Four Quarters of Light (43 page)

‘And do you still need the veil?' I asked.

‘No,' she answered. ‘I have spent so much time criss-crossing worlds that I know who I am and what I have to do. If I remain true to that then the powers give me all the support I require. But enough of me. I have been “working” on you since we left the hill yesterday. I have something to tell you. It's bad news, but you need to know it.'

‘Okay,' I said, trying to hide the apprehension flaring up inside me.

‘The scales have grown back. There are lots of them like small buds on your back. I don't know why that has happened.'

I saw Debra look at me. The shock and the fear on my face must have been very apparent.

‘Don't worry about this. It is often not easy to fix things at one go and it was incredibly strenuous work for me yesterday. But perhaps this has happened for a reason. Perhaps you still need your armour for a while. We shall see. But always remember you have great allies in the spirit world. I knew from yesterday and what I have been learning since. We will work together again. You can be my son for a while and I will teach you to walk on your own.'

The day of our leave-taking was bright and hot. We were packed and ready to leave long before our boat arrived to ferry us back to Kotzebue. I wandered about the campsite and ranged about the land where we had climbed to Oneson's hill. Then I took myself down to the river. The seal skin Lena had taught me to tan was still stretched in its wooden frame. Anyway, now the fish rack would be full of salmon hanging like dripping candles. All Lena's buckets and basins were piled under the gutting table. Several of her ulus lay on the table with their queer half-moon-shaped blades, which she handled with such dexterity and finesse. I remembered the mischievous look on her face when she sliced a piece of raw seal flesh for me to eat. Life was simple and very hard, but I had loved being here and I would miss it. It had been nothing like what I'd expected yet it had been everything and more. I tried to find a suitable phrase to encapsulate my time here but I couldn't. I had been blissfully content. I was about to leave this little piece of paradise and I knew that I would never return. I would not find anything to replace it, nor would I want to.

As I walked back to the cabin, I spied a particularly fine rack of caribou antlers still attached to the bleached skull of the beast. I
walked over to it and took it back with me. When I reached the cabin our bags were stacked outside, waiting to be carted onto the boat. Charlie was sitting under his tree, just as he had been when I arrived. I was a bit apprehensive as I approached him with my find. It was like being caught in the orchard with an armful of apples. Before I could say anything, Charlie nodded sagely with the tiniest hint of a smile.

‘You take to your home,' he said.

I noticed Lena and Debra standing in the doorway. ‘I would rather take Lena, she is a great worker,' I said aloud, mimicking what Charlie had first said about Lena when he met her. Charlie just kept nodding as if he hadn't heard me while Debra smiled and Lena chuckled.

Inside the cabin the CB radio crackled and a squeaky voice said something I couldn't understand. Lena rushed in to answer the call and came back within a few minutes to declare that the boat would be with us in ten minutes. There was little else to do but say our goodbyes. Charlie stood leaning heavily on his stick and shook hands. His arm was still giving him a lot of pain, so our handshake was brief, and I hugged him slightly, remembering his damaged ribs. But for Lena I reserved the biggest, most affectionate bear hug, and unashamedly confessed just how much I would miss her.

‘Maybe you come back some time,' she said with the kind of invitation that you know is a final goodbye.

‘Maybe,' I returned, keeping up the pretence but speaking with heartfelt yearning.

The boat to take us back was not an open scull like the one that brought us. It had a small cabin area to the front, mainly as a windbreak and nothing more. We were soon loaded and waving our goodbyes to Charlie and Lena on their hilltop position. As the boat motored downriver and towards the open sea, I felt lost for words. Joe, the boat's skipper, was in good humour and bantered us ‘white guys' about going native.

‘It's such a pity to be leaving so soon,' was all I could manage.

‘Yes,' answered Debra. ‘It's always a pity to be leaving.' She hesitated before adding, ‘It could be years before I see them again and Charlie is in such a state.'

The fact that she used the word ‘state' rather than refer to Charlie's illness or his injury suggested that perhaps she was hinting at something I could sense but hardly understand. I didn't want to pursue the matter, because I didn't want these dreamy days to be blown away so soon.

Back in Kotzebue we stowed our bags in the back of Joe's truck. He took one look at my antlers and asked where I intended taking them.

‘To Ireland,' I replied innocently.

Joe just looked at me quizzically. Debra volunteered an explanation. ‘We are going to catch a flight to Nome for a few days and then fly back to Fairbanks. We were hoping to ship them on to Fairbanks.'

Joe studied the antlers. ‘They ain't gonna carry them. They have gotta bit particular lately. Won't ship any antlers unless you have got them specially packed.'

I was heartbroken. These antlers were very, very special to me. Debra checked with the cargo handlers when we got to the airport. Joe was right. I walked out of the corrugated-iron shed, dumped the antlers on the ground and walked over to collect the rest of our baggage from Joe's truck.

Suddenly I had an idea. ‘Joe,' I said, grasping excitedly at straws, ‘if I pay you, would you pack the antlers and send them on to me in Fairbanks?'

Joe was still unsure. ‘Maybe you paid me and I packed them and they still didn't take them.'

‘Well, then I won't have lost anything as I'm going to have to dump them anyway,' I said.

‘Except a few dollars,' Joe was quick to remind me.

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘At least I would have tried.'

Joe lifted the last of our belongings out of the truck and carried them into the departures area where he deposited them with the rest. ‘Okay,' he said. ‘Write down your address in Fairbanks and I
will try and get them shipped to you. I know some of these guys who work here.'

I was almost ecstatic. ‘Great, Joe. Now, how much do I owe you?'

‘Nothing. If they get to you, you send me a case of Bud.'

