White Heat

by Melanie McGrath

  'Do everything you can to make sure no air gets into the wound or the lung could collapse. I'm going to get a snow shelter up. The blizzard goes big, this bivvy won't hold. Anything changes, call me, OK?'

  Taylor said: 'You're not going to look for whoever did this?'

  Edie bit back her irritation. One thing she couldn't abide was a whiner.

  'Look, do you want to play detective or do you want your friend to live?'

  Taylor sighed. She watched him disappear into the bivvy, then drove the snowbie to the old drifts at the back of the beach beside the cliff and followed the shingle up the slope to the high point, looking for footprints and shell discards. She wasn't going to give Taylor the satisfaction of knowing that was what she was doing. All the same, she wanted to be clear in her own mind that the shooter wasn't still around. Up on the high ground, the wind was already blowing the snow hard. If there had been any prints, they were gone now. She turned the snowbie back and was passing beside a rocky outcrop when she spotted something on the ground. She squeezed on the brakes, jumped off and went back to check. There it was, the remnant of a single footprint, which had been protected from the worst of the wind by a small boulder. She inspected it more closely, bringing to mind Taylor's footprints from earlier. This was different. A man's and recent. Wagner's perhaps. If not, most likely the shooter's. For a moment or two she stood and took it in, memorising the zig-zag pattern with what looked like the outline of an ice bear at its centre, as bit by bit the wind blew snow over its surface. Up on her feet, now, she could just make out the rapidly filling indentations where the trail of prints had once been, heading away out onto the tundra. If it was the shooter, he was long gone.

  She made her way back to the beach and focused her energies on finding the right kind of building snow. Too hard and you'd never get the blocks to caulk together, too soft and the whole structure would be in danger of collapsing. A textbook she'd once read at the school listed the perfect building snow as having a density of 0.3-0.35gm/cm3 and a hardness of between 150-200gm/cm3. She'd remembered the numbers because they'd seemed so abstract and absurd. Out on the land, you had to do your own calculations.

  As luck would have it, she found precisely the right kind of three-layered snow in a drift at the northern edge of the beach. For a while she worked, sawing the walrus- ivory snowknife to and fro to form rectangular bricks the size of breezeblocks, stacking them on top of the trailer and moving them in batches out from under the cliff to where the bivvy currently stood. The job took her a while, because she moved slowly to avoid breaking into a sweat. Bricks cut, she dived back inside the bivvy to check on Wagner. The wounded man was quiet now, his breathing shallow. She checked his boots. No ice bear.

  'He still bleeding?'

  Taylor shook his head.

  'That case, you need to come help.'

  She showed him how to place the bricks, then caulk between, and as he worked, she dug out the ice floor and levelled it off. Finally they built the little entrance tunnel, sloping down to prevent warm air escaping. It was crude, but it would do. Together they heaved Wagner inside and laid him on a small pile of caribou skins. Edie emptied his pockets of a white plastic ballpoint pen, a pocket knife and a few coins and tossed them in her bag, then went back outside to collect her things and untie Bonehead. The wind chill was formidable now, -45 maybe, the air foamy with ice frost. She built a crude little annexe on the side of the house, lowered Bonehead into it and bricked him in. The snow would keep him cosy. Then she went inside, poured what remained of the hot tea from the thermos and, handing a mug to Andy Taylor, raised hers in a toast:

  'Here's to another fine mess,' she said.

  Andy looked up from his tea, eyes glaring. Incomprehension, maybe. Contempt, more like.

  'Laurel and Hardy.'

  'I know who it is.' Andy Taylor shook his head, clucking like an indignant duck whose nest has been disturbed. 'Jeez, have you any idea how inappropriate that is?'

  Edie wrinkled her nose and stared at her hands. It was as much as she could do not to punch him. If he'd been Inuk, she wouldn't have held off. Situation like this, you told stories, you drank hot tea, and you joked about. Only things keeping you sane. Fifteen minutes passed in silence. The blizzard was a way off still. It was going to be a long wait.

