Edie Kiglatuk's Christmas (5 page)

Joe said: ‘Right.' He sounded impatient with her for focusing on such a thing, even for a moment. ‘But your fellow's breathing, right?'

‘Just about. If we can stabilize him and stop the bleeding . . .'

‘You got any plastic?'

‘I already cut a piece.'

Some energy passed between them. Love, admiration, maybe a mixture of the two.

‘Gonna pack the clinic's snowbie and come myself,' Joe said. ‘Meantime, if the blizzard blows over, they'll send the plane. Keep doing what you're doing and don't give him anything by mouth.' His voice softened. ‘Kigga, nothing you can do's gonna make it worse.'

‘Joe . . .' She was about to tell her stepson to be careful, when she realized he'd already hung up.

Edie went back to the two men, pulled out the bivvy from Taylor's trailer and in a few minutes had it up and over the injured man. It had started snowing. In a couple of hours the blizzard would be upon them. Pushing Taylor back, she leaned over Wagner's face, fingered his neck for a pulse and temperature, took the square of polyurethane from her pocket, opened up his fleece with her knife and tamped the plastic over the wound. A small thought scudded across her mind. Only three days ago this stout little man thought he was setting out on a grand adventure, something to boast about at the clubhouse bar back in Wichita. The odds on Felix Wagner ever seeing the clubhouse again had just lengthened considerably. She turned to Taylor.

‘Do everything you can to make sure no air gets into the wound or the lung could collapse. I'm going to get a snow shelter up. The blizzard goes big, this bivvy won't hold. Anything changes, call me, OK?'

Taylor said: ‘You're not going to look for whoever did this?'

Edie bit back her irritation. One thing she couldn't abide was a whiner.

‘Look, do you want to play detective or do you want your friend to live?'

Taylor sighed. She watched him disappear into the bivvy, then drove the snowbie to the old drifts at the back of the beach beside the cliff and followed the shingle up the slope to the high point, looking for footprints and shell discards. She wasn't going to give Taylor the satisfaction of knowing that was what she was doing. All the same, she wanted to be clear in her own mind that the shooter wasn't still around. Up on the high ground, the wind was already blowing the snow hard. If there had been any prints, they were gone now. She turned the snowbie back and was passing beside a rocky outcrop when she spotted something on the ground. She squeezed on the brakes, jumped off and went back to check. There it was, the remnant of a single footprint, which had been protected from the worst of the wind by a small boulder. She inspected it more closely, bringing to mind Taylor's footprints from earlier. This was different. A man's and recent. Wagner's perhaps. If not, most likely the shooter's. For a moment or two she stood and took it in, memorising the zig-zag pattern with what looked like the outline of an ice bear at its centre, as bit by bit the wind blew snow over its surface. Up on her feet, now, she could just make out the rapidly filling indentations where the trail of prints had once been, heading away out onto the tundra. If it was the shooter, he was long gone.

She made her way back to the beach and focused her energies on finding the right kind of building snow. Too hard and you'd never get the blocks to caulk together, too soft and the whole structure would be in danger of collapsing. A textbook she'd once read at the school listed the perfect building snow as having a density of 0.3 – 0.35gm/cm
³
and a hardness of between 150 – 200gm/cm
³
. She'd remembered the numbers because they'd seemed so abstract and absurd. Out on the land, you had to do your own calculations.

As luck would have it, she found precisely the right kind of three-layered snow in a drift at the northern edge of the beach. For a while she worked, sawing the walrus-ivory snowknife to and fro to form rectangular bricks the size of breezeblocks, stacking them on top of the trailer and moving them in batches out from under the cliff to where the bivvy currently stood. The job took her a while, because she moved slowly to avoid breaking into a sweat. Bricks cut, she dived back inside the bivvy to check on Wagner. The wounded man was quiet now, his breathing shallow. She checked his boots. No ice bear.

‘He still bleeding?'

Taylor shook his head.

‘That case, you need to come help.'

She showed him how to place the bricks, then caulk between, and as he worked, she dug out the ice floor and levelled it off. Finally they built the little entrance tunnel, sloping down to prevent warm air escaping. It was crude, but it would do. Together they heaved Wagner inside and laid him on a small pile of caribou skins. Edie emptied his pockets of a white plastic ballpoint pen, a pocket knife and a few coins and tossed them in her bag, then went back outside to collect her things and untie Bonehead. The wind chill was formidable now, – 45 maybe, the air foamy with ice frost. She built a crude little annexe on the side of the house, lowered Bonehead into it and bricked him in. The snow would keep him cosy. Then she went inside, poured what remained of the hot tea from the thermos and, handing a mug to Andy Taylor, raised hers in a toast:

‘Here's to another fine mess,' she said.

Andy looked up from his tea, eyes glaring. Incomprehension, maybe. Contempt, more like.

‘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.