The Shaman's Knife (24 page)

He wasn't any too loquacious, even with the earpiece in. No, they'd seen nobody going in or out until all the crowd came, policee and everybody. They were very sorry about Thelma and Dennissie and my mother. The woman kept nodding. I left.

Next door, the fat lady didn't answer the door to my knock, but roared through it, “I didn' see nothin'!”

 

I spent the rest of the morning partly on the phone, partly writing a condensed version of what I'd been doing, and sending it by fax to G Division with a copy to Ottawa. Bouvier was screening all incoming calls and I took none of them. One was from Erika Hall in Cambridge Bay. She wondered if we knew of any charters coming this way that she might hitch a ride on. When Bouvier told me that, I hoped she wouldn't somehow find Thomassie Nuniviak and turn on the charm. Thomassie, I knew of old, was not impervious to charm.

From the detachment window I could see, as expected, that no snowmobile was parked at Debbie's house. Every hour, I called the weather office. I also did a lot of looking out of the window hoping to see the storm easing off. By ten thirty, that seemed to be happening. I went back to the hotel and asked Margaret if she would make me up a lunch, sandwiches, thermos of tea. By then I had done everything else necessary. Bouvier was getting the detachment snowmobile gassed up and loading a sled with everything I might need for a three-day trip (to be on the safe side). I called to see how he was doing.

“Good,” he said.

“How long?”

“Half an hour, max. Most of it's loaded already except some of Sadie's heat-in-the-bag stew I'll get from her freezer.”

I decided to call Thomassie ahead of the noon call we'd decided upon. If I got out of here in half an hour and the traveling wasn't real bad, I'd be something like five hours getting to No Name Lake. From Cambridge Bay Thomassie said the official weather word was that the storm had blown itself out north of here by now and that the clearing was moving steadily south.

“They tell me likely I can get off by three.”

“Okay, let's figure on that. What I'll do is take a direct course from the airstrip here to No Name. What you do when you can fly is head straight for the lake area and see what you can see. Three or four hunters from here including the one I want most are out somewhere on two snowmobiles, and the best guess I can get locally is that they headed for No Name. You won't see any old tracks around there, the snow would look after that, but if you see a hunting party or signs of a camp before you see me, just keep on going until you do see me and can land. We'll figure it out from there. If you're at two or three thousand feet with your eyes open—”

“Nuniviaks never sleep,” he interrupted. “Especially while flying.”

“—and we stay on those courses and neither of us screws up, we oughta see each other all right around four.”

Being Thomassie, he didn't ask what if we don't?

“I'll be on the detachment snowmobile, blue, towing a sled. When we see one another you find a place you can land and I'll follow to talk about what next, okay? See any holes in that?”

“No more than a million,” he said cheerfully. “But it sure as hell beats flying guys across the Mackenzie Delta from Inuvik to Aklavik with cases of beer. That all?”

“All I can think of.”

I hung up. Margaret was watching me. She'd heard enough to know what was happening. “You're crazy,” she said.

For reasons that I knew very well, the excitement of going into action, I felt not crazy at all, but good.

Boarding the snowmobile to head out a little later, I was briefly tempted to go along the sea ice for a while, which might have been smoother. But that wasn't the course I'd given Thomassie, the straight line from Sanirarsipaaq to No Name Lake, so I didn't.

The temperature, I figured, was just around freezing. I was prepared for worse, if it came. Most of my heavy-duty cold wear had flown with me from Labrador last Monday. The rest I'd borrowed from Bouvier. I had on a thermal shirt next to my skin, down vest, pants of caribou hide with the fur inside, knee-high boots of caribou hide with rubber bottoms, a winter parka, fur hat, and goggles which at first I had to keep wiping free of the occasional flurry of wet snow until I soon tipped them back under my parka hood.

In the compartment below the seat was the detachment's two-way radio and a few tools and spare parts that the prudent northern traveler never leaves behind. A rifle projected from a scabbard by my right knee, one clip loaded, with extra clips in my parka pocket. A light tent, a box of cooking utensils and food, plus seven (to be on the safe side) red plastic gas cans, each holding five gallons, made up the main load on the sled. Also, I didn't go anywhere in the north without the little Swiss-made Silva compass I had hanging around my neck. The bearing I had to follow was a little west of due south.

