The Shaman's Knife (32 page)

“Is it making any difference?”

“It has to, but there's been no noticeable effect. I can still hardly get any pulse or blood pressure, can hardly observe any breathing, pupils still dilated, no reaction to light, in fact I've thought he was gone two or three times, but he seemed to stabilize just before you came in. He might just make it. So that's where we are now.”

I sat down at her desk and from my notes wrote in longhand a summary of what she'd said. When I read it to her, she said, “Yes, that's about right,” and signed it. This statement later appeared in my final report under the heading of, “Nurse Homfray-Davies's Account.”

Bouvier claims, and he might be right, I was not functioning all that well by then, that when I was folding up her statement and sticking it in my pocket, I looked at her and said quietly, “Thank you. You're a bloody star!”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“Keeping this guy alive so we can try him for murdering Dennis Raakwap and Thelma Pukwap and causing the death of my mother,” I said, having trouble with the last few words.

And then I said something that Bouvier insisted on laughing about later. He even phoned Maxine to tell her, figuring she would appreciate it.

“You're standing there, Matteesie,” he said. “The guy is almost dead. About one breath away from eternity, wherever that is. And you're standing over him telling the nurse, ‘It would have been a bloody miscarriage of justice if he checked out unconscious and never had to sit in court and listen to what an asshole he really was.'”

Soon after that, Davidee died. Slipped away, with no sound, more like a cessation of sounds. The nurse swiftly checked and looked to me, shaking her head. “Gone,” she said.

I stood looking down at him for a moment and then for some instinctive reason I went over to his ravaged-looking mother and father. She was motionless, expressionless, staring nowhere, as if in a trance. I put my hand on Ipeelee's shoulder. He looked up at me and slowly, faintly, smiled. Either the shaman trying to help him, or maybe the shaman's knife right there, sticking out of Davidee, had made a difference.

Then I went over to Erika, standing against one wall taking notes. “Phone me in the morning,” I said. “I'll answer any questions you've got, on one condition.”

“What's that?”

“Find out where Barker is staying in Honolulu and fax him a copy of your story. Put a note on it saying it's with Matteesie's compliments.”

“You're a bastard,” she said. “It's a deal.”

I drove to the detachment with Bouvier. While we carried Andy to the van and later into Barker's house, he mumbled sleepily and then was gone again. We laid him on a bed and took off his lousy cheap boots.

“Byron?” Bouvier asked.

It had to be done. “You stay here,” I said. “I'm going over there now.”

The whole family had gathered, brothers, sisters, parents, Byron, Debbie, Julie. Plus Lewissie. I stood just inside the door.

“I have to charge you,” I said to Byron. “I'll let you know in the morning what happens next. Get a good lawyer.”

Debbie cried. “You know what Davidee said to Byron in the rec hall, that he was going to kill Julie!”

I had wondered. Now I knew. But I only said, tiredly, “Be sure Byron's lawyer gets that. It'll help Byron in court.”

I don't know when I got back to the hotel. Margaret let me in and hugged me. I hugged her back. Maisie hugged me, too, just about cracking my ribs, crying a little, either over her narrow escape from being more involved, or from a lingering wish that she had stayed around to throw another male creep out of a second-story window.

Thomassie was sitting in our room, smoking his pipe. He'd heard all about the action by now but had missed being an eyewitness—he hated rock music, and had left when it began. He had done rather well with the rest of my rum, but had saved one drink for me. I told him that, with Davidee dead and everything else done that could be done, I wanted him to fly me and Byron and maybe somebody else to Inuvik in the morning, once I had a chance to think things over and talk charges with Yellowknife. There are holding cells in Inuvik.

“What other passenger besides Byron?” Thomassie asked.

“Andy. I'll ask him, anyway. Just want him to see somewhere that isn't Sanirarsipaaq. Broaden his horizons. He can use that.”

Actually, Andy and Maxine got along fine. He made her laugh a lot when he was mimicking me marching around his town looking important. But soon he got homesick for Sanirarsipaaq. He just wanted to know what was going on there. He didn't want to be away when he had a chance, maybe his first, to be the center of attention. It was probably the right thing for him. Annie took him in. I might do more about him sometime. But so far I'm not sure exactly what.

 

There was no avoiding the original charge against Byron, first-degree murder. Mr. Justice Charlie Ferguson Litterick heard the case in the rec hall at Sanirarsipaaq. Maxine flew in to cover the trial. She told me she'd just got word back about the directors' course she'd applied for, giving me one of her more radiant smiles. “I didn't get it, and now I'm relieved.” She waved around the rec hall-cum-courtroom, jammed full with the Inuit community, men, women, babies, parkas, knee-highs. “Who'd want to leave all this behind?” I'd felt that way often, too; still did.

Among dozens of witnesses, the most important were Andy and Leah, with Hard Hat a close third. What made him decide so precipitately to leave Sanirarsipaaq was that he had overheard Davidee making a second muffled call to the hospital at Yellowknife to ask about my mother's condition, and had drawn a conclusion that filled him with terror.

The judge agreed with Byron's counsel, with the assent of the crown prosecutor, to allow the charge to be dropped to manslaughter because of extreme provocation, Davidee's threat to kill little Julie, who was in Court wearing the sunglasses with the heart-shaped rims.

When Byron pleaded guilty to the lesser charge, the judge sentenced him to three years with a recommendation for early parole, and also ordered the court clerk to return the bloodstained fifty-dollar bill to the Co-op, and to have the shaman's knife returned to the shaman, who gave it to me. “A souvenir, Matteesie,” he said. A real mind reader.

Byron served a year and was granted parole in the minimum time allowed by Canadian law, one-third of his original sentence. With the active help of the Inumerit, fully supported by the community, he and Debbie and Julie got their own house.

 

One of Canada's most beloved journalists,
Scott Young
wrote more than forty-five books in his lifetime. Known primarily for his sports journalism, Young also wrote mysteries, young adult fiction and non-fiction during the course of his career. Born in Cypress River, Manitoba in 1918, Scott Young died in 2005.

 

The Shaman's Knife © 1993 Scott Young

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