Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  Finally he spoke. ‘For someone who wasn’t looking for clues you sure found a few.’

  ‘Too many.’

  ‘Sitting there, tapping away on Bert’s computer, looking for answers online.’

  ‘What else could I do? And surely you want answers too?’

  ‘I thought I did . . . But for Bert there’s probably only one answer really. Maybe it’s better not to know.’

  ‘Do you want me to stop looking?’

  He thought about that for a while. ‘No. That’s alright . . . But maybe you’re going the wrong way about it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We have all these notes and letters and stuff, but we don’t know what they’re meant to add up to. Bert must have kept all that in his head. Or on his computer where we can’t get to it. So it’s like we’re trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle without being able to look at the picture on the box.’

  ‘Okay. But where do we find that picture?’

  ‘Maybe we should switch off the computer and go ask around.’

  ‘I asked you what your brother was doing. You didn’t know. We asked Mike. He didn’t know. Neither did Rose. Who else can we ask? We don’t even know where he gets this stuff from.’

  ‘Do you remember that cop we met up in Tuktoyaktuk?’

  ‘Sergeant Peake? You want to ask him?’

  ‘No . . . Not yet, anyway. Though he seemed kind of knowing. But remember he mentioned that he’d sent me, meaning Bert, to go and talk to some old Eskimo guy in the hospital? Maybe Bert did go and see that guy. Maybe he can tell us what Bert was asking about.’

  ‘I’d forgotten about that.’

  ‘The old guy’s name is Moses Isaac.’

  ‘You’ve a memory for names.’

  ‘Not really.’ He handed her the folder he was holding. ‘I just saw his police service record in this folder I was reading. This one marked “Albert Johnson”.’

  The seniors had their own day room in the hospital with newspapers and games and armchairs and TVs. The attendants wore ordinary clothes, which Nelson thought was a nice touch. He remembered the home where he’d last seen his father, the sterile white scrubs prefiguring the end. His father had lowered his voice whenever he saw an attendant, as if he were spooked by them.

  The old folks here wore slacks and sweaters and bright woollen cardigans with maple-leaf pins. Wire-rim glasses hung on coloured cotton cords. The programme director, Eunice, was an Inuvialuit woman in her thirties. She looked at them doubtfully.

  ‘So you’re wanting to talk to Moses?’

  ‘It’s just for a chat,’ said Nelson. ‘Sergeant Peake suggested we come and see him. My name’s Nilsson.’

  Eunice considered them both. ‘Oh, Moses likes to chat alright. But he’s been pretty sick lately.’ She mulled it over. ‘I’ll go and ask him. If it’s okay with him I guess it’s okay with me.’

  The old man waited for them on a straight-backed chair in a room furnished with several empty couches. He was alone. Voices murmured in another room across the hall, and Nelson guessed that Moses must have come out here to talk in private. He wore a maple-leaf baseball cap and held an orthopaedic walking stick between the knees of pressed blue jeans. His hands, resting in his lap, were a mesh of old scars.

  ‘You’re not Mr Nilsson,’ the old man said.

  Nelson stopped in the door. ‘I’m his brother.’

  The old man stared up at him, his expression unchanging. His face was smooth apart from two deep lines from his nose to the corners of his mouth. The lips were pursed in what looked like half a smile.

  ‘Then I guess you’re a Mr Nilsson after all.’ He waved one hand at a couch opposite him. ‘Where’s the other one?’

  ‘We’re not sure where he is,’ said Fay, sitting. ‘That’s why we’ve come to talk to you. We heard he’d been to see you.’

  Moses nodded slowly for a few moments and then, just when Nelson had decided that he hadn’t understood, he spoke again. ‘Who are you, lady? Are you the police?’

  ‘No. I’m just a friend of Mr Nilsson.’

  ‘Which one?’

  He is smiling, thought Nelson.

  ‘This one. I haven’t met the other one.’

