Coppermine (23 page)

“You let them escape! I told you!”

Angituk looked at the empty shelter and the smouldering fire, confused and upset. They did seem to be gone.

“Maybe they’re around.”

“Of course they’re not around! Now what are we going to do? They could be anywhere! They could be on their way back to the Coppermine. I found them and brought them all this goddamn way. And then you lose them! I just asked you for one thing! ONE THING! So goddamn stupid!”

Angituk stood there shivering without her coat on in the morning chill. Creed could not see the tears that pooled in her blue eyes.

“I’m sorry.”

“Lot of good that does.”

“I never thought they’d run away.”

“Well, they did!”

“Maybe we can find them.”

“With me half blind?”

“I can go. I’m a good tracker.”

“Right,” he said with a seething sarcasm driven by the pain. “I should never have trusted—”

And then they heard his voice.

“Angituk?”

It was Uluksuk. Creed could not see him, but Angituk smiled with relief at the old man. Uluksuk and Sinnisiak had returned. Sinnisiak held up two fresh hares he had snared. And Uluksuk showed her a skin full of special mosses.

“I found the ‘mother moss’ for his eyes, under the snow. Didn’t know if it grew down here. This will be the best for him.”

“Quanaqqutit,”
the girl said to both of them as she took the rabbits and examined the moss.

Creed turned toward Angituk. “What did he say?”

She looked at him with disdain, her voice acid.

“Figure it out for yourself.”

Eleven

Uluksuk had Creed lie down again in the shelter and carefully prepared and applied the special paste from the mosses he had collected. Then he put a blindfold around Creed’s head.

“That’s incredible. The pain is almost gone. Thank you.”

But Angituk was not there to translate. Creed gave him a blind thumbs-up and the old shaman did it back against Creed’s thumb. Sinnisiak brought in the rabbits he had roasted over the wood fire. Angituk came then and ate with the hunters, but did not say a word to Creed. Creed accepted this. He deserved it. It would work out in time. The rabbit was excellent and cooked through for him. Though he was blindfolded, Creed heard the sound of the chain on Sinnisiak’s handcuffs against his tin mug.

“Stick out your hands.”

The hunter was unsure what Creed wanted. Creed found Sinnisiak’s hands, pulled them toward him, and fished the key out of his jacket pocket. He undid the shackles first of Sinnisiak and then of Uluksuk. He shook their unencumbered hands and told them they were good men, and then he stood and threw the cuffs as far away as he could into the bushes.

BY THE TIME CREED
regained some of his sight and was ready to travel again, the days had grown longer. The Great Bear River had begun to open up and the first subtle signs of spring were all around them. Creed still had pain and could not see details well, but he wore the eye protectors through the day and his eyes slowly healed. They walked along an old path on the riverbank, Creed with his hand on Uluksuk’s shoulder. Uluksuk took an interest in Creed’s compass and now kept it in his pocket and consulted it on a regular basis. But his attraction to it had nothing to do with determining direction; he knew the precise direction he was travelling at any given moment as unfailingly as a river runs its course. He was trying to fool it. He would turn around one way and then quickly the other, turn it upside down, hide it in his coat and spin round again, but the compass would not be confounded—it always pointed to where Uluksuk knew north to be. Home.

The shaman had also taken over Creed’s binoculars and he looked through them from either end. When Creed first showed the glasses to Sinnisiak, the young hunter told him: “Yes, with this you can see a long way, but can you see into the future like Uluksuk?”

Creed’s rapport with the hunters deepened, but Angituk was still not speaking to him. She had not forgiven him for his accusations. She never looked at him now or initiated conversation, and her responses were monosyllabic.

“They behave like they are married. Do you think they’re married?” Sinnisiak asked Uluksuk one morning when Angituk was out of earshot.

“I don’t know. You’re right, but it would be rude to ask.”

Creed had tried once to apologize and Angituk had not answered. In the meantime she had become great friends with Sinnisiak and Uluksuk, chatting away all day, telling jokes and stories without translating, leaving Creed on the outside. Twice he had heard her say to them in reference to him,
“Kabloona ayortok.”
He was sure it meant, “The white man knows nothing.”

ULUKSUK ONCE TOLD
a long, entertaining story and the others listened with interest and amusement. They laughed for a long time when he was done.

