White Heat (19 page)

    Pulling
on her outerwear, Edie hurried to the Northern Store and asked Mike if she
could make a long-distance call from the phone in his office. The number picked
up on the second ring and a voice in a drawling accent said, 'Zemmer?'

    The
name sounded familiar, but for now she couldn't put her finger on where she'd
come across it before.

    'Is
Andy Taylor there?'

    A
pause on the line. 'We don't have an Andy Taylor.' The voice sounded wary. 'Who
is this speaking?'

    'I'm
sorry,' she said. 'Maybe I got the wrong number. Is this the computer place in
. . .' She searched her mind, '. . . Washington, DC?'

    'No,
ma'am, this is pizza delivery in Houston, Texas.'

    Edie
ended the call and went back into the store.

    'No
one in?' Mike put on a sympathetic smile.

    Edie
shook her head. You had something to hide, it was best to act mute. Something
she'd learned from silent movies.

    She'd
just stumbled on something whose significance she didn't yet understand, but
she knew it was significant all right. Not even Andy Taylor was crazed enough
to call for takeout from some pizza joint six thousand kilometres away.

    A
week later, during a break from school, Edie gathered her gear and provisions
and walked down to the beach to where her komatik sat. With the exception of
the quick trip to Aunt Martie's cabin, Edie hadn't been out in it since Joe's
death and it would need some routine maintenance before it was safe to take it
out in what was by now still compacted, but ever so slightly softening, late
May ice.

    Most
people used plastic runners these days but to Edie they had the effect of separating
her, somehow, from the ground, a feeling she found distracting and unpleasant.
The old liver-and-mud paste on the komatik's walrus-ivory runners would need
chipping off and a new lot spread on. She preferred to sled old-style.

    While
the runner paste was freezing and hardening, she'd re-knot the slats with
sealskin rope and check over the dog harnesses.

    She
told herself she was going fishing under the ice at Craig. This was true, but
it wasn't the whole truth and she knew that too. Had she really only been
interested in ice fishing, there were closer and better spots.

    There
had been no news of the whereabouts of Andy Taylor since the second and final
S&R and Joe's family, Simeonie and even Derek Palliser had seemed almost
indecently keen to put both Taylor's disappearance and Joe's suicide behind
them. If she had any sense she'd do the same, but Joe's death had stirred in
her some compulsion which she was unable to ignore. Call it a hunter's sense,
intuition, mother love, whatever, she didn't care. All she felt sure of was
that the two deaths and Taylor's disappearance were somehow connected. If Joe
hadn't died maybe she
would
have done as Sammy suggested, toed the line
and shut up, but now she felt sure the fates of the two
qalunaat
offered
the key to understanding what had happened to her stepson. Openly challenging
Simeonie's authority would make her life extremely difficult, if not
impossible, which was why she had kept her intentions so secret that she could
hardly even admit them to herself. But she knew that if she didn't get to the
bottom of Joe's death, there would be no point in her going on.

    When
she'd finished on the komatik, she pulled it along the sea ice to where she
kept the dogs chained. She'd already fed the animals the morning before, and
wouldn't now feed them again until she pitched camp that night. It was
important to keep the team just on the edge of hunger. If they were sated they
wouldn't run.

    For
the past few seasons, her lead dog had been a dusty grey bitch she'd called
Takurnqiunagtuq, Happiness. The name seemed ironic now. Joe had always teased
her for her sentimental attachment to her sled dogs. She was thinking about it
now, as she went among them, squeezing their ribs to gauge the strength of
their chests and checking their feet for abrasions that might cause trouble on
the trail. Paws and lungs were often the first to go. Candle ice could cut the
pads to pieces and when it got really cold some of the weaker dogs would cough
blood. She'd had dogs in the past whose lungs had burst like blown bags. But
for the most part they were a hardy lot, bred from the fierce, lean Nunavik
animals brought up by her grandparents and the larger, more placid Greenlandic
dog with its tremendous coat and tiny ears that prevented it losing too much
heat.

    She
picked out fourteen and tied them to the fan harness, leaving two to run
alongside as backup. Giving her clothes and gear a final check, she tied a pile
of caribou skins tightly over the komatik, called Bonehead to heel and mushed
on the sledders with a
Ha! Ha!

    It
was perfect sledding weather. High cloud had kept the temperature at a pleasant
-20C, cold enough for the ice to remain hard but not so cold that the sled
runners would bounce, and the wind was gusting softly enough not to raise the
snow into frost clouds.

    As
the komatik bumped along on the shore-fast ice towards the bank of pressure
ridges signalling the start of the floating pack, a scene from
The Frozen
North
came unbidden into her mind and she heard herself chuckle. It seemed
so long since she had laughed at anything. There, in her head, was Buster
Keaton desperately trying to mush together his team of teeny nonsense dogs.

    Up
ahead, a great jumble of pressure ice brought her back into the present. This
was one of the things she loved most about sea-ice travel, the way that, if you
let it, your progress across the land could become your thought universe,
pushing all other thoughts to one side until everything seemed embedded in the
journey and movement itself seemed like the only thing that had ever mattered.
Was it wiser to travel on the pack or along the ice foot? From what direction
was the spindrift coming? Were they entering bear country? Were the tides high
enough to break up the ice?

    At
the first ridge she stopped the dogs, pushed the anchor into the ice then went
ahead to look for a route through the jumbled ice steeples and towers onto the
pack beyond. Returning, she led Takurnqiunagtuq slowly through, running back to
balance the komatik each time it threatened to overturn. It was strenuous work
and by the time Edie reached the smooth floating pack on the other side, she
was ready for a rest. She threw down the anchor, commanded the dogs to lie
down, then kicked a few steps into a nearby iceberg and clambered up for a
view.