  The old man nodded again. He moved both hands to the clasp of his stick.

  ‘I used to be police myself, when I was a young fella.’ He had a gruff, slow way of talking, as if speaking fluently in a foreign language. ‘I was a special constable at Arctic Red River – Tsiigehtchic, they call it now. They wouldn’t let me serve back home in Aklavik.’ He gave a single snort of laughter, like a large animal exhaling. ‘Nobody’s going to respect you where you’re born, not when you’re only a kid.’ He looked at Nelson. ‘If you’re worried about your brother, have you talked to the police?’

  Nelson understood the nodding now. It buys him time to do his thinking. He knows he’s not as quick as he used to be but he wants to get there in the end.

  ‘I talked to Sergeant Peake, the sergeant from Inuvik. He told me my brother had been to see you. I figured it might help if I knew about what.’

  Eunice appeared in the doorway. ‘You okay, Moses? Not too tired today?’

  ‘It’s fine, Eunice. Just more folks from the south come to ask about the old days. Same old stories. I could tell them in my sleep.’

  Eunice made up her mind and prepared to go. ‘I wish you would tell them in your sleep, Moses. That way you’d get the rest you need.’ She looked at the visitors. ‘He’s getting over a bout of pneumonia, so please don’t take too much out of him. He’ll be ninety-two next birthday. I’ve got twenty bucks on it.’

  The old man smiled to himself.

  When Eunice was gone Fay spoke again. ‘Is that what Mr Nilsson wanted to talk about? Your time as a Mountie?’

  Moses shook his head. Nelson saw his eyes drift towards a small TV set in the corner of the room, although the TV was off.

  ‘I wasn’t a Mountie.’ His eyes left the TV and moved to a window, a square white glare in the hospital wall. ‘I was a special constable. They hired us locally. We helped the white Mounties who came in from the south. They couldn’t speak the languages or move on the land as good as we could. When I’d made enough dough to pay for my own outfit I quit the police and went ­hunting on Banks Island. That’s where I spent most of my life. Hunting bear and Arctic fox out on Banks Island.’ He chuckled again. ‘I’d be out there still if I could.’

  His expression changed as he stared out the window, seeing his island again. Then he remembered his guests. ‘Your brother was asking me what everyone asks – all the writers and film-makers and suchlike. He wanted to talk about Albert Johnson.’

  Fay had skimmed an online dictionary before she came over. But she would let the old man tell the story his way. ‘Albert Johnson?’

  ‘Albert Johnson,’ he said again, as if the name was some kind of clinching argument. ‘He’s a legend up here from back in the thirties. He was a drifter and loner who came from outside in the Great Depression. He tangled with the police and shot a couple of them for no known good reason, then fought off a whole bunch more in a gunfight at his cabin. After that he went on the run on foot in a real bad winter. It took the police and army six weeks to get him. They had dogs and sledges and local trackers and radios. They even brought in a plane. All he had was his rifle and snowshoes. They finally ran him down and shot him dead over in the Yukon. But they still don’t know who he was.’

  ‘The Mad Trapper of Rat River,’ said Nelson. ‘That’s what the papers called him. That’s how the bar in town got its name.’

  The old man stirred again. ‘Up here, most people didn’t call Albert Johnson a trapper. They called him a man who stole from other people’s traps. Whether it’s true or not, I don’t know. But he never got himself a fur licence – that’s why the police went looking for him in t
he first place.’ He lifted the stick out from between his knees and laid it flat across his lap, as if cradling a rifle. ‘I knew men who were on the posse that got him, elders from Aklavik, who said that Johnson knew bush tricks even they didn’t know. And he was just a white man, appeared out of nowhere all by himself.’ He bent his lips. ‘Few years ago, a TV company came and dug up his bones in Aklavik. They did a bunch of modern science tests hoping to find out who he really was. They couldn’t match him to anyone. All they found out for sure is he wasn’t from Canada. And that he wasn’t a mountain man. He’d had big city dental work before he came up.’

