The Boy in the Snow

by M. J. McGrath

  ‘I was busy,’ she said, anticipating his question. ‘Tending to the lame.’

  26

  Edie decided to take breakfast at the Snowy Owl Café. But today it wasn’t just the food she was after.

  When Stacey bounded up with her usual busy smile, she said, ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, Stacey, I love my Snowy Owl breakfasts, but I’ve just got an urge to hunt me some meat today and I was kinda hoping you could recommend me an outfitter? I’m only looking to go after ducks, nothing fancy.’

  For a moment the waitress looked taken aback, then the smile reappeared and, gathering herself, she said she could definitely help.

  ‘Oh, no, sure, everyone hunts in Alaska. You know you can just buy your permit right from the outfitters.’ She scribbled something down on her order pad and peeled off the page. ‘My uncle Anthony’s got a set-up just two blocks down the street. Here’s the address and phone number. You just tell him Stacey sent you and he’ll give you a good price.’

  An hour later, Edie had the dog on the back seat and a rented Remington 308 in the trunk and she was heading up the Glenn Highway north again. The roadblocks had gone. She guessed the police figured that if Galloway was going to try to drive himself out of trouble, he’d have done it by now. At the turn to Wasilla, where she would normally have swung left, she kept right, following the signs to Palmer and Chickaloon. The journey up to the part of the forest where Galloway might or might not be hiding took longer than she’d anticipated. Several times she found herself struggling with Anatoly Medvedev’s directions. Driving took your focus away from the land itself. The road signs were unhelpful and she was now on new terrain. Things were so different here. Back home, she was as familiar with the land as she was with the lines on her face. Everything had an Inuktitut name that made sense to her: rivers were called after the quality of the fishing or according to when the ice in them melted, cliffs were known for the birds nesting there. If you needed to find your bearings there were always high points from which you could get a view and the tundra was littered with inukshuks marking the route of hunting trails. Here in Alaska, low points or high points, all you could see were trees and more trees and it was hard to tell anything from names like McDougall or Sunshine or Palmer.

  At Glennallen she made a left on the 4 north towards Sourdough, then another left there, bumping along on hunting and logging trails towards the Alphabet range until she reached a hollow dip in the land on the edge of a stream with a view of foothills, which fitted Medvedev’s description. Parking up, she unloaded Bonehead, strapped on her snowshoes and plunged into the forest. The two of them brushed through thick alder and bitter-smelling hemlock pine into deep stands of dark spruce part buried in smooth snowdrift. She’d brought a compass with her, something she never needed on the tundra, and for a long time she followed Medvedev’s instructions, heading north-north-west from the spot where he’d suggested she leave the car. Here and there they came across animal tracks in the snow which Bonehead had a hard time ignoring, but there were no signs of any human activity at all. They continued to dodge through the trees, straining for human sounds, stopping every so often for Edie to check the compass. She felt disoriented and light-headed, only the presence of the dog steadying her. After what seemed like the longest time, Bonehead began to whimper and shake, alternately sniffing the air and pressing his nose to the snow. She clipped on his leash, allowing him to lead and he took them along the bank of the stream, then back up through trees to a tiny clearing and there it was, the hide, a cube of two-by-fours simply roofed in corrugated iron and pinned with snow pegs and with a single plank door and a small window, the view through which was baffled by the way the sunlight fell onto it.

  Edie crouched for a moment and let her breathing slow, then called out. No response. A shadow moved across the window of the hide. Again she called. Nothing. Reaching for the rifle, she let off a shot into the air. There was a silence broken by a rough voice saying, ‘What do you want?’

  ‘How’s about an explanation?’ she said. ‘If I don’t like it, I’m taking you in.’ The biggest part of her didn’t think Galloway had murdered Lucas Littlefish but she wanted to hear him deny it. His relationship with Schofield needed ironing out, too.

  There was a pause, and then the door to the hide swung open and Peter Galloway emerged, holding up his hands in a gesture of surrender. His eyes widened. ‘I know you,’ he said.

