Edie Kiglatuk's Christmas

T
he shortest day of the year didn't count for much up on Ellesmere Island. By the time 21 December arrived, the sun hadn't come up for two months and it would be another two before it managed to scramble over the High Arctic horizon. Objects, animals and even people could disappear during the Great Dark without anyone much noticing.

Which was why no one reported Tommy Qataq missing until a hunter came upon him on his way to check his trap lines, by which time the fella was half-dead, his part-open eyes like marbles, and the wound to his head crusted with frozen blood. The nurse on duty at the medical station said it looked as though he'd fallen over and hit his head on a rock, while loaded on cheap whiskey. He might pull through, but then he might not.

At first, most folk in the tiny Arctic hamlet of Autisaq assumed it was misadventure. Tommy Qataq was young and reckless and he liked a drink. But then they found the bruising on his fist and the dark welt on his solar plexus, which still bore the marks of knuckles, and rumours began to circulate that Tommy Qataq was feuding with another boy by the name of Willie Killik over Tommy's girlfriend, Nancy Muttuk.

News of Tommy's sorry state reached the nearest policeman, Sergeant Derek Palliser of the Ellesmere Island Police, who was based out of the Kuujuaq Detachment. His immediate response was to get on the phone to part-time teacher and ex-polar-bear hunter, Edie Kiglatuk. The two were old friends. Over the years Edie had morphed into Palliser's unofficial eyes and ears in Autisaq. More to the point, she knew the dead boy and his supposed enemy, having taught them both in high school, and she'd had dealings with Willie Killik for a long time after.

‘I'll fly over when the weather lets up. Meantime, I'd appreciate it if you could tell me something about those two young men,' Derek said.

Tommy Qataq had always been a straightforward kind of kid, someone who, in the south, might have been thought of as a jock. No genius, but big into sport and girls. He'd been living with Nancy Muttuk at her parents' house. Rumour had it that Tommy had taken his fist to Nancy a couple of times recently. They had a kid, a little girl called Aggie. A three or four-year-old, Edie thought.

The other boy was a different case. Willie Killik was one of those young, lost souls the Arctic seemed to specialize in, a statistic-in-waiting, tough on the outside but wounded and somehow fragile.

‘Willie's parents are drinkers, given up on the boy,' Edie told Derek. ‘He has other family, but they got their own problems.' Willie, it seemed, shared the family's addiction curse, he was a self-destruct type. Petty thief, carouser, all round pain in the ass, but he'd never been known to be ser- iously violent. Leastwise, not till now.

‘For him to do this, something or somebody must have pushed him real hard,' Edie said.

‘How's about you check out the boy for me, let me know what you think?' Derek said.

■ ■ ■

Edie phoned ahead to the halfway house, then went by the scruffy little unit squeezed between the town hall building and the Northern Store. Having been kicked out of his own home years before and having outstayed his welcome with various relatives, Willie had been living there a few months now.

The super, a thin man in his fifties, who went by the name Freddie rather than by his real, Inuktitut name, showed them into the office, muttering under his breath. His wife had some kind of illness, which prevented her from doing much, and Edie put his crankiness down to living with an invalid and existing on a diet of Doritos and overpriced soda. Willie was slouched in a chair beside the desk.

‘You tell me how you came by that black eye?' Edie said.

‘I fell over,' Willie replied, sulkily.

‘C'mon Willie, what you and Tommy fight about?' Edie rocked back in her chair and caught the boy's eye. ‘You still sweet on Nancy, that it?' Willie and Nancy had dated when they were at high school, a long time ago now. Edie remembered trying to be the boy's advocate just before the headmaster closed the door on his education for good.
The kid is among the brightest I've taught. Been attending class almost regularly, got himself a steady girl.

‘I ain't given Nancy a thought,' Willie said. When he saw that wasn't going to wash, he added, ‘Me and Tommy had a scrap OK? He fell back but then he got up. I swear he was on his feet when I hoofed off.'

‘Tommy's pretty sick, so I'll ask again. What you two fight over?'

‘Nothing, like I told you. You gonna arrest me for scrapping now?'

‘Who said anything about arrest?' Edie let that sit for a moment, hoping to catch the boy on the back foot. Instead, Willie sunk deep inside himself and let the light in his eyes go out.

■ ■ ■

An hour and a half later Tommy died and no time at all after that Willie Killik went missing, failing to show for supper at the halfway house, breaking the terms of his juvie order.

The super came over to advise Edie of this fact and found her in the outhouse in her backyard, taking advantage of the bad weather to chalk up some routine maintenance on her snowmobile.

‘I checked all the usual places,' the super said, his breath in great geyser gusts. He listed the names of a few trouble- makers Willie sometimes hung out with: a dope den, a couple of well-known local moonshiners. ‘Came up empty. Went round to his folks too, but they seem more bothered about the snowbie he took from their port.' He blew through his nostrils to unfreeze the hairs. For a moment he watched her wipe the grease off her hands, then he went on.

‘I called Derek but the weather's still too bad out there to muster an air search. Anyone else, the elders, would have got a ground search party together.' The super stamped the blood back into his feet. ‘But this is Willie and the wind's taken all the tracks and it's nearly Christmas, so …' He shook his head in a disapproving manner. ‘Everyone knows that boy's a suicide waiting to happen. He got nowhere to go.'

Throwing the oily cloth over the stovepipe to stop it freezing, and pulling on her wolf-skin mittens, Edie saw the truth of this: boys, young men, turning on themselves at an alarming rate. ‘Suicide epidemic', the news channels were calling it. You couldn't argue with the stats. Young Inuit men were forty times more likely to kill themselves than their compatriots in the south.