Edie Kiglatuk's Christmas (7 page)

E
die Kiglatuk had no way of knowing how long the bear had been looking at her. His eyes, brown and beady, were like dark stars in a summer sky, set in clouds of fur. He raised his nose and snuffled, scenting her out, his huge body framed by the snow-laden spruce of the Alaska forest.

She had spent enough of her life around polar bears to be sure that, despite its colour, the animal standing before her wasn’t one. Ice bears had longer heads, sharper snouts and smaller ears. This creature was different, snub-snouted and raggedy, the size of a black bear. Only not black. And, with its brown eyes, no albino either.

On the long flight over from her home in Autisaq in High Arctic Canada, Edie had passed the time reading guides to Alaskan flora and fauna and it now occurred to her that the animal was a spirit bear.
Qalunaat,
white folk, called them Kermode bears but the native people, the Gitga’at, knew them as
mooksgm’ol
, and never hunted them. They said the bears were outsider animals, creatures with the power to pass messages across the invisible portals between the living and the dead.

Something in her felt compelled to get closer. Swinging from her snowmobile she landed with a dull thud in the snow. Alarmed, the animal gave a short bark and rose on his hind legs. He was about six feet tall but his stance wasn’t so much aggressive as…
As what?
Edie had been around bears all her life, but there was something about this one she couldn’t read.

For a moment the animal continued to face her, his nostrils flaring, small eyes brown and shiny as rain-soaked rock, then he dropped back down and slowly began to tromp away among the trees, turning his head from time to time to make sure she was not following.

Or maybe to make sure she was.

The animal reached a patch of sunlight between two spruce, stopped and turned around. Then he stood, making little coughing sounds, his breath fogging the air.

Waiting.

She moved towards him, slowly at first, then with more confidence. For a few moments he stood fast, then he turned and began to lumber further into the forest. She continued forward, sure now that the bear was leading her somewhere, that he had sought her out.

Glancing at her watch, she saw it was just past 9 a.m. In two hours from now Sammy Inukpuk would be pulling into the official start of the Iditarod dogsled race at Willow, expecting to see his ex-wife among the backup crews. It was her job to make sure he had all the supplies he needed and to offer moral support at the start of what were bound to be two of the most challenging weeks of Sammy’s life as he raced sixteen dogs 1150 miles through some of the toughest terrain on the planet. From then on, she’d remain in Anchorage, organizing supplies and being on hand to receive any dogs that might get injured en route, while her old friend and ally, Derek Palliser, provided logistics support and managed communications up at the race finish in the northwestern town of Nome.

Edie walked on, the bear maybe fifty feet ahead, through stands of white spruce then out into clumps of quaking aspen, wading
through deep snow, her heart thudding in her throat. It seemed as though they had been travelling a long time when, all of a sudden, the bear stopped and swivelled about. He was a long distance away now, his body visible through the trees like a patch of mist in the dark. He watched her heading closer for a while, then raised his head and smelled the air, turned and cantered away.

Edie looked about. For the first time in her adult life, she realized that she was lost. Glancing back at her footprints, she could already see that the bear had led her round in circles, jumbling the prints into a series of long switchbacks. Now she found herself in a dank world full of shifting shadows and strange, whispering sounds, like something from a childhood dream, with absolutely no sense of where to turn next. She felt her throat tighten and her palms begin to sweat.

She took in a deep, calming breath and stood listening, absorbing the sounds of the forest and trying to take some meaning from them. Where Edie came from, up on Ellesmere Island, just shy of the North Pole, there weren’t any trees, only raw, rocky tundra. On a clear day you could see the earth’s curve. The unfamiliarity of the landscape was just one more thing about Alaska she hadn’t really thought about when she’d agreed to step in to help Sammy after his one surviving son, Willa, broke his arm. Now the wind picked up and began snaking along the forest floor, bothering the snow into little fountains of flakes. The trunks of the spruces all around her creaked very softly and a drift of accumulated powder snow swept from the branches and tumbled to earth. If she’d been in Alaska any longer than two days she might already know where the prevailing winds blew from, but even of that she was ignorant. She looked up but could not see the sun through the canopy. No chance of knowing which direction she was going in.