    In
the far distance the cliffs of Taluritut rose from the sea ice. The Inuktitut
name meant 'tattoo', after the ridged and folded cliffs which looked from a
distance like the tattooed whiskers Inuit women used to wear on their chins. So
much more expressive than the
qalunaat
name, Devon. A few kilometres to
the north, its windswept edges glowing bruise-mauve in the sea ice, sat Craig
Island.

    Edie took
off her snow goggles, closed her eyes and set her face towards the sun, feeling
the first intimations of warmth. How beautiful it was. All over Craig now,
under vast hills of blown snow, mother bears would be stirring with their cubs
and in a few weeks the eiders would appear, followed by dovekies and walrus.
Turnstones, snow geese, knots, snow buntings, and kittiwakes would show up and
all at once it would be summer.

    On
his thirteenth birthday, Edie had presented Joe with a second-hand komatik and
a pile of pups. Over the next couple of years the boy put a great deal of his
energy into raising and training those pups and by the age of fifteen, he could
hold his own against the most experienced mushers in Autisaq. Joe used to race
her out here. As late as early July, just before the breakup, he would beg her
to harness her dogs and they would take themselves off to the edge of the pack,
where the bears hung out waiting for seal. Often, he'd go on ahead of his team
and she'd watch him, testing the ice, often just leaping from floe to floe. It
was incredibly dangerous but he had a knack of knowing exactly when the floes
would merge or split apart, of how to place his body when to open a stride, how
far to jump and when to hold back. He used to tease her that he'd learned his
timing from the 'greats', by which he meant Lloyd and Chaplin, Keaton and
Laurel and Hardy.

    She
started up again. It was eerily calm now, the wind nothing more than a faint
stirring, the sun bouncing from the sea ice and sending up a heat haze. If you
weren't careful in all this dazzle, you could be snow blind in thirty minutes.
The blindness itself wouldn't kill you but with no sight you'd be reliant on
your dogs to get you home safely. Edie could name four or five hunters who would
not be alive today were it not for their dogs. Just another reason why,
wherever possible, when Edie went out on the land alone for any extended
period, she preferred to travel in the traditional way.

    In
any case, in good conditions, the journey to Craig wasn't all that arduous.
Once you'd got over the pressure ridge you were on flat sea ice all the way.
The distance from the beach at Autisaq to Tikiutijawilik on Craig couldn't be
more than fifty kilometres. But in difficult conditions, it was a whole other
story. Looking out across the huge and largely featureless expanse now, she was
struck by what a miracle it had been for Joe to have made it back in the middle
of a whiteout, hypothermic, frostbitten and confused. A rush of anger came
then. On that fateful trip out with Fairfax and Taylor she and Joe had both
wanted to take their dog teams. They figured it would be easier to pick up
signs of old cairns or burial mounds that way, but Taylor had insisted on
taking the machines. He'd used them in Alaska and was absolutely convinced of
their superiority over dogs. Edie had pointed out that Alaska was as far south
from Ellesmere as California was from Alaska but this didn't seem to impress
him. He'd been in such a hurry.

    Too
many thoughts. Edie mushed on the dogs and tried to focus once more on the
route.

    A
couple of kilometres from the coast of Craig she saw something stirring on the
horizon, a
puikaktuq,
a mirage, in Inuktitut literally 'rising above the
sea'. At first a shining silver cloud, the
puikaktuq
began to quiver
then slowly to coalesce and, as it did so, Edie realized to her amazement that
a figure was forming from the cloud. Slowly, slowly the cloud billowed and
shrank, gathering an outline, until there was no question in her mind that the
outline was that of a young man and, more specifically still, from the way it
moved, that what she was looking at was a
puikaktuq
of Joe: not the Joe
of the bones and meat, interred beneath rocks on the muskeg, but the Joe of the
spirit world, the
atiq
Joe, a soft, surrounding presence. There he was,
a great Northern Light shimmering on the horizon. The dogs, too, seemed to have
sensed something because they set up a furious howling and began pulling
excitedly forward. As the komatik raced across the pan, Edie felt the ice
crystals forming little boulders in the corners of her eyes, the moisture
between her lips freezing, the hairs in her nose pulling at the snot as it
froze inside her nostrils until she could sense him all around her, little
particles of Joe, tumbling across the sea ice.

    Then,
just as suddenly as he had come, the
puikaktuq
disintegrated, the dogs
slowed and standing on the shore- fast ice not far away, the figure of a man
appeared, and beside him, resolving in the dazzling sun, a small komatik and
six dogs. Edie realized that it was this man, not the
puikaktuq,
who had
been the reason for her team's excitement.

    Waving
and calling, she made her way towards the figure, but got no response. As she
neared, she could just make out the shape of Old Man Koperkuj. He was fishing
through the ice. He'd clearly been there some time, because there were six fat
char lying beside his fishing hole.

    'You
sent the fish away,' he grumbled, as she anchored her dogs and walked up to
him.

    Edie
apologized. He was quite right to be upset. Had she been observing proper
custom, she'd have pulled her dogs up some way off and awaited his signal to
approach. The incident with the
puikaktuq
had made her forget her
manners and now she had probably cost him some fish.

    Though
she'd known Saomik Koperkuj all her life, she'd never had very much to do with
him. He lived in a cabin not far from Martie and came into town only to pick up
his welfare or trade a pile of furs. One of the original Nunavik exiles and a
bit of a drinker, it was said. Rumour had it that he and Martie had something
going for a while, but even if that was true, Edie regarded it as nobody's
business but their own. All the same, he was an ill-tempered old musk ox, been
on his own so long he had forgotten how to be in company. All that snorting and
showing his horns. She couldn't understand what her aunt had seen in him.