by John Moss
“That’s better,” she said when she returned. “Gloria, there’s no point.” She said this not unsympathetically. “Your chopper won’t be there. A bunch of hunters west of Pond are stranded out on an ice floe. Your guy was called in from Nanisivik for emergency evacuation. There are twenty of them out there, a couple didn’t make it. Searching for the bodies of your people is second priority.”
“He may not be dead.”
“He’s dead, Gloria. One way or another. Put it together. He has to be dead.”
One way or another? That struck Morgan as a curious observation and as soon as the pilot moved away to supervise the unloading of cargo, he leaned over to ask Gloria Simmons for clarification. Neither of them felt inclined to leave the plane.
She glanced into his eyes and then away, speaking in a low voice without looking at him. “Inuit do not crash boats into whales. Whales do not attack boats.”
“If there were whales?”
“There had to be.”
“Why?”
“He wouldn’t lie.”
He might kill but he wouldn’t lie. Again, Morgan felt locked in a parallel universe. He couldn’t swim, but he was picked up in the open water? “You know him?” he asked.
“By reputation. He is a very powerful hunter. Pauloosie Avaluktuk. We do not swim, Morgan.”
“The life jackets?”
“Life jackets, no bodies. They didn’t have a chance to put them on, Detective. Perhaps he shot them and rammed the whales to cover his tracks.”
“No,” said Morgan, feeling more sure of himself. There was cultural difference and then there was human nature. “He wouldn’t shoot them. Bodies have a way of turning up, even up here. He’d be afraid of that. And he wouldn’t sacrifice his boat unless it was used as a weapon. Would he have known about the whales in advance?”
“Yes, probably. By radio.”
“Two-way?”
“Or broadcasts. News programming up here includes the movements of whales.”
Or, Morgan thought, he might have smashed his boat on a shoal just deep enough below the surface to have sunk it without risking his own life. Then he wouldn’t have needed whales. He was offended to think this Pauloosie Avaluktuk would violate a cardinal credo of his culture, not by denying the truth, but by dishonouring such majestic creatures with his lie.
“They might have made it to shore,” he said. “Avaluktuk could have been so busy rescuing himself he didn’t see.”
“Do you really think so?”
“No, but if there is the remotest possibility —”
While they had been talking, the plane was unloaded and the pilot slipped away. They were alone inside the empty fuselage. Morgan looked around. The seats had been removed in Iqaluit to make room for the cargo; there was a backpack shoved against a bulkhead. He could read the tag on the pack from where he was sitting. Lost baggage, destined for Broughton Island. He knew there was a remote federal park called Auyuittuq cutting across the peninsula, separating Cumberland Sound from Baffin Strait. Extreme hikers could trek from just south of Broughton Island to just east of Pang. He had read it in a tourist brochure during the flight up from Toronto.
Gloria Simmons rose and walked to the exterior door, leaned out, and looked around, then pulled the door shut and locked it. With solemn deliberation, she climbed through into the cockpit and motioned Morgan to join her. By the time he was strapped into the co-pilot’s seat, he knew there was nothing he could do to stop her. He was there as an observer, a witness, a hostage to fate, which he didn’t believe in. She started the engines, revving the props until the whole fuselage shuddered, then abruptly the wheels jumped the blocks and the Twin Otter began to roll forward. With cool expertise she taxied toward a break in the thickening fog.
She pulled back full throttle, the plane lurched and rumbled as it accelerated on the narrow strip between the high school and the weaving co-op, and suddenly the earth dropped away and they were airborne, engulfed in swirling grey. Just as Morgan was beginning to unclench bowels and fists, a dark shadow loomed from the right, quickly transforming into a tumultuous wall of rock that sheared away as she banked over the frigid waters of Cumberland Sound and continued to climb.
To Morgan’s astonishment she looked over at him and winked.
