The Boy in the Snow

by M. J. McGrath

  ‘The man you spoke to, he have an accent at all?’

  ‘An accent compared to what?’ Edie allowed herself to feel offended because, for an instant, it gave her the upper hand. Truro’s brow wrinkled, as though he was waiting for some addendum. Edie thought of the little boy in the snow and relented.

  ‘Some kind of accent, yes.’

  Truro nodded and went on.

  ‘The clothes the two were wearing, the long robes. The man’s facial hair. Are you aware that what you described is typical of the Old Believers?’

  ‘Since I already told you I don’t know what that means, I guess the answer’s no.’

  Detective Truro began to stroke his tie. He caught her eye and looked away. Then he reached out and turned off the camera.

  ‘Miss Kiglatuk, I have to ask you, why did you pick up the body?’

  Why had she? It was hard to say. At that moment, her thoughts had been swirling around in a blizzard in her mind.

  ‘I didn’t know what was in the parcel when I picked it up. And then, when I did, I guess I wanted to try to comfort him.’ She thought about the ghosts of people she’d loved and lost.

  Truro lifted his eyes from the desk and cut her an icy look.

  ‘You make a habit of comforting the dead, Miss Kiglatuk? You realize you could have seriously compromised our investigation?’

  She didn’t answer.

  Truro continued to look at her, his gaze fading away to a scowl. She held it. They sat like this for a moment.

  ‘The Old Believers are a religious cult. Are you familiar with that term?’

  She blew air down her nose. ‘I’m Inuit, not an idiot.’

  ‘Of course.’ His eye flipped across a typewritten page. ‘Your people here call themselves Eskimos, by the way.’

  ‘I’m guessing they call themselves Alaskans too,’ she said, ‘which, by the way, technically makes them your people.’

  ‘You believe in God, Miss Kiglatuk?’ Truro looked put out.

  She looked at the badge on his lapel.

  ‘Not in the way you do.’

  ‘In evil then.’

  ‘You mean, the Devil?’ She thought about the little boy lying frozen in the woods. If he’d asked whether she believed in devilishness, she’d have said, oh yeah, seen plenty of that, but a red guy with a forked tail? She shook her head.

  A look of frustration or maybe disappointment spread across Detective Truro’s face.

  ‘Let me tell you something about these people you ran into, the Old Believers. They’re not regular folk, like you and me.’

  She had to pinch herself to stop herself talking back. Regular folk? What did that mean?

  Truro didn’t appear to notice her expression and continued. ‘Originally, they came from Russia. People here still call them Russians though they haven’t actually lived there since they broke away from the Russian Orthodox Church hundreds of years ago and started wandering across the globe. They’ve been here in Alaska forty years and some of ’em still don’t even speak English. They’re closed people, they stick with their own, they call folk like us “worldly” and do their best to avoid us,’ he said. ‘We don’t know much about them, but we don’t much like what we do know.’

  He picked up a pen, see-sawed it about between his fingers.

  ‘You remember the cross, the one marked on the body?’

  She looked at him, aghast. How could he imagine she would forget it?

  ‘That silk stuff wrapped around the body of the little boy you found? The Believers use that for their religious ceremonies. The little house is a spirit house. It’s an Athabascan native tradition.’

  He turned the camera back on and Edie wondered if anything he had said amounted to much more than supposition, prejudice even.

  ‘Now, let’s go back to when you saw the two Old Believers on the snowmachine.’

  She wanted to tell him about how little snow drift there had been around the house, about the absence of footprint or tracks leading up to it and what all that said about when the house had been left. She wanted to explain about how the ice crystals had broken where they had touched the frozen corpse, how she didn’t understand what it meant though she was sure it was significant, but she no longer had any confidence that he’d listen.

