The Shaman's Knife (6 page)

I began thinking of carvings. As far as I knew, carvings had nothing to do with the problem I had to solve, but the shaman in Sanirarsipaaq was a master carver. My mind kept struggling to come up with carvings I'd seen from time to time. What I was seeking seemed to be a particular carving. I couldn't visualize it clearly but was getting
something
, maybe a memory from childhood.

I stared from the porthole and tried to
will
that particular carving into revealing itself to me. For a brief few seconds, a moment, I thought I was getting it, some kind of an angry-looking bird, and then the beak dropped off and it all became fuzzy and was gone and wouldn't return. Passing the endless procession of frozen lakes I refused to let their outlines register, instead registering an endless procession of shamanistic carvings, calling up anything I'd seen or heard.

But what I sought eluded me.

Then I began to think of shamanistic masks I'd seen, the kind a shaman might don when going into his trance as he tried through his helping spirits to bring our people better hunting, better fishing, a healing power that would drive out sickness or madness. Not that would lead to murder.

Then I fastened on the passages in the report I'd seen in Yellowknife that mentioned the amount of money found on the murdered man. The later information I'd received from Buster, not in the report, that his bankroll had been larger than the money he'd been paid that night, might take us somewhere. Meaning someone had paid him a debt? If so, who? What debt?

I must have dozed. When I woke we were coming into Cambridge Bay, landing, wheeling in beside two other aircraft. One was the First Air milk run Hawker Siddeley that I would catch for Sanirarsipaaq. The other was a Twin Otter from Adlak Air. The Hawker Siddeley was parked as close as possible to the terminal building.

As I gathered up the bag of winter clothing that I'd packed—was it only yesterday?—in Labrador, had not unpacked in Ottawa, again had not unpacked in Yellowknife, our pilot up front could be heard swearing into his radio about whoever had parked “that god damn First Air blocking the terminal entrance so that nobody else can get near, for Christ's sake.”

There are social distinctions among aircraft in the north. Citation pilots look upon themselves as deserving precedence, like a Mercedes in a flock of Fiat 850s. So our pilot beefed, but in vain. As I looked outside I wished I was wearing something warmer than my Ottawa clothes. The court people, carrying their own bags, fought their way out of the aircraft into the wind. Even though dressed for the cold, they were wincing from the stinging whip of ice particles blowing almost horizontally off the winter banks of snow and ice lining the runway. The official start of spring was two weeks past, but official is one thing, actual another. The radio that morning had given a Celsius temperature of minus thirty for Cambridge Bay. The thin woman and the lawyers protected their faces by walking backward as they ducked around the offending Hawker Siddeley. The judge had his parka pulled low over his face but didn't walk backward, as if to say “to hell with it.”

With all those impressions fighting for attention, it wasn't until I got inside the little terminal building and the wind slammed the door shut behind me that I found that the whole place was packed with weeping people. The court party had stopped dead, astonished and abashed at the scene around them. Deborah, the pretty young court reporter, ran back to me. “Matteesie! What is it? Why all this?”

I said, “It must be for someone who has died. Maybe for the murdered people. I'm not sure.”

Then among the mourners I saw the thin and wasted figure of Lovering Oquataq, the Anglican priest who was twin brother of Jonassie the shaman in Sanirarsipaaq.

He seemed to have shrunk since I saw him last, years ago. His clerical collar was several sizes too large under his open parka. He sat with his arm comfortingly around the shoulders of a very old lady, maybe of my mother's generation, who was making a steady heartbroken sound, stopping only for breath. Another old Inuit woman sat at her other side, tears running down the deep lines in her cheeks. Many other women, especially the old, wailed as they wept. Some alone, some with the women, were somber, set-faced men with tear-filled eyes. Little kids stared, upset and wide-eyed. Some teenagers were trying to keep the little ones calm, holding their hands, talking quietly.

I knew what was happening. I had been part of it from time to time myself, long ago.

“Father Lovering,” I said, leaning over to him.

“Matteesie,” he said, looking up, unsurprised.

The old woman he was holding to him was oblivious, her wails uninterrupted.

“This is for the boy and his granny killed in Sanirarsipaaq?” He nodded and briefly met my eyes. “The young man murdered, Dennis Raakwap, was young and bright, much beloved,” Lovering said quietly. “Good schooling, more planned . . .”

