'What a pity,' the blond said. 'It broke.'
'Luckily, we have come to the rescue,' the skinny one chipped in.
He gestured at Edie with his rifle. It was not a make she recognized. Russian, she guessed. She nodded in the direction of her backpack. The skinny guy smiled and shook his head.
'Good sense of humour,' he said, picking up her rifle and harpoon. He unzipped the bag, peered inside and threw it back in the Zodiac.
They scrambled along the shale then up a steep slope, Edie sandwiched between the two men, until they were standing on top of the cliffs, the dovekies clattering beneath them. The sun had begun its circle low above the horizon and the air was so clear they could see the purple shadows of Ellesmere Island to the west. Tramping on, Edie conscious always of the rifle aimed at the back of her head, they passed below them on a wide stretch of shale beach the remnants of the great whalebone huts built by the Thule, who had travelled east across the ice from Canada more than a thousand years before. Edie stopped momentarily to catch her breath, but the blond hurried her on with a hiss. It began to spit, the rain spiny with ice blown in from the northwest.
Ahead of her, Skinny turned and shouted something in Russian to the blond with the rifle making up the rear. He replied and they quickened the pace. They were passing alongside a gravelly plateau, scattered with vast slabs of grey rock on which cotton grasses fluttered. Up ahead, a makeshift path gave onto a slope leading back down towards the sea, and they turned off and began their descent along the cliffs.
Below them, on a stretch of shale at the bottom of the fiord, was a sprinkling of old sod huts, marking the now abandoned Polar Inuit settlement of Etah, once the most northerly habitation on the planet. It struck Edie more forcefully than ever that this was not human terrain, but a land governed by other, more ancient, rules. She watched Skinny striding along fifty metres ahead. Her earlier plans now seemed ludicrously over-simplified. Even were she to extricate herself from his particular situation, it would be far too dangerous, too logistically complex to try to round up the men and take them back to Ellesmere. Besides, she still didn't have the evidence she needed. Better to stay put and try to work out exactly what the two men were doing. So long as they continued to think of her as just a protestor, she had some cover. From Skinny's confident manner, the unnecessary speed, she could see that he thought he had the land licked; but from their hastiness alone Edie knew that neither Russian truly understood the north. When the time came, Edie Kiglatuk meant to make the most of their ignorance.
The two men had set up camp beside the huts, using those that still offered some measure of protection from the wind and rain to house their equipment. From the size and depth of the fire circle, and the number of garbage bags lying inside one of the turf huts out of the way of bears, Edie guessed the men had been at camp for about a month.
Skinny directed Edie towards a hut nearest to the two sleeping tents and the two men followed her inside. The tinny aroma of damp hit her but the interior of the hut felt warm and free of draughts. The men had laid a tarp down and on it placed two fold-up chairs. It was to one of these that the blond now directed her while Skinny fetched a coil of rope from a kit bag in the corner and began to secure her hands and feet to the chair. The situation was slightly absurd, she thought, like something from a silent comedy, and if it weren't for the fact that it was taking all her energy not to be afraid she would have laughed.
The blond put down the rifle and began heating some coffee on one ring of a portable gas burner. On the other he placed a frying pan and into it a large dollop of fat from a tin.
'So, one of those natives who hates white men, huh?' His English was better than Skinny's but it was his friend who was the leader.
'Not all white men,' she said. 'But you definitely.' Knowing they had no idea of her real intention made her feel more secure.
The blond let out a thin laugh. He'd poured some batter into the frying pan and it now gave off a thick, slightly sour wheaty smell.
'Hungry? Too bad.' He poured some coffee into a plastic mug and brought it to her lips. She took a little and immediately spat it out.
'Without sugar it's disgusting.'
The blond shrugged. 'Moller said you were a handful.' He looked her up and down. 'A very small handful.'
Skinny burst in and gabbled something in Russian. From then on, the blond ignored her.
Not long afterwards, the two men headed out. Edie watched them go, waited a long, long time, then with tremendous effort, she rose and, taking the chair with her, shuffled on her knees to the entrance of the hut and looked about. There was the usual cluster of expedition paraphernalia stacked up neatly against the walls of another turf house: ropes, a couple of books, climbing gear, wet suits, several primus stoves and back-up gas canisters, an ice pick for chipping out sweet water-ice and a camera on a tripod. She wriggled and tried to work her hands loose, feeling for the knot, but from the position of the ropes she surmised that Skinny was some kind of mariner, because he had tied her with a perfect buntline hitch. There was no way of getting out of that one.
