The Bone Seeker

by M. J. McGrath

  ‘I don’t recognize many of these names,’ Derek said. ‘They must have died before I got here. Most of the ones I do know have passed on now too. It seems that the Kuujuamiut don’t make old bones.’

  Bones were becoming a theme, Edie thought, returning to her papers. A later batch, dating from the last ten years or so and relating to the various clean-up tasks – from removal of waste, tar, creosote, building materials, paint, fuel and other contaminants to reconstruction and replanting – had been negotiated solely by Sonia Gutierrez after she took over as chief counsel in the case. By this time it was the early 2000s and the negotiations had been rumbling on for a decade without much progress. From what Edie could make out, Gutierrez’s argument was that the contaminated land lay very close to the bird cliffs from which the Kuujuamiut regularly harvested both eggs and birds. She had drafted a press release and the Arctic Circular had picked it up. Some of the southern papers took note too. It seemed that it was the press interest that had forced the department to reach a settlement.

  A sudden rattle on the steps. The door swung open and Klinsman appeared with the Camp Nanook counsel, Marty Fielding, following behind. Derek very discreetly pushed a plain file cover over his papers and got up from his chair. The colonel eyed them momentarily then held out a hand.

  ‘You got a few minutes, sergeant? Maybe a stroll down to the sea?’

  Palliser stared at the hand but did not take it. He was angry and not feeling polite about it. ‘Take a look around, colonel. This look like some spy hole-up? Some security intelligence outfit? This is a country police detachment at the end of the world and you’ve parachuted in and crapped all over it.’

  The colonel blinked and stood his ground.

  ‘A stroll by the sea,’ he said.

  • • •

  They walked down to the shoreline in silence and stood looking out over the spangle of Jones Sound. The tide was low, and on the exposed shingle a huge Arctic lion’s mane jellyfish lay dead, the two metre wide crimson bell still shiny in the sunshine, the flame-coloured tentacles so long you could measure off a basketball court and have some to spare.

  Fielding stood back, unwilling to move closer.

  ‘You still want that stroll?’ Derek asked.

  ‘What the hell is it?’

  ‘Itqujaq,’ Edie said. ‘In the whaling time, the qalunaat whalers called it the sea devil. We sometimes say it’s a drop of blood from Sedna, our sea spirit. The tentacles can be dangerous even after death. They usually stay out in deep sea but they’ve started coming in to the shallows.’

  They picked their way to the shoreline. The iceberg that had been part-obscuring the view of Devon Island earlier in the week had moved on, leaving the bruise-coloured cliffs a hundred kilometres to the south shimmering in heat on the horizon.

  ‘I thought I’d been some places till I came here,’ Fielding said. He raised his hand to shield his eyes and gazed out across the water, squinting in the flare of reflected light.

  Edie smiled to herself. She was glad the Arctic had unsettled him. He and others like him. Maybe that way they might stay away.

  ‘Sonia Gutierrez is missing,’ Edie said.

  Klinsman’s shoulders tightened. ‘This is dangerous terrain, Ms Kiglatuk. People go missing all the time. But I guess I don’t need to tell you that.’ In a softer tone, he added, ‘You’re going to have to get used to sharing the High Arctic, you know that, don’t you?’

  Edie turned to look at him but he would not meet her eye. ‘Our kind of sharing and your kind of sharing aren’t the same,’ she said. ‘We remember how you “shared” our whales. Two million of them. Stripped the blubber to render into oil, kept the baleen and threw away the rest. Just one of those whales could have kept an entire Inuit settlement alive for a year. Now you’re telling us you want to “share” oil, gas, minerals. You want to “share” the fish, the seas, the animals. We’ve already seen how you share things that don’t belong to anybody and you want to keep “sharing” until there’s nothing left. Except us, colonel, we’ll be left. By the time you have finished sharing, we’ll be left with nothing.’

  Klinsman and Fielding laced their arms behind their backs.

