The Ice Child (46 page)

It took Gus a very long time to get the blankets from the tent and wrap the body. The effort exhausted him.

At the very end he couldn’t remember a single prayer, and he couldn’t weep. He sat with his hands resting on the body, watching the water.

Then, he lay down at Crozier’s side, and waited to follow him.

Thirty-eight

The rain had stopped. The day was dull, but visibility was clear.

The bear lay on her stomach, all four legs splayed out, her head propped up slightly on the stones. She felt easier that way. There was more air.

She had been dreaming for hours.

There was more than one world, and she had lived in them all.

She had swum under ice ceilings swept clean of snow, that filtered light through the ocean, filling the depths with curtains of color. She had filled her senses with the power of the current, the fierce cold beauty of the ice-covered sea. In Lancaster Sound in the Arctic summer the sea was filled with millions of ctenophores, fringed with pulsating tendrils; thick with tiny, translucent copepods, so small that they looked like luminous dust in the refracted light. To dive under the ice was like diving into the stars—an unmapped eternity where whole galaxies rushed by.

She dreamed of the whales; belugas and bowheads who, after wintering along the southern edge of the pack ice, migrated back each spring. They came before any other traveler, returning through leads and cracks, moving northward. If the ice froze over and the leads closed, the beluga could submerge itself for twenty minutes and travel up to two miles under the pack. If there were no breathing holes, it would simply rise to the surface and push the pack upward, and take air from the pocket it had created between the unbroken ice and the sea. She had seen them swim past her, their backs and blowholes scarred from colliding with ice ridges.

She had heard the whales singing, sounding their way through the oceans. The beluga was the rhythm, its series of clicks rattling through the current. The bowhead, so decimated and slaughtered by man, almost to the point of extinction, truly sang—a low, long, slow-frequency melody.

She had been part of the sea, and the other worlds of high summer. She had tracked hundreds of miles along shoreline, and seen the irrepressible return of life each year: the bearberry, whose leaves turned bright red in the autumn. The crowberry, that stayed on the plant even through the frozen winter. The cloudberry, with its thick, creamy consistency. The lichen—the oldest plants on earth, and virtually indestructible. The flush of wildflowers—pink-flowered fire-weed, poppies, white mountain avens, blue forget-me-nots.

She had been part of the air, living on the messages transmitted through scent, carried for uninterrupted miles. She knew the huge concentrations of birds: the four hundred thousand snow geese on southwest Baffin; the two hundred thousand Ross’s geese of the Queen Maud Gulf; the long-tailed jaegers; the killer hawks; the black-legged kittiwakes.

She knew the changing patterns of the sky, the dazzle of brightly lit snow reflected on the underside of clouds. The blue-white of arctic haze, carrying ice crystals; the optical illusions of sun dogs, sun pillars and haloes—displays of light caught between the sun and ice and fog.

She had their image in her head and heart. And so many others.

A million stars in the light-filled water.

Sun streaming over snow.

Storms.

Silence.

They carried her now, on her final journey.

The helicopter swung low over the beach, making its fourth run along that section of coast.

“There!” Richard Sibley shouted. “There, by the gravel ridge!”

It was four days since he had got back to the office in Winnipeg. He had been filming grizzly above Khutzeymateen, and returned home to find his sister snowed under with e-mails, and John Marshall sitting among the chaos, a single duffel bag at his feet and a cup of coffee in his hands.

An Inuit guide had spotted the bear from a freighter canoe. He had come back to Gjoa to spread the word of the adult female, apparently dead, a wound showing at the base of her throat. The Swimmer still wore her collar, and the side turned to the sky still carried the black-painted number of the tagging team.

Within minutes the message had gone down to Sibley.

We have the Swimmer onshore here.

Do you want a last picture?

He surely did.

He had originally planned to come north to Gjoa Haven in the summer, to shoot the arctic char fishing. He had said when he invited John Marshall here again, that he would be on King William Island around August, and that he would maybe try to get to the trout fishing farther south, at Chesterfield Inlet.

Marshall had sent him one letter in reply. It had contained the date of his arrival and the flight number.