  ‘Sure you do. I’m the one you left in the forest a few days back, remember? Only on my way out I discovered your dirty little secret.’

  He shook his head, caught her eye, and focused in on it. ‘I didn’t have nothing to do with that,’ he said. The intensity of his gaze was unsettling. If he was lying, he was damned good at it. He’d probably already guessed who’d sent her, which meant he must know she was unlikely to shoot, or take him in for that matter. Still, he didn’t know and it was his not knowing that put her in a stronger position.

  She said, ‘I know you and TaniaLee Littlefish were friends.’

  ‘I taught her to read, and that’s all I did,’ he said. ‘I saw her around town sometimes, when I was living in Homer. She worked at the supermarket for a while, but I hadn’t come across her in something like a year when her baby was born.’ He kept his voice low and his eyes straight, no sign of the rise or the small deflection which might indicate a lie. But he was scared, she could sense that, and it made him dangerous. ‘I didn’t kill that kid.’

  ‘Which one?’ she said, meaning to catch him out.

  Peter Galloway stared at her, his face a blank. He appeared to have no idea what she was talking about. Edie glanced down at Bonehead but the dog remained alert and calm, his ears forward, eyes beady, tail relaxed down. He hadn’t picked up any increased anxiety, the kind of subtle change in energy you might expect if someone were lying.

  ‘Listen, I never touched TaniaLee. I’m very sorry for her troubles and I’m sad about the kid. But that girl will believe anything anyone tells her, they repeat it enough times. There ain’t no Dark Believers so how can I be one of them? You think I’d kill a baby?’ He let his arms fall to his sides.

  ‘Put your hands where I can see them.’

  He did as she asked.

  ‘You gonna take me in or not?’

  The dog let out a low growl. She clicked off the safety catch. He’d advanced a little as he’d been talking. He was near enough to her now that she could feel the warmth of his body.

  ‘Watch yourself,’ she said. Her fingers curled around the trigger. ‘I’ve shot bigger and meaner.’

  He stopped advancing and looked at her quizzically, like something had just fallen into place.

  ‘You saw Schofield, didn’t you? Natalia said you would. She said you were the nosy kind wouldn’t be able to help yourself.’

  When she didn’t reply he sighed and paused for a while, thoughts moving on his face.

  ‘Who’s Fonseca?’ Edie asked.

  He shook his head.

  ‘TaniaLee said Fonseca is the father of her baby.’

  Galloway’s hands began to move back towards his sides. ‘Look, I have no idea what line you’re pursuing here but I can tell you for sure it comes out at a dead end. There’s powerful people wrapped up in this, more powerful than me or Tommy Schofield.’ Watching her carefully, he took a step towards her without letting up his speech. ‘I never killed any babies. How could I do that? C’mon, I got my own baby coming any time.’

  Bonehead began to growl and she told him to be quiet. Then she felt the dog rush forward. There was the sensation of her legs disappearing from under her and a blur in front of her eyes as Galloway bounded for her gun.

  Her first thought on waking was that a bear had got her. Then she remembered that the bears round this way were still in hibernation. Her arms windmilled out and caught Bonehead on the chops. The dog let out a yelp. She sat up and blinked. Her head hurt like a group toothache in a walrus pod. Her hand grazed across warm, sticky blood at the back of her skull. It
was dark, her rifle was gone and she had no flashlight. Then she remembered Peter Galloway. In the moonlight she could just about pick out Galloway’s tracks heading off into the forest. She got up and steadied herself and, ordering the dog to go ahead, she followed on. Before long they were back at her truck. Sitting in the driving seat with the locks fastened she felt safe enough to check the wound by tilting the rear-view mirror until it reflected the back of her head in the vanity on the passenger side sunshade. The blood was already beginning to dry up. She checked her face in the rear-view. Her pupils seemed uprooted and floaty. Or was that how she felt in general? It was hard to tell. She turned the radio on, screwing the dial to a heavy rock station and turning the volume up. In the back seat, Bonehead gave a pained whine. Thinking how best to keep herself awake, she settled on reciting the titles of Charlie Chaplin’s short films in reverse chronological order, and pulled the truck out onto the road.