So my guess had been right. It was always this way for the young and treasured, not so much for the old. Deaths of the old by sickness, accident, drowning, freezing, starving, are seen as natural, inevitable—they have lived their lives. When a young person dies, cut off almost before the real life begins, it is a wound to the survival of our whole race, our culture, our language. The worst losses are those suffered through suicide or murder, unnatural ends. A young girl's suicide through lack of job opportunities, a perceived hopelessness, an unwillingness to keep on in the world she sees, of drink, unemployment, serial welfare, so that she chooses death instead, brings such an outburst as I was seeing now.

There were tears in my own eyes. All the brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents, loved ones, of the vastly extended family that is common to Inuit life were here. “They're from Pelly Bay, Hall Beach, Gjoa Haven, Spence, Cambridge, Igloolik,” Lovering murmured, looking up at me. “Even Iqaluit, Inuvik. Gathered here to mourn. It is the double blow, Dennis and Thelma . . . not only the loss of a good young man, but Thelma was the mother to some here, granny, aunt, cousin.”

I turned away. No doubt some would come on to Sanirarsipaaq, others would not. The old taboos against touching the dead or anything that had belonged to the dead are no longer so strong as they were, but the Inuit always would rather remember the live person than mourn over the body emptied of its soul.

When the boarding call came and I moved with the wet-eyed mourners who were continuing to Sanirarsipaaq, I felt part of them more than just in the physical sense. The last time I had grieved among others this way was when a sixteen-year-old girl in Paulatuk, my first cousin, had hanged herself, apparently out of deep despair that what she saw around her was all she had to look forward to. She was wrong, she was special, but it is the special people who most often fear that they are not special
enough
. Among the weeping people gathered with me in that other airport I had heard a kindly white woman, just wanting to say something to show sympathy, ask among the mourners, “How old was she?”

A middle-aged Inuit woman with a ravaged face had replied calmly, but too fatalistically, a common trait among my people, “Old enough to make up her own mind.”

The plane was not very crowded for the fairly short flight on to Sanirarsipaaq; there were perhaps fifteen of us in all. As usual, the passenger part of the plane ended at a partition behind which freight would be stowed. The partition, movable depending on the size of the freight load, had a small door on the left hand side for access to the freight and flight deck.

As soon as we were airborne the stewardess stopped in the aisle beside me. She was tall with long fair hair and a very womanly figure, and wore little or no makeup.

Leaning over to speak, she said, “You're the only new one, except the ones who are crying, and I don't think we have to disturb them. Would you mind if I just explained the safety measures to you personally instead of me getting up in the aisle at the front like we're supposed to do?”

“Go ahead,” I said.

She explained seat belts, oxygen, exits, the usual. All in about fifteen seconds. With that over, I said, “I want to change to heavier clothes. Could I do that behind the partition?”

She gave a radiant and amused smile. “I won't peek.”

I had to bend my head and turn sideways to get through to the freight compartment, where I stopped with my bag beside big boxes strapped into freight racks. Some were addressed to Sanirarsipaaq, many to Inuvik. Others were for transshipment to Arctic Red, Fort McPherson and Norman Wells. I dumped out the warm clothes I'd worn a few days earlier in Labrador, when I helped the sergeant from the local detachment get a few caribou for his freezer.

I pulled on a thermal undershirt due for laundering as soon as I could arrange it, caribou-skin pants with the fur side against my body, wool socks, knee-high mukluks with white felt liners, and over it all a long brown oversweater that Lois had knitted for me long ago. Into my parka pocket I stuffed an old woolen balaclava that I carried more out of habit than anything else. Then my hat, very official RCMP, the force's badge in front.

The co-pilot emerged from the cockpit just as I was finishing. He stared. “Back to nature, is it, Matteesie?”

Even before he spoke I had presumed he was Irish (the name badge on his left chest read: Kieron O'Kennedy). Many foreign nationals are part of the scanty population (some fifty-five thousand at last count) of our North—Germans, Americans, Vietnamese, Russians, English, at least a dozen nationalities co-existing with, and working alongside, the much greater majority native population of Inuit, Indians, and Metis. The newcomers, including many from southern Canada, go north for all kinds of reasons, from leaving trouble behind to looking for a new meaning in life. I could not even guess what had brought Irish Kieron O'Kennedy to fly co-pilot on an Arctic airline. Whether he was from Ireland's Protestant-dominated north or Catholic south, the thousands of sectarian murders committed by terrorists of both religions bothered good people in all parts of Ireland. Drove some out. He had the Celtic red hair and a very fair skin and backed up the Irishness by talking like a cast member of a sometimes ribald Irish play I'd seen once in Ottawa,
Playboy of the Western World
.