  It was about 10 p.m. as she made her way down Fourth Avenue after the interview. The weather was clear but street lights formed a ceiling of brightness just over her head, obscuring her view of the stars. The contrast between the stifling heat of the APD building and the cold March night brought on a thrumming jaw ache. She passed by some souvenir stores selling cheap native crafts, tacky bits of fake mammoth-tooth carving, furs inexplicably sewn into miniature copies of the fur-bearing creature they first came from, moose-shit novelties, trash of all kinds. A couple were bent over the glass, window-shopping. Beside her, on the street, trucks rumbled by, leaving a wake of diesel fumes.

  She made her way up to the cheap studio she’d rented for the duration of the Iditarod and, not for the first time since she’d opened the grisly package in the forest, was struck with a powerful desire to drink herself into oblivion. Not that drinking was any solution to anything, except the pain of the moment, but the pain of the moment held her so powerfully that she had to say the words out loud in order to make herself commit to them: I will not drink.

  Instead, she went to the kitchenette and put on the kettle for a mug up. On either side of her, through the drywall, she could hear the sounds of her neighbours’ bedtime routines: the burble of TVs, the coughs and sighs of men and women settling down for the night. When she’d first arrived two days ago, she’d knocked on the doors on her floor, intending to introduce herself, but hardly anyone answered and she could tell from the bewildered and wary expressions of those who did that they suspected her of being crazy. She didn’t tell them what she really thought, that they were living like cliff birds, wedged into their tiny little fortresses, puffing up their feathers and pecking away all comers, wary of any motives that were not their own.

  Going over to the single window, she flipped the blind to block out the thin light coming in from a fluorescent tube in the walkway outside. Then, with a mug of hot tea in one hand, she went over to the phone and dialled the number Derek had given her for his digs in Nome, the finishing point for the Iditarod. An unfamiliar voice answered and asked her to wait, then came Derek’s soft, familiar tone.

  ‘Edie, hi. I was waiting for you to call.’

  ‘Who was that picked up?’

  ‘Zach Barefoot. The friend from the Native Police Association I told you about? I’m staying in his spare room.’

  Derek was right, he had told her. She felt relieved, slightly foolish. Over the course of the day she’d almost forgotten what she was doing in Alaska in the first place. Still, she wanted to keep what had happened as private as possible till they’d had time to talk it through.

  ‘Zach still there?’

  ‘No, why?’ Derek’s voice sounded alarmed. Without waiting for an answer, he said, ‘Sammy set off OK?’

  ‘Yeah. At least, I think so. I wasn’t there.’

  ‘I thought we agreed you were going to see him off.’ Derek sounded peeved.

  She told him everything that had happened. ‘The thing that freaked me out, it seemed like Truro had an angle, like he just wanted me to say that these Old Believer people had done it.’ She knew Derek would understand her reservations about religious nuts of all kinds. It was missionaries and zealots who’d told them that the old customs were evil, even though in some cases, like when the brother of a dead hunter took the widow for his second wife, they saved lives. But it was mostly their absolute moral intransigence which bothered her. You were either with them or against them. You were one of the saved, or you were the Devil’s work.

  Derek heard her out and was sympathetic. He tried to get her to come up to Nome for a couple of days. ‘I don’t like the thought of you being alone.’

  She let out a dry laugh.


  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘The lone wolf. Even lone wolves have to return to the pack sometime.’

  ‘Is that what you are, Derek, the pack?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Edie.’ He sounded irritated. ‘I’m your friend.’

  The rebuke stung her a little, but she knew it was deserved. She took a pause to signal that she’d taken it in.

  ‘Then do me a favour, as my friend. Don’t mention any of this to Sammy, OK?’ She’d already decided not to speak to her ex for the duration of the race unless there was no way to avoid it. As she understood her role, there would be no particular need to speak to him unless something happened in the race which required her assistance in Anchorage. His more routine communications would be routed through Derek at the Iditarod HQ in Nome. She didn’t trust herself not to be selfish and tell Sammy the whole story.

  ‘If you think that’s for the best,’ Derek said, unconvinced.

  ‘It’s just that he’s been wanting to run the Iditarod ever since I’ve known him. It was all he used to talk about when we were married. If he gets wind of what’s happening down here, he’s gonna be on the first plane to Anchorage, thinking he can rescue me.’