  It wasn’t until she reached the door of the studio and tried repeatedly, and failed, to connect the key to the lock that she realized how confused she was. Everything looked slightly off. Inside at last, she turned on all the lights and took a cold shower, standing in the water with her hair cascading from her shoulders like black rain. She stepped out of the shower and grabbed for a towel then everything suddenly went very, very fuzzy.

  Some time later she thought she could hear voices in the studio. She opened her eyes. She was lying on the bathroom floor and someone was leaving a message on her voicemail. Using the basin, she pulled herself up and went for the door. Her head swam and she was as unsteady on her legs as a newborn pup. A woman’s voice she didn’t recognize was just signing off. By the time she reached the phone, the caller had hung up. She waited for the blinking light then pressed message play. The voice came back on again:

  ‘Miss Kiglatuk? I’m sorry to call so late. There’s been a problem with Mr Inukpuk. Derek Palliser has already flown out to Unalakleet. We really need you to come up to Nome as soon as you can.’

  27

  She struggled with contradictory impulses. Her head wound made her sleepy but she knew she could not afford to rest. She kept herself awake by watching Laurel and Hardy reruns on an old movie channel and drinking hot sweet tea. Every so often she called Zach Barefoot’s and left a message. Calls to the Iditarod HQ went straight to voicemail. When she’d been phoning a few hours without getting any answer from anyone, she contacted the officer on night duty at the Nome PD, who promised to make some enquiries but never called back.

  At 4.30 in the morning Edie pulled on her outerwear and went outside. The snowploughs and gritters hadn’t yet got to work, so the walk from the apartment building was slow and treacherous, the street lights illuminating the ruts and gulleys of footprints made by the stamping feet of the Mommabear demonstrators, which had hardened and iced overnight. At 4.45 she was waiting outside the Snowy Owl, hoping to catch Stacey before she went on shift. At 4.50 a face she recognized appeared out of the gloom and came smiling towards her.

  ‘Man, Edie, you ever sleep?’ The young woman reached out for Edie’s arm and gave it a squeeze. ‘Come in and get warm. The cook doesn’t get here till five, but I can make you some tea.’ Opening the door, she walked through, turned on the lights and spotted the whorl of dried blood on Edie’s head. In an instant, her expression changed.

  ‘Hey, what happened?’

  Edie squeezed the hand on her arm. ‘Next time you got a week to listen, I’ll explain.’ She looked her directly in the eye. ‘Right now, though, Stacey, I could really use some help.’

  ‘Sure, whatever, you got it.’ Stacey’s eyes widened with worry and affection in equal measure. For a moment Edie was tempted to tell her the truth, about Sammy and the wounds, old and new, about everything that had brought her to this moment. But why burden the girl with it? There was nothing Stacey could do and there was in any case no time to explain. She needed to be on that first flight up to Nome.

  ‘I need you to look after my dog,’ Edie said. ‘He’s in my apartment.’ She gave the address.

  ‘Oh-kaaay,’ Stacey said, waiting for the punchline.

  ‘You’ll need to give him plenty of exercise. He’s not used to eating commercial dog food but you’ll find a coyote in the refrigerator. I already portioned it up.’

  She saw Stacey’s composure give just a little but she took a beat and recovered. She took her wad of cash from her pocket, peeled off a couple of big bills and pressed them into Stacey’s hand. ‘You might need to buy more food. Meat, or whatever you got left over from the restaurant. He’s real happy just to crunch on bones for a while. And it’ll be best if you wear this when you go see him.’ Edie handed over one of her old Arctic hare vests. ‘Don’t wash it.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘If you smell of me he won’t tear you to pieces.’

  ‘When you put it like that, it’s irresistible,’ Stacey said. She took a breath. ‘You know how long this might be for exactly?’

  Edie shrugged. Why were southerners so stuck on timetables?

  ‘If things go well, exactly for a couple of days. If they don’t, I’m guessing exactly for ever.’

