Late Nights on Air (25 page)

He thought of a phrase, something he’d read in one of Ralph’s northern books:
to have felt snow and ice forever, and nothing forever but ice and snow
.

The cold gathered. It was just beyond his window. He could feel it pressing in. All the cold from all over the Arctic pressing against that pane of glass.

At work, Harry leaned against Eleanor’s desk, idly lifted a few papers, then looked into her face.

“I haven’t heard a thing from her,” she said quietly. “Nobody has.”

Harry had instituted Monday morning story meetings for everyone on staff. Just once a week, he said, to keep one
another generally informed of what we’re doing. And still he met with sullen resistance from the newsroom. If anything, they were more openly mutinous. Bill Thwaite attended against his will. “What have you got this week?” Harry would ask. And Bill would fold his arms and answer, “Not a thing.”

They were in the studio, gathered around the big table. Harry peeled an orange over the metal wastebasket, the scent reminding him of lost Dido. The explosive fragrance. After she’d left him, his private drinking spree had cost him a week of work and earned him another black mark on the list of sins that would be used against him before long. Gwen watched his hands, fascinated by the way his fingers dug under the skin of the orange and ever so neatly peeled it back.

She had been brought in from the night shift to take over for Dido, a casual had been hired to do the night shift in her place, another was rapidly being trained by Andrew McNab to be a technician.

Harry looked around for Jim Murphy. But Jim, it would seem, couldn’t be bothered to show up.

He turned to reliable Gwen. She mentioned having lined up an interview with a bush pilot who’d discovered the remains of a beer keg on one of the high arctic islands, probably left behind in the 1800s by a search party looking for Franklin, and Bill laid into her for poaching on his territory: That’s
news
, he said, jabbing his ink-stained finger at her.

Turf wars, thought Harry. Inside the station, and out. “This is why we have story meetings,” he said wearily, “to coordinate current affairs and news. If you want a clip of Gwen’s interview for the newscast, all you have to do is ask.
And Gwen, you won’t air the full interview until after Bill’s run the clip. Okay?”

He turned to Teresa. Teresa had in front of her the newspaper story that related the case of a young Dene woman wandering naked and blind-drunk in the street after being locked out of a motel room; two men who worked at one of the mines stood accused of rape. She tapped the paper with her finger and said she wanted to do a series on violence against women. She had in mind an on-air manual in English and Dogrib of anecdotes, advice, information—what women faced, what they could do, who they could turn to. Gwen expressed immediate interest and they agreed to work on it together.

Before the meeting ended, Gwen asked Bill if he’d heard anything more about Lorna Dargabble. What were the police doing, anyway?

“They’re doing their job,” he said. Then, a little less grudgingly, he added, “I’m guessing we’ll learn what happened in the spring, after the snow’s gone.”

In the background, providing a wealth of material for Gwen and Teresa, were quietly impassioned witnesses at the Berger Inquiry presenting what amounted to a catalogue of northern pathologies. Anthropologists outlined the history of prospectors, traders, whalers, and miners pouring into the North with their diseases, their alcohol, their licentiousness. Medical experts and social workers methodically outlined what happens when the traditional pattern of life breaks down and individuals, families, whole communities lose their way. They described the particular burden for women, their isolated and
vulnerable lives during the long northern winters. And in the Dene communities, witness after witness told Berger about a close-knit culture increasingly fragmented by the white frontier mentality. Everyone, Dene and white, agreed that booze was the single most destructive force in the unravelling of lives that ended either in the slow violence of apathy and despair, or in the sudden violence of death by accident, homicide, poisoning, suicide.

THIS WAS THE WINTER
, the winter of 1976, that Gwen would remember in part for the three unlucky things that happened to Harry, three months in a row. January robbed him of Dido. February brought a second loss, which unfolded far from town. March would have its own misfortunes.

