The Shaman's Knife (21 page)

I shook myself back into the present. I was sure Bouvier hadn't made significant yards with the three native girls he'd questioned Saturday. When I talked to them again myself, maybe I'd get more, would expand upon Maisie's account. I went to the window and could see Jonassie walking down to the shore, appearing to be deep in thought. When he turned back he walked slowly, head down, toward Debbie's father and mother at the side of their house. The man, watching Jonassie approach, wiped his skinning knife on his pants. His wife put down the sharp ulu with which she'd been cleaning another skin. Jonassie seemed to speak first, then he and the woman both talked to the man, who stared down, apparently saying nothing. What was that about?

And how was it that Debbie's father and mother were working on seals? They must have come from a friend, someone who had hunted well . . . or from Davidee? Of course, I hadn't been around from Saturday morning to Monday night. Davidee and his playmates could have bagged a seal or two, then zoomed off again. The three-wheeled Honda was still in place, but no snowmobiles.

Perhaps this was my chance to talk to Debbie. She'd been on my mind off and on since Barker said she had not been home when her parents backed up Hard Hat's alibi on the night of the murders. I left a note telling Bouvier where I was going, and walked up the hill. Jonassie, leaving, called a greeting but kept going, not looking back. I waved at the other two. The woman waved back, not the man.

I knocked on the door. Debbie opened it a crack, then wider, and beckoned me in while putting one finger to her lips and nodding toward a store-bought wooden cradle where young Julie was sleeping. Inside, once the door was closed, I said quietly, “I want to ask you a few things about when Davidee starting sneaking back into town . . . what, a week or two ago?”

She smiled, a very small smile. “Try three.”

“You mean as soon as he got to Cambridge and got parole permission to go as far as No Name Lake, he started coming here?”

She nodded, not smiling at all. “I heard that but didn't see.”

“He didn't stay here, then?”

She shook her head. “Too close to the RCMP. No, he'd stay with Hard Hat, probably. Has a little place of his own.” She shrugged. “Now, of course, no need to hide, so he's back in his old room here.”

“You talk to him much?”

“Not at all . . . So what else do you want to know? Early this morning he took off hunting. Tommy and Paulessie had been out sealing with him late Saturday. Maybe they went along with him today. I just heard the two snowmobiles taking off.”

There was nothing basically suspicious about that kind of hunt at this time of year. With the weather moderating sometimes young men got restless and took their guns and snowmobiles and went out to bring home meat.

When that Friday storm hit they must have been holed up somewhere warm, like an igloo or a tent. Maybe they had come back Saturday in better weather; maybe they had sighted caribou and come to get provisions and go out again. Farther south, the caribou herds would be moving past the tree line into the open tundra to where the females had their favorite calving places. Here, hundreds of miles north of the treeline, the caribou had the same habits of calving in one secluded area. If hunters saw a herd, they went for them.

Meanwhile, Debbie. Her parents? I thought their wariness of me earlier would almost guarantee that they wouldn't come in. I thought of Davidee being back in this house. No matter what the courts allowed in their dumb idea of justice, honest to god, what could have been in their minds, a family reconciliation? Bullshit. But where could she go? From what Byron had told me, he and Debbie wanted a place of their own but did not have it yet. So she was here out of necessity. Necessity is something that my people have lived with for centuries, sometimes in worse circumstances than these, but it shouldn't be imposed on them by some dunces living in suburbs of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, where Davidee had been in the pen.

I plunged. “The night of the murders, when Hard Hat was here, according to your parents, Barker told me that you weren't. And that you weren't around the next morning, either, when he questioned your parents to check on Hard Hat's story.”

She watched me, listened, but said nothing. I picked my way with a certain amount of care.

“If you were here both times and backed up your parents on Hard Hat being here all evening on the night that the murders happened, I would have been inclined to believe you.”

She watched my eyes, her own very big behind the round spectacles.

“Was Hard Hat really here that night?”

Her gaze didn't waver, but she said nothing.

“Put it a different way—you don't know whether Hard Hat was here or not?”

