White Heat (22 page)

    Two
days passed, and on the morning of the third day she woke, still drunk, to find
her sheets in such disarray she wondered if her spirit had been attacked in the
night. She phoned in to school to say she would be late and took herself down
to the nursing station. There were only a few people in line at the morning
drop-in and she didn't have to wait long.

    Robert
Patma ushered her into his room. He seemed surprised to see her. She had never
been a great one for doctors and had only called on him once during the three
years he'd been in the post. He threw her a sympathetic look and asked what was
wrong.

    'I
don't know,' she said. 'I can't sleep.'

    'It's
a
big thing you've been through. You just need to let everything settle.'

    'I'm
seeing things.'

    For
a
moment Robert looked taken aback. Then, gathering himself, he leaned
forward, concern written across his face: 'What do you mean, you're seeing
things?'

    
'Puikaktuq
.'
It sounded stupid and in the moments that followed she tried desperately to
think of ways of taking the admission back.

    She
glanced behind her to make sure the door to the consulting room was closed.
People would think a bad spirit had possessed her, or that she was going crazy.
Her voice lowered to a whisper.

    'I
saw a mirage out on the land, then it followed me. Now it's with me all the
time.'

    Patma
was lost in thought for a moment, then he said: 'This
puikaktuq,
did it
look like Joe?'

    She
nodded, then corrected herself. 'Sometimes, then not.' She shivered. 'Am I
sick?'

    Patma
shook his head. He didn't seem so great himself, she thought. He looked like he
needed a sleep. 'Uh nuh, you're not sick and you're not going mad. I think what
you're describing are probably bereavement hallucinations. They're very
common.'

    'Did
you get them?' she asked.

    Robert
sat back.

    'When
your father died?' Was it his father? She couldn't remember. So much had
happened since then.

    He
frowned. 'My mother,' he said.

    'Yes,
of course,' she said. 'I'm so sorry.'

    He
acknowledged her with a slight nod.

    'You
need to get some rest, Edie,' he said. 'All this, it's a big shock.' He
considered for a moment. 'Look, I guess you know Joe had problems, Edie.' He
looked up. 'I mean the gambling.'

    The
sudden change of subject floored her.

    'It
doesn't make any sense to me.'

    'Me
neither,' he said. 'We were pretty close.' He reached for her hand but didn't quite
clasp it. 'But you know, Edie, sometimes you just gotta accept things. It
happened, it was a tragedy and we're all just going to have to get used to it.'

    She
noticed his hand was shaking.

    'Those
hallucinations will move on just as soon as you do.'

    All
of a sudden she felt uncomfortable, wanting to be out of there. She stood up.

    At
the door he called her back and in a sterner tone, he said; 'I could give you
something to help you sleep, but you'd have to quit the drinking.'

    Derek
Palliser had been watching lemmings stir for weeks and by the middle of June,
what he'd seen had convinced him a swarm was gathering. None of the lemming
experts had predicted it but, the way Derek saw things, that was because they'd
got the business of population dynamics back to front.

    It
had started when he'd been out walking Piecrust one day at the beginning of
May, very early in the year for lemmings to have roused themselves from their
winter quarters underground, and detected fresh lemming droppings among the
willows scraped clear of ice by caribou. Next time he went out on the land, he
took a notebook and began writing down the position of the runways and nests,
marked by sprigs of the dried grass the lemmings had used to insulate their
winter quarters, and by tiny piles of fibrous droppings, and sometimes only by
Piecrust's excitable barking.

    It
was still early in the breeding season and already the lemming population was
showing signs of exploding. On the river banks he began to see more fox spoor
than usual and twice, while walking along the cliffs on Simmons Peninsula, he'd
spotted pile after pile of jaeger pellets consisting entirely of lemming fur
and bones. Droppings littered those parts of the muskeg where the sun had
cleared the ice and the willow buds had been nibbled to nubs.

    In a
few weeks from now he expected the pressure on food resources to be so extreme
that the lemmings would begin to eat their young. After that, they'd begin gathering
in great living sheets, hundreds of thousands of them, all pressing forward in
the search for new terrain. As they began to swarm, the pressure of numbers
would send those on the periphery cascading over cliffs and ledges, and the
meltwater streams would become seething bridges of live and drowning rodents,
each successive wave trampling over the other in their push for new ground.

    In
the world of his fantasy he had so often imagined this frantic exodus to new
pastures, the mass tramplings, drownings, tumblings from cliffs and rocks, the
frenzy of predators, that he felt he'd somehow brought the moment into being.
He thought of himself as the brave and selfless reporter sending dispatches
from the middle of the war zone, because, make no mistake, the lemming swarm
was war, a Darwinian struggle for survival played out on a breathtaking scale.

    More
than at any other time in his life, Derek was conscious that he could not
afford distractions. He would have to focus his every waking moment on the
meticulous, systematic gathering of the evidence so that when he finally
presented his findings - to
Nature,
perhaps, or to
Scientific
American -
the whole package would be watertight. The thought that he alone
might predict a lemming swarm when scientists with PhDs and grand reputations
were saying the population wouldn't peak for another year was thrilling. He'd
waited too long in the wings for this not to be the moment that changed
everything.