Rocking back and forward in the chair, taking tiny steps, Edie wormed her way towards the piles of equipment, hoping to find, if not a knife, then some kind of edge with which she might cut the rope. There was nothing, but as she manoeuvred the chair back to its original position, the back leg caught on one of the two books in the pile, sending it flying to the ground. Anxious not to give away what she had been doing, Edie turned the chair and by jigging up and down managed to flip the book over. As she did so, she noticed a book mark. Using her toe, she flicked the pages forward. The book was some kind of nineteenth-century printed diary, with entries divided up by date. Every so often she came across a lithograph, mostly of stereotypical Arctic scenes familiar to her from similar books in the Autisaq school library: strangely drawn bears and ragged, implausibly beached icebergs. A curio. She was about to push it back, when the page flipped and she found herself staring at the face of Joe Inukpuk. The image was so exact an impression of Joe that it was as though Edie had been thrust forward in time and was looking at her stepson twenty years from now. There he was, older and more weathered, but her stepson all the same. Yet his outfit was too old-fashioned to have come from anything but the past.
Beside the Inuk man stood a qalunaat. The two men were passing a knife between them. In the background were the cliffs and ice-crimped moraine of Northwestern Greenland and when Edie squinted at the picture it became clear that the two men were standing on exactly the same beach as the one the two Russian men had escorted her from only a few hours before. Beneath them was a caption, in Danish, of which Edie managed to make out two words: 'Karlovsky' and 'Welatok'. Her confusion fell away. The man she was looking at wasn't Joe at all but her great-great-great-grand- father, an ancestor she and Joe shared. Welatok must have met this man, Karlovsky, in Greenland, and either guided or traded with him. Could it be Welatok's grave the Russians were looking for?
Edie shuffled her way to the front of the hut, pushed open the door with her head, and looked about. There, on the horizon, was a faint human presence. In front of her, at a distance of about ten metres, was a camera mounted on a tripod. She had an idea. Dropping to her knees she began very slowly to shuffle across the shale towards the camera. It was an exquisitely painful journey. Each time she put her knee down, the stones bit in through the layers of leather and cloth, spiking the skin. The most direct route left her too exposed - she assumed the men would have binoculars - so she was forced to wind her way around the remains of two of the turf huts for cover. As she lowered one knee and then the other, the points of shale in her skin drove in a little deeper so that by the time she reached the tripod her trousers were soft with blood and the skin on her knees burned like frostbite.
From this position it was impossible to shift backwards in order to resume sitting on the chair so there was nothing for it but to take her weight on her knees once more to lift herself up to the camera. It was o
nly by stretching as far as she could that she could raise herself high enough. In this position the shale bit savagely into her knees and the sharp edge of the chair sank into the skin of her back. She took a deep breath and thought, this isn't Edie, this is Kigga and Kigga can do these things.
Straining, she managed to put her eye to the viewer. Her heart sank. The lens was directed at just the wrong angle. She would have to find a way to pivot the camera thirty degrees to the right. Plus the zoom wasn't on. She took an agonizing step back on her knees and craned her neck. From that angle she could just see a button that looked as though it might be the zoom. Another couple of inches and she would be able to press it down with her chin. Approaching the camera once more Edie took a deep breath in, pressed down on her knees and reached up with the whole of her trunk. At last she felt the cool of the plastic case on her chin and, moving along gently until she felt the slight raise of the button, was about to open her jaw and press down when a piece of shale suddenly gave way under her left knee, sending her off balance. Unable to use her hands to save herself, she toppled sideways, the left side of her jawbone crunching onto the stones. She felt the bone dislocate from its socket and, moments later, a searing pain. When she looked up she saw the camera skewed at an improbable angle where she had dislodged it as she went down.
For a moment she wanted to give up. But only for a moment.
The first thing was to ignore the pain. She had a method for this, something her father had taught her. She sat with her eyes closed and replayed the scene in Safety Last!, with
Harold Lloyd eighteen storeys up hanging on to the hands of the giant clock, until the pain lay somewhere beneath the laughter and she could at least think clearly again. But it wouldn't be for long; pretty soon, the pain would take over once more. She needed to manoeuvre her jawbone back into its socket. By moving her foot as though she were about to tread on her toes, she was able to lift the knee on the dislocated side a little closer to her head. She took a huge breath, leaned over and pressed the dislocated jaw into the knee. The pain was so excruciating she thought she might black out, but soon she felt the pop of the jaw re-engaging and what had been unbearable became simply agonizing. Her face would swell around the dislocation, but she'd at least be able to use her mouth.
What she needed now, Edie thought, was some kind of stick she could hold between her teeth to prod the camera zoom. But where to find such a thing? The nearest tree lay two thousand kilometres to the south. She looked around. Edging herself across the shale she made her way past the fire circle towards the stack of equipment. Then something told her to take a knee-step back. There, among the charred remains of heather and the tiny nubs of willow twigs, she spotted a ballpoint pen that must have fallen from one of the men's pockets. The end had caught the flames, the plastic whorled into a mess of carbon and burned ink. She kneeled over it, bent across and with a tremendous effort of will craned her neck and plunged her face into the pile of ashes. She pulled back up onto her knees, and slowly, slowly, with the pen between her teeth, made her way across the shale to the tripod.