“That's not exactly right,” she said with a little smile, but didn't go on, although various emotions crossed her face. She dipped water from a pail into a kettle and put it on the stove. She got out a small teapot. I was not jumping from one foot to the other waiting for the answer. I could guess how she was considering what I had asked. When a lawyer or a policeman or a judge is asking questions, there is a tendency among our people to figure out what answer the questioner would
like
to hear, and provide it. That way, you're less likely to get bullied. Conflicting sworn evidence is a constant bugbear in even minor cases in the north.

So as her silence dragged on, I let it. I was a native, too, sitting at a seal hole. Make the slightest false move, and no seal, or in my case no answer. I had all day. Davidee was one thing; I couldn't see her wanting to protect Davidee. Her parents' story giving Hard Hat an alibi was another thing altogether. She wouldn't want to hurt her parents by contradicting their accounts, if she could avoid it.

She was silent, moving around, gazing at her child. I thought she was getting ready to answer. Then someone passed by the window, heading for the door. She said hurriedly, “Not now. Not here. Tonight at the detachment,” and the door opened behind me and Byron Anolak limped in.

“Hey, inspector,” he said.

Damn the interruption!

Which might have been why I needled, “I thought maybe you'd be out hunting with Davidee.” I said it to get a rise out of him, but I was astonished at the black fury that suffused his face.

He took a deep breath, two, three. His angry color receded a little. Only a little. “My girl and our daughter live in this house where Davidee now lives too, thanks to a justice system that doesn't know its ass from a seal hole! I don't hang out with those guys and you goddamn well know that! I don't hang out with Davidee
ever
. But I don't disturb the peace if I can help it.”

“Okay,” I said. I really liked that line “doesn't know its ass from a seal hole,” and would make sure that the judge in question got that message. “However, do you know where they might have gone to hunt?”

Rather curtly he replied, “I could guess. Lewissie Ullayoroluk went south a day or two ago, down around No Name Lake, and got caribou.”

At that moment the little girl's eyes opened and she smiled at Debbie and Byron, standing together, looking down at her. Debbie picked her up. I was thinking, with all that bloody happens around this place, and keeps on happening, the child woke up smiling. Byron reached for his daughter and sang a few lines of a song that I knew and apparently she did, too, for she laughed. I looked at Debbie. The question I'd asked still hadn't been answered.

“I'll see you later,” she said. She spoke swiftly to Byron about him taking over the baby around nine or a little later. He nodded. She turned back to me. “Okay, after dark be in the detachment with no lights on. I'll knock.”

Byron glanced at me and then at Debbie, laughing. “Say, ‘yes boss' to the lady, Matteesie!”

“Yes, boss, lady,” I said.

Exit, all laughing, including the baby. Outside, the parents, back working on the seals, were being studied soberly by two or three bundled-up children too young for school. The man stared at me sadly and then at the house and then looked back down to continue skinning the seal.

As I walked to the detachment I was thinking that, beyond tonight, when Debbie might tell me something, I needed a plan. If by then Davidee and those with him were still out on the tundra, what better place could there be to face them? Checking out Byron's No Name Lake guess would be a logical start. Maybe I could track them by snowmobile, but—the big
but
—following snowmobile tracks on the tundra is very low on any list of surefire projects. What I needed was a backup from the air.

I thought about that. It was routine for the force to pay for a charter to do a search, especially in a murder case. But I didn't want some pilot I'd have to explain things to—not only who we were looking for, but how long the charter might take, hours or days. Antler Aviation, flying out of Inuvik, came to mind. I knew their pilots. But right on the heels of that idea came another that for a lot of reasons was more personal and therefore suited me better.

While I was reading the note Bouvier had left on the counter, saying that he'd decided to go out to check garbage cans again for remnants of burned boots or clothing (my “new hobby,” he wrote), I picked up the phone and called Komatik Air in Inuvik. Thomassie Nuniviak, who owned Komatik's three-aircraft outfit, had been my friend since we were both only seven or eight years old, shipped into Inuvik with a lot of other scared kids, away from our families for the first time to go to school.