I looked at Debra, unhappy to be shipping alcohol to a native community. She just shrugged her shoulders, understanding my dilemma. So I gave Joe a contact address in Fairbanks, still insisting that I should pay for the shipping advance. The case of Budweiser I would send on to him as a thank you anyway. But he was insistent that he would take no money in advance. I concluded that the case of Bud was just as important to him as the antlers were to me. So I left them with him and passed through the departure gates.

As we waited, Debra spoke again about her work on Oneson's hill.

‘I know you thought it was a difficult job, my working on you, but the truth is, all the pain I felt was your pain. I felt a tremendous amount of sadness and I cried because I felt it, but it wasn't my sadness, my pain, it was yours. It did take me over, but that was part of the healing. I took it on for your benefit and then I could let it go because I wasn't attached to it. It was a long and major healing; you had kept so much for so long and needed to release it all. A lot happened. I remember I brought back at least one if not more soul pieces, lost parts of yourself. I can't remember them all, it was all too much like a dream so it fades. There were many spirits watching, mainly spirits of that place, of the hill, the tundra, the wind, and many animals. They were all there to support you, to bear witness to your healing. It was a tremendous experience to have all of nature watching and supporting us. Mostly I was pulling dark energy from you and throwing it to the wind. So much old energy, old sad stuff that needed to go.

‘I knew I received a lot of info for you. I was told to teach you to journey, that you were a Dreamwalker too but a lost one. I remember the bear and how it came over the hill from the north and tried to keep hidden in the bushes, not coming out all the way. It growled and acted feisty but was immensely powerful and
was willing to share its power with you. A very good thing.

‘Remember the bones? You were practically lying on them and when you sat up we saw them. They were a sign from your ancestors that they were with you, and would be your future allies. That's why I told you to take them.'

There was nothing dramatic in Debra's voice as she spoke, but I was filled with wonder and awe. I could have been my son listening to a fairy story. But I never doubted for a moment what my guide was telling me.

The drone of the plane's engines and the flashing seat-belt signs ushered us back into another world. In ten minutes we would be on the earth again.

Mike Murphy, a retired sergeant in the Nome Police Department, was an old friend of Debra's and had kindly offered to put us up. Nome's short but colourful history unearthed a community that had been burned almost to the ground and pounded by Arctic gales blowing in off the ocean. Its population had been decimated by epidemics of influenza and diphtheria, and on occasion its extreme location had it on the verge of starvation. In 1900, Nome was the biggest boom town in Alaska, with a population of more than twenty thousand. In the good old days of the gold rush, anybody could pick up a fortune off the beach and thousands of dreamers flocked here from all over the Americas and Europe. But now, Nome is like any other well-settled small town in rural America. It looks staid and settled, but you just know there are hundreds of stories here waiting to be picked up and dusted down. I looked out of the window of Mike's powerful Jeep. It could have been Punta Arenas set in Connemara countryside!

Mike soon had us settled in at his home. He was a big man in height and in girth. The walls of his home were draped in bear skins and the hides from musk ox. He brewed his own beer in his cellar and we enjoyed a few glasses as we chatted about our travels and intentions. Mike smiled in admiration as I told him of my travels to date and my last few weeks, when I intended travelling down through the south-west peninsula.

‘You've seen more of Alaska in a few months than most Alaskans have in their lifetime,' he commented.

I nodded, explaining that he wasn't the first person to have told me that.

‘What have you made of it so far?'

I told him I wasn't quite sure. It was too big to be quickly summed up. In any case, most Alaskans to whom I had put that question had been stumped for an answer. ‘In a way, it's a conundrum,' I said, attempting an answer I knew would be hopelessly inadequate. ‘Sometimes it feels smaller than its actual size. And there are so many layers to it. Sometimes moving between different locations is like moving between unknown worlds. No wonder the writers of
Star Trek
stole the phrase “the Final Frontier” from Alaska. There's a lot of worlds out there, and sometimes when I arrive in them I feel just like Captain Kirk, that I have boldly gone where no man has gone before.' I saw Mike and his wife and Debra looking at me in silence. ‘It's your home brew that's doing the talking, Mike,' I quickly added, trying to lighten the situation.

‘In vino veritas,' Mike said with a laugh, filling my glass.

‘Well, the core of the conundrum is that it's big but it's small. It's American but it's not culturally part of the lower forty-eight. It's one country yet full of different worlds. There is little consensus about the big issues, yet every Alaskan declares themselves Alaskans to the bone.' I realized that the beer was having the precise effect on me I had said, so I decided to cut the monologue short. ‘It's about transcendence. You can lose yourself and you can find yourself in the Big Lonely, and that is the biggest conundrum of all.' I paused for a moment. ‘And I'm not drinking any more of this rocket fuel, Mike, okay?' By now everyone was laughing, including me.

The next day, Mike drove us around the town and the outlying area. It looked more like Connemara than I had first thought. He informed us that some people had reported sighting a polar bear only a few days ago. By all accounts it was a young one. It was unusual to find such creatures in and around Nome in
summertime. He hoped the game and wildlife rangers found it before someone with a bellyful of booze decided to make a trophy out of it. In over twenty years as a police officer, Mike assured me that there had been no real serious crime. The community was too small and too long established. Everybody knew everybody else's business. But there were many funny and sad stories, and some that were not so funny, like finding the bodies of young kids who have committed suicide or have gone off on their snow mobiles without the right gear and no bush savvy. ‘You need to teach survival skills very young here. Bringing home some young kid who has died from exposure after a few days in the bush is very disturbing. You probably know the kid and its family. It is a very unpleasant and upsetting day's work. Thankfully, it doesn't happen too often.' Mike paused for a moment, then stated that it wasn't so much a police force they needed in Nome as a force of psychiatrists and social workers.