He hadn’t had much time to talk to the boy, and in truth, it seemed to him that Marshall was no conversationalist. He kept to himself, habitually wrapping his arms tightly to his chest. Sibley had plenty of time to observe this pose, as John sat next to him on the long journey up to Gjoa, changing down to smaller and smaller aircraft until they at last circled above the small settlement, perched on the edge of a wide sweep of bay.

John had liked Gjoa on sight. The grid of wood and prefabricated blocks rising out of the limestone lowlands. The regularity. The closed look of it, he’d said, face almost pressed to the plane window.

They had come out yesterday but seen not a single trace of the bear, even with the guide alongside them.

Sibley had woken this morning in a bad temper, irritated at the expense of a second flight.

“She’d better be there this time,” he’d told John over breakfast. He had dug a heap of letters and notes from his bag and was sifting through them rapidly. At one he stopped and raised his eyebrows.

“Know someone called Gina Shorecroft?” he’d said.

“No,” John told him.

Sibley passed the message across, a handwritten note taped to an e-mail by Sibley’s sister. “Says it’s urgent,” he’d said.

John looked at it, then put it in his pocket.

“Who is Jo Harper?” Sibley asked. He quoted the e-mail. “
Jo Harper needs to talk to you.
”

John got up. “She’s talked to me before,” he murmured, pulling on his coat. Seeing Sibley’s puzzled expression, he shrugged. “I’ll ring tonight,” he said. “It’s the middle of the night there now.”

The helicopter came down a hundred yards from the shore. Their guide, Mike Hitkolok, got out first. They ran forward from the rotors, before Mike stopped them.

“You stay behind me,” he said. “We see what she’s doing, okay?”

They nodded their agreement.

Richard had handed a pack of equipment to John, and they both edged onward with the cameras. When they got to the first of the gravel rises, Mike went below. They watched him carefully. There was no sight of the bear from this angle.

“I feel like I know her,” John murmured.

Sibley looked at him. “We’ve followed her for four years,” he said. “She’s some beast. You know what they’ve put on the Web site now?
Pihoqahiaq
, her Inuit name. The Ever-Wandering One.”

John nodded slowly.

“Not supposed to do that,” Sibley murmured. “Supposed to have contained habitat, you know? Few hundred miles this way or that. But not her. Not this one.”

The sweat was springing up along his neck, nerves more than heat. Whenever he got this close to bear, he itched. He had never quite lost the awe of them, the fear of their capabilities.

“John,” he said softly, “if she’s not dead, if she moves, you run, okay? We’re back in that machine. Don’t look back, get in it.”

“Okay,” John said.

“Saw a piece in the
Nunatsiaq News
a while back,” Sibley murmured. “Australian hiker just east of the Soper River. A female bear and two cubs chased him for seven miles.” Sibley laughed, almost a hiss of anxiety. “Probably not hungry, just curious,” he added.

Down the slope they saw Mike wave to them.

They went down cautiously, to within twenty yards.

Mike stood guard on top of the nearest rill.

“She dead?” Sibley called.

“Dead, yeah,” came the reply. “No movement.”

They eased on, until at last they saw her, curled in almost a fetal position. Blood stained her chest; her back legs were drawn tightly up. Sibley flexed out the tripod and took some time to position it.

When he had done so, he was surprised to see that John had moved forward.

“Hey, son,” he said.

“Hey,” Mike called, almost at the same moment.

John was walking at a steady pace.

“What the hell?” Sibley muttered. He had set the handheld video running.

“Stay up,” Mike shouted, meaning stay upwind.

Just in case.

Just in case …

Through the lens Sibley barely saw what happened next. The flash of movement was so sudden that the shock sent the video slithering in his grasp. It slipped from his eyes, and while automatically raising it again—even then the photographer’s instinct for the picture got the better of him—he saw Mike Hitkolok raise the rifle to his shoulder in one swift, smooth-running movement.

John didn’t cry out at all. He didn’t run.

As the bear launched itself forward, he remained exactly where he was, as if frozen to the ground.

The sound of the shot was earsplitting. The bear staggered, a ghastly sight, paws extended, coat stained with blood, teeth bared. Sibley had a split second to think,
What a size, Jesus, Jesus.…

Before she fell, dead, barely six feet from John.

