White Heat (20 page)

    'You
coming to visit the boy, I suppose,' he grunted.

    Edie
was startled. For a moment she thought he'd seen the
puikaktuq
too, but
then she realized he'd meant the grave.

    'Shame
about the boy,' he mumbled. 'No call for it.'

    Koperkuj
invited Edie to squat beside him. 'I was fond of him, he had good
ihuma.
You don't find that so often these days. When your ancestor, Welatok, was
around, maybe, but now, not so often.'

    'No,'
she said, glad that, unlike almost everyone else, Koperkuj clearly hadn't seen
Joe as the unstable kind.

    He
motioned to the pile of char lying beside his fishing hole, the leister beside
them. He'd been hunting hare, too. Two males and a female lay slung over the
bars of his komatik.

    'You
hungry?'

    Edie
nodded. Until then she hadn't realized how much.

    She
watched while Koperkuj expertly sliced open a char and sorted the guts, laying
the edible ones on the ice and putting aside the lower digestive tract, no
doubt to take home and wash out. Char gut made good patching for sock linings.
As he worked, he passed her the choicest morsels, shining and bloody, and she
tucked in appreciatively, relishing the taste of the sea still on the flesh.

    The
old man had already set up a primus and the fish was followed by hot sweet tea.
Edie fetched her thermos of Canadian Mist from the komatik and added a splash
to each, the old man nodding encouragement to her to keep pouring.

    When
the first fish was all eaten up, Koperkuj instructed Edie to go fetch another
and as she went to the ice hole, her eye was drawn to the fishing leister
sitting beside it, which was marked with a blue stripe and a sticker of a
sabre-tooth tiger. It was familiar to her. She gave the leister a closer look.
The sticker was the marque of the Nashville Predators ice-hockey team. Joe and
Derek Palliser were supporters. The leister was Joe's old one, the one he'd been
given a few years back by his father. What was Old Man Koperkuj doing with it?
Then she remembered. Hadn't Joe said he was taking the spare out for Andy
Taylor? Wanted to show him how the experts did ice fishing. The leister had
been in Andy Taylor's gear, which could only mean that Koperkuj had come across
it on Craig. She stood up, and, without betraying the turmoil in her mind,
calmly walked back with the char.

    She
said: 'You been ice fishing before this spring?'

    'Once,
back in April.' Koperkuj wiped his mouth and gave her a wary look, the kind of
look a starving fox will give you if you hold out meat for it.

    'Good
catch?'

    He
shrugged: 'The usual.'

    She
passed him the whisky and encouraged him to take a few slugs. He let out a
satisfied little chuckle. She knew him well enough to recognize, any direct
question about anything, he'd clam up. For a while they swapped hunting stories
while she plied him with more booze. She'd have to come in on this one slowly,
obliquely, so he wouldn't even notice he was caught.

    'Good-looking
hares you got there,' she said, cutting her glance to the corpses hanging on
the sled bar.

    'Oh
sure,' he said. 'Round here, hare's easy.' He turned and pointed back to a
headland to the south. 'I got those near Tikiutijawilik. But any of the spots
south of there are pretty good. You know, where the wind blows the snow off the
ground cover.' He named a few places, giving their descriptions in Inuktitut.

    'Mind
if I take a look?' She went over, ostensibly to admire the pelts, her eyes
scoping along the length of the sled.

    At
the back, balanced on the slats, he'd left a hunting rifle, a Remington 700,
pretty new. Identical, in fact, to the one Andy Taylor was carrying when she'd
taken him and Felix Wagner out birding.

    'You
get these hares with that 700?' she said.

    He
nodded, loose now.

    'Sweet,'
she said.

    Inside,
she felt winded. No way an old man like Koperkuj could afford a new Remington.
Had Koperkuj come across Andy Taylor's abandoned snowbie? It was possible, but
it seemed unlikely. Even the skinny
qalunaat
wasn't so stupid as to
leave his vehicle without taking his rifle. She decided to go off-tack while
she gathered her thoughts, get back to the topic subtly once the old man had a
few more slugs of whisky.

    'Get
any big game recently?'

    He
swayed and reached for the flask. 'Got a wolf a while back. Not on Craig
though. The crazy thing is, when I cut him open I found this inside the
stomach.'

    He
drew out a gold chain on which hung a mottled stone the size of a raven's skull
and offered it to her. Edie picked up the stone, weighed it in her hand, then
let it fall back onto the old man's parka. The rock was weirdly heavy, unlike
any she'd come across before.

    The old
man giggled. 'They're hungry enough, wolves eat anything.'

    'Amazing.'
Edie did her best to look impressed.

    Koperkuj
chuckled approvingly. The old musk ox was so pickled now he didn't even cop the
fact that he'd just told the world's most unconvincing lie. No wolf would get
so hungry it would eat a stone. In which case, how'd the old man come across a
gold necklace? Could the stone have belonged to Andy Taylor? Edie ran a theory
over in her mind. Did Koperkuj kill Taylor? Not likely. The fellow was an
opportunist but he wasn't a murderer. What
did
look increasingly likely
though was that Koperkuj had got up close and personal to the
qalunaat
and rehomed some of his things. Not that she was going to get any kind of
confession out of the old ox. He was drunk, but he wasn't a fool.

    A
thin wailing started up: Koperkuj was trying some of the old-time songs,
beating out a rhythm on a nearby rock, voice like a vixen on heat. A plan
hatched in her mind. She plucked her flask from the gravel, flashed Koperkuj a
polite smile, then thanking him for his hospitality and wishing him good
travelling, returned to her team.

    She
made land at Ulli, the crescent-shaped shingle beach where once she, Joe and
Willa had gone collecting eider duck eggs, tied in the dogs and fed them some
pemmican.