  ‘What you’re describing is inevitable, Ms Kiglatuk. There is nothing you can do to stop it. Whatever you think you’re looking for, you won’t find it. I advise you strongly not to keep on looking. Everything has its natural depth. Fish, humans, institutions. That creature there . . .’ He thumbed at the jellyfish. ‘It likes deep waters, you said. But look what happened. It overreached itself. It wandered into the shallows. Believe me, you are out of your depth here.’

  His eyes were flat but there was a weariness in his voice, Edie thought. Whatever game was being played, he had begun to tire of his role in it.

  ‘Saxby and Namagoose will be tried for the murder of Martha Salliaq in a military court and I have every expectation they will be found guilty. That’s all we can offer. It’s a good deal. Make it enough.’

  The colonel turned and began to make his way back up the beach, Fielding following close behind. At the track he stopped and turned. ‘You want me to send a couple of men to move that thing off the beach before someone’s child steps on it?’

  Derek gave a low snort. ‘It’s a little late for your offers of protection, colonel, wouldn’t you say?’

  • • •

  Edie and Derek waited for the jeep to disappear. They had always thought that they understood what trouble looked like. Up here it looked like avalanches and white-outs and hungry bears. It did not look like a fastidiously dressed man in a jeep and his spineless nose bot of a sidekick. But the truth now lay right before their eyes on that beach. The bloody tentacles of the beast reached further and deeper than the military were prepared to acknowledge publicly. That was a new kind of trouble.

  • • •

  At the detachment steps they stopped. Derek pulled his ATV keys from his pocket.

  ‘I need a break from those papers, see how Anna Mackie’s getting on. Alfasi’s parents should be arriving any time. They’ll be wanting to know when they can take the body. We’ll get back to the papers when I return.’

  Edie watched his vehicle lumber up the track. She returned to the detachment and tidied the papers into a pile. A sticky note fell out with the letters RTG and SrTCs scribbled in blue ink in Sonia’s handwriting. She turned the paper over in her hands and sank back. It meant nothing. The paper trail had fried her brain in a way that a trail on the tundra never did. Her head felt watery-heavy and letters and plans spun together behind her eyes.

  She went into the kitchenette, found the remains of the walrus head in the refrigerator and, cutting off a few slices, made a large walrus omelette from the last of the eggs. This she wrapped in plastic film and slipped inside Gutierrez’s backpack, then she made her way towards the nursing station.

  Luc was in the consulting room taking a clinic. Anna and Derek were in the makeshift morgue packing up.

  ‘I’ve brought walrus omelette,’ she said.

  Mackie pulled off her examination gloves and began collecting her instruments. Edie sensed that relations between Derek and the medical examiner were strained.

  ‘Alfasi drowned,’ Derek said. ‘No reason to think it was anything but a suicide.’

  Mackie turned briefly. ‘That’s what I’ll be saying in my report for the coroner but in the end it’s her decision.’ Mackie snapped off her surgical gloves and went to wash her hands. Her voice, like her actions, had a crisp, official air to it.

  ‘You see Sonia Gutierrez around Iqaluit the last couple days, Anna?’

  Mackie stopped drying her hands and turned around to face the question.

  ‘I already told Derek, no,’ she said decisively.

  Edie offered her a piece of omelette. She shook her head, turned her back and went on with her packing, closed as a clam. On the o
ther side of the room Derek grimaced as if to say this was a lost cause. He took the piece of omelette. They ate in silence for a minute or two, while Mackie worked around them. When it looked like they weren’t going to get anything more out of the ME, Edie licked her fingers, drew the sticky note out of her pocket and passed it over to Derek. ‘I found this, it’s Sonia’s handwriting.’

  Derek read the letters RTG out loud, handed the note back and carried on chewing. ‘Means nothing to me.’

  It was a few seconds before Edie noticed that the clinking sound of metal on metal had ceased. In the corner of the room Mackie had stopped what she was doing and was standing with her back to them, her shoulders tensed. The atmosphere in the room thickened. Eventually Mackie turned to face them. She seemed to have had a change of heart.

