Someone purporting to be Sir James's descendant had been up on Ellesmere several years back with a film crew, making a documentary following the explorer's penultimate voyage. She couldn't remember much about it. Happened during her lost years.
'Yeah, that one. He wants to locate his ancestor's body. Reckons it could be on Craig. Bringing an assistant, just the two of them. Think they might be able to get some TV company interested.'
On the surface, this sounded like the perfect gig. Small party, presumably with some knowledge of local conditions, no hunting involved and she knew Craig Island as well as anyone. It seemed unlikely they'd find Sir James Fairfax's body, she thought, but you could never tell. Under all that snow and ice, the tundra was one great open-air charnel house: bones, antlers, skeletons scattered all over. Nothing ever rotted or even stayed buried long. There was no deep archaeology, no layering of history here.
Southerners often marvelled at the way the recent and ancient past were equally present, as though there had only ever been one yesterday and everything in the past had happened on that single day. Only a couple of years ago a group of anthropologists from the University of Alberta had located the first mate from some old-time expedition. His comrades had buried him under rocks but decades of wind and weather had moved the body out from under them and he was found lying out on the ice, in more or less pristine condition.
All the same, it was kind of a weird time to look for a man, the ice and snow not yet melted off, and Edie said so.
'I told them that,' Sammy said. 'But it didn't seem to bother them.'
'So long as they know we're unlikely to find anything.' Qalunaat ventured north for all kinds of reasons, often not the ones they supposed.
'Maybe the body was left in some cave or something, I dunno much about it.'
'They're paying?'
Sammy nodded. 'The usual.'
'Why aren't you doing it then?' She narrowed her eyes, waiting for the catch.
Her ex looked at his feet. 'I got council of Elders business.' He drained his beer and belched. 'Any case, you always get first dibs on Craig, Edie.' This was true, though he was only saying it to soften her up.
Edie thought about the money. 'Sure.'
She was still waiting for the catch.
'They're arriving on the supply plane tomorrow.' He hesitated. 'There's just one thing.'
Edie wrinkled her nose. Right. The same old Sammy; slippery, never giving you the whole picture, the Sammy she divorced. First dibs on Craig, my ass.
'All it is, Bill Fairfax's assistant . . .'He dropped the ring pull into his empty can and rattled it around a little.'. .. it's that Andy Taylor fellow.'
The name came at Edie like an unexpected gust of cold wind. What the hell was Andy Taylor doing back in Autisaq? Just when she'd squared it with herself to leave the whole Felix Wagner business alone. Now it was coming right back at her.
'You know how I feel about that guy. Can't you do this, I'll do the next one?' A dark slick of anger seeped over her.
'Like I said, Edie, I got business.' Sammy twirled the ring pull round inside the can some more.
She didn't want anything more to do with Andy Taylor. On the other hand, if she turned this down, she'd have to go to the back of the line for the next gig. She needed the money and Sammy knew it. He'd backed her into a corner.
'Don't worry, I fixed it so you won't have to guide him. You'll be working with the other one.'
'Why? Taylor staying in the settlement?'
'Not exactly,' Sammy said. 'He and this Fairfax fellow want go out in two separate parties, one to the west by Uimmatisatsaq, near where you were before, the other around Fritjof Fiord in the east. I told them you would take Fairfax to Fritjof. Joe already agreed to take Taylor.'
Edie felt startled. All this time Sammy had been cooking this up and now he'd somehow cajoled Joe into agreeing to it, without even asking for her opinion.
'Wait up just one second, Sammy Inukpuk,' she said. 'You're not letting your son out with that man. Andy Taylor's a panicker, he's inexperienced, unreliable.' The look on Sammy's face darkened.
'You don't get to tell me how I should treat my son. You abandoned us, remember?' He stood up and swept to the door.
She'd seen this before, Sammy trying to take the moral high ground. It was as though, in his eyes, that was all she had become, some kind of flaky, no good bolter. She made a grab for her pigtails and saw him bite his lip. At least he knew how much the A-word hurt her.