“What was his story about, Angituk?”

She didn’t reply.

“Angituk? What was the joke?”

She tossed a cold look in his direction. “He called down the northern lights one time to help him trap a caribou.” And that was all he could get out of her.

ONE MID-AFTERNOON
only a few days away from Fort Norman, they had the encounter with the Cree. Uluksuk led and Creed took up the rear, watching the path ahead of him through his eye protectors. Silence except for a few bickering crows. Suddenly Uluksuk was grabbed and thrown up against a tree with a knife pressed to his throat. Creed’s pistol and rifle were yanked from his hands. Angituk struggled against two men who held her. Star bit the leg of one of the men who held Angituk and he swung a club against the dog’s head, knocking her unconscious. The leader had Sinnisiak against a tree with two men holding him. He slapped Sinnisiak across the face.

“Ejaka!
What you do here? WHAT YOU DO HERE ON MY LAND?”

Creed got one hand free from the men who held him and took off his eye protectors. He squinted at the leader and spoke in Oji-Cree. “Leave him alone. He’s with me. I am Corporal Creed of the Royal North West Mounted Police.”

The leader glanced at Creed, unimpressed. “Police. What you doing with filthy
Ejaka?”

“These two men are my prisoners. They’re expecting us in Fort Norman.”

“Why you in filthy Eskimo clothes?”

“They’re warm.”

The leader studied him. “Prisoners? So what they do?”

Creed hesitated. “They’re accused of murder.”

“Murder? Filthy murdering Eskimos.”

The leader put his knife up to Sinnisiak’s terrified face, the point making an indentation in his cheek. It broke the skin. A drop of blood. Sinnisiak was trembling.

“Why go to Fort Norman? We kill them here for you. Free service.”

“If you do that, you will be charged with murder and arrested too.”

With a quick movement, as Sinnisiak cried out, the leader sliced open the front of Sinnisiak’s hide trousers. “Let’s see what he got down there. Maybe I want an Eskimo cock,” he said, brandishing his knife.

“I’m warning you. Leave him alone!”

Sinnisiak was crying. The leader turned and came slowly over to Creed with the knife, and smiled at him.

“You long way from white friends. Many people, even white men, even police … many people disappear in the bush. You can disappear too.”

One of the other Cree who was holding Angituk now spoke up. He was feeling her breast with one hand. “Look! This one’s a woman!”

Angituk spat in his face and tried to break free from the two men holding her. The leader stepped over to her, opened her coat, tore open her flannel shirt, and looked at her small breasts. The men forced her down on her knees.

An icy calm came over Creed and he spoke with all the authority he could summon.

“Listen to me. I am under direct orders of the King to safely bring in these three people. If you harm them, you will have to kill me. And if you kill me, the King will send one hundred officers just like me to track you down, arrest you, and hang you. All of you. Do you understand?”

He was realizing the usefulness of Hornby’s crass threat. The Cree were listening but not yet convinced on a course of action. Uluksuk suddenly gave a wild, ear-splitting yell. He opened his eyes wide and stared maniacally at his captors and shouted words they did not understand. After a moment Creed took the cue.

“He is an
Ejaka
shaman,” he told them in Oji-Cree. “He has powerful magic. He has sucked the souls of many men to take them to the place of the dead. Why do you think I am taking him to Fort Norman?”

The men holding Uluksuk let go of him then and stepped back. The shaman began to dance, his hands raised, eyes wild and intense, hands rotating in a conjuring motion as if to possess them, a sinister smile on his face.

“This is a trick,” said the Cree leader, but his voice betrayed a deep sense of apprehension.

Creed continued: “Release us. NOW!”

The men holding Creed, Angituk, and Sinnisiak let go and backed away. Uluksuk kept up his dancing and leering as the Cree stared at him, mesmerized.

“Drop the weapons!” Creed commanded.

His pistol and rifle fell to the ground.

“Now save yourselves! Save your souls! Go!” Creed warned them, and the leader backed away from the crazed Uluksuk. “And tell any other Cree you meet, we are not to be bothered. RUN!”

A moment later, they were gone.

Angituk scrambled to her feet and, wrapping her shirt around herself, stood beside Creed. He put an arm around her and she leaned into him, trembling.

“You all right?” Creed asked.

She nodded.