  ‘You two just don’t give up, do you? RTG might be radioisotope thermoelectric generator. They were installed in a lot of remote Arctic monitoring stations. They use radioactive decay to generate electricity off-grid. There were still a few in use in the North American Arctic right up to the end of the nineties.’ She stopped abruptly, as though her battery had just run out, before deciding to go on.

  ‘A couple of cases came to me when I was working in forensics over in the Yukon . . . drunks sticking their heads right inside them and getting radiation burn. But you’d have to get right up close.’

  Edie flipped the sticky note over in her fingers and read what was written on the reverse. A thought arose in her mind like a footprint in the snow, deep and telling.

  ‘What about SrTCs? That an acronym for something?’ They were the same letters as she’d seen written on Chip Muloon’s hand but she decided it was better not to say anything about that. Mackie was spooked enough as it was. She didn’t want to frighten her off completely.

  As it was, the ME seemed profoundly unsettled. She had her back to the counter, her hands clasped along its edge, and was staring into the middle distance as though she was trying to make sense of something.

  ‘Anna, please,’ Edie said simply.

  When Mackie turned her head Edie could see that her eyes were moist with tears.

  ‘I can’t do this,’ she said quietly. Her chest rose and fell. For a moment she seemed to fix on the door and Edie wondered if she was about to make a run for it. But there was nowhere to run to and Anna Mackie knew that too.

  ‘We found a paper forbidding the testing of the animal bones among Sonia Gutierrez’s documents. We know that Charlie Salliaq has bone-marrow disease and now you tell us that the Defence Department took samples of Martha’s bones. What is it about bones, Anna?’

  The ME went over to the gurney and zipped the body of Rashid Alfasi back up inside its bag. She seemed to be weighing up her options.

  Edie gave her a pleading look. The dead have ears, she thought, and they can speak. She could hear Martha Salliaq whispering to her but there was only one word in a hundred she could catch. And all around her this deafening roar of paper. The white man’s footprints. She thought about the photo of Martha that she’d been carrying around in the pocket of her parka. She pulled it out now and went over to where Mackie was standing. It may be, she thought, that Mackie was so used to seeing the dead that she’d forgotten the one great truth about them, that they had all once lived.

  The ME took one look at the photograph and issued a little cry of shock.

  ‘She was beautiful and smart and in love. With him’ – she pointed to the body bag – ‘with Rashid Alfasi.’

  Mackie bit her lip. She looked gaunt and haunted. With a fierceness that was almost frightening, she suddenly thrust out her hand and said, ‘Show me the note.’

  Her eyes flashed over it.

  ‘Those letters are the symbols for strontium, tritium and caesium. Strontium and caesium are radioactive metals, tritium is an isotope of hydrogen. People sometimes call them the unholy trinity. Exposure to them causes radiation sickness and cancers. Of the three, strontium is probably in the god spot. It collects in the bone marrow and causes leukaemia. People call it the bone seeker. It’s generally a by-product of nuclear fission.’ She seemed resigned now, and lonely, as though she had crossed over a line from which there was no going back.

  Derek had stopped eating. Edie saw him watching Anna intently. The three of them unwilling actually to give voice to what they now knew.

  • • •

  They finished the packing in silence and Derek escorted Anna Mackie back to her plane. While he was gone, Edie returned to Charlie Salliaq’s room in the nursing station. She pulled up a chair and sat beside the bed. The old man did not open his eyes, but neither did it seem to her that he was sleeping. He had grown even paler since her last visit, the veins on his arms like the milky-blue run-off on moraine. It was clear he didn’t have long to go.

  ‘Avasirngulik.’ The old man’s eyes moved under their lids.

  ‘The Lemming Police’s girl.’ He reached out and patted her affectionately on the leg. The pupils were glassy and unseeing. ‘Did you find your way through that storm of paper?’ He chuckled. ‘You know why they shower these document blizzards down on us? It’s so they can sneak in while we are blinded and do what they like.’

  ‘Is that what they did at Glacier Ridge?’ Edie said.

