White Heat (12 page)

    'Been
with your father?'

    Joe came
through to the kitchen and opened the fridge. 'Uh huh. We checked over the
snowbies, sorted the equipment out. I lent Andy one of my leisters so he can
get some proper ice fishing in.'

    For
the first time since the Felix Wagner affair, he seemed relaxed and happy. He
didn't ask about the boot tracks leading up to the door and she didn't tell
him. He needs this, she thought, a good, simple trip, no one dying on his
watch.

    'Eat
already?'

    'I
guess,' he said. It was what he always said when he'd filled up on junk food at
his father's house.

    'Listen,'
she said. 'That skinny
qalunaat
? Be careful with him. He's slippery.'

    'Kigga,'
he said, touching her nose with his finger. 'I'm all grown up now.'

    The
next day the party left early and took the snowmobiles across the shore-fast
ice ridge and the rim of ice heaves to the flat expanse of the year ice. By
mid-morning the few thin ladders of low cloud had burned off, leaving the air
clear and dry, perfect travelling weather.

    By mid-morning
the travellers had split into two parties, Joe leading the way towards the west
coast of Craig and

    Edie
following the well-worn hunting paths across the ice dunes towards Fritjof in
the east. Twice they stopped briefly to eat and drink hot tea, before setting
out once more across the ice desert. Visibility remained superb throughout the
afternoon and into the evening, illuminating the long, craggy outline of
Taluritut, which southerners called Devon Island, to the south. As they
travelled, Edie could hear Fairfax behind her, whooping like a child.

    In
the sparkling light of the late High Arctic spring evening, they set up camp on
the shore-fast ice, feasting on duck stew and oatcakes. For a while they
watched the sun circling the horizon, exhausted.

    'Tell
me something, Edie,' Fairfax began.

    'About
what?'

    'Oh,
I don't know, something about the Arctic.'

    Edie
thought for a moment: how to begin? She flipped through her mental file of
Arctic facts. 'Arctic rainbows are circles.'

    'That
so?' Fairfax laughed, a great, relaxed, wide laugh, a different man from the
one she met at the airstrip yesterday. 'I guess there's no pot of gold at the
end, then.'

    'I
guess not.'

    A
pair of eiders flew by, lost maybe or just very early. All the migratory birds
were coming in earlier now. Edie followed them with her eye until they
disappeared in the faint gloaming that served both for twilight and dawn at
this time of year.

    'Before
I came up here the first time, I never understood why in God's name my
great-great-grandfather kept returning to the north; the frostbite,
snowblindness, living on frozen whale blood and ship's biscuit.'

    Edie
half-listened to the white man, but her thoughts were with Joe. He and Taylor would
have set camp on Craig by now. She imagined Joe fixing the white man's supper.

    Perhaps
she'd overstated her case a little to Taylor last night, but that's how she was
when it came to her stepson: a mother bear protecting her cub. Everything about
Taylor told her not to trust him. On the other hand, Sammy and Joe were both
right: it was time she put more trust in her boy. It seemed no time since she
was helping him with his schoolwork but she had to accept he was twenty years
old now. Plenty old enough to look after himself.

    'I
guess you've read your ancestor's diaries, you know he was guided by Welatok.'

    'Sure,
but they fell out. Sir James mentioned that in the penultimate diary, said if
he was going to come again, he'd probably have to find another guide.'

    'Yes,'
Edie said. 'I know.'

    'You
do?' Fairfax looked puzzled.

    'Welatok
was my great-great-great-grandfather.'

    'Ha,
that right? Hey, we could include you in the doc,' Fairfax beamed. 'The
descendant of Sir James Fairfax's guide, guiding the great-great-grandson of
the great man himself.'

    Edie
shook her head.

    Fairfax
looked whipped. 'There'd be a fee in it for you.'

    Edie
smiled blankly.
Qalunaat
just didn't get it. Wasn't it enough that she
sold herself? What, she should sell her ancestors now, too?

    Fairfax
sucked his teeth. 'Simeonie told me all you folk got moved up here by the
Canadian government in the fifties from Quebec?'

    'Uh
huh,' she said.

    The
episode was still too painful to talk about much. It had happened because the
Americans were sniffing around the area after the war and the government wanted
Canadians on the land. Only people they figured might survive up there were
Inuit, so they'd persuaded nineteen families to make the twelve-hundred-mile
trip by telling them they'd be able to hunt whatever they liked and come back
home when they were done. It was only after they'd arrived, seen the barren
rock and had to find a way to survive through the first winter in
twenty-four-hour darkness and with temperatures hitting -50C that they realized
they'd been had. Most of them never got to see the families they'd left behind
again. Lot of people said the problems they had with alcohol, the suicides, you
could trace them right back to this one traumatic event.

    Edie
explained that her own grandmother on her mother's side, Anna, had been one of
the original exiles, but her grandfather was a descendant of Welatok. He'd been
born in Greenland and had come across to Ellesmere to trade with the new
arrivals there.

    The
following morning they set off and reached Fritjof Fiord around lunchtime. The
fiord was still very iced up and they were forced to hack out a path through
some new pressure ridges with picks. After an hour, they made their way through
onto the other side.

    'My
God,' Fairfax sighed, carried away by the sight before them.