“Some kind of a disguise is it you're puttin' on now?” he asked. “Somebody's husband after you, then? I thought you Inuit fellas didn' worry about technicalities like that . . .” He laughed at his own joke. “Anyway, what I came back to tell you is that we're laying over in Sanirarsipaaq for an hour or two, in case you want to solve the murders fast and come back with us.”

“Very funny,” I said.

“Well, we're concerned about time. I mean, if yer man up front there”—I deduced he meant the pilot—“doesn't get to Inuvik tonight his girlfriend says she's going to look for a bank clerk or somebody with regular hours.”

None of this really affected me, but what he said next did.

“We're lucky the weather has changed enough already, thanks be t' God, to let us get down with this crowd of sad people. The Otter guy we saw in Cambridge, I know him, he can fly anything in near any weather. Still, he said in normal circumstances he would have just laid over in Sanirarsipaaq waiting out the weather, but he had the bodies to take out.”

Bodies? I had a sinking feeling.

“If he hadn't got out, they would have had to put the bodies back in the cooler. Otherwise, they might have thawed if he'd had to layover and leave them aboard and then the weather changed. He said people were pleading with him to hurry and get away while he could or they'd never forgive him and the whole economy of the town would be ruined. He told 'em he'd give it one try and if it was too dangerous they'd just bloody well have to put the bodies back in the cooler. As it turned out, though, once was enough, he made it.”

He was laughing. I wasn't. Gradually dawning on me was the fact that the bodies that were my main concern in coming here, and that I'd intended to see before they were moved, had been on that Twin Otter we'd seen on the ground at Cambridge Bay. But I still didn't have it all.

“Put the bodies back where?”

“Oh, I guess you couldn' know. When they had those two murders last Friday, y' know, the weather was away too warm for them to be just left, like, in the shed at the Mountie detachment, so they put the body bags in the freezer at the Co-op. They were stacked away at the back, out of the way, nobody even had to look at them if they didn't want to, but the Inuit guy who manages the Co-op knew both of them . . . Superstitious, y' know? He just refused to open the freezer door again as long as every time he went in he had to look at them body bags.”

I groaned. This all figured. Nobody who understood Inuit fears and beliefs about death would have used a public freezer for body storage. That goddamn Barker!

O'Kennedy was going on. “No freezer being opened meant nobody could get anything out of the freezer until the bodies were gone. Meaning no nine-dollar cheeseburgers or four-dollar ice cream bars or other stuff for the bingo players. The entire economy of Sanirarsipaaq was grinding to a complete halt. So now with the bodies out of there, the joint's back to normal. At least until somebody else gets murdered.”

I went back to my seat, swearing.

“Okay?” the stewardess asked.

Okay? Not really. “Yeah, thanks.”

Gradually I accepted what I'd heard. Couldn't do anything about it. A few deep breaths and I forced myself into less stressful thoughts. We were flying over places I remembered, the deep bays and fjordlike inlets. I'd traveled these parts often with nothing on my mind but where to make camp. When I was young and on the move sometimes we'd be forced to swing wide offshore with our dogs or snowmobiles, slowing to a crawl where the sea ice had been tossed and tumbled against the island, then frozen.

I thought ahead. I had never met Jonassie Oquataq, but was remembering something about him that had not crossed my mind for years. One of my assignments in the 1970s was to tour Inuit settlements in the eastern and high Arctic with what was called a vice-regal party, led by Canada's governor-general, who was officially, but mainly ceremonially, the queen's representative. At the time, our government was in one of its periodic paroxysms of showing the flag in the Arctic. There are a lot of ice islands far to the north that Canadian sovereignty freaks claim are ours. Scientists of the old Soviet Union and their successors prefer to believe they are at the very least jointly owned. Both sides take care not to get tough about it—while the Americans send in submarines and icebreakers from time to time, more or less in the peaceful spirit of, “Hey, fellows, remember us?”