Far away, a few ravens chattered, a nearby twig snapped, and
there was the rustle of something low to the ground, a fox perhaps.

It had been crazy irresponsible to come out here without so much as a rifle, the kind of thing she’d had a habit of doing when she’d been drinking. The kind of habit she hoped she had kicked.

A thin rumble came to her, more a vibration than a sound, then it deepened and grew louder until it resolved into the deep whine of an engine and she felt a hollowing sense of relief. The vehicle drew closer and before too long a snowmobile came into sight. She grinned and waved and waited but when the vehicle carried on without even slowing, she ran into its path, shouting and waving her hands, bewildered. The driver opened his visor and a pair of eyes almost lost in a furze of salt and pepper facial hair looked out. A female passenger in silver fox mitts sat impassively behind him. Under their down parkas, they both appeared to be wearing long, billowing tunics and matching trousers. The couple had obviously been doing the week’s grocery shopping. There were bags hanging off the snowmobile’s every surface.

‘Hey, didn’t you see me waving?’ She felt irritated. Did people have no manners down here? ‘I’m lost. I need to get back to the Hatcher Pass.’

The man shrugged. ‘You’re on Old Believer land,’ he said simply.

She wanted to say that right now she didn’t care if she was on Kiss-My-Ass land, but held back. ‘I need directions to my vehicle.’

The man looked momentarily surprised, but then he flipped his head in the direction he and his companion had just come from. ‘If you can’t make out your own tracks, then follow ours,’ he said. ‘Was that your snowmachine down there on the track?’

Snowmachines. That’s what they called them down here in the south, in Alaska. Where Edie was from, you saw a snowmobile with
no one on it, you didn’t just ride by, you stopped to make sure no one was in trouble.

‘You always this helpful?’

The man sucked his teeth disapprovingly. ‘The concerns of the worldly are no concerns of ours,’ he said, then glancing back at the woman sitting behind him he seemed to relent a little. ‘We don’t appreciate outsiders trespassing on our land is all. If I were you, I wouldn’t be fixing to come up this way again any time soon.’

With that, he let go of the brake, flipped his visor and swung on the throttle. The snowmobile began sliding forward and Edie watched the two travellers disappear into the gloom of the forest, then she turned and followed the man’s instructions, keeping their snowmobile tracks in view to her left. A while later a gap in the trees signalled the position of the road back into town and in the distance she caught a glimpse of her vehicle.

Relieved, she began to walk towards it. Where the tracks finally gave out onto the packed snow of the path, not far from the snowmobile, she spotted a bright yellow object lying at the base of a spruce, protected from the snowfall by the tree’s branches, slightly to one side of the pass itself. The thought occurred to her that something had been thrown from the couple’s snowmobile. Straying from the track a little, she wandered over to take a look.

Closer up she was surprised to see that the yellow object was a tiny wood-plank house of the sort you might make for a small dog, about a yard long and half as wide, with a sloping roof and solid sides. The front was decorated with ornate shapes, and there was a door, fastened shut with a crude wooden lever.

Edie looked around. A very thin layer of snow had collected on the roof, but there was none banked up against the sides, suggesting that the house had been there since the last snowfall, but most likely not much longer. There were no animal or human tracks
either around or leading up to it. The little house sat as though it had always been there in the snow, as though it belonged to some other reality and there were tiny fairies living inside.

All thoughts of getting back for the Iditarod had gone from her head. She called out, having no sense of who or what might answer, but there was only silence. Reaching the house, she crouched down and with her right hand turned the lever on the little door. She could see something inside, though it was too dark to see what. Her first thought was to draw out whatever it was, but something stopped her. The spirit bear came to mind, the power of its quiet, ghostly pallor. She was struck suddenly by the realization that it was the bear who had led her here, that the spirits had sent their messenger to draw her to this very place.