In the adrenaline surge they had momentarily forgotten their mission, but as soon as they broke into the clear, surrounded by infinite blue, they settled into their own private thoughts. He suspected fate was a euphemism for accepting what couldn’t be stopped. They were flying inland over spectacular alpine terrain that had broken through the cloud cover below them. The plane banked away from the Auyuittuq valley and skimmed low over glacial ice fields as they headed north through the relatively clear skies along the plateau. Gloria Simmons was flying like she’d been doing it all her life.
She leaned across and spoke in a voice loud enough that her words cleared the insistent drone of the engines: “So, Detective, do you think we’ll be arrested?”
“Probably,” he said.
“We didn’t steal it, technically.”
“Technically?”
“D’Arcy Associates has a major stake in the airline. Shareholder’s rights.”
“I don’t suppose we were cleared for takeoff?”
“Controller was on his way home. I saw him duck off the runway when we took off. He and the pilot. They’re a couple, I think.”
Morgan looked over at her. She seemed ominously cheerful. “You fly well,” he said.
“So far so good.”
“You are licensed?”
“To fly?” She had to be enjoying this. It was a distraction from what lay ahead.
“Have you ever flown a Twin Otter before?”
“No, but I’ve watched very carefully from where you’re sitting in the co-pilot’s seat. And I’ve flown a Piper Cub, no, a Beaver, well, actually, I did the takeoff and my instructor did the landing.”
“You are joking, aren’t you?”
“I’m afraid I’m not. But I’m very good at reading the GPS and I know exactly where we are.”
“About one thousand feet up.”
“A little less at the moment. There’s the Barnes Ice Field. We’re right on course, except for the up and down part. We’ll figure it out.” She leaned forward and looked up, then to the side, and looked down. “I don’t think it will be too hard.”
Morgan shifted his gaze back and forth between the glacial terrain below and the glacial expression on her face. If only she would smile, he thought.
Once again, her uncanny sense of seeming to be able to read his thoughts kicked in and she turned, swinging in her seat to address him directly. Instead of words, she suddenly smiled. It was a radiant smile. Lines at the sides of her eyes projected unrestrained pleasure. She placed a hand on his knee and squeezed.
“Trust me,” she said. “It can’t be that difficult to land a plane. There’s only one direction to worry about, and gravity works in our favour.”
“Or not. Things fall. Copernicus, the Tower of Pisa.”
“Galileo. And it probably never happened.” She was still smiling. Her behaviour did not seem at all like a prelude to death.
Morgan took a deep breath and tried to smile back. She turned again to confront the instrument panel as if it were a code to be deciphered. She pushed and tugged and glanced and tapped, and he had to admit she seemed to have a stern command of the up-down thing and she apparently knew where they were.
“Inuk hunters read the land,” she said. “They read striations in the snow, the patterns of wind, the contours of rock, they read the colours of white that record and anticipate weather, they read the colours of white.” She repeated the colours of white as if she had just received a revelation.
While Morgan looked out the window, the world below abruptly disappeared and they seemed to be hovering motionless in a thick blanket of cloud.
“Broughton’s socked in,” he said. “Maybe we’d better head back.”
“Qi
kiqtarjuaq.”
What Morgan heard was a cluster of dissonant syllables coming from the back of her mouth. He waited for an explanation:
“Broughton. We’re taking back our country, word by word, Detective. Qik-iqtar-juaq. Means, ‘the big island.’ It’s not a traditional name, it’s a new name in the language of the people. This is the dawn of a new era, Morgan. Early morning, but it’s happening. And we can’t go back. Pang will be just as bad by now and, anyway, we’re running low on fuel.”
“That is not a good thing.”
“It makes our decision easier.”
“Our decision?”
“To land where they picked up Pauloosie. I think I can find the coast.”
“We’re flying blind — you can’t see a thing.”
“I’m calculating.”
Morgan sat back in his seat, closed his eyes, then opened them again. He was not sure where to look. She handed him a map.
“Can you read contours?” she asked. “Forget it. Hold it open for me. No, there, so I can follow along that fjord.” An interminable pause. “We should be over it now. Hang on, we’re on our way down.”