  The old man gave a sigh of resignation. ‘That’s what they always do.’

  ‘Can you remember what happened there, avasirngulik?’

  ‘Ha, my memory,’ Charlie said, smiling weakly. ‘I saw a TV show when I was down in Iqaluit. They said that by the time the light from the stars hits us it’s old. They said that what we see is already history. You, me, everything.’ He reached out and patted her arm. ‘But we already know that, don’t we, Lemming Police’s girl? We Inuit have known since before time began.’

  His breath became a cough and as his body seized Edie caught a glimpse of the skin on his chest beneath the hospital gown, the colour of it translucent and as yellow-grey as a stretched seal bladder. She picked up his water cup from the nightstand. He propped himself up on an elbow and took a sip.

  Then he lay back, shifting his body a little in the bed.

  ‘Glacier Ridge was a long time ago. I was a handyman. I cleaned up and fixed things.’

  ‘Did Martha ever visit you there?’ Edie said.

  He shook his head. ‘I finished working there before Martha was even born.’

  ‘You recall anything they were trying to keep secret, Charlie? Any place you weren’t allowed to go, any process you weren’t allowed to witness?’

  The old man raised a bony hand and rubbed his left ear. ‘I’m tired, Edie Kiglatuk.’

  ‘You need that blood, elder.’

  There was a fleeting instant when she saw something raw and full of life cross his face.

  ‘There was one time. Way back. It was in the winter, I remember, because the sky lit up the night and then the ground shook and there was a hot, rushing wind and the sound was like a thousand icebergs turning over. We were all scared. We thought maybe the sun had made a mistake, maybe that the seasons had gotten mixed up. We were living in huts then, just tiny little cabins fixed together from old packing boxes, heather and fur between the walls as insulation. Some of us stayed in our cabins with our families. The ones who believed in Jesus, they went to the church and said their prayers. In the evening a qalunaat came into town; he was dressed strange. He said they were closing the station for a few days. He gave us two weeks’ pay. But they never reopened it properly.

  ‘Not long afterwards the qalunaat shut the place down and shipped out. But the fire burned for a long time. You couldn’t see it but you knew that it was there. It made that lake. The water was hot for a while but no birds ever flew over. People said the fire brought evil spirits from their resting places. Why we called it Lake Turngaluk.’

  ‘You recall what year this was?’

  ‘I’m old, I don’t remember
things that way,’ Charlie said. He sensed Edie pressing him. ‘I was married to another woman then, and I didn’t have my daughters.’ A sudden look of pain came over him. ‘People said that qalunaat had put a curse on the place. Babies died. My wife, that wasn’t Alice then, Elizapee was her name. Her babies died. The spirits at the lake took ’em down into the underworld, that’s what people said.’ He lifted his head and licked his dry lips. Edie held the water to him and he took another sip.

  ‘Who else worked at the site?’

  ‘They’re all gone to spirit now. All except Toolik Pitoq.’ Charlie gave a long sigh and shut his eyes. ‘It’s taboo to talk about this. The spirits don’t like me to talk about it. That’s why I’m so tired.’

  Edie took the old man’s fragile hand in hers and placed a kiss on his forehead. Salliaq whispered something she didn’t catch, then, without opening his eyes again, he fell asleep.

  35

  It took Edie a while after she’d woken to figure out where she was. The sun was blading through the blinds in Derek’s bedroom. Derek himself was still asleep, a blanketed mound on the couch. She got up, quietly wrapped his robe around her and stole towards the door without waking him. An empty whisky bottle lay in the sink. Had they drunk it? She couldn’t remember. She blew on her palm but her breath smelled only of sleep.

  She made some tea and took it out onto the steps. The jaeger was sitting on the telegraph wire. It whistled a warning call. She went around to the back of the building and checked the nest. There was only one fledgling now, almost fully grown, preening itself in a soft cup made from the down and feathers of its devoured siblings. It froze when it saw Edie’s face, its beady eye indignant at the intrusion.