As the phone at Komatik Air rang and rang, I remembered our first textbooks, ridiculously enough the standard Dick and Jane and Spot stuff—stories set in southern white family situations as alien and unknown to us as if they'd been set on the moon. But at the time that was how the government insisted every native kid learn to read, write, and talk in English.

They were regretting that now, with individuals in every native organization recalling publicly for the first time how they were mistreated. Some had been whipped if they were caught speaking Inuktitut. It was the old, old story, not exclusive to Canada, of the white establishment senselessly and systematically trying to wipe out ancient native cultures in favor of . . . what? The bullshit that whites know it all. The hatred and distrust bred in those days would not go away, and knocked hell out of the more understanding initiatives that slowly followed, the government was forced into reluctant reform only when the natives grew, matured, and fought back, as they learned that fighting back sure as hell beat turning the other cheek.

Finally, it must have been on the twentieth ring, Thomassie answered. “Matteesie! Are you in town? Come on over. God, I'm sorry about your mother. Live that long and then die for being in the way of that shit, whoever did it!”

He had come home with me to Holman one springtime after school finished, when his parents hadn't come in yet from the winter hunt—either stranded or just late, I forget—so he knew, had known, my mother. Once he had tried to smoke her pipe and had gone so pale that she said, “Oh, Thomassie, I didn't know you were part white man!”

I told him where I was, not in Inuvik but Sanirarsipaaq, and that I needed somebody to do some flying. The sooner the better.

“It's about the murders?”

I said it was.

“Well, look, I got both the Beaver and the Cessna right here. You got a preference?”

“No, whatever you say. Any chance you could fly it yourself?”

He laughed. I could imagine him in that little office he had in an old 512 on the banks of the Mackenzie, electric kettle and tea bags and powdered milk at his elbow, two of his three somewhat timeworn aircraft sitting on the river ice out front. Last time I'd seen him his Cessna had been missing, flown by some fugitives who'd hidden it south of Fort Norman where I'd found it safe and sound.

“Sure I'm gonna fly you myself! You think I'd let anybody else fly you?” He thought aloud about the time element. “It's a little late for me to get there today but I could get part way. Can't fly at night into that landing strip you got there with forty-watt bulbs along the runway, but I should make Cam Bay and call you from there and maybe come on at first light in the morning.”

After I hung up I thought that if Davidee did return on his own today and I didn't need an aircraft, I could cancel. But I had a strong feeling that Davidee was not planning a quick return. If I was right I had saved a day or two by laying on an aircraft now.

Bouvier had rushed in during the Thomassie call and headed straight for the bathroom, his business there broadcast by a sound like that of a hose filling a pail. He emerged grinning and drying his hands on a well-worn towel. Before I could ask him to fill me in on the days I'd been away, Bouvier, looking a little embarrassed, beat me to it, laughing, comically trying to both talk and light his cigar.

“Really weird thing happened Sunday. I had my Easter dinner at the hotel, a big spread, soup, fish, chicken, pie, you name it, and came back here to write a letter home but first I really had to go to the can. When I came out pulling my pants back up, not so easy in that bathroom, it's so damn small, I just happened to look out. What do I see but Davidee walking downhill across the open space, as if he's heading for the rec hall.

“It was still broad daylight, of course, and around Easter Sunday dinnertime, hardly anybody else around. Then I see Byron, going in the same direction as Davidee, but by a different route, like shadowing him, always keeping a building between him and Davidee.”

I was thinking about Byron's angry flush and denial just a few minutes ago when I'd needled him about thinking he might be out hunting with Davidee.

“While I'm watching, just pulling my braces up over my shoulders, and Davidee is going by in front of the detachment, Byron takes a step from where he'd been shielded—right behind the corner of our building here—and, Jesus, he brings up a twenty-two Magnum he's been carrying sort of shielded by his right leg. He sights right on Davidee, had his finger on the trigger, couldn't have missed, clear shot, twenty-five yards or so, and holds it for maybe a second or two, and then drops the gun and turns. It all happened so fast. I grabbed my parka and when I got outside I could see Byron heading back toward his house pretty fast for a guy with a bum leg, and I yelled at him, ‘Hey, stop right there!'”