    It
was
astonishing. The interior of the fiord stretched into the far distance:
windless, white and magical. Layer upon layer of snow had fallen over the
course of the long winter and lay packed into dense, creamy undulations,
interrupted here and there by bear, musk ox or human tracks.

    The
spot Fairfax had marked, the place he reckoned most coincided with the place
his great-great-grandfather had marked out for overwintering, was a wide gravel
beach huddling beneath granite cliffs half a kilometre into the fiord, away
from the worst of the tide and sheltered by the rocks behind it. Here Edie
started the work of setting up ramp while Fairfax went off to survey the surrounding
area on foot, returning several hours later with photographs and measurements.

    'You
were right about the body.' This over a supper of caribou steaks. 'Perfect
excuse to come back in the summer with a film crew.'

    They
passed the remainder of the evening in their separate tents, Edie turning
stories over in her mind while Fairfax sat in his sleeping bag a few feet away,
frantically scribbling in his notebook.

    The
following morning, after a breakfast of seal-meat porridge, they broke camp and
headed back towards Autisaq. The journey was uneventful and they reached the
settlement late that evening. While Bill went back to the hotel to change out
of his travelling clothes, Edie took off home for a hot shower then drove round
to Sammy's house to ask after Joe's expedition. She'd been hoping to see her
stepson's snowbie parked outside her house but it wasn't there and there were
no tracks to indicate anyone had come by that way. On the way to Sammy's she
passed by Minnie's house just in case he'd decided to stay with her, but his
snowbie wasn't there either. Sammy's place smelled of the usual blend of stale
booze and junk food.

    'See
Joe yet?'

    'Nope,'
he said. He was sitting on the sofa watching an episode of
Columbo
and didn't
look up. 'Don't expect to, least not for a day or two.'

    'They
get bad weather?'

    Sammy
nodded. He didn't seem too bothered.

    'How
bad?' Her voice sounded calm. She reminded herself to keep it that way.

    'Bad enough
we can't reach them on the sat phone.'

    'A
spotter plane go out yet?'

    'Maybe,'
Sammy said in a vague tone, his eye still half on the cop show. 'Poor
visibility over there today but it'll clear, always does in Craig this time of
year. Don't worry so much.'

    Edie
envied Sammy his cool-headedness. Inuit men were brought up that way, to save
the worrying for the things they could actually do something about. Everything
else stayed buried under the surface. Joe was the same. She didn't know why she
worried so much - perhaps it was the
qalunaat
in her, perhaps it was
just part of being a woman.

    She
went across to the hotel to check on Fairfax and give him the news, and found
him in the communal area, drinking a large mug of hot chocolate and making
notes in a fancy-looking hardbound book. He was immersed in his own discoveries
and, she thought, didn't seem particularly concerned about the situation,
except in so far as it might delay his return home. He had family business to
attend to. If Taylor was delayed too long, he would have to leave without him.

    'It
was his idea anyway.'

    Edie
raised her eyebrows.

    'You
thought I put up the money?'

    'Actually,
yes.'

    Fairfax
shook his head. 'Andy contacted me, said he had interest from some TV outfit,
but their schedules meant we'd have to go up on a recce right away.'

    She
recalled what Taylor had said about being broke. Maybe he was just the hustler
for the TV company.

    'No
offence, why did he need you?'

    Fairfax
looked up, a little offended all the same. 'The name,' he said. 'I'm the name.'

    Sleep
eluded Edie that night. She passed the long hours touring the list of rational
explanations for Joe's absence.

    Trips
got weathered out all the time. The ice shifted, some large leads unexpectedly
opened up, the wind started gusting badly, the air whited out. It was
nothing—nothing—to be two, three, even four days late on even the shortest
trip. All these things she told herself, over and over, until by the time the
morning came she felt exhausted by them.

    It
was hard to concentrate on her teaching that day and the children sensed it. As
a result, the lessons went badly; the class was bored and played up. Edie felt
rotten for letting them down but didn't seem able to pull herself together. The
moment the final bell rang, she yanked on her outdoor boots and went to the
mayor's office. No further news of the Craig Island expedition.

    At
four the supply plane came in, unloaded its cargo, loaded up the mail and a few
bits and pieces of electrical plant being sent away for repair. Fairfax took
his seat beside the pilot and was gone.

    On
her way home, Edie was taken with a sudden impulse to search Andy Taylor's room
in the hotel. It was unethical, but right now she didn't care. Padding upstairs
and along the corridor, she nosed through the doors to the rooms until she
found the only one currently inhabited. There was a lock, but the key had long
since been lost and no one had bothered to replace it. Aside from what he'd taken
to Craig, Taylor didn't have much with him: a couple of magazines, an empty
notebook, a tape recorder and an iPod. Edie picked up the headphones, caught a
snatch of a Guns N' Roses track, then replaced the player on the table. In a
leather pouch she found a spare pair of glasses and, wrapped in foil,
presumably to fox the drug dogs, a thumbnail-sized piece of dope. A half-empty
whisky bottle sat on the chest of drawers.

    Something
about the bleakness of the hotel room gave her new purpose but she knew that if
she went back to Sammy, or to the mayor's office, she'd be told to stop
worrying. She didn't want to hear any of that now. Sure, Joe was only
twenty-four hours late, but in Edie's mind that was twenty-four hours too long.
From the hotel she walked directly to Minnie and Willa's house and found Willa
in front of the TV playing Grand Theft Auto.