White Heat (3 page)

    'Laurel
and Hardy.'

    
'I
know who it is.'
Andy Taylor shook his head, clucking like an indignant
duck whose nest has been disturbed. 'Jeez, have you any idea how
inappropriate
that is?'

    Edie
wrinkled her nose and stared at her hands. It was as much as she could do not
to punch him. If he'd been Inuk, she wouldn't have held off. Situation like
this, you told stories, you drank hot tea, and you joked about. Only things
keeping you sane. Fifteen minutes passed in silence. The blizzard was a way off
still. It was going to be a long wait.

    After
a
while, she said: 'We should eat.' It had been several hours since their
last meal and she and Andy had expended a good deal of energy building the snow
shelter. Hungry people made poor judgements. She poured more hot tea, then
pulled a drawstring bag from her pack and went at its contents with her
pocketknife, handing a slice off the block to Andy Taylor. Taylor took what was
offered, eyeing it suspiciously.

    She
cut another slice for herself and began chewing, throwing Taylor a thumbs-up
sign. 'Good.'

    Taylor
took a bite. Slowly, his jaw began to move. Pretty soon, a rictus of disgust
spread across his face. He spat the meat onto his glove.

    'What
the fuck?'

    
'Igunaq.
Fermented walrus gut. Very good for you. Keep you warm.'

    The
wind screamed. Edie chewed. Taylor sat in silence. Hail thumped up against the
snowhouse walls like distant thunder. Taylor gave off anxious vibes.

    'This
man who's supposed to be coming,' he blurted. 'Does he know what he's doing?'
He had to shout to make his voice heard above all the racket of the weather.
'How do we know he'll actually get here?'

    It
seemed like an odd question, a southerner's question. Why would Joe set off if
he wasn't as sure as he could be that he'd reach his destination? 'It's not all
that bad,' she said.

    Taylor
gave her a look of exasperation. 'It sure sounds bad. And if it's not bad, then
why the fuck hasn't someone sent the plane?'

    'The
wind's coming in from the east.'

    Taylor
wiped his glove over his face. His voice was tainted with aggression, or,
perhaps, frustration, Edie thought. Then again, she might be wrong. Southerners
were difficult to read. She explained that the winds would gather through the
gaps in the mountain passes, becoming fiercer, more localized and katabatic,
like mini-tornadoes. The plane would have to fly right through those winds,
which could prove incredibly dangerous, but at ground level, things would be a
little easier. It would be rough travelling — too rough for them with Felix
Wagner in the trailer, but Joe was very experienced at travelling in difficult
conditions and he was bringing proper medical kit and more expertise than she could
muster alone.

    Edie
sliced off another piece of
igunaq
and began chewing. She noticed Taylor
back off slightly.

    'You
know I didn't have anything to do with this, right?'

    'You
ask me, I don't think you did.' She considered telling him about the footprint,
then decided that right now, he didn't deserve to know. 'But it'll be hard to
prove.'

    A
gust of wind blustered over the snow shelter, sending a patch of caulking
falling onto Wagner, who began to groan again.

    'What
if your friend can't find us?'

    Edie
sliced off another piece of
igunaq.

    'You
really should eat,' she said.

    'For
fuck's sake, we got an injured man here!'

    Edie
peered over at Wagner. 'I don't think he's hungry.'

    Taylor
pulled off his hat and rubbed his hair. 'Does
anything
rattle you?'

    Edie
thought about this for a moment. It wasn't the most interesting question, but
it was the only one he'd asked that helped the conversation along, so they were
making progress. 'There's this scene in
Feet First.
. .' she began.

    'Scene?'
His voice had risen to the timbre of a sexed-up fox. Despite the difficult
circumstances, Edie realized she was quite enjoying herself.

    'Yeah,
in the Harold Lloyd picture. Anyway, there's this scene, where Harold Lloyd is
swinging from a scaffold on the side of this huge skyscraper, it's like he's
just clinging onto the edge of a cliff and the wind is shaking it.'

    Andy
Taylor looked as her as though she was some crazy person.

    'What
the hell? A movie?'

    People
were always making this mistake. Edie was always having to put them right.
'Sure it's a
movie,
but Harold Lloyd did all his own stunt work.'

    Taylor
laughed, though probably not in a good way.

    'Straight
up,' she said. 'No doubles, no stuntmen, no camera tricks, nothing.'

    The
skinny
qalunaat
wiped his forehead and shook his head. After that he
didn't say anything for a while. Time passed. The wind got up to a terrible
pitch. Unsettled, Taylor began to fidget.

    'Don't
you people tell stories at times like these, about the animals and the
ancestors, all that?'
You people.
That's rich, thought Edie. One of us
sitting here is
paying
to be 'you people', and it isn't me.

    'I
just did,' she said.

    'No,
no, I meant like real stories, Eskimo shit.'

    'Uh
huh.' A familiar throb rose in Edie's right eye, a ringing in her ears. When
she was a little girl, her grandfather used to say these feelings were the
ancestors moving through her body. 'Listen,' he would whisper. 'One of your
ancestors wants to tell his story.' She closed her eyes, those coal-black discs
Sammy used to say reminded him of the eclipse of the sun, the perfect arch of
her eyebrows rising like the curve of the earth above her broad, flat forehead.
She thought about her grandmother, Anna, coming all the way here from Quebec,
meeting Eliah out on a hunting trip, Eliah moving all the way from Etah in
Greenland to be with her. Her thoughts ran to Eliah's great-grandfather,
Welatok, who guided white men and journeyed all the way from Baffin Island and
settled, finally, in Etah. Then she thought of Maggie, her mother, flying down
to Iqaluit to look for her man, not finding him because he'd deceived her and
wasn't there.