  ‘I understand,’ Derek said simply.

  Edie smiled to herself. In her experience, most men shared certain rescue fantasies, particularly when it came to women.

  ‘But you know, Edie, I really think this is a matter for the police department. Why don’t you come up here?’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ she said, to humour him. She liked Derek, admired him even. At the same time she knew there were things about her he’d never understand.

  Later, in bed, she tried to get the image of the dead baby out of her mind.

  ‘Why me?’ she asked herself, as though her heart didn’t already know the answer.

  4

  Derek Palliser was woken by an unfamiliar sound. At first he thought it was the doorbell of the police detachment at home in Kuujuaq, then he remembered he was at his friend Zach Barefoot’s house in Nome, on the northwest coast of Alaska. An instant later he also recalled what he was doing there. Edie Kiglatuk had suckered him into taking annual leave to come over to Alaska to help Sammy Inukpuk’s bid at the Iditarod on the grounds that he knew dogs and didn’t have any other kind of a life. He’d agreed on condition that he base himself at the Iditarod finish line in Nome, leaving Edie down in Anchorage. Derek’s role would be to remain in Nome and act as principal communications liaison with Sammy. All Sammy’s supplies – dog food, dog booties, spare clothes, dog harness and sled tracks and the like – had been shipped up to the appropriate checkpoints prior to the start of the race and unless something went badly wrong, Derek didn’t anticipate being called on until the end. Sammy wouldn’t want the distraction of having people he knew turn up at the checkpoints.

  He yawned and glanced at the window. Thin threads of deep grey light hung like ribbons from the blinds. He looked around, then, with a sinking feeling, recalled his late-night phone conversation. Why had he been dumb enough to more or less insist that Edie join him in Nome? It wasn’t that he didn’t like her. On the contrary, he liked her so much that he sometimes wondered whether there wasn’t more to it than just liking, but the woman also drove him completely crazy. On the other hand, he couldn’t help but feel protective towards her and he didn’t trust her not to get herself into some kind of scrape. Edie seemed to be attracted to trouble in the way that foxes were attracted to bait traps.

  He heard voices speaking softly, then there was a knock on the door and Zach called his name.

  ‘Aileen Logan, the Iditarod boss, is here to see you. I’ll get coffee.’

  Zach and Derek had met at the annual conference of the Native Police Association in Yellowknife a few years back and kept in touch. They both shared a laid-back approach to law enforcement. Zach worked out of Nome as a brownshirt, an Alaska Wildlife Trooper. His job mostly involved enforcing hunting and fishing regulations, and in the navigation season he worked closely with the coastguard monitoring shipping across the Bering Strait. It was a police household. When she wasn’t on maternity leave, Zach’s wife Megan Avuluq worked as a Village Public Safety Officer, the first responder covering the area from the Safety roadhouse a few miles east of Nome to the Inupiaq village of White Mountain.

  Stumbling out of the put-up bed, Derek pulled on yesterday’s shirt and pants and went into Zach’s living room.

  A plump woman with a cloud of dirty blonde hair sat on the sofa. In front of her was a mug of coffee.

  ‘Rise and shine.’ She had the voice of a musk ox in rut.

  Derek rubbed his eyes, yawned and checked his watch again. 5.30 a.m. He’d only been in bed a couple of hours.

  Aileen gave a little hoot of laughter. ‘You Iditarod rookies make me roll about,’ she said. ‘Fella, up here 5.30 a.m. is what counts as a lie-in.’

  Zach came through with more coffee. Derek sat with his mug, heating himself up before moving too fast. Mornings never had been his strong suit.

  ‘Listen,’ Aileen said, ‘I heard about your friend down in Anchorage. That’s too bad what happened.’

  She saw the look of surprise on Derek’s face.

  ‘Welcome to Alaska, the biggest small town in the world.’ She let out another hoot. ‘But, listen, I didn’t disturb your beauty sleep just to commiserate about your friend,’ she went on. ‘Your man got a little problem.’