Positioning the camera with her head, she prodded the on switch then the zoom. There were a series of inukshuk on the bluff above the plateau and, below them, burial cairns. The Russians were busy removing the stones from the cairns. She backed off and, using the pen, let off a shot. The motor whirred in and shot off a few more frames.
Sweaty and weak, she now needed to get back to the hut before the men returned. There, taking advantage of the softness of the pressed mud floor, she was able to spear the front legs of the chair and, rocking back and forth, propel herself back upright into a sitting position. Her jaw pulsed and jammed, as though someone was using it for ball practice, but at least it was warm inside the hut and her sweat would not freeze before it had a chance to evaporate.
It began to get dark in the hut and though it was still light outside, Edie could already feel the drop in temperature signalling the approach of what would pass for twilight. Her knees ached and her jaw was swelling fast and for the first time she became conscious of a tremendous thirst. There was no sign of the men. She wondered if they might have just left her there to die.
A long time later, she heard voices then the sound of boots on the shale. The blond came in first.
'Oh, it's you,' he said, as though he'd forgotten her.
She peeled her tongue from the roof of her mouth, which left both with the feeling of having been stripped. 'I'm thirsty.'
The blond came over and untied her hands. He passed her a beaker of water and as he did so noticed the swelling of her jaw and the blood on her knees. He shot her a look, expecting an explanation, but she avoided his gaze.
'We get what we want, then we let you go,' he said, anticipating what was going through her mind. He was lying and he wasn't very good at it. Another reason to focus on him, Edie thought. His humanity made him vulnerable.
Skinny came in then. He saw Edie's face and looked impressed.
'She try and escape?' he said, passing the blond his rifle. 'Next time, use this.'
While the blond retied her wrists, Skinny swung the bag that was over his shoulder onto the ground and removed from it a handful of small rocks. The two men pulled out some equipment and began measuring, chatting away in Russian for a while. Edie tried to focus on the conversation, listening for familiar words, sounds. From time to time one of the men raised a rock to his mouth and licked it. One by one they threw the rocks outside.
Skinny started to fix the evening meal. The smells of cooking began to chase out the odour of damp. When the food was ready, Skinny poured out the contents of the pan into two bowls and handed one to the blond. The blond took a spoonful then pushed his plate away. An exchange of what sounded like insults followed, and then the blond turned to Edie and said in English:
'My friend thinks he is Auguste Escoffier.'
Edie shrugged.
'You try,' the blond said. He moved towards her and lifted the spoon to her mouth. 'Food is terrible, no?' he persisted, determined to recruit her to his cause.
Edie moved the food around her mouth. Her head was swimming in pain and her jaw prevented her from chewing but she wanted to seem obliging. Eventually, she swallowed. 'A little more salt, perhaps.'
The blond laughed. Another exchange of insults followed then Skinny made a sudden lunge for the frying pan, threw it across the hut and stormed out.
'Now my friend thinks he is artist,' said the blond, wearily.
Not long afterwards, Skinny swept back in toting a plastic carton. Snatching up the bowl, he tipped the carton over the remains of the blond's meal.
'Soll,' he said to Edie. 'You eat now.'
Edie bit back the pain in her jaw and put on what passed for a smile. Soil. The word had come up again and again when the two men had been licking the rocks. They were looking for a salty stone.
'I've just lost my appetite,' she said.
Later, the blond loosened her ties so she could wash and see to her bodily functions. He was setting about retying her wrists when a clattering came from outside. The sound of Skinny shouting sent the blond scuttling out to investigate. For a moment chaos seemed to break out and there was wild shouting followed by gunshots. A while later, the blond appeared at the entrance to the hut. He seemed exhilarated and out of breath.
'Bear.' He walked around to the back of the chair and resumed tying Edie's hands. 'He ran away.' Then, chuckling to himself, 'Don't get any ideas. For you, it won't work.'
A long while later, she heard noises of the two men settling in for the night, then quiet. Edie's jaw was a walrus in rut, puffed and roaring. Thoughts tumbled incoherently through her mind only to return to a single source: the ridiculous optimism of her plan. Sometime in the night, the puikaktuq appeared, momentarily, standing in the doorway. A throb started up in her right eye, followed by a ringing in the ears. It could be the result of the injury to her jaw, but she didn't think so. She held her breath, waiting for the ancestors to begin to
speak to her, but nothing came. Then the puikaktuq faded and she was left alone. A terrible bleakness crept over her, a fear that she was going to die out here and that what she knew would die with her and no one would ever find out that Joe Inukpuk did not kill himself but had been murdered.
At that