I speeded up past a snow plow on the airport road and onto the empty landing strip. After a mile or two I was in terrain I'd never traveled before, so I didn't know what landmarks, if any, might exist. Once I reached the open tundra the snow had almost stopped. The wind was on my back. I opened the throttle again, this time to what I thought was a fair cruising speed for unfamiliar terrain, bumping along at probably ten miles an hour.

An hour and a half out I stopped to look around, check my compass, pour tea from the thermos in a holder alongside my left leg. I ate a sandwich, slices of musk-ox pot roast on thick brown bread spread with butter, mayonnaise, mustard, and lots of pepper. Finishing that, I pulled my binoculars from their pocket next to my body and scanned the horizon. Visibility, which had been zero when I woke and maybe a few hundred yards when I set out, was getting a little better all the time. I saw rabbits, one fox, one raven.

Ahead, I really didn't know what to expect. Davidee and company might not have gone as far as No Name, might have encountered caribou before that . . . but I'd seen no caribou signs at all. The wolf howls I'd heard the night before, a likely sign of caribou, had been coming downwind and could have been well west of my course. My thoughts drifted back to the people at mother's funeral, dozens of whom I hadn't seen for so many years; some who hardly knew me at all; the extended family, kin group, of half-brothers and half-sisters, mostly older than me, from this father or that, causing me to remember all the sometimes kind and sometimes cruel men who had subbed for my father in my mother's life after he drowned. The funeral had been a time of sadness and praise, along with occasional slow and even shy questions. It seemed that after the sadness had been expressed, the thought on every mind was, “When are you going to find who did this, Matteesie?”

So I went on with occasional stops to wipe condensation from my binoculars and scan the horizons. Once, with a jab of excitement, I saw well to the west what I first thought was a wolf, maybe an outrider for a caribou-shadowing wolf pack. Where there were caribou I might find the hunting party I was looking for. But closer up, exit excitement. Using the binoculars again I could see from the animal's distinctive running style, humping along like a small bear, that it was a wolverine.

Farther along I crossed the tracks the animal had left going east-to-west across my course. Tracks are always conclusive. Wolves, from the dog family, have four toes. Wolverines, from the weasel family, have five.

One thirty passed, then two. Nothing in front, behind, or at either side except the featureless tundra. A feeling I knew well stole over me. For much of my life I had felt this kind of euphoria on the trail, an inner peace that is difficult to describe. On one level I was alert to everything I saw—even the total sameness of what I was seeing, the mainly trackless snow, places where the going looked rough and rocky and should be avoided, the vast expanse of empty land ahead whenever I reached the top of a small rise and started down the next long stretch. On another level I was thinking of my mother and of the dog teams I'd driven long distances while hunting, of times in my late teens when I had brought game back to camp to happy hungry people and had been the honored one around the cooking pot. Then I would be given the best sleeping place in the igloo (in the middle, with lesser lights assigned to the cold outside walls). At other times, before I had been old enough to be counted a hunter, and when others brought in the meat, I could remember when I had to sleep on the cold end trying to cuddle close to the body next to mine—never young and female, the adults who laid out the sleeping arrangements always would see to that.

In some terrible storms, when the right kind of densely packed snow for igloo-building wasn't close to hand, igloos built hastily or carelessly had been known to collapse, sometimes causing death or injury to some inside. Once, when I was quite young, my mother and her man and I were traveling with two other families, a total of fourteen in all, when a mighty blizzard fell on us, bad enough that we knew we might not be able to move for days.

One old man in the group, not often heard from with the younger men around, suddenly was boss. In a few shouted words above the howling wind he made the fourteen of us into a team; pointing, explaining, pushing for speed and accuracy. All of us, even children my age, dug down to find the kind of snow suitable. Heavy blocks were cut and trimmed by the old man into great wedges for the foundations, smaller wedges as the walls grew upward. When the igloo was domed and complete, with him inside, he lighted a fire in the igloo then cut his way out and sealed the hole. I shivered, held close to my mother while she put her mouth close to my ear so I could hear above the gale as she explained: the fire inside would melt a thin layer on the interior of the snow blocks, this to freeze solidly into a structure strong and safe.