It was only then that Sibley dropped the camera. He started to run full pelt down the slope, stones shifting under him, threatening to unbalance him.

Mike was ahead, shouting John’s name.

They got up to him and spun him around.

“You fucking shithead!” Sibley yelled. “You shithead fool! What did you think you were doing? You got a death wish, or what? I told you to stay clear of her, I said to you …”

But the words glanced off the boy like weightless blows.

John Marshall was staring past them, past the body of the female, to the pit where she had lain.

“She’s got a cub,” John whispered. “Look … she was protecting the cub.”

Thirty-nine

They picked Jo up at midday the next day, outside Great Ormond Street Hospital.

As Jo walked out under the white canopy of the front doors, Gina and Mike got out of the taxi to exchange places with her. Jo stumbled a little as she walked forward, and almost fell into Gina’s arms.

Catherine got out of the cab. “You don’t have to come with me,” she told Jo. “Stay here. I’ll get to Heathrow by myself. It’s okay.”

“You won’t,” Jo said.

“You’re a wreck,” Gina agreed. “Look, I’ll go with Catherine and see her to the flight.”

Jo put up her hand to stem any further comment. “Look,” she said. “If I could, I’d go all the way with her. Not just the airport.”

“We know,” Gina murmured.

“I’ll be back with Sam as soon as I can,” Jo told her. “By teatime.”

“We won’t stray,” Gina replied. “I’ve got the number of your mobile phone. Go.”

Jo kissed her and hugged Mike. She and Catherine got back into the cab. They waved out of the back window, then, as the cab pulled away from the pavement, Jo turned to Catherine.

“You’ve got everything?”

“Yes, don’t worry.”

“What time does the flight leave?”

“Three-thirty. Plenty of time.”

“And from Calgary …”

“To Edmonton,” Catherine said. “From Edmonton to Yellowknife.”

“What time are you in Yellowknife?”

“Ten forty-four
P.M.”

Jo nodded. “And the next day you go on to Gjoa Haven.”

“I’ll be there at half past one in the afternoon,” Catherine confirmed. “I’ll ring.”

“And your father takes another day?” Jo asked.

Catherine nodded. “He’s in Nunavut already, but he has to come via Iqaluit, to Yellowknife, to catch the same First Air to Gjoa. He’ll be there twenty-four hours after me. It’s a long way.”

Jo suddenly gripped her hand. “I can’t believe this is happening,” she said. “First John’s there. Then he’s not.” She squeezed Catherine’s hand. “Where’s the end to all this, Cath?”

Cath put her arm around her shoulder. “There is an end,” she said. “We’ll find him.”

“For God’s sake, even if the weather doesn’t seem that bad when you get there, even if they’ve tracked him, promise me. Promise you won’t go out after him without your father, and this Mike Hitkolok. Don’t do anything dangerous.”

Catherine smiled. “I promise you,” she said.

They locked hands.

Gina had got a call yesterday evening from Richard Sibley. He had rung his sister in Winnipeg to confirm the phone number he had seen on John’s copied e-mail, the one he had stuffed into his pocket. Yes, John had come to Gjoa Haven with him, he told her. Yes, it was true that they had found the bear. Yes, John had survived the attack, and they had come back to Gjoa together, and from there he had run the news item through the wires.

But, no, he didn’t know where John was.

“I’m sorry?” Gina had said, afraid she had misheard him over the crackling static of the line. She had been at home, with Mike, getting ready to go down to the hospital.

“We came back. He went to his room,” Sibley shouted down the line. “When I’d done the item for the news, I went to find him. The e-mail with your number was on his bed. But John had gone.”

“Gone?” Gina had echoed. “Gone where? Where is there to go to, for God’s sake?”

“He’d taken a freighter canoe,” Sibley replied. “And, Mrs. Shorecroft …”

Gina had waited, eyes squeezed shut.

“Somebody here from CBC told me. They told me about Sam. I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t know?” Gina breathed, her heart sinking like a stone.

“There was nothing on the e-mail to tell us.”

“It was on your national network!” she protested.

“We never saw it,” Sibley replied. “We were nowhere near a TV. When we came back, we flew straight to Gjoa. We didn’t even have dinner,” he said, and the pale little joke fell horribly flat over the thousands of miles of line.