    'How's
about an ancestor story?' she said. 'Why don't you start?'

    'What?'
Taylor had a bewildered look on his face.

    'Tell
me about your ancestors.'

    'My
what?' Taylor sounded flustered, then his face seemed to bunch up, like he was
trying to squeeze the juice from it. 'Hell, I don't know.' He waved a hand. 'My
grandfather on my mother's side came over from Ireland. We didn't go in for
that family history stuff.'

    The
vehemence of his response, the contempt in the tone took her back. 'How can you
live like that, not knowing where you came from?'

    'Pretty
well. Pretty fucking well.'

    'My
great-great-great-grandfather guided
qalunaat
explorers.'

    'Oh,
that's just terrific,' he said, with some sarcasm. 'Nice family business you
got here, generations of experience in leaving people to die in the middle of
fucking nowhere.'

    'His
name was Welatok,' she said, ignoring the man's tone. 'He guided a man called
Fairfax.'

    Andy
Taylor started. 'Right.' Going into his pocket, he drew out a hip flask, looking
calmer suddenly. He took a few sips from it and waved it in the air.

    'Think
old Felix here could use some?'

    'He's
sleeping.'

    Taylor
put the flask back in his pocket. She knew why he didn't offer it to her.
Inuit, drink: a match made in hell. She would have said no anyway. Her drinking
days were long behind her.

    'Old
Felix here, he knows a thing or two about those old-time Arctic explorers, all
the heroes: Peary, Stefansson, Scott, Fairfax, Frobisher. Pretty interesting
stuff,' Taylor said.

    'He
ever mention Welatok?' she asked.

    Taylor
shrugged.

    'I
guess not,' she said. 'We never did get much credit.'

    Beside
them, Wagner began making small moaning sounds. Edie thought of Joe, now
struggling across the sea ice to reach them, and about what kind of future he
would have in whatever was left of the Arctic once the developers and
prospectors and explorers had swept through it. It was greed, she knew, though
she'd never felt it. Well, greed for love maybe, for sex even, but for stuff,
never. With Edie, same as with most Inuit, you owned enough, you hunted enough,
you ate enough and you left enough behind so your children and their children
would respect you. It wasn't about surplus. It was about sufficiency.

    Some
time later, Edie sensed Bonehead begin to stir and scrape about inside his ice
kennel. Andy Taylor had fallen asleep. Wagner was still, though breathing.
Throwing on her sealskin parka, she clambered through the entrance tunnel.
Outside the air was alive with darting crystals and ice smoke, the wind roaring
like a wounded bear. Edie edged her way around the snow shelter, took out her
snow- knife and cut a hole in Bonehead's kennel. The dog burst from his
confinement in a spray of snowflakes, greeted her briefly, then rushed off into
the gloom to meet Joe.

    Clambering
back inside the snow shelter she woke Taylor to tell him that Joe was on his
way. Neither of them heard his snowbie until it was already very close. Shortly
afterwards Joe himself appeared at the entrance to the shelter.

    'What
happened?' Before anyone could answer, Joe crawled over to the wounded man.
Removing his gloves, he pressed the index and middle finger of his right hand
to

    Wagner's
neck, counting the pulse in the carotid artery. He took out a blue clinicians'
notebook from his daypack and wrote something down.

    Edie
raised her hand in a thumbs-up but Joe only shrugged. She watched him
inspecting the wound and felt the familiar surge of pride in her boy.

    'How
much blood has he lost?'

    'A
lot, maybe more than a litre.'

    Joe
turned to his daypack, pulled out some antibacterial wipes and began washing
his hands. Five minutes later Felix Wagner was on a saline drip with codeine
for the pain. The situation was pretty grave, Joe explained. The injured man
was now in full hypovolemic shock. His chances of survival depended on the
severity of the shock and that could not be established until he was properly
hospitalized. If the shock was severe enough, kidney failure would set in and gradually,
one by one, the organs would begin to shut down. It might take a few hours or
as long as a week, but, unless Wagner was extraordinarily lucky, the outcome
would be the same.

    'We
need that plane, Sammy.' Edie was on the sat phone again.

    'We're
still being pummelled over here.'

    'Can
you get Thule out?' It was a big ask. The US air- base across the water in
Greenland had bigger planes, built better to withstand Arctic conditions than
Autisaq's Twin Otters. They were usually unwilling to intervene in what they
saw as Canadian problems, except in the case of an outbreak of TB or measles or
some other some infectious illness, but Wagner was one of
them,
an
American.

    When
the response came moments later, she could barely hear it and asked Sammy to
repeat, then abruptly lost the signal. After a few minutes' wait the phone rang
back. This time the signal was poor but Edie could just about hear a man's
voice through the crackle, something about visibility.

    'Sammy,
listen.' She had to shout above the shriek of the wind. 'What about Thule?' But
the phone had already gone dead.

    'They
flying?' Joe looked hopeful.

    Taylor
opened his mouth to speak.

    'Don't.'
Edie held up a hand. 'Just don't.'

    They
finished up the tea in the flasks and waited. It was rough still, but the wind
moved across to the northwest and began to ease off. A little while later,
Bonehead began scratching about and barking, Edie put her ear to the ground and
detected an engine vibration. Martie. It had to be. No one except her aunt
would be crazy enough to fly through the tail-end of a blizzard.