    Even
though there had been no formal investigations, the dismal events of the spring
had tied up a great deal of detachment time. In a normal year, he and Stevie
would start out on their spring patrol at the end of April. This was their
chance to survey the land, check on caches, conduct
a
few low-level
experiments, complete their wildlife assessments for the year ahead and make a
courtesy call on one or other of the more remote weather stations.

    Now
the snow had mostly cleared from the low-lying tundra, and though it lingered
in drifts and in the lee of cliffs and eskers, it was too late to travel any
distance on the land. On the other hand, the sea ice was still solid and it was
light all the time now, so there was nothing to stop them travelling twelve,
fifteen hours a day. More importantly, Derek would be able to gather more
evidence of the impending lemming swarm and be ready to report on it on his
return.

    They
would sleep 'upside down', travelling during the cooler hours after 10p.m. In
good conditions they would average two hundred kilometres a day, though there
were places where travel would be tougher, such as at the narrow strait where
the Colin Archer Peninsula of northwest Devon Island reached up to the
southwestern tip of Ellesmere. The strait was part-blocked by North Kent
Island, which functioned like a cork in a bottle. Here the sea was open all
year and huge ice boulders raced through violent and unpredictable currents.
Derek reckoned on taking a couple of days to get around it.

    He'd
also factored in three research stops on the way. The first would be his own
pet project, a count of lemmings on the Simmons Peninsula; the second was a
Wildlife Service survey of wolves up on Bjorne Island. This was a trickier
proposition altogether, because it was so hard to get anywhere near a Bjorne
wolf. Then from Bjorne they'd head across Baumann Fiord into Eureka Sound and
drop into the weather station there for the third and final stop, though most
of the research up at Eureka would be of the strictly social kind.

    They
set off in light drizzle and, after a few hours of uneventful travel across the
pack, made camp on the green beach at the tip of the Lindstrom Peninsula and
clambered up onto the plateau. Thaw slumps had appeared since the last spring
patrol. Stevie took pictures, making a note of the shrunken ice wedges in
amongst the rocks and of the relative profusion of mountain sorrel caused by
the retreating spillway. When that was done, they checked on the police cache
they'd planted there a couple of years previously, in case they ever got into
trouble.

    The
two men made such good time that they took the afternoon off to rest and fish
at the ice edge beside Hell Gate and that evening feasted on char and bannock
bread before starting their second night ride. It had stopped drizzling now and
the air had taken on the electric smell of the dry west country.

    They
started out again around 10 p.m. and hadn't gone far when Derek remembered that
neither of them had yet checked in with the detachment, which was being manned
in their absence by Pol. One of the joys of the patrol was how quickly you lost
all sense of clock time, particularly, as now, when it was light twenty-four
hours a day. Now wasn't such a good time to stop. The tough conditions around
North Kent Island lay ahead and Derek needed the petty distractions of small
town life like a hole in the head. In any case, he figured, nothing significant
ever happened in Kuujuaq while they were away. Getting in contact was a
formality as much as anything, a way of registering that he and Stevie were
doing OK. He made a note to himself to do it next time they made camp.

    As it
turned out, the ice foot was pretty smooth and still plenty wide enough to
accommodate the snowbies riding side by side. By the end of the third night's
travel they had already passed North Kent and were on the pack in Norwegian
Bay.

    Around
6a.m. they scouted the far corner of a beach gouged by ice blocks, which gave a
view out to the low coast of Graham Island. They'd camped here at least once a
year for as long as Derek could recall. Just to the west of the beach there was
a tidewater glacier surrounded by steep moraines from where it was always
possible to chip out sweet water. In the winter, there was good ice fishing to
be had here and in the summer, murres, kittiwakes and dovekies nested along the
low, blunt cliffs, eiders bred among the finger willows and caribou came down
to drink at the spillways.

    It
was the start of bear country. They were often to be found way out on the pan,
hunting seals, though in recent years, the melting pan had forced them inland
earlier, but the air was most often clear and the country was low with wide
vistas so man and bear weren't likely to run into one another by accident. That
said, you couldn't be too careful. A decade or so ago, he'd seen them regularly
playing with the dog teams on the ice outside Kuujuaq but these days the bears
were more likely to view the dogs as an easy meal. It was a hard time to be a
bear.

    When
they'd finished erecting the tent, Stevie set up the primus and the two men
mugged up and put on some bannock to heat. Neither was a big talker and while
they waited for the bread to cook, they mostly sat in silence, speaking only
when some question came to mind they couldn't answer for themselves.

    'You
read that piece in the
Circular
?' Stevie said. 'Hermaphrodite bears.'

    'Uh
huh.' A long pause. 'Actually, no. What the hell
is
a hermaphrodite
bear?'

    'One
that's both male and female. That's what the
Circular
said.'

    Another
long pause, while both men chewed this proposition over, then Stevie said:
'Now, wouldn't
that
save a heck of a lot of trouble.'

    Later,
Derek lit a cigarette while Stevie cranked up the sat phone and made a brief
call to his wife, who was just getting the kids off to school. Stevie signed
off: 'I guess we should check on the detachment.'

    Derek
replied reluctantly: 'I guess so.'

    Out
on patrol was the one time Derek had the luxury of forgetting about the place.