Suddenly water appeared twenty metres below them.
“Yes!” she exclaimed. She pulled up just a bit, keeping the water in sight. She reached over and tapped on the map. “When we get about there, we veer left.”
“We’re landing on the water?” Morgan was acutely aware the sea looming up was filled with ice chunks, some as big as the plane.
“We’ve got tricycle landing gear, Morgan, no pontoons. Once we’re directly off the north end of Aberdeen Island we’ll cut diagonally back to the mainland, that’s where they picked him up, and we’ll try for an esker.”
“What about snow?”
“Snow’s too wet this far from the Barnes. Nothing glacial, just slow melting pockets. We’ll find ourselves some solid gravel.”
“Good luck,” he said. “To both of us.” He settled back against his seat again, his feet squarely on the floor, and waited for a summarizing explosion of flashbacks.
She flashed him another rare smile. “Hang on, we’re going down when we can.”
Cliffs loomed dead ahead, she pulled back almost into a stall, banked sharply, and dropped through the cloud swirling around them onto heaving terrain. As the plane fishtailed against gravel and slowed, it shuddered violently, but, true to its reputation, held together and came to an abrupt halt, swaying for a few moments as if finding its footing, and then subsided into stillness. Gloria Simmons killed the engines and there was an eerie almost deafening silence, broken finally by her nonchalant voice.
“According to my GPS, if they made it ashore, it would be about here,” she said, unsnapping her seatbelt and standing up. “We’re within shouting distance of the accident scene.”
Morgan realized she was not referring to their present predicament — their own situation was not accidental and their survival was a remarkable achievement, which did not seem to surprise her at all. She opened the door in the fuselage and jumped out. Then Morgan heard a distinctly anxious shout. She had sunk into a gravel slurry up to her knees. He reached out and grasped her outstretched arms to haul her back into the plane.
“We seem to be on a small gravel moraine in the middle of a river,” she announced. “The water looks treacherous, too deep to ford, we’ll have to swim.” She paused. “I don’t swim.”
Morgan gazed out the windows at the swirling torrent that flanked them on both sides. “Too deep, too fast, I don’t think anyone’s swimming anywhere. What time is it?”
“What difference does it make?”
“It’s three p.m.”
“You knew, why ask?”
“It was a rhetorical question.” He bent low and looked through the windows on all sides as if taking measurements, and at last turned back to address his companion who, for the first time since he had known her, seemed uncertain and edgy. Her eyes had followed his perambulations and her mouth seemed poised to frame an inarticulable question.
“This is glacial runoff,” he said. “We’re sunk up to the axels in glacial debris.”
“And?”
“This water was solid ice not more than a mile or two upstream.”
“So far that is not reassuring. Keep going.”
“We sit tight for twelve hours. The flow will die to a trickle during the night.”
“There won’t be much night, Morgan. We’re north of the Arctic Circle. It’s August.”
“When the sun swings down across the northern sky, moving around from west back to east, even if it doesn’t get dark it’ll get colder, cold enough that the water flow will drop.”
“You know this, how?”
“Explorers’ journals. I read stuff. Between three and six in the morning, we’ll be good to go. And given the weather I don’t think Search and Rescue will be looking for us for quite a while.”
Together they scoured every cranny of the plane interior, looking for food and extra clothes and found nothing more than a couple of chocolate bars in the cockpit and a rain jacket hanging in a bulkhead closet. They found a good first aid packet with bandages, splints, and a variety of patent medicines. As if they had tacitly agreed to save the best for last, they finally turned to the errant backpack and together they released its straps and fasteners like it was a shared Christmas present.
The temperature had dropped to freezing in the last hour and as they withdrew the backpacker’s gear they put on what they could. Gloria Simmons slipped out of her wet pants and wrung out her socks and donned dry socks and a pair of pants that were too big for her. Morgan found a fleece pullover that was a little too small and put it on under his own clothes. There was a small gas stove, but no fuel. There was no food. The guy must have been planning to stock up in Broughton before setting out on the land. They found a ratty old sleeping mat with his gear, folded not rolled, and a down-filled sleeping bag that had seen better days.