  After a while, she said: 'We should eat.' It had been several hours since their last meal and she and Andy had expended a good deal of energy building the snow shelter. Hungry people made poor judgements. She poured more hot tea, then pulled a drawstring bag from her pack and went at its contents with her pocketknife, handing a slice off the block to Andy Taylor. Taylor took what was offered, eyeing it suspiciously.

  She cut another slice for herself and began chewing, throwing Taylor a thumbs-up sign. 'Good.'

  Taylor took a bite. Slowly, his jaw began to move. Pretty soon, a rictus of disgust spread across his face. He spat the meat onto his glove.

  'What the fuck?'

  'Igunaq. Fermented walrus gut. Very good for you. Keep you warm.'

  The wind screamed. Edie chewed. Taylor sat in silence. Hail thumped up against the snowhouse walls like distant thunder. Taylor gave off anxious vibes.

  'This man who's supposed to be coming,' he blurted. 'Does he know what he's doing?' He had to shout to make his voice heard above all the racket of the weather. 'How do we know he'll actually get here?'

  It seemed like an odd question, a southerner's question. Why would Joe set off if he wasn't as sure as he could be that he'd reach his destination? 'It's not all that bad,' she said.

  Taylor gave her a look of exasperation. 'It sure sounds bad. And if it's not bad, then why the fuck hasn't someone sent the plane?'

  'The wind's coming in from the east.'

  Taylor wiped his glove over his face. His voice was tainted with aggression, or, perhaps, frustration, Edie thought. Then again, she might be wrong. Southerners were difficult to read. She explained that the winds would gather through the gaps in the mountain passes, becoming fiercer, more localized and katabatic, like mini-tornadoes. The plane would have to fly right through those winds, which could prove incredibly dangerous, but at ground level, things would be a little easier. It would be rough travelling — too rough for them with Felix Wagner in the trailer, but Joe was very experienced at travelling in difficult conditions and he was bringing proper medical kit and more expertise than she could muster alone.

  Edie sliced off another piece of igunaq and began chewing. She noticed Taylor back off slightly.

  'You know I didn't have anything to do with this, right?'

  'You ask me, I don't think you did.' She considered telling him about the footprint, then decided that right now, he didn't deserve to know. 'But it'll be hard to prove.'

  A gust of wind blustered over the snow shelter, sending a patch of caulking falling onto Wagner, who began to groan again.

  'What if your friend can't find us?'

  Edie sliced off another piece of igunaq.

  'You really should eat,' she said.

  'For fuck's sake, we got an injured man here!'

  Edie peered over at Wagner. 'I don't think he's hungry.'

  Taylor pulled off his hat and rubbed his hair. 'Does anything rattle you?'

  Edie thought about this for a moment. It wasn't the most interesting question, but it was the only one he'd asked that helped the conversation along, so they were making progress. 'There's this scene in Feet First. . .' she began.

  'Scene?' His voice had risen to the timbre of a sexed-up fox. Despite the difficult circumstances, Edie realized she was quite enjoying herself.

  'Yeah, in the Harold Lloyd picture. Anyway, there's this scene, where Harold Lloyd is swinging from a scaffold on the side of this huge skyscraper, it's like he's just clinging onto the edge of a cliff and the wind is shaking it.'

  Andy Taylor looked as her as though she was some crazy person.

  'What the hell? A movie?'

  People were always making this mistake. Edie
was always having to put them right. 'Sure it's a movie, but Harold Lloyd did all his own stunt work.'

  Taylor laughed, though probably not in a good way.

  'Straight up,' she said. 'No doubles, no stuntmen, no camera tricks, nothing.'

  The skinny qalunaat wiped his forehead and shook his head. After that he didn't say anything for a while. Time passed. The wind got up to a terrible pitch. Unsettled, Taylor began to fidget.

  'Don't you people tell stories at times like these, about the animals and the ancestors, all that?' You people. That's rich, thought Edie. One of us sitting here is paying to be 'you people', and it isn't me.

  'I just did,' she said.

  'No, no, I meant like real stories, Eskimo shit.'