  ‘Was there anything in particular about Albert Johnson that my brother wanted to know?’

  Moses put his head back and closed his eyes. ‘I get a lot of people coming to see me about Albert Johnson. Your brother . . .’ He opened his eyes again. ‘Your brother had a photograph he wanted to show me. A really old picture taken at a trading post in the Yukon, a few years before Johnson showed up here. It’s supposed to be a picture of Johnson when he went by a different name – the only picture they’ve got of him from before he was shot dead.’

  ‘It was a new thing, this picture?’

  ‘No. A writer showed it to me years before. He dug it out somewhere down in the Yukon. It’s been in lots of books and stuff since then.’

  ‘And my brother knew that it was nothing new?’

  ‘He knew. But he thought he knew something else about the photo. He thought he knew who the guy in it was.’

  ‘He knew who Albert Johnson really was?’

  ‘He had another photograph, an older one, which he thought was the same guy when he was younger. He was wearing US Army uniform. He wanted to know if I thought it was the same man.’

  ‘And why did he think you in particular might know?’

  The old man smiled, picked up his stick and set it back between his feet, adjusting it to the vertical like a sentry with his rifle.

  Fort McPherson, North West Territories, July 1931

  His sisters had made him a paddle to bring on his first long canoe trip. He dipped it in the water a few strokes at a time, aping the motions of his mother in the prow. The swarming black flies had driven them from the slack water under the bank and his mother strained against the strong current mid-stream. From time to time, switching sides with her paddle, she would glance back at her son, sat up on their bundle of furs. His efforts with the paddle threw off her rhythm, dripped water on their cargo, but she never complained. This was how he would learn.

  It was just past noon and the day was hot. The canoe came around a wooded bend and there at last was Fort McPherson, a few tin and shingle roofs on a ridge above the Peel. His mother, who had never been this far south before, rested her paddle, looking for a gap in the alders which grew on the riverbank under the ridge.

  The sun smoked off the water, and as the canoe turned broadside to the current the child glimpsed a shape in the heat-haze. It might have been a waterbird holding its wings out to dry, or a sail boat with only its upper sails spread, but as his mother started paddling again the shape turned into a raft made of logs lashed with willows. On it stood a man with a long-handled paddle. He was a white man – his blond-brown hair showed this from two hundred yards away – but he was travelling light; the boy could see a burlap sack tied to his back but there was no gear on the raft, no pack or rifle, not even an axe.

  The raft drew closer, drifting downstream from the south. Coming under the bluff, the man began to paddle it ashore. And the boy’s mother, assuming that the stranger knew where he was going, shifted her own course to follow. A gash of bare sand appeared in the alders where several canoes were already beached. A dirt path led up through birch trees to the settlement above.

  Their canoe, moving faster, overtook the raft, almost near enough for the paddles to touch. The boy’s mother, who was suspicious of all men and white men most of all, gave the stranger a silent nod. He stared back at them without expression, blue eyes in a broad stubbled face which was burnt red and brown. He wore a duck jacket and torn canvas pants. His boots, bleached by sun and water, were bound with the same willow twine that he’d used to lash the raft.

  The boy heard his mother mutter a charm and then the canoe scraped on mud and she jumped into the shallows to drag it from the stream. He waited until the canoe was high and dry and then he followed her, feeling the sand crunch under his feet.

  His mother took a couple of turns of rope around a birch which still clung to a mud bank scraped bare by the thaw. Thus the child, and he alone, witnessed the stranger’s landfall. The raft, coasting up to the riverbank, bumped into the sand. The stranger, dropping his paddle in the water, simply stepped ashore and, without a backward glance, abandoned his craft to the river. It bobbed in place for a few moments like an unwanted dog then slowly slunk off with the current, bound for Aklavik and the Beaufort Sea.