  ‘Well, so now we’ve got that clear,’ Stacey laughed, the anxiety still on her face. ‘When do I start?’

  Edie dug the apartment keys from her pocket.

  At Anchorage airport she called Zach Barefoot’s number again, but got no response. She went through the ID and baggage check in a daze, her mind fizzy with worry. Her ex must have had an accident. Why hadn’t Derek called her himself? Once on the plane, she waved aside the Air Alaska breakfast and tried to focus her mind on the soft purple early morning light creeping over Mount Denali, but it was hopeless. Her head throbbed from the rifle butt and her heart ached for Sammy. They continued on, over the Kuskokwims and the Kaiyuhs, over the Iditarod trail, then moved out across Norton Sound and into the barrens. As they left the treeline behind, she felt herself expand into the tundra. It was fully light now, a few high clouds throwing shadows on the Seward Peninsula. The plane began its descent. She felt a sudden pain and realized she’d been biting her lip to distract herself from the catastrophic thoughts crowding her brain.

  At the terminal in Nome, she called Zach’s number, and getting no response, decided to head directly to the Iditarod HQ in the centre of town. When she explained her predicament, the volunteer at the info desk seemed out of her depth. She didn’t know anything about any message. Unfortunately, Aileen Logan was in the field all day, inspecting checkpoints, the volunteer said, but she would call Logan’s deputy, Chrissie Caley, who would probably be able to help.

  After what seemed like for ever a pert businesslike woman with hair the colour of spring run-off came over, introducing herself as Chrissie Caley and giving Edie a sympathetic look. She listened to Edie then said she’d go and check the records and be right back. Ten minutes later (Edie counted them in) Caley took a seat in the waiting area. She wondered if whoever had left the message had given her name.

  ‘Uh nuh.’ Edie shook her head, and then, feeling her brain shaking in its box, regretted it. She lifted her hand to the wound. Caley shot her a concerned look.

  ‘Do you need to see a doctor for that?’

  ‘Please, I just need to see Sammy.’

  Caley nodded but her eyes remained anxious. She explained that the reason for the delay had been that she’d checked in the records and the last communication the team had had with Sammy Inukpuk was at the checkpoint at Eagle Island. She’d asked around in the back office but no one seemed to know anything about a message. An added mystery was the fact that Sammy Inukpuk’s GPS tracker was indicating he was still on the move and due to arrive at the Kaltag checkpoint within the next few hours.

  ‘But the message said my teammate had flown out to Unalakleet?’

  Caley knitted her brow. She gave a tiny glance at the wall clock, keen to get on with the business of the day.

  ‘Please re-check.’

  Caley’s eyes flared impat
iently but she went off nevertheless. Not long afterwards she returned looking steely-faced and somewhat put out.

  ‘I just went through all our records real well, Miss Kiglatuk. No one has any recollection of making a call to you and there’s nothing in the books to suggest anyone did. I understand your concern, but your sledder is doing just fine. Like I said before, we’re expecting Sammy Inukpuk at Kaltag early this evening. If you want, we can give you a call when he arrives or you could come back around six and wait. That way, when he calls in, you’ll be there to speak to him in person.’

  Edie tried to recall the phone message. Part of her wondered if, in her current state, she’d misinterpreted something, but every time she replayed the message in her mind, it seemed perfectly clear.

  ‘Did you locate Derek at Unalakleet?’

  Caley gave a peevish snort. ‘Maybe you need to look harder at your team communications, ma’am. Mister Palliser,’ she emphasized the ‘Mister’, ‘went over to Council with his hosts last night, said he’d be back before lunch. We got a snowmachine going there in a couple minutes, if you want a ride over.’

  Edie rubbed her forehead, trying to get something to make sense. Caley coughed. She was nearly out of patience. ‘Thank you,’ Edie said, ‘that would be great.’

  About five miles out, past the sink marking the workings from the old gold mines, past the Cold War remnants of the nuclear weapons facility on the Council Road, the driver of the snowmachine turned his head and shouted: ‘Up ahead!’