    Then
she scrambled up the scree to the cliff top where the
inukshuk
for Joe
looked out across the ice of Jones Sound and made her way on wind-blown,
compacted snow, to the slight dip in the plateau where Joe's body lay under a
cairn of small boulders. At some distance, from the safety of a rocky outcrop,
a raven watched.

    She
said: 'Joe, it's Kigga.'

    A
wind blew up and the raven took off on it. For a while, Edie squatted by the
cairn trying to conjure the places Joe might have taken Andy Taylor, the
hideaway little nooks he and Edie explored when he was a boy, places the old
man might know about too. If Koperkuj had run into Taylor's body it was likely
that he would have come across it in one of his regular haunts.

    She
decided to make camp a few miles to the north of Tikiutijawilik near
Uimmatisatsaq. The beach there was shallow and the tide relatively small,
protected somewhat from northwesterly winds. It was on this western coastal
fringe that Bill Fairfax and Andy Taylor thought they might find evidence of
Sir James Fairfax's camp. It was also the first of Koperkuj's hare-hunting
grounds. After that, she'd head south and make a search of all the hideouts she
and Joe had explored together. It was possible that Joe had pointed them out to
Taylor or even that the
qalunaat
had found one of them himself. It was a
real long shot, but right now, long shots were the business she was in.

    Once
she pitched camp, Edie pulled out her thermos and drank tea, while the light
spun from south to north and the bright stare of the midnight sun shed its
shadows from her spot around the fire. The swell of land above the beach at
Tikiutijawilik, low though it was, looked out across a stretch of relatively
flatter coastline before the land rose up at Uimmatisatsaq and the cliffs
proper began at Ulli. From that spot, using binoculars, Edie had a view of the
customary landings all the way to the northern tip of the island.

    Already
the snow was becoming soft and wet in places, impossible for a snowbie to
negotiate and difficult enough even with a dog team. Ten years ago, Edie
wouldn't have needed to think about that, but breakup started earlier now and
the ice was so much less predictable. In a couple of weeks from now, she
supposed, the melt would begin in earnest and she wouldn't be able to travel on
the land. Then, in late July, leads would start opening up in the sea ice and
any travel across large distances, such as that between Ellesmere and Craig,
would become very dangerous until breakup proper in late August or early
September, when the sea became navigable by boat. So if Edie couldn't find
traces of Andy Taylor now, she would have to wait three months for another
opportunity.

    She
gave the dogs cooled weak tea and carved off pieces of the frozen seal she'd
brought, then settled into her sleeping bag. For a while the clatter of
guillemots and dovekies kept her awake, but not for long. When she woke, the
southern sun was beating through the canvas, heating the air in the tent. She
went out onto the snow and stretched in the fragile warmth of late spring. Over
a breakfast of the fish she'd traded with Koperkuj for dog pemmican and more
sweet tea, she decided to explore the area directly around Tikiutijawilik then
head south where the land rose up to cliffs, shaggy with greenish talus cones,
whose placid, iced feet protected the shore-fast ice from tide cracks and where
there was good travelling ice. There were no maps for this kind of a search. If
Andy Taylor was to be found, it would not be at a set of co-ordinates. It would
be on the land.

    It
was very late when Edie finally called it quits. It had been a frustrating
search. Some time in the afternoon Bonehead had started signalling the
proximity of bear. Edie thought it odd, since by this time of year the bears
were usually to be found up on the east coast of Ellesmere, taking advantage of
the rich supply of seal and beluga at the
sina,
the floe edge where the
ice pack met the North Water, or west at Hell Gate, but in recent years, as the
ice began to break up earlier, their routes had become less predictable. For
several hours she'd had to slow the dogs right down and scan the horizon with
her binoculars just in case.

    Eventually,
when neither bear nor tracks appeared, Edie mushed on the team but the delay
meant that by the end of the day they had covered less ground than she'd hoped,
and hadn't come across a single clue to the whereabouts either of Andy Taylor
or his snowmobile. The incident
had
made her think though. If there were
bear in the area, it was possible that Taylor had been killed and eaten.
Sitting in the lea made by the tent she mugged up a brew and made a note to
herself to look out for bear tracks or for the tracks of foxes who often followed
behind in the hope of some good scavenge.

    She
ate a supper of three guillemot eggs she had found in an abandoned nest,
cracking the shells in the palm of her hand and throwing the contents into her
mouth raw, then wrapped herself in her caribou sleeping bag and set her
internal alarm clock to wake her early. Sometime in the night she dreamed of
the
puikaktuq
again, but by the time she woke she was conscious only of
its shadow on her mind.

    Before
the seabirds had even risen from their roosts, Edie started out south along the
coast through early morning coastal fog. Usually at this time of year, the fog
gave way to low-lying cloud signalling drizzle, but this morning the sun burned
it off and the day soon became bright with patches of high cirrus.

    They
had rounded the headland just south of Uimmatisatsaq when Edie decided to move
down onto the beach itself. This was where Joe and Andy Taylor had most likely
spent at least part of their time and she wanted to make sure she didn't miss
anything.

    She
and the dogs were making their way along a sloping clamshell-rubbled beach when
Edie's eye was drawn to an intense sparkle not fifty metres up ahead. Ice
sparkled, snow sparkled, in the right conditions some rocks sparkled; fish
skins sparkled, as did the hooves of musk oxen and caribou and the metallic
parts of snowbies and komatiks, but nothing Edie could remember encountering
before sparkled quite like this.

    Bringing
the dogs to a halt, she anchored them by the komatik and went ahead on foot. A
thin, hard covering of compacted ice obscured the shelly beach in places and
made it harder to locate the exact source of the sparkle. Wondering if she'd
imagined it, she began an Inuit search, walking round in minutely expanding
circles, eyes evenly scanning the small segment of ground immediately in front.