On a Saturday in late February, Harry and Ralph went ice fishing. They took Harry’s van and drove an hour to Prelude Lake, Harry’s dog riding in the back with the gear. Normally, Ella rode up front with him, leaning into his side “like a hot date,” in Ralph’s amused estimation.

They parked at Powder Point, skied across the tip of the snow-covered lake to a small rapids and followed the portage around them, then skied across a stretch of frozen river before climbing a steep hill, crossing a small lake and following another portage into Hidden Lake. From the edge of the lake rose rocky outcrops dusted with snow. Slender birch trees and taller spruce had footholds near the shore and more haphazardly on ridges and between rocky hills farther back. Every so often a raven spoke to them, cr-awk, cr-awk, and flew from one tree to another.

Ralph took note. The raven’s call had a little pop or pong sound, it seemed to him, an oval-shaped noise more
appropriate for a mouth than a beak. He’d helped Gwen assemble and dramatize her program of Raven tales, lending her his books and doing much of the writing of the trilingual scripts, since he knew a basic, uninhibited Inuktitut from his days of teaching in the eastern Arctic. From Teresa he was now learning some basic phrases in Dogrib—Teresa had written and delivered the Dogrib repartee for the Raven tales, as natural an actor, as uninhibited and relaxed, as she was a broadcaster. The beautiful Dido had narrated, but she hadn’t stuck around to hear the broadcast.

Long ago, went the central tale, man and the wild animals lived in utter darkness, for the great Chief hoarded the light. Raven, inspired by his own dark cunning, devised a plan to steal it. He turned himself into a pine needle, set himself afloat on water, and was swallowed by the Chief’s daughter, who became pregnant, giving birth to a boy. The boy grew up playing with his grandfather’s bags of light, biding his time, until finally he was old enough to fly up through the smoke hole and with a triumphant squawk empty the bags into the sky, thus giving light to the world.

A book of northern legends weighed down one of Ralph’s pockets, a flask of whisky weighed down another.

Ella, in her glory, bounded along beside them, darting off into the bush, darting back. Such easy travelling, wind and bug free (unlike last summer on the same lake when Ralph applied his hand to the back of his head and felt about twenty little bodies smear into his scalp; this he’d done every few seconds, it seemed, with unvarying results). In a sheltered cove, they used an auger to cut through the three-foot depth of ice, making four holes about half a foot in diameter each.
They dropped in lines baited with the small fresh-water herring called cisco. Each line was attached to a short stick propped up in the snow: when the stick fell over they had either a bite or a trout. To keep warm, they built a fire on shore and made tea and ate Ralph’s ham sandwiches. Once, Ella broke through the thin ice that covered a fast-running stream. The dunking soaked her fur, which froze immediately, making her look like a four-legged wraith. But her spirits were undampened.

With bare hands Harry and Ralph pulled up their lines, landing a total of five fat trout. They warmed themselves at the fire and talked about the summer expedition they were planning to the Thelon River. The trip was rapidly taking shape. A group of four was best, Ralph believed. More than that would be cumbersome. Fewer would be risky. “You say Eleanor is keen to go,” he said.

“She’s motivated,” nodded Harry. “And steady. I’ve never seen her lose her cool.”

“I like her,” smiled Ralph. “She puts up with me.”

“There’s Gwen. She’s avid to go too, even though it means two weeks without pay.”

“But I wonder if she’s got enough muscle,” said Ralph, “enough heft.”

“She’s wiry. She’s a worker. You’d get your money’s worth, I think.”

“She’s got physical courage,” Ralph admitted. “It’s not a mean feat, driving by herself all the way from Ontario.”

“There’s holiday time for her to work out. Eleanor, too. Six weeks is a long stretch.”

“Can
you
get away?” asked Ralph.

“I’m the boss,” said Harry with a mock swagger.

“Shall I tell them we’re on then? Or will you do the honours?”

“I’ll leave that to you,” said Harry.