She went back to the snowmobile, took her flashlight out of the pannier, trudged back to the house and opened the door once more. The light revealed a package, wrapped in a very elaborately embroidered red cloth. Edie reached out carefully and touched it. The cloth itself was crisp without being frozen hard. Since it was probably –25, even in the relative shelter of the forest, it was unlikely to have lain there for very long, she thought. She opened the door wide, reached in and pulled at the object. It was unattached and came away quite easily. The cloth was exquisite, satin she guessed, and embroidered all over with a pattern of flowers and tendrils. In places there were ribbon ties. Whatever was inside was very hard, something long frozen. She stood up with the package in her hand, moved over to the snowmobile, and rested it on the saddle so she could take a better look. Tucked in under the ornate fabric, she saw now, was a square of white linen-like cloth. She pinched it between her finger and thumb. Almost instantly, the cloth came away and as it did so, it seemed to dislodge the ties around the parcel, exposing what lay inside.

In an instant, her breath left her and a burning, tightening sensation shot up her spine. She blinked, trying to make the terrible thing go away, but when she opened her eyes it was still there. She felt herself lurch away. Her legs no longer held her and she reached out and grabbed the nearest tree. She felt faint, then wanted to throw up, but did neither. Clasping her arms around her chest, she closed her eyes and squeezed hard until the pain calmed her. When her breath returned, irregular, gasping, she eased herself back towards the horror she had released from its tiny yellow house.

There, lying on the saddle of the snowmobile, was the body of a baby boy, a month or maybe two in age, lying on his belly, dead and hard frozen. The boy’s arms were raised, the hands balled into tiny fists, the legs angled down from the body as if in repose, his skin glittering with ice crystals. The skin on one shoulder was puckered with what looked like an ice burn but there was nothing to suggest how he had died, or when.

Reaching out with the utmost caution, she clasped the body at the shoulders with her mittened hands and slowly turned the boy over. His face was veiled with ice, the eyes were closed and he wore an expression of softness and calm. He looked so waxen, so distant from life, that, for the tiniest instant, Edie convinced herself he was a doll even as she knew that she was looking at a corpse.

Onto the delicate new skin of the boy’s body someone had smeared grease and what looked like charcoal, or maybe ashes, in an elaborate, inverted cross.

A
nchorage Mayor Chuck Hillingberg helped his wife Marsha out of the official vehicle at the Iditarod HQ near Willow, just outside of Wasilla, and beamed for the waiting cameras. His colleague at Wasilla City Hall, J. G. Dillard, the only mayor in Alaska to sport a comb-over, came striding over, hand outstretched, pulling his mouse of a wife behind him, eager to join in the picture-taking. Chuck had no interest in the man – unlike Chuck, who had thrown his hat into the ring for the upcoming race for Alaska governor, Mayor Dillard wasn’t going anywhere – but today was all about playing nice.

‘We’re sure glad to see you both up here,’ Dillard said. ‘Thought all that time in the big city, maybe you both forgot your Wasilla roots.’ It was said with bonhomie, one mayor to another, but there was an edge to it. On the drive up (Chuck had wanted to take the mayoral ’copter but Marsha had dissuaded him on the grounds that it would look too fancy, and in this, as in so many other things, she’d been right), he’d decided to make this section of his day all about loyalty. He’d not been on the ground for five minutes and Dillard was already questioning his hometown identity. It pissed him off.

‘Never forget home, JG,’ Chuck said, pumping the hand offered to him. That much was true, at least. Chuck never had forgotten home, which, for him, was Jersey City, New Jersey, a place he’d left
at the age of four and still felt an almost painful nostalgia towards. As for Wasilla, he loathed the place with an unholy passion. People went on about the spectacular setting of the town, bounded by verdant valleys to the south, the Chugach Mountains to the east, the Talkeetnas to the north. They rattled away about its clear water, its homey Christian values and community spirit. People like J. G. Dillard. All Chuck could recall of his years in Wasilla were the godawful winters he’d spent cooped up in his tiny bedroom in the family cabin on the Willow side of the town, not ten minutes’ drive from where they were now, listening to his hippy dropout parents taking out their disappointments on each other, and longing to be somewhere, anywhere, but the self-proclaimed Duct Tape Capital of America.