White Heat (38 page)

    'Sleep
well, Maggie Kiglatuk?'

    It
was so obvious, she kicked herself. Hans had had second thoughts and betrayed
her to Moller who had taken the precaution of phoning his clients. In her mind
she hastily reassembled what little information she'd given the two pilots. Had
she provided them with any reason at all to connect her to their activities on
Craig? No, she was sure not. Immediately, she felt a lot calmer. They would
presume she was one of the protestors against the grave digging, someone with
family in the area who was keen to protect a burial site. So long as they
didn't connect her to Autisaq or to Craig itself, she wouldn't be enough of a
threat for them to want to see her dead.

    The
man motioned her out of the boat. Behind him stood the blond, who had strange
iceberg eyes, his hands on the Zodiac's outboard motor. She saw him pull out
the fuel hose from the tank. He fired up the engine cord and the machine
sputtered, roared for a short while then fell dead.

    'What
a pity,' the blond said. 'It broke.'

    'Luckily,
we have come to the rescue,' the skinny one chipped in.

    He
gestured at Edie with his rifle. It was not a make she recognized. Russian, she
guessed. She nodded in the direction of her backpack. The skinny guy smiled and
shook his head.

    'Good
sense of humour,' he said, picking up her rifle and harpoon. He unzipped the
bag, peered inside and threw it back in the Zodiac.

    They
scrambled along the shale then up a steep slope, Edie sandwiched between the
two men, until they were standing on top of the cliffs, the dovekies clattering
beneath them. The sun had begun its circle low above the horizon and the air
was so clear they could see the purple shadows of Ellesmere Island to the west.
Tramping on, Edie conscious always of the rifle aimed at the back of her head,
they passed below them on a wide stretch of shale beach the remnants of the
great whalebone huts built by the Thule, who had travelled east across the ice
from Canada more than a thousand years before. Edie stopped momentarily to
catch her breath, but the blond hurried her on with a hiss. It began to spit,
the rain spiny with ice blown in from the northwest.

    Ahead
of her, Skinny turned and shouted something in Russian to the blond with the
rifle making up the rear. He replied and they quickened the pace. They were
passing alongside a gravelly plateau, scattered with vast slabs of grey rock on
which cotton grasses fluttered. Up ahead, a makeshift path gave onto a slope leading
back down towards the sea, and they turned off and began their descent along
the cliffs.

    Below
them, on a stretch of shale at the bottom of the fiord, was a sprinkling of old
sod huts, marking the now abandoned Polar Inuit settlement of Etah, once the
most northerly habitation on the planet. It struck Edie more forcefully than
ever that this was not human terrain, but a land governed by other, more
ancient, rules. She watched Skinny striding along fifty metres ahead. Her
earlier plans now seemed ludicrously over-simplified. Even were she to
extricate herself from his particular situation, it would be far too dangerous,
too logistically complex to try to round up the men and take them back to
Ellesmere. Besides, she still didn't have the evidence she needed. Better to
stay put and try to work out exactly what the two men were doing. So long as
they continued to think of her as just a protestor, she had some cover. From
Skinny's confident manner, the unnecessary speed, she could see that he thought
he had the land licked; but from their hastiness alone Edie knew that neither
Russian truly understood the north. When the time came, Edie Kiglatuk meant to
make the most of their ignorance.

    The
two men had set up camp beside the huts, using those that still offered some
measure of protection from the wind and rain to house their equipment. From the
size and depth of the fire circle, and the number of garbage bags lying inside
one of the turf huts out of the way of bears, Edie guessed the men had been at
camp for about a month.

    Skinny
directed Edie towards a hut nearest to the two sleeping tents and the two men
followed her inside. The tinny aroma of damp hit her but the interior of the
hut felt warm and free of draughts. The men had laid a tarp down and on it
placed two fold-up chairs. It was to one of these that the blond now directed
her while Skinny fetched a coil of rope from a kit bag in the corner and began
to secure her hands and feet to the chair. The situation was slightly absurd,
she thought, like something from a silent comedy, and if it weren't for the
fact that it was taking all her energy not to be afraid she would have laughed.

    The
blond put down the rifle and began heating some coffee on one ring of a
portable gas burner. On the other he placed a frying pan and into it a large
dollop of fat from a tin.

    'So,
one of those natives who hates white men, huh?' His English was better than
Skinny's but it was his friend who was the leader.

    'Not
all
white men,' she said. 'But you definitely.' Knowing they had no idea of
her real intention made her feel more secure.

    The
blond let out a thin laugh. He'd poured some batter into the frying pan and it
now gave off a thick, slightly sour wheaty smell.

    'Hungry?
Too bad.' He poured some coffee into a plastic mug and brought it to her lips.
She took a little and immediately spat it out.

    'Without
sugar it's disgusting.'

    The blond
shrugged. 'Moller said you were a handful.' He looked her up and down. 'A very
small
handful.'

    Skinny
burst in and gabbled something in Russian. From then on, the blond ignored her.

    Not
long afterwards, the two men headed out. Edie watched them go, waited a long,
long time, then with tremendous effort, she rose and, taking the chair with
her, shuffled on her knees to the entrance of the hut and looked about. There
was the usual cluster of expedition paraphernalia stacked up neatly against the
walls of another turf house: ropes, a couple of books, climbing gear, wet
suits, several primus stoves and back-up gas canisters, an ice pick for
chipping out sweet water-ice and a camera on a tripod. She wriggled and tried
to work her hands loose, feeling for the knot, but from the position of the
ropes she surmised that Skinny was some kind of mariner, because he had tied
her with a perfect buntline hitch. There was no way of getting out of that one.