'Three days, six max,' he said, shaking his head at her.
She went after him, reached the internal door to the porch and yanked it open. The cold felt like a bad dream. 'Sammy?'
He looked up from tying his bootlace.
'This goes wrong, I won't forgive you.'
He finished his lace, stood up and waved her away. 'I'm not asking you to trust me, Edie, not any more, but try to have some faith in your stepson.'
She felt herself blush, a sense of shame needling her belly. Sammy was right. Joe was a highly competent guide and he knew Craig almost as well as she did. It wasn't as though Andy Taylor was a bad man. He was just high maintenance was all.
'Sure,' she said, in a chastened tone. He winked at her and smiled. She waited while he opened the door and stepped out into the cold.
'Sammy?'
'Yeah?'
'You owe me a beer.'
The following morning, Edie drove the snowbie along the shoreline then took the ice road up beside the school towards the landing strip. As she bumped along the ice, she turned over the details of the trip. It was late enough in the spring season for the ice to be just beginning to destabilize but it hadn't begun to rot in earnest yet. That wouldn't happen for another three months. Some leads would have opened up in the shore-fast ice but so long as she and Joe were careful, the routes should be pretty unproblematic. Taylor and Fairfax were expecting to be out on the land for three days. That might stretch to five if they got weathered out, but at this time of the year blizzards were short-lived.
Before long, she caught the sound of the plane humming in the far distance but the sky was a drab blanket patched with low and clumpy clouds and she couldn't see it yet. It would be bumpy up at fifteen hundred metres today. She hoped Andy Taylor and Bill Fairfax were good flyers.
She passed the lonely little cemetery thinking about the bodies of Sir James Fairfax and his crew, lying out on the tundra somewhere, far, far from home. Like her great-great- great-grandfather, Welatok, buried out near Etah in Greenland, a different country, his spirit rootless and unreachable.
Here in Autisaq, the tombstones were completely obscured by snow, but relatives had stuck plastic flowers in the ground and the cemetery looked like some weird, otherworldly art project. When the time came, she wanted to be buried in the proper Inuit way, under a pile of stones out on the tundra, with an inukshuk or a low stone cairn marking her place.
It struck her then that those of his crew who had survived him might have erected some kind of marker for Sir James. If there was a marker, it was odd she hadn't seen it. Then again, perhaps she didn't know Craig Island as well as she thought.
The Twin Otter nudged out from behind clouds. Edie had checked the manifest the night before and knew that Aunt Martie was at the controls. When she wasn't drinking, there was no finer bush pilot across the High Arctic. Martie was one of only a handful of Inuit pilots, and the only woman. She'd had to be twice as good as any of the men just to get her licence. Sure, she was eccentric, a bit of a loner even, but she'd handed a lifeline to Edie so many times she'd lost count and, despite her own struggles with booze, she'd always tried to keep her niece away from drink. Edie respected and loved her all the more for that.
Martie was bringing in the plane from behind the mountains so she wouldn't get caught up in a patch of turbulent wind. Banking into a sharp turn, she swooped back and brought the Otter in level. For an instant it seemed to hover above the surface of the landing strip before coming into a long, controlled skid along the
gravel. The plane stopped right outside the tiny prefab that served as a terminal. Moments later, the door opened and a tall, slender man emerged down the steps, visibly stiffening in the cold. Behind him followed Andy Taylor, looking shaken. The instant Taylor hit the gravel, he doubled over and was violently sick. Bill Fairfax turned momentarily, wrinkled his nose in disgust and walked on towards the terminal building. So, thought Edie, the relationship between the two men was strictly business.
Fairfax was an elegant, chiselled man in his fifties. He was wearing traditional caribou mukluk boots, a sure sign of a man in the grip of Arctic nostalgia. As he walked, the nap on his sealskin parka caught the light and lent him the appearance of something radiant and mystical. The gossips who hung around the back of the Northern Store would be having fun over that outfit for weeks.
