White Heat (54 page)
Authors: Melanie Mcgrath
'He's
good,' Edie said.
'Tell
him to come by sometime,' the old man said. 'I prefer his company to yours.'
'That's
a relief,' Edie said. 'Been looking for any excuse not to have to come.'
'I
never asked you to.'
'I
only do it to get the Rev Whathisname off my back about not going to church.'
'Won't
do you no good,' Koperkuj said. 'You're going straight to hell anyway.'
She
left the old man with some homemade blood soup and scooted up to the airstrip.
A group of people in business suits and parkas were hanging around the
terminal, trying to squeeze various pieces of native handicraft into their
luggage before the flight out arrived. Simeonie was standing in their midst,
attempting to marshal the proceedings. He acknowledged her with a nod. They
weren't exactly friendly with one another but, since the confrontation, he'd
been surprisingly polite, fearful, she supposed, that she might expose him in
public.
Derek
Palliser was talking to Pol Tilluq up by the luggage scales. He spotted her,
waved an arm in the direction of the suits and mouthed the word 'consultants'.
Edie shrugged and mouthed back,
Ayunqnak,
it can't be helped.
Since
the events of more than four months ago, she'd barely seen the police sergeant.
He'd spent some time convalescing in Iqaluit, then been flown down to Ottawa to
receive a commendation from the government. After that, he had returned to
Iqaluit for a while to work with the prosecution lawyer for Robert Patma's
trial, which was scheduled for the summer. The
Ottawa Citizen
had
printed his picture on page seven and the
Arctic Circular
had carried a
long article about his lemming research and named him Northern Communities
Policeman of the Year. Misha called not long afterwards. He'd been wrong to
suspect she had anything to do with Beloil, he said, but he didn't invite her
back to Kuujuaq.
Edie
elbowed her way through the crowd towards him. He flashed her a smile and got a
stupid grin in return.
'Hey,
Police. Spare a moment later?' she said. 'I got a favour to ask.'
He
gave her a look of mock despair.
'I'm
just crazy about you, too, Sergeant Palliser,' she said.
The
remainder of the day, she taught class, ate a hot supper of caribou tongue at
home and packed her trailer. Around five she called in at the police office.
Derek was clearing the last of the papers on his desk.
'You
ready?'
'As
ready as I'll ever be, not knowing where we're going or what we're doing.'
She
winked at him.
'Trust
me,' she said.
He
laughed. 'Right.'
They
took the snowmobiles out over the pressure ridge near to the shore and onto the
ice sheet of Jones Sound. It was biting cold now, fifty below with wind chill,
but the ice was the best travelling they'd had all winter: still, firm and
settled, and the moon was high and bright, the stars littering the sky like so
many snowflakes. Three and a half hours they journeyed south. Eventually, with
the outline of Craig Island looming from the dark ahead, Edie stopped beside a
large berg, whose northwest side had collected great banks of snowdrift,
compacted in the wind. She swung from the vehicle and went over to check.
She
shouted over to Derek: 'Three-layer snow.'
The
policeman brought his vehicle in closer and switched off the engine. 'You
planning on making a snowhouse?'
'What
else do you do with three-layer snow?'
Edie
fetched her walrus-ivory snowknife and began sawing out blocks.
'You
know what night this is?' she said.
He
thought about it for a moment and shook his head, stumped.
It was
the last night of the Great Dark Period, a night most High Arctic Inuit spent
all winter looking forward to, the end to four months of twenty-four-hour
darkness. Just before midday tomorrow, the sun would rise for the first time,
if only momentarily. It would be the first they had seen of it in more than a
hundred days.
They
found a good spot for a house, far enough from the berg not to be in danger of
shattering but near enough to be protected a little from the prevailing winds,
and loaded the blocks of snow she'd cut out onto the trailer. The snow- house
took them three hours to build. When it was up, Edie crawled inside, tamped the
floor, laid caribou skins, put up lamps and cut a window glazed, in lieu of
seal gut, with a piece of plastic. They drank hot tea and rested for a while,
sitting on the skins, Derek smoking, neither of them saying much.
Edie
went out onto the ice, taking her walrus knife with her, and beckoned for Derek
to follow. Cutting a hole in the ice, she squatted down beside it. For a while
she was silent, running the events of the past months over in her head. Then
she reached for the thread of seal leather around her neck, untied it and
handed it to him. He took it and laid it on the palm of his hand. It was the
first time he'd seen the stone.
'Doesn't
look much, does it?' was all he said.
She
said: 'I want you to throw it into the sea.'
He
reached over the hole in the ice, lifted the necklace above it and dropped the
stone. They heard a tiny splash, then nothing. It began to snow, thick discs of
infinite, microscopic complexity, tumbling down from high, patchy cloud.
'I'm
tired,' she said suddenly.
He
nodded. 'Let's get some sleep.'
They
returned to the snowhouse and slept for a long while. When they woke, Edie
brewed hot tea from berg ice and heated the seal stew she'd brought.
That
week, the
Arctic Circular
had reported that the oil spill in the Okhotsk
Sea had proved worse than Zemmer had predicted. The oil company's shares were on
the floor and environmental groups were calling for the company directors to be
prosecuted for breach of their fiduciary duties to the people affected by the
spill. Zemmer had scaled down its exploration operations. The corporation
wasn't likely to be back in the Arctic again for some time. Beloil, too, had
taken a heap of bad press after someone posted footage of two of its employees
robbing graves on YouTube. Its chairman, Belovsky, had publicly promised to get
to the bottom of the incident. In the meantime, Beloil was laying low.