When the old man cut out what was to be the entrance tunnel and then entered and doused the fire, this freezing did happen, fast. All of us were inside by then, the women preparing their oil lamps for heating and cooking and spreading skins two or three deep on the sleeping ledges. The old man then jabbed his knife through the roof to make the essential tiny hole always left in an igloo's peak. The hole would let out the warm air from our lamps and bodies so that everything would not get damp within. Every time I built a snowhouse after that, I did it the old man's way.

At three the clouds broke, and the sun shone through. I was passing the eastern tip of a small lake that showed on my map as being a few miles north of No Name. I halted for tea and another sandwich and to sweep the horizon with my binoculars, checking the sky too in case Thomassie's Cessna might be a speck up there somewhere. It wasn't.

Then, around three thirty, a break. Close to the north shore of No Name my binoculars picked up a line, some kind of a trail. Standing beside it minutes later I found a fresh set of snowmobile tracks, heading east. They had been made since well after the storm began—maybe about the time the snow ended, to judge from the drifting that had started, along with the quickly dropping temperatures and rising wind. The straight parallel lines of the machine's skis framed the hard-packed narrower path of the drive-belt. Far away to the east the trail seemed to come to a point, like an old movie shot of train tracks disappearing into infinity.

I thought it over for angles. Except for the possibility that this trail had been made by someone entirely separate, someone had left Davidee's hunting party. Why? And who? While I thought about it, I tried to raise Bouvier on the radio, but he didn't respond. Anyway, he hadn't called me so I could assume there was nothing new at his end.

And then I did hear the aircraft. Thomassie circled me, waved, and came in to land on No Name a few hundred yards away. I arrived alongside just as he switched off his engine and opened the door to hop out. We hugged one another. We are almost exactly the same size. A person who didn't know differently might have thought we were brothers, even twins, with our black hair, stubby build, slanted eyes slitted by the sun; the main difference was that he was dressed more lightly for the Cessna's heated cabin, while I was more like a modern version of the old skin-clad Inuit who had been traveling these climes for centuries, hunting food and shelter to survive. He got on the snowmobile behind me. We went back and inspected the tracks. He agreed that the recent minor drifting set a time frame.

“I could see the trail but no machine when I was coming in,” Thomassie said. “If it went by here say two hours ago that would be time to get out of sight.”

I tried to raise Bouvier again. “Bouvier? Matteessie here. Over.” Got only static in reply.

I was doing some heavy thinking, or trying to. Traveling at speed due east, whoever drove that snowmobile might have been on his way back to Sanirarsipaaq, hoping for smoother going on the sea ice. But the who and why could not be answered. Davidee? Not likely—he'd been at pains to keep out of my way, for whatever reason. Hard Hat? Prom what Bouvier said about the talk Saturday and from Hard Hat's remarks, to me earlier he'd seemed actually to be too scared to do anything except deny that he'd done anything so far, trying to sell the image that as far as he was concerned there was nobody here but us chickens.

Then I noticed something. I drove my machine slowly until I was close to, and parallel with, the other machine's tracks, which I could see had cut deeper than mine.

Thomassie and I were talking mostly in the regional dialect, Siglit, which we both understood. I pointed at my track and said, “
Atausitchiaaq
,” meaning, that “only one” man, I, was on that machine. Then I pointed at the other track. “
Malruk
.” Meaning that I thought two had been on that one. He pondered that and asked, “
Suuq?
” Meaning in this instance something like, “Why? How many are there in all?”

“At least three, maybe four.”

Our planning conference then was fairly heavy with the common Siglit words for “What should we do next?” In the end I suggested that Thomassie take off and make a sweep to the east to try to pick up the other snowmobile and maybe land and see who was aboard.

I would run west, backtracking to where the machine had come from. When either of us had something to report, we could communicate by radio. Thomassie started back toward the Cessna, turning after a few steps to call back, “
Anayanaqtuaq
,”—“Be careful.”