  The boy tried to help his mother haul the furs from the canoe but the bundle weighed a hundred pounds or more and she shooed him away for fear the load might injure him.

  He retreated sulkily and instead watched the stranger. The white man stood on the shore with his back arched and his arms outspread, as if stretching himself after sleep. Then he shook himself and started on his way. He had the slow, straight-backed walk of a man in no hurry, but the boy could see the skin stretched tight across his cheekbones, the prominent knobs of his wrists. He decided that the white man must be rather hungry; hunger was something the boy already knew.

  His mother had succeeded in hauling the pelts onto her back, hooking her thumbs under the sinews that bound them together. She stood there, swaying under the weight, and the white man, who had drawn abreast of them, paused for a moment, looking down at the little dark woman in her best woollen trade clothes, bowed by her load, who was staring back at him.

  Looking from one adult to the other, the boy saw no emotion on either face, just a bored kind of watchfulness, like the face his father had worn when he waited for hours by a seal-hole in the ice. Then the man turned his head and looked at him and the boy moved close to his mother and took a hold of the hem of her jacket. The stranger stretched himself again, as if his back were hurting him, then disappeared into the trees.

  When he was gone the boy’s mother put the furs back into the canoe and put her son on top of the furs and pushed off into the river. She paddled upstream another two hundred yards until she found another sandbank, green with sprouting willows, where she dragged the canoe up to the edge of the forest and covered it with driftwood. She shouldered the furs, and then she remembered their rifle, and that it couldn’t be left in their boat, not in this place full of Loucheux and white men.

  The boy would have to bring it for her; she could carry nothing more, and he waited for her to empty the rifle of the three bullets that – along with the pelts and the rifle itself – were all she had left of worth in this world. Yet this time she neglected to unload the weapon; she merely handed it to her son and told him not to fiddle with it and to stay close beside her.

  There was no trail here, and the rifle was too heavy for him, so that he had to pull it along by the barrel, its butt dragging in the mulch and undergrowth, over wind fall trees still wet from the morning, but he felt a surge of manly pride that his mother, slipping and scrabbling behind him, dragging herself upward by branches and roots, had trusted him with a loaded gun.

  This was the quiet time of the year at Fort McPherson, when the mission schools were closed and the people went out on the land fishing and hunting. The poles of their autumn shelters stood here and there along the low ridge. A white man in a black suit waved at the boy from a church with a square-pointed turret. A string of dogs dozed outside a split-log kennel, dulled by the sun, too sleepy to bark at the passing strangers. A few yards away, beyond the dreary grey mud of the felled zone, the spruces resumed their march into the north. To the west, across the river, the ground c
limbed in folds from the further bank, ridge after ridge darkly stubbled with forest, further and higher and fainter, until they merged with a blue haze in which white summits floated. The boy had never seen the mountains so close before; they belonged to other people than his own and defined the edge of his world.

  A couple of young men in store-bought clothes were passing the time outside the Hudson Bay store, sitting on the stoop and smoking rolled-up cigarettes. They fell silent when they saw the boy and his mother, then started talking again. And although neither the boy nor his mother knew Gwich’in it was clear that they were wondering what it was that brought a couple of Eskimos this far from the coast, and why they had no man with them.

  Ignoring them, his mother set her pelts on the porch and then sat beside the bundle, her eyes closed, fanning herself and getting her breath back: she would need her self-possession for the bargaining ahead. The boy placed his back against the shingled wall and stood with one hand around the barrel of the rifle, its butt resting by his right foot, like the soldier he’d seen in a picture at the mission school, protecting the King in his palace in England. But the muzzle of the rifle stretched half a foot above his head and when the two young men began to laugh at him his mother reached over and touched his hair gently and then she took the rifle and laid it down beside her. From her pocket she took some dried meat bound in moss and she shared it out between them, sitting there in the sun. They washed it down with rainwater which they scooped with their hands from a butt by the wall, then they rinsed their hands clean and it was time to go inside.