'I
guess there'll be other oil outfits up here,' she said, spooning up the stew.
'Bringing bigger machines, more money.'
Derek
agreed that in the long run, they were unstoppable.
'And
in the short run?'
'I've
been thinking about that.'
The
policeman outlined his plan. At the time of the National Parks Act, back in the
1920s, when most of the rest of Ellesmere and its outlying islands had been
designated as National Park, Craig had been left out. It was an anomaly which
made the island very vulnerable. But Derek had been thinking, if he could
persuade the National Parks board that there were special reasons for
redesignating Craig then, at least for the foreseeable future, they might issue
a pending order over the island. If that happened, no one - not the Town Hall
or the Nunavut legislature or even the federal government would be able to
issue resource exploration licences for the island - until the redesignation
issue had been sorted. Even with evidence of the existence of a gas field on
Craig, no one could buy their way into a drilling operation there.
'So
I'm thinking, the summer Wildlife and Parks expeditions make audits of
Ellesmere's rare and endangered animal populations,' Derek went on. 'But when it
comes to more common wildlife, they rely on my reports.'
She
laughed. 'Not lemmings!'
He
grinned back. 'Lemmings, yes, on which, if you remember, Edie, I'm something of
an expert.'
'I do
believe I had forgotten,' she said, cutting him a wink.
There
were two species of lemming, he said, the common collared,
Dicrostonyx
torquatus,
and the North American brown,
Lemmus trimuscronatus.
'There
are all kind of sub-species and variants, but for our purposes, let's just say
there are two.'
'And
what are our purposes?'
Derek
held up his hand.
'I'm
coming to that. Up here
D. torquatus
is very common, but
L.
trimuscronatus
is rare everywhere, so rare in fact that it's on the IUCN
list of threatened species.' Derek smiled. 'To this point in time, there has
never been a sighting of
L. trimuscronatus
north of Baffin Island.'
Edie
considered this fact for a moment. She raised her palms as if to say, 'And?'
'As
Wildlife Officer for Ellesmere Island, I'd obviously be duty bound to report to
the Canadian Wildlife and Parks Service any sightings of
L. trimuscronatus
on Craig Island, even if they were unconfirmed.'
All
of a sudden, Edie could see where this was going.
He
held up his palm to indicate that he wasn't finished.
'There
would have to be demographic, environmental and habitation studies. And what
with the research period confined to a couple of months in the summer, who
knows how long they might take?'
A
laugh escaped Edie's lips.
'You're
almost as cunning as those oil men,' she said, admiringly.
'Even
a lemming brain has its uses,' he said.
They
beamed at one another, then she stood up and reached out a hand.
'Come
on, Police,' she said. 'Let's go outside and wait for the sunrise.'
I was
greatly assisted in the early development of this book by a grant from the Arts
Council England. Thanks also to Simon Booker and Dr Tai Bridgeman, who read a
number of drafts and had many useful suggestions to make. I am grateful to my
agent, Peter Robinson, to Stephen Edwards, Margaret Halton, Kim Witherspoon and
the staff of Rogers, Coleridge and White and of Inkwell Management. Very many
thanks are also due to Maria Rejt, Sophie Orme and the team at Mantle and to
Kathryn Court, Alexis Washam and the team at Penguin USA. Any errors are mine alone.
Many
of the places in this book including Ellesmere and Devon Island, part of the
Queen Elizabeth group in the Canadian High Arctic, and Qaanaaq and Etah in
Northwest Greenland, are real. Others, such as Autisaq, Kuujuaq and Craig
Island, are inventions. There is a real weather station at Eureka on Ellesmere
Island and a scientific research station on Devon Island, but any resemblance
between these real-life facilities and/or their personnel to the fictional ones
described in this book is entirely coincidental.
Inuktitut
is a highly sophisticated, polysynthetic Eskimo-Aleut language spoken by Inuit
across the Arctic region. It is broken up into a number of regional dialects
which form a linguistic chain. Each dialect is mutually intelligible to
neighbours but not those far away, so an Inuk from Greenland may not be able to
communicate easily with another from, say, Alaska. Some dialects are written in
the Roman alphabet, others in a syllabic- alphabet created by missionaries in
the late 1800s.
Inuktitut
consists of morphemes, the smallest units of meaning, which, in relation to one
another, build into compound words. These compound words may be the equivalent
of a whole sentence in Indo-European languages, e.g.
pariliarumaniralauqsimanngittunga,
which means 'I never said I wanted to go to Paris.' Additional morphemes can be
used to change the nature of the root morpheme, so
qinmiq
means dog,
qinmiqtuqtuq
going by dog team.
Inuktitut
both supports and reflects the Inuit world- view. It is highly relational and
tends to deal in the concrete rather than the abstract, shying away from
generic nouns. In their traditional hunting culture, it was less useful to
Inuit to know there were fish in a river as to know exactly what species of
fish and in which part of the river they were to be found. Place names, too,
tend to be specific and functional. Inuit call Ellesmere Island Umingmak Nuna
or Musk-Ox Land to signal to themselves and to future generations that the
island is a place where musk ox can be found and hunted. Even today, when new
words have to be conjured, these have a concrete, descriptive quality. The word
for computer,
qarasaujaq,
means 'something that works like a brain.' It
is, however, a myth that the Inuit have hundreds of words for snow. In fact
they have about the same number of 'root' words for snow as Indo-European
languages but the nature of Inuktitut means that to describe what we might call
'frosty, sparkling snow,' Inuit can use a single poly- synthetic word,
patuqun.