The conversation turned to Eddy. Harry had told Ralph when it happened about being visited by the police. But there was no reason for Eddy to be mixed up in that kind of thing, he said again, still puzzled, still disturbed. He was a strange guy, but if he had anything it was a sense of morals.

“No reason you can think of.” Ralph rubbed his hands together close to the fire. He remembered Gwen’s view that Eddy had a problem with women. “Why I wonder did he and Dido take off so suddenly.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

About three o’clock they headed back to the van. Under the overcast sky, they had trouble seeing any contours until they were upon them, the snow deceptively flat in the fractional light. Harry kept a concerned eye out for leg-hold traps, having seen snowmobile tracks leading across the lake and knowing that trappers were about. He kept his dog close to him. But within sight of the road Ella bounded far ahead, suddenly stopped, then went after something.

Harry, coming alongside, shouted at her until he saw that it wasn’t a trap, just some dark indecipherable thing sitting above the snow. Not a body, animal or otherwise, but a piece of meat or skin. He called Ella away, she refused to come.

He skied on, paused, called her again. This time she came, but reluctantly.

They stowed their skis and packs, took swigs from Ralph’s flask, surveyed the dim sky. They were about to get into the van when the dog began to act strangely. She let out a whimper,
turned in circles, then fell to the ground and lay writhing. Harry knelt beside her, his hands on her jerking head, until she quieted, then he lifted her into his arms. The dark something must have been baited with poison and left in the open for wolves, probably, or foxes. A trapper hunting fur with poison.

Harry gave the keys to Ralph. In the passenger seat he held his nearly spent dog in his lap, while Ralph stepped hard on the accelerator. After about ten minutes, the second fit took hold, her limbs kicking, her whole body convulsing. Again, she quieted. Harry spoke to her, soothed her, stroked her.

Ralph kept the accelerator to the floor, but after a while Harry said what Ralph already knew, that there was no need to speed any more.

In the weeks that followed, watching Harry’s sadness, Eleanor found herself talking to Dido in her head,
You left somebody in the lurch, you know
. She wondered if she would ever get the chance to say it, face to face.

It was Eleanor’s fourth winter in Yellowknife. For the duration of it, all eight months, she missed the tiny flowers and richly coloured lichens that dotted the rocky outcrops, but she wasn’t sorry not to see the quantities of garbage that surfaced everywhere in the spring. She missed the long grass that shone whitish-gold with a purple tinge in the setting sun; the wild, small, misshapen raspberries sufficient for a modest pie; the occasions when half a dozen Dene children tore up and down the street, tumbling about at midnight, having a loud and happy time. But at the same time she was glad not to have to look at the cowering, cringing, beaten dogs that
spent the summers chained to willows and covered with flies.

One afternoon, when she and Gwen were in the Gold Range café talking about how to prepare for the summer expedition, Gwen said to her, “Sometimes I see Lorna out of the corner of my eye. At night I catch glimpses of her grey fur coat. It’s never her, of course.”

Eleanor didn’t answer. She felt a helpless anger about Lorna and her sad life and no doubt sadder end. About Dido she felt a different sort of anger. Cavalier Dido, who’d also left suddenly, without saying goodbye, then chosen to inform the station she was gone by calling at around seven in the morning, when she knew Jim Murphy would be the only one there. She’d told him that she and Eddy were in Hay River already, and they wouldn’t be coming back.

Suddenly Gwen looked up and asked, “Do you think I’m hot and cold? Too unpredictable to be trustworthy?”

“I wouldn’t be going on a canoe trip with you if I did.”

Later that afternoon, Harry came to Eleanor’s trailer, having offered to mend the worn patches on her kitchen floor with some leftover linoleum he had in his house—a pattern of black and white squares that he measured and cut, showing more dexterity than she’d given him credit for. His grandfather had been good with his hands, he explained, passing on the information that the old man had been a furrier in Winnipeg. In Eleanor’s mind something clicked.