now in the thin but vital sun, and Angituk was drying off with the towel, his back to Creed. It took a moment or two for what Creed was seeing to fully register with him. At first he believed his eyes were playing tricks. But there could be no doubt. The narrow waist, the curved hips.

Angituk noticed the pause in Creed’s speech and half turned toward him, casually askance. “What about my face?”

Creed noticed then under her arm as she towel-dried her hair the small, firm breast, nipple erect from the cold water.
It can’t be,
he thought.

In that second of silence Angituk saw him staring at her and realized her clumsy indiscretion. “Oh, no,” she said under her breath.

She had done so well until now. She had simply forgotten. Ashamed, she covered her body with her towel, turned fully toward him, looked at the ground, and waited for his reaction. Creed could think of nothing to say but the obvious.

“You’re a girl.”

Angituk had nothing to add. Creed became aware of his nakedness and grabbed his towel to cover up. Then the anger and embarrassment hit him. He had been fooled.

“What do you have to say for yourself?”

Angituk didn’t answer.

“Why did you agree to come with me?”

“I wanted the work.”

“Why did you lie to me?”

“I never lied.”

“Well, deceived then! It is absolutely unacceptable for me, a police officer investigating a murder case, to be travelling alone out here with a … with a young girl.”

“I don’t bite.”

“This is not funny! It could compromise the whole investigation. I’m after one or more dangerous killers. I can’t be looking after you.”

It was then Angituk’s turn to be indignant. “You don’t look after me. I have done my job well, feeding you and translating for you. You didn’t complain before. This is my home and these are, as you say, ‘my people.’ But … if you want me to go, I’ll go.”

Creed calmed himself, studying her for a moment, distracted by this new reality as she pushed her hair back out of her blue eyes, tightening the towel around herself and glaring at him defiantly, still shivering a little.

“I can’t let you go. I need you for translation.” He looked at her for a moment. “You can’t go. Well … turn around and let’s get dressed.”

They turned their backs to each other again in their usual manner, both silent with their thoughts. They quickly put on their dry clothes and did not speak again until well after dark.

ANGITUK FOUND
two nice pieces of driftwood swept north on the river from below the treeline and enough twigs and bushes to build a small fire. Creed repaired three holes in the poor battered canoe with a melted bar of resin and patches of canvas he had for the job. The night was a freezing contrast to the sunny day and Angituk stretched out a tarp behind the small fire to reflect all the warmth toward them and the tent. She also managed to snare a fat Arctic hare, one of the last of the season, and roast it to Creed’s pleasure. Frankly, she found it a relief to be a girl once more. Although they had not spoken again about her deception, Creed’s manner had softened a little toward her and she wanted to talk to him about it. They sat by the remnants of the tiny fire after their meal.

“It was my mother’s idea before she died. I was thirteen years old. I would pretend to be a boy and in that way I could get work in the white man’s world and men would not try to have sex with me. And it’s also a custom of our people, if we’ve had bad luck, we will dress in the way of the opposite sex. It confuses the bad spirits. They don’t know who you are and they leave you alone.”

“You understand with my people it is not appropriate for a man and a woman who are not married to be travelling alone together.”

“Yes.” She paused, thinking. “Why?”

“Because they might be tempted to become ... intimate.”

“Intimate?”

“To have sexual relations without being married, and that is not allowed. So, what I’d like to do is carry on the way we were, as if you were a boy. You’ll continue to dress like a boy and pretend to be one in the presence of any others we encounter. Okay?”

“Do you see any dresses around here?”

“Don’t be smart. We’ll just both pretend this never happened and go on as we were. Okay?”

“Is this for what others think? Or is it for you?”

“It is for others! We are on official business here.”

“I want to understand. It is not boys that you prefer?”

“No! I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Just continue as we were. Okay?”

“Okay.”

LATER THAT NIGHT,
Creed lay outside the tent in his sleeping bag. Angituk was asleep inside. The fire was dead, the meagre fuel used up, but Creed felt it appropriate to sleep outside. His breath came out in clouds of vapour in the moonlight of the cold, still night. The temperature had dropped dramatically and he was curled up to retain warmth, but he could not stop shivering.

Then it began to snow. Very quickly a soft white layer covered the bag and chilled him deeper still. He heard Angituk’s voice at the fly of the tent.

“Corporal Creed. Come inside.”

“I’m all right.”

“No, you’re not. You are cold, I am cold. Come inside.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“If you get sick, then who will protect me?”

Creed noted the faint sarcasm in her tone. Still he didn’t move. She crawled out of the tent, over to him, and poked his shoulder. The snow was coming down heavily now, filling in and softening the landscape all around them. Had he not been so cold, he would have appreciated the beauty of it.

“This is stupid,” Angituk continued. “I am freezing and we need to keep each other warm. And I am a boy again, so you shouldn’t be scared.”

“I’m fine here,” he said through chattering teeth.

“Okay. Go ahead. Freeze out here for all I care. But in the morning I’m just going to cover your body with snow and go home.”

She went back inside the tent.

Creed lay there for a moment, the shivering uncontrollable now, thinking of what she’d said. He crawled from his bag and shook the snow off it. Then he climbed thankfully into the tent, dragging the bag after him. In the little tent, they lay chastely back to back in their bags, and it was in fact much warmer for both of them. As she fell asleep, Angituk smiled at Creed’s prudishness. No question, the ways of these white men were strange.