Edie went over, introduced herself and apologized for Joe's absence, explaining that he was busy assisting Robert Patma in the nursing station. At close quarters her charge bore a remarkable resemblance to his ancestor, whose portrait Edie was so familiar with from the school history book. The match was exact enough to be unsettling, as though an old spirit had appeared in modern guise to sort out some unfinished business.
'Taylor said you were a bear hunter.' Bill Fairfax spoke in precise, clipped English. Sammy hadn't said where he was from, but Edie guessed England. Elizabetland, the locals called it.
She said: 'Once. Not in a long, long while.'
'Ah well.' He sounded disappointed.
An awkward moment followed as they tried not to watch Taylor out on the strip, kicking gravel over the mess he'd made.
'But you're quite the landswoman, I hear,' Bill Fairfax continued, returning to the subject of bear hunting.
Edie wondered for a moment if he was expressing a lack of confidence in her, then realized that it was just the opposite. Even though she was herself half qalunaat, she quite often found it was hard to read southerners.
'That hunting trip sounded terrible,' Fairfax went on.
Edie felt a lurch. Surely Taylor hadn't been stupid enough to have confided in Fairfax about the Wagner affair?
'Just bad luck,' she said, hedging.
'You're too modest. Taylor told me all about it, throwing up that snowhouse. Nasty blizzard you two got caught up in.'
'Oh, that.' Edie felt herself relax. She guessed Taylor was lying for the same reason that she would go along with his lies: they both needed the work. Maybe he wasn't so stupid after all.
After she'd settled the two men in the hotel, Edie went across to the clinic to let Joe know she'd arranged a briefing meeting at the mayor's office and was met at the door by Robert Patma. Joe was busy talking to Minnie Toluuq, Robert explained, but he'd be free very shortly.
In the three years Robert Patma had been in the community, Edie had found herself growing increasingly fond of him. Like most qalunaat, he'd come up on a two-year contract, but, unlike almost all, he'd stayed. He was a hardy, uncomplaining type and although on the surface very cynical about his reasons for remaining in Autisaq - citing northern hardship money and long leave entitlements as chief among them - he'd often gone above and beyond what was called for under the terms of his contract. For example, he hadn't been under any obligation to allow Joe to volunteer at the nursing station but he'd showed a great deal of generosity and commitment to him and over the months the two men had become good friends. Joe often went round to Robert's apartment after work and the two would listen to music together and eat the curries the nurse liked to cook.
She made a point of following him into the kitchen where he was making tea and asking after his father.
'He's OK,' he said. 'Sugar?'
'Sure,' she said. She watched Robert drop a single cube into the mug. 'I'm sorry your mother didn't make it.'
He blinked. 'I don't really like to talk about it much.'
She reached for some more sugar, but he pushed the mug towards her as it was.
'You want to watch that,' he said. 'Diabetes. Arctic epidemic.'
'Another one.'
Robert smiled bleakly.
Just then Joe emerged from the consultation room at the back. He and Robert had a brief discussion about various things that needed doing then Joe put on his coat and boots and he and Edie walked down the ice road towards the mayor's office.
Edie said: 'Sweetheart, if you don't want to take this Andy Taylor fellow, you don't have to. You know that, don't you? You don't have to do anything just because your father says.'
He looked at her with affection and shrugged. 'It'll be different when I'm qualified.'
'You'll stay here in Autisaq, right?'
He shook his head. 'Yellowknife, Iqaluit maybe, somewhere bigger.' Then, tapping her on the nose, he said, 'You'll come too, Kigga?'
'Sure,' she said. 'Sure I will.' She meant it.
The heat in the mayor's office was stifling. Fairfax had complained about the cold, so Sammy had turned up the furnace. Edie glanced at the thermostat. Sixteen degrees. A hot house. Taylor was sitting in his Polartec, wiping away the sweat around his collar, looking ill at ease. Fairfax spread out in a chair beside him, giving off an air of entitlement.
After the success of the first TV documentary, Fairfax had been approached by the TV company about another idea, a search for the body of his ancestor.
'I guess you know the rumours?'