TWICE MORE
in the next few days they passed parties of Indians on the river, but there was no more trouble. The Cree avoided them, and they felt safer the closer they got to Fort Norman.

At a widening of the path on a slight decline, Creed came alongside Uluksuk.

“Uluksuk. How do you get to be a shaman? Are you born to it?”

Angi was close enough to translate. “It is determined during pregnancy. A shaman came to examine my mother and determined I would be one. So when I was born, I was shown my afterbirth, and I examined it. And as soon as I was able, I was fed large amounts of caribou brains. My mother would chew them for me. Then, when I had been through a few winters, the old shaman came back to instruct me for a time. And since then I am guided by the spirits.”

“Do you feel them now?”

“No. They are busy with their attention on others. They have no interest in us right now. And that is a very good thing. Believe me, you do not want their attention. Enjoy this time. Let it be a time of healing for you.”

“My eyes are almost as good as new.”

“I don’t mean your eyes.”

He paused. Creed looked up at the old man with surprise.

“Enjoy this healing time,” the shaman repeated to him.

THE SNOW MELTED QUICKLY
now and the qamutik was no longer practical. They cached it near the river, still forty miles from Fort Norman, and built a simple travois for the dogs to pull, two poles they dragged behind them with a small woven platform that could take thirty pounds of gear and food. Creed decided to shave again and Angituk laughed at his clean baby face and felt his smooth cheek for a long moment.

Spring had come upon them with a startling, almost violent suddenness. The days were sunny and warm, and the snow had all but melted into the swollen river. The cells of plants and trees attuned to their short growing season had already begun their vigorous photosynthetic multiplication, and the ducks and geese and other wildlife were engaged in a flourish of activity. Creed’s eyes were almost completely recovered now, so he could enjoy both the rich odours of the earth and water and the visual performance of the greening forest full of creatures and the blue sky full of birds.

The ravens were most numerous and entertaining, with their mystical connotations shared in the mythologies of hundreds of cultures. They would pass overhead and call out their distinctive, almost human croak. Creed found he had a talent for duplicating the raven’s guttural speech and he would call it out in reply, much to the amusement of Sinnisiak.

“Do it again,” the hunter would ask, and Creed would oblige with a long, croaking raven phrase, and Sinnisiak would laugh again. “Uluksuk! The white man is turning into a raven.”

“Good choice.”

As they walked in these spring days, Uluksuk sometimes sang a song and Angituk translated it:

There is joy in feeling the warmth!

Come to the great world,

And seeing the sun,

Follow its old footprints in the summer night,

And rejoice for the life you are given.

Iy-alya-ya-ya-ya!

IN THE INTOXICATING FREEDOM
of the warm weather, and with the slightly melancholy anticipation of the end of his mission, Creed felt no huge impulse to hurry into Fort Norman. At a particularly pleasant spot on the river where a series of calm pools had formed in bays out of the main current, he declared a rest stop for a day or two. They built two shelters from saplings and skins and found themselves surrounded by wildflowers. Creed was amazed: the buds had matured and blossomed in a matter of days. Sinnisiak murmured, “The spirits are in a good mood.”

Angituk had been more civil to Creed since the Cree episode, translating their conversations freely, but there was still a distance between them. It occurred to him that she might be doing it out of self-defence. In Fort Norman they would have to separate, and that realization saddened him. He watched her talking and laughing with the hunters, combing out her long hair with a wide comb of walrus tusk. The warm spring sunshine—the sparkling clarity of Arctic air intensifying the sun’s extravagant rays—made her playful and he found himself preoccupied by her beauty. He was astounded again that she had ever convinced him she was a boy. As he watched her, he became aware of the deep ache that entered him whenever he thought of leaving her.

Early in the afternoon, the sun was so luxuriously hot that Creed told himself it could counteract the numbing effect of the river. He was determined to take a bath. He walked along the riverbank with a towel and a handful of sweet-smelling leaves Uluksuk had found, in search of a particular pool. It was out of the stronger current and just waist-deep. He was amazed at the flowers blooming along the path that had not been there the day before: pink saxifrage, white Arctic poppy, and blue Arctic heather. He would never have known or cared about the names of any of these but for the little handbook Cowperthwaite had slipped into his pack with sketches of Arctic wildflowers. How it had not been used for fuel these past months, he had no idea.