Six

By morning, the violent seasonal shift to winter had dropped on them like a roof caving in. Two and a half feet of snow blanketed the land, crushing down on the little tent and covering the canoe. Along the shoreline in calm eddies and bays, a membrane of ice stretched just short of the strong current. The river was quickly freezing up. They would soon have to abandon the canoe altogether. For the first day since leaving Fort Norman, Creed didn’t shave and they each wore every piece of clothing they had, including their heavy moosehide coats. When they stopped moving, the chill still cut through everything, deep into their bones. They turned the Peterborough over, loaded and launched her, and paddled north on the diminishing liquid path of the river.

NINE MILES DOWNSTREAM
from Bloody Falls, the Coppermine widened suddenly and was swallowed up by the vast Coronation Gulf, a wide channel of the Arctic Ocean. At the mouth there were not even bushes or tall grass for fuel. They would be eating most things uncooked and even unwarmed. Their own bodies would be their primary source of heat.

At the mouth of the Coppermine there were a few small, flat islands, and in the distance, across the Gulf to the north, loomed larger, flat-topped islands with rugged cliff faces. Creed took out his binoculars to scan the distant islands and as he did so, a beautifully sculpted hill of ice came drifting into the foreground. An iceberg! It was moving to the east, mammoth, a cool opaque blue.

Creed and Angituk beached on the east side of the river mouth. A mile away on the west bank Creed could see movement, tiny figures against the vast white expanse of the Arctic shoreline.

“There’s the camp. But I don’t see tents.”

“They live in snow now.”

She was right. He could make out white bumps, the outlines of several snow houses, through the glasses. He had seen pictures of them in books. The Eskimos had no watch set up; no defences or guards were visible. There were children playing hide-and-seek. He could see one with a hoop and stick, making it roll along on the packed snow near the shore.

Creed put the binoculars away and they set off paddling across the great expanse of the churning river mouth where it contacted the deeper gulf water, toward the west bank and the camp. Halfway across, Creed slid the .38-55 out of the leather sheath, levered a bullet into the chamber, put on the safety, and laid the rifle across the gunnels in front of him.

Angituk, in the bow, heard this action and turned to look at him. “You will scare them, if they know what it is. Put it away, please.”

Creed hesitated, then slid the rifle back into its sheath, leaving the flap open.

A moment later the Eskimos began to move down to the shore—men, women, and children. They seemed a healthy and energetic people. They wore heavier skin clothing than the Eskimos Creed and Angituk had met south on the river and it gave them all a round, short, childlike profile. Creed could see their open faces, free of fear or hostility, until he paddled closer and they took in his white face. There were a few expressions of vague apprehension, then a young woman cried out and grabbed her child.
“Kabloona!”
They backed away in fear, and a few ran.

Angituk waved an arm in the air. “We are friendly to you and in a good mood! We have no weapons.”

Creed tried to repeat her phrases, missing the accents, hoping he wasn’t making it worse or appearing a fool, and held up his mittened hands in a passive, saluting gesture.

Angituk continued. “The
Kabloona
means no harm! Don’t run away. He wants to talk to Koeha. Is Koeha here?”

Her question had the desired effect. The people stopped their withdrawal at the name of their best hunter. A boy ran up toward the biggest snow house.

The bow of the canoe cracked through the thickening layer of ice on the shallow water as Creed and Angituk paddled up onto the beach. They stepped out onshore. Several men came up to them, while the women and children remained at a distance. Angituk made small talk with them while they stared at Creed. The hunters had known Angituk’s grandfather and also her mother, before they moved away to the west. They greeted her with smiles, but they remained wary of Creed. One man moved close to them and touched the skin of Creed’s cheek with his fingertips and peered into his eyes.

“I reassured them you are not a demon. They say you are only the third white man they have ever seen.” She exchanged a look with him.

“The first two must have been the priests. Ask them about the priests.”

“It might scare them. Maybe we should wait and talk to Koeha about the priests.”

“All right.”

As he had with the Eskimo hunting party farther up the Coppermine, Creed began a thorough survey of their primitive but resourceful way of life, noting the absence of any metals in their camp, save the copper implements they hammered into blades. Angituk told him that the people had been fishing in the rivers before the heavy snow and had lots of char to share. They would stay at this camp until the ocean froze and then move far out to the ice edge to hunt seal and narwhal.

As they stood among the Eskimos, a short older woman with a broad smile approached them, calling out Angituk’s name. The two embraced joyfully and laughed and talked at length. Angituk finally introduced her. Creed noted the warmth of their greeting and the tears in their eyes.

“This is Kingagolik, who was a good friend of my mother’s and was like an aunt to me when I was a child. She was married to Koeha’s cousin and hunting partner, who was killed by a walrus three winters ago many miles west of here. She thinks you’re my husband.”

The women laughed and talked some more. A group of young children in hide clothing, looking like a litter of friendly puppies, surrounded Creed. They pulled at his coat and pleaded in their language.

“What do you want?” Creed asked them. They all growled in response. “A bear? I’m not a bear.” He noted the subtle disappointment on the round, eager faces of the young ones, then suddenly raised his arms over his head and growled as loud as he could, baring his teeth for them to see. They screamed in terror and delight and raced away from him, but only so far. From a short distance they dropped to their knees and pelted him with a vicious barrage of snowballs.

“Little bastards,” he mumbled, and raising his arms again he roared after them. Again they all ran squealing. He chased them in wide circles through the snow, but some doubled back on him just like wolves on a deer and he would find two or three at his heels, waiting for an opportunity to strike. One managed to leap on his back and hang on; he heard giggling at his ear. Another smaller one latched on to his belt and dug his heels into the snow. Others poked sticks at his feet to bring him down, and still the rain of snowballs continued, all thrown at his head with a sniper’s accuracy.