  'Uh huh.' A familiar throb rose in Edie's right eye, a ringing in her ears. When she was a little girl, her grandfather used to say these feelings were the ancestors moving through her body. 'Listen,' he would whisper. 'One of your ancestors wants to tell his story.' She closed her eyes, those coal-black discs Sammy used to say reminded him of the eclipse of the sun, the perfect arch of her eyebrows rising like the curve of the earth above her broad, flat forehead. She thought about her grandmother, Anna, coming all the way here from Quebec, meeting Eliah out on a hunting trip, Eliah moving all the way from Etah in Greenland to be with her. Her thoughts ran to Eliah's great-grandfather, Welatok, who guided white men and journeyed all the way from Baffin Island and settled, finally, in Etah. Then she thought of Maggie, her mother, flying down to Iqaluit to look for her man, not finding him because he'd deceived her and wasn't there.

  'How's about an ancestor story?' she said. 'Why don't you start?'

  'What?' Taylor had a bewildered look on his face.

  'Tell me about your ancestors.'

  'My what?' Taylor sounded flustered, then his face seemed to bunch up, like he was trying to squeeze the juice from it. 'Hell, I don't know.' He waved a hand. 'My grandfather on my mother's side came over from Ireland. We didn't go in for that family history stuff.'

  The vehemence of his response, the contempt in the tone took her back. 'How can you live like that, not knowing where you came from?'

  'Pretty well. Pretty fucking well.'

  'My great-great-great-grandfather guided qalunaat explorers.'

  'Oh, that's just terrific,' he said, with some sarcasm. 'Nice family business you got here, generations of experience in leaving people to die in the middle of fucking nowhere.'

  'His name was Welatok,' she said, ignoring the man's tone. 'He guided a man called Fairfax.'

  Andy Taylor started. 'Right.' Going into his pocket, he drew out a hip flask, looking calmer suddenly. He took a few sips from it and waved it in the air.

  'Think old Felix here could use some?'

  'He's sleeping.'

  Taylor put the flask back in his pocket. She knew why he didn't offer it to her. Inuit, drink: a match made in hell. She would have said no anyway. Her drinking days were long behind her.

  'Old Felix here, he knows a thing or two about those old-time Arctic explorers, all the heroes: Peary, Stefansson, Scott, Fairfax, Frobisher. Pretty interesting stuff,' Taylor said.

  'He ever mention Welatok?' she asked.

  Taylor shrugged.

  'I guess not,' she said. 'We never did get much credit.'

  Beside them, Wagner began making small moaning sounds. Edie thought of Joe, now struggling across the sea ice to reach them, and about what kind of future he would have in whatever was left of the Arctic once the developers and prospectors and explorers had swept through it. It was greed, she knew, though she'd never felt it. Well, greed for love maybe, for sex even, but for stuff, never. With Edie, same as with most Inuit, you owned enough, you hunted enough, you ate enough and you left enough behind so your children and their children would respect you. It wasn't about surplus. It was about sufficiency.

  Some time later, Edie sensed Bonehead begin to stir and scrape about inside his ice kennel. Andy Taylor had fallen asleep. Wagner was still, though breathing. Throwing on her sealskin parka, she clambered through the entrance tunnel. Outside the air was alive with darting crystals and ice smoke, the wind roaring like a wounded bear. Edie edged her way around the snow shelter, took out her snow- knife and cut a hole in Bonehead's kennel. The dog burst from his confinement in a spray of snowflakes, greeted her briefly, then rushed off into the gloom to meet Joe.

  Clambering back inside the snow shelter she woke Taylor to tell him that Joe was on his way. Neither of them heard his snowbie until it was already very close. Shortly afterwards Joe himself appeared at the entrance to the shelter.

  'What happened?' Before anyone could answer, Joe crawled over to the wounded man. Removing his gloves, he pressed the index and middle finger of his right hand to

  Wagner's neck, counting the pulse in the carotid artery. He took out a blue clinicians' notebook from his daypack and wrote something down.

  Edie raised her hand in a thumbs-up but Joe only shrugged. She watched him inspecting the wound and felt the familiar surge of pride in her boy.

  'How much blood has he lost?'

  'A lot, maybe more than a litre.'