Sammy, Joe and Edie nodded. Everyone knew the rumours. When Sir James's final expedition got into trouble, some Inuit had passed by the camp and seen what they took to be human meat hung out to dry. As the story was passed on to various white traders who came into and out of the area it was embroidered and elaborated upon. By the time it reached London it had become quite a scandal, casting a shadow over the explorer's reputation. It was on account of this that Sir James's backers had refused to send out a rescue party to try to locate the explorer and his crew. Probably it would have made no difference anyway. Fairfax's ship, the Courageous, was found drifting and abandoned by an American whaler just north of Cumberland Sound. None of the bodies had ever been recovered.
As Bill went on, Joe caught Edie's eye, looking for some kind of steer. He often thought of her as a bridge between his world and that other, unknowable place to the south. She signalled back with a reassuring smile; they'd talk it over later. She'd read enough about the old white explorers to know that the prospect of cannibalism hung over them like some malevolent spectre. To the Inuit, eating human flesh was merely the survival tool of last resort. The most dishonourable thing an Inuk man with a family could do was to take the easy way out, to give up the struggle to provide for his loved ones, lie down and die. That way he condemned his present and future family and brought shame on his ancestors. In the qalunaat world, the opposite was true. Dishonour had become attached to Sir James Fairfax's name precisely because he'd done everything he could, right down to eating his own kind, in order to survive.
Sir James's last known diary had recently surfaced among the effects of Bill's great-aunt, he continued. The explorer had been a punctilious diarist, keeping meticulous notes of weather conditions, navigational decisions as well as lists of supplies and a day-to-day account of happenings among the crew. His diaries from his first two Arctic expeditions, in 1840 and 1843, had long been part of the collection at the Scott Polar Institute at Cambridge University. It was always assumed that the diary of the penultimate voyage of 1847 was somewhere among the family papers, but it hadn't turned up until Bill himself had discovered it in an old port box filled with bits and pieces which his great-aunt had left him in her will. Bill doubted that his great-aunt had known the contents of the box; she'd left him several dozen, and most had contained nothing more interesting than old copies of accounts. But this was quite a prize. The diary was of particular interest because it contained a detailed plan of Sir James's proposed next voyage, the one during which, as it turned out, he and his crew disappeared.
Bill Fairfax hesitated. The newly recovered diary revealed that Sir Jam
es had planned to stay at Craig Island during the migration of beluga whale which passed close by during September on their way south. He hoped to kill enough whale to provide meat through the winter months, and had scouted out suitable campsites on a previous expedition, one of which was near the present-day Uimmatisatsaq, the other on the east of the island at Fritjof Fiord. Bill Fairfax spread his maps on the table, pointing out the two spots for Edie and Joe to examine.
No one knew what went wrong, he said, whether the beluga travelled by another route that autumn or the crew were struck down by disease but Bill Fairfax had a hunch that his ancestor made it to Fritjof. In any case, if he could find Sir James's body, he was convinced that recent advances in forensic testing would reveal the real cause of his death to have been scurvy or vitaminosis and not the starvation that might have led him to resort to the unspeakable.
The room fell silent for a moment, then Edie spoke up:
'Even with all these maps and the diary, unless there are some pretty big grave markers, you may as well be trying to find a snowflake trapped inside an iceberg. It would make your job easier to come back in the summer, when the ground is partly exposed.'
Fairfax coughed. 'It's a little awkward,' he said. 'But I'm under some pressure to sell the diary and when I do, the information will become public. We're hoping to get enough material together to interest the TV people. Then we'll come up again with a film crew in the summer, you see.'
So it's about money and ego, Edie thought. Not that she cared. This wouldn't be the first ego trip she'd guided - she thought back to the French property tycoon who'd been determined to prove that the Gauls discovered Baffin a thousand years before the Vikings and the American movie star who'd wanted to live in a snowhouse to explore 'ice in the soul' - and she was pretty sure it wouldn't be the last.
She said: 'So long as you understand the likelihood is we won't find anything.'
Bill, leaning over to shake her hand: 'Perfectly understood.'
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