  A call had come in on the radio from the Yentna checkpoint, only 66 miles from Wasilla, to say that Sammy was giving up his lead dog.

  ‘Not Bonehead?’ Derek said. After two of Sammy’s team tore their pads on a patch of candle ice during practice, Sammy had borrowed Bonehead from Edie. The dog was bombproof.

  ‘You tell me,’ Aileen said. ‘Cut paw. His bootie fell off and there was a piece of glass ice.’ The stewards at Yentna would hold the dog until one of the bush planes that plied the route during the course of the race – the self-styled Iditarod Air – could take him back to Anchorage.

  ‘You’ll have to pick him up from the Pen.’ The warden at the Women’s Correctional Facility in Anchorage had set up a rehab programme for women prisoners at the end of their sentences, giving them sick or injured dogs to look after until their owners could pick them up. It was in the handbook Derek had read rather too hastily on the flight over. ‘They’ll keep him a couple of days if you need ’em to, but you got that friend of yours taking care of things down there, don’t you? Needs something to take her mind off all that trouble with the kid.’

  5

  From the moment Edie turned out the light, the face of the dead baby appeared in her mind, as though someone had engraved it there. Eventually, she abandoned any idea of sleeping. Rising early, she took a shower and while braiding her hair tried to turn her thoughts to Sammy. Her ex had probably travelled just over a hundred miles by now. In a few days he’d reach the high peaks of the Alaska Range. Beyond those lay the Kuskokwims, after which there would be 150 miles of hard, bumpy, dangerous sledding along the ice of the Yukon River before he reached the ice pack of Norton Sound.

  Sammy had no thought of winning and not much prospect of it either, but that wasn’t the point. He needed this race as much as he’d needed anything in his life. Certainly as much as he’d ever needed her. He’d begun seriously talking about entering about three months after Joe died and he’d kept on talking about it. He had this burning need to do something difficult, to push himself in ways he’d never dared before. Once he’d made up his mind to run, he’d put all of his energies into fixing his sled, training up his team and raising the money. All that activity had helped keep him sane. A year on, he still hadn’t forgiven himself for his son’s death. For Sammy the Iditarod was the perfect displacement activity, but it was more than that. Running the race was a chance to heal his wounded pride, to convince himself that, in spite of the fact that he had failed to protect his son, he was a man still, and capable of the kinds of things men were put on this earth to be able to d
o.

  It was a long time since Edie had relied on Sammy, but knowing he was so far away increased her sense of aloneness and being awake in the early hours of the morning only added to her isolation. She had the feeling of being sucked into something she did not understand but had no power to stop. Emotions she had kept at bay for years had begun creeping back into her consciousness, like some kind of muscle memory starting to stir, the boy in the snow dragging her back to a time she wanted to forget. Some feelings got to be like parts of the body, she thought. You could ignore them for years, and then, one day, they started playing up and it became impossible to think about much else.

  Pulling on her outerwear, she left the studio and trudging through hard packed snow still crusted with the night’s ice, made her way down K Street to the Snowy Owl Café, the only place she’d found in Anchorage so far serving something approaching real food. The early shift waitress, Stacey, came bundling up to show her to a table. She and Stacey had already bonded over the hassles of long hair – the brushing and drying and tying it demanded – and now the waitress was admiring the rickrack Edie had just braided into her plaits. Not that Stacey was the kind of girl to go in for rickrack. She thought of herself, she told Edie, as a Northern Goth and had the tattooed skulls on her wrists to prove it.

  ‘My grandma was tattooed,’ Edie said, and Stacey’s eyes said she wanted to hear the rest of that story. ‘It was a right of passage. They tattooed on little blue rays, and whiskers inking out from here.’ She wiped a finger along her upper lip. ‘It was kind of a tribute to the ugjuq, the bearded seal, which kept us alive back in the day. They don’t do it any more.’

  Stacey had made a long face. ‘I guess you have other things keeping you alive these days.’