  Joe turned to his daypack, pulled out some antibacterial wipes and began washing his hands. Five minutes later Felix Wagner was on a saline drip with codeine for the pain. The situation was pretty grave, Joe explained. The injured man was now in full hypovolemic shock. His chances of survival depended on the severity of the shock and that could not be established until he was properly hospitalized. If the shock was severe enough, kidney failure would set in and gradually, one by one, the organs would begin to shut down. It might take a few hours or as long as a week, but, unless Wagner was extraordinarily lucky, the outcome would be the same.

  'We need that plane, Sammy.' Edie was on the sat phone again.

  'We're still being pummelled over here.'

  'Can you get Thule out?' It was a big ask. The US air- base across the water in Greenland had bigger planes, built better to withstand Arctic conditions than Autisaq's Twin Otters. They were usually unwilling to intervene in what they saw as Canadian problems, except in the case of an outbreak of TB or measles or some other some infectious illness, but Wagner was one of them, an American.

  When the response came moments later, she could barely hear it and asked Sammy to repeat, then abruptly lost the signal. After a few minutes' wait the phone rang back. This time the signal was poor but Edie could just about hear a man's voice through the crackle, something about visibility.

  'Sammy, listen.' She had to shout above the shriek of the wind. 'What about Thule?' But the phone had already gone dead.

  'They flying?' Joe looked hopeful.

  Taylor opened his mouth to speak.

  'Don't.' Edie held up a hand. 'Just don't.'

  They finished up the tea in the flasks and waited. It was rough still, but the wind moved across to the northwest and began to ease off. A little while later, Bonehead began scratching about and barking, Edie put her ear to the ground and detected an engine vibration. Martie. It had to be. No one except her aunt would be crazy enough to fly through the tail-end of a blizzard.

  In no time, they were loading the patient, the snowmobiles and equipment on board Martie Kiglatuk's Otter. Martie was large, at least by Inuit standards, with skin the colour of an heirloom suitcase and a voice like a cartoon train wreck. She also happened to be Edie's best friend.

  The plane hugged the shore-fast ice of South Cape and turned west along the Ellesmere coast. Before long, it had cleared sufficiently for Edie to be able to watch the land sail by. She was struck, always, on her rare flights, by how much the Arctic was shrinking back into itself, floe by floe, glacier by glacier. Witnessing it was like watching a beloved and aged parent gradually and inexorably come apart. Every year a little more death and dying and a little less life. In thirteen years' time, when Joe was her age now, she wondered if anything would be left at all.

  The crags softened then gradually fell away to fl
at shoreline and the northern hamlet of Autisaq rose into view like a set of ancient teeth, jagged with age and wear, clinging on uneasily to the bony foreshore. Behind her, Joe whooped.

  Martie said: 'Seatbelts on, folks, we're coming in.'

  Edie felt a familiar ear-pop as they began to descend and then, muffled, but unmistakeable, the sound of Joe's voice again, only this time alarmed, and when she looked back over her shoulder she could see Felix Wagner foaming at the mouth, his eyes rolling back, his whole body quaking and jerking and Joe frantically signalling Andy Taylor to hold the wounded man steady while he filled a hypodermic. Time warped and bent. Edie was aware of the plane's steep descent and a bunch of fractured shouts and barked instructions. She tried to loosen her seatbelt to help but could not get a grip on it. Behind her, Joe was pumping at the man's heart, blowing into his mouth, and the plane was pitching and diving towards the landing strip. Suddenly, Martie was shouting; 'Seatbelts on now, people. Tuarvirit! Quick!' and the two men fell away from Felix Wagner like old petals.

  Moments later, the familiar skid and grind of the tyres on gravel signalled their arrival and as Edie swung round she saw Felix Wagner's arm escape from underneath the blanket.

  Martie taxied to the end of the strip, shut down the engine.

  'What we got?'

  Joe said: 'Trouble.' He was out of his seat, kneeling beside the body of Felix Wagner, looking crushed. 'The qalunaat just died.'

  'Iquq, shit.' Martie glanced out of the window at the welcome party of Sammy Inukpuk and Sammy's brother, Simeonie, Autisaq's mayor, heading towards them.