They ate one of the chocolate bars, washed down with glacial water that Morgan had retrieved by removing his pants and socks, putting his boots back on to protect his feet, and manoeuvering through the slurry to the surging flow, which had not, as far as he could tell, diminished in the slightest. They rolled out the sleeping bag on the mat and sat on it close to each other, legs drawn up to their chests to preserve body warmth.
By about nine in the evening, when the cloud cover had descended to engulf them in its frigid, dull gleam, they were both trembling from the cold. Each seemed lost in personal thoughts; Morgan trying to imagine the subtropical warmth of Easter Island, and Gloria Simmons, perhaps thinking of the comforts of her life in Toronto, perhaps grieving in her peculiar quiet way for Harrington D’Arcy.
Abruptly, she stood up and started stripping off her clothes. At first Morgan thought she was simply redistributing them, trying to eke out maximum warmth.
“Come on, Morgan,” she said. “Get naked.”
As he watched her he wondered if she’d lost her mind, if her cool aplomb had finally collapsed. But she seemed inordinately calm as she unhooked her bra and dropped it beside him, then stepped out of her panties. His eyes filled with her, from her toes wrinkled with the cold to her honey-blonde hair that seemed to have just been exquisitely groomed. She was a natural blonde, tall and robust. His gaze stuttered, refusing to settle on her exquisite breasts as he tried to avoid gawking, and finally came to rest on her face. Lust, he had often imagined, was the last thing to go. “This must be me, dying,” he mumbled to himself.
“Morgan!” She gave him a kick with the side of her foot. “You’re defeating the point of the exercise.” He tried to quell the brazen image of a naked Valkyrie and himself a slain warrior ready to meet Valhalla in her burning arms. She unceremoniously prodded him again. He got up; and she immediately squirmed into the sleeping bag. “Come on,” she said. “It only works if we’re both naked.”
“What only works?” he said, as he stumbled out of his clothes, leaving his jacket, swea
ter, and shirt until last, then, with a great twisting heave, removing them as well, so that he stood before her feeling more exposed than he had ever been in his life. “Now what?” he asked, his hands cupping his private parts.
“Now,” she said, holding the mouth of the sleeping bag open. “Now you climb in here beside me. Come on, let’s not get any colder.”
Morgan slid down into the warmth as she opened the space to receive him. Every nerve ending registered where he was touching her in astonishing detail as if his own body were a singular sensory organ. When he tried to twist away there was no room and she turned into him and pressed skin to skin so that their thighs touched, her breasts pressed against his chest, her breath streamed over his shoulder and against the crook of his neck. He could feel himself stirring and felt strangely embarrassed.
“This is how my ancestors kept warm,” she said. “I suppose it’s how they became ancestors.”
Their hips ground in slow motion against each other. He could feel her breasts burn into his skin. Then she stopped. “Lie still, Morgan. Unless you think we can do it without sweating. If we sweat we freeze to death.”
The material of the sleeping bag clenched them together so they could only make the smallest movements by consensus, but they were warm. “Have you noticed,” she said, “that my people move with a lovely stillness. That is to avoid sweating.” She was whispering in his ear. “If you sweat against furs in the winter, they lose their warmth. Same with down-filled sleeping bags. Do you think you can sleep?”
“No.”
The Arctic landscape, surrounding with an immense austerity that was somehow felt deeply inside, this impossibly beautiful woman, the absurdity of their nakedness, invoked the poetic in Morgan’s mind. Not evoked, he was no poet, but his sense of wonder brought out flashes of poetry inscribed in the depths of his mind and long since obscured, until now. This time it wasn’t Hopkins.
“Have you ever read John Donne?” he asked.
“I was a chemistry student, Morgan. I’m a lawyer. No man is an island, that was Donne.”
“To teach thee, I am naked first.”
“No you weren’t, I was.”