    Rocking
back and forward in the chair, taking tiny steps, Edie wormed her way towards
the piles of equipment, hoping to find, if not a knife, then some kind of edge
with which she might cut the rope. There was nothing, but as she manoeuvred the
chair back to its original position, the back leg caught on one of the two
books in the pile, sending it flying to the ground. Anxious not to give away
what she had been doing, Edie turned the chair and by jigging up and down
managed to flip the book over. As she did so, she noticed a book mark. Using
her toe, she flicked the pages forward. The book was some kind of
nineteenth-century printed diary, with entries divided up by date. Every so
often she came across a lithograph, mostly of stereotypical Arctic scenes
familiar to her from similar books in the Autisaq school library: strangely
drawn bears and ragged, implausibly beached icebergs. A curio. She was about to
push it back, when the page flipped and she found herself staring at the face
of Joe Inukpuk. The image was so exact an impression of Joe that it was as though
Edie had been thrust forward in time and was looking at her stepson twenty
years from now. There he was, older and more weathered, but her stepson all the
same. Yet his outfit was too old-fashioned to have come from anything but the
past.

    Beside
the Inuk man stood a
qalunaat.
The two men were passing a knife between
them. In the background were the cliffs and ice-crimped moraine of Northwestern
Greenland and when Edie squinted at the picture it became clear that the two
men were standing on exactly the same beach as the one the two Russian men had
escorted her from only a few hours before. Beneath them was a caption, in
Danish, of which Edie managed to make out two words: 'Karlovsky' and 'Welatok'.
Her confusion fell away. The man she was looking at wasn't Joe at all but her
great-great-great-grand- father, an ancestor she and Joe shared. Welatok must
have met this man, Karlovsky, in Greenland, and either guided or traded with
him. Could it be
Welatok's
grave the Russians were looking for?

    Edie
shuffled her way to the front of the hut, pushed open the door with her head,
and looked about. There, on the horizon, was a faint human presence. In front
of her, at a distance of about ten metres, was a camera mounted on a tripod.
She had an idea. Dropping to her knees she began very slowly to shuffle across
the shale towards the camera. It was an exquisitely painful journey. Each time
she put her knee down, the stones bit in through the layers of leather and
cloth, spiking the skin. The most direct route left her too exposed - she
assumed the men would have binoculars - so she was forced to wind her way
around the remains of two of the turf huts for cover. As she lowered one knee
and then the other, the points of shale in her skin drove in a little deeper so
that by the time she reached the tripod her trousers were soft with blood and
the skin on her knees burned like frostbite.

    From
this position it was impossible to shift backwards in order to resume sitting
on the chair so there was nothing for it but to take her weight on her knees
once more to lift herself up to the camera. It was only by stretching as far as
she could that she could raise herself high enough. In this position the shale
bit savagely into her knees and the sharp edge of the chair sank into the skin
of her back. She took a deep breath and thought,
this isn't Edie, this is
Kigga and Kigga can do these things.

    Straining,
she managed to put her eye to the viewer. Her heart sank. The lens was directed
at just the wrong angle. She would have to find a way to pivot the camera
thirty degrees to the right. Plus the zoom wasn't on. She took an agonizing
step back on her knees and craned her neck. From that angle she could just see
a button that looked as though it might be the zoom. Another couple of inches
and she would be able to press it down with her chin. Approaching the camera
once more Edie took a deep breath in, pressed down on her knees and reached up
with the whole of her trunk. At last she felt the cool of the plastic case on
her chin and, moving along gently until she felt the slight raise of the
button, was about to open her jaw and press down when a piece of shale suddenly
gave way under her left knee, sending her off balance. Unable to use her hands
to save herself, she toppled sideways, the left side of her jawbone crunching
onto the stones. She felt the bone dislocate from its socket and, moments
later, a searing pain. When she looked up she saw the camera skewed at an
improbable angle where she had dislodged it as she went down.

    For a
moment she wanted to give up. But only for a moment.

    The
first thing was to ignore the pain. She had a method for this, something her
father had taught her. She sat with her eyes closed and replayed the scene in
Safety Last!,
with

    Harold
Lloyd eighteen storeys up hanging on to the hands of the giant clock, until the
pain lay somewhere beneath the laughter and she could at least think clearly
again. But it wouldn't be for long; pretty soon, the pain would take over once
more. She needed to manoeuvre her jawbone back into its socket. By moving her
foot as though she were about to tread on her toes, she was able to lift the
knee on the dislocated side a little closer to her head. She took a huge
breath, leaned over and pressed the dislocated jaw into the knee. The pain was
so excruciating she thought she might black out, but soon she felt the pop of
the jaw re-engaging and what had been unbearable became simply agonizing. Her
face would swell around the dislocation, but she'd at least be able to use her
mouth.

    What
she needed now, Edie thought, was some kind of stick she could hold between her
teeth to prod the camera zoom. But where to find such a thing? The nearest tree
lay two thousand kilometres to the south. She looked around. Edging herself
across the shale she made her way past the fire circle towards the stack of
equipment. Then something told her to take a knee-step back. There, among the
charred remains of heather and the tiny nubs of willow twigs, she spotted a
ballpoint pen that must have fallen from one of the men's pockets. The end had
caught the flames, the plastic whorled into a mess of carbon and burned ink.
She kneeled over it, bent across and with a tremendous effort of will craned
her neck and plunged her face into the pile of ashes. She pulled back up onto
her knees, and slowly, slowly, with the pen between her teeth, made her way
across the shale to the tripod.

    Positioning
the camera with her head, she prodded the on switch then the zoom. There were a
series of
inukshuk
on the bluff above the plateau and, below them,
burial cairns. The Russians were busy removing the stones from the cairns. She
backed off and, using the pen, let off a shot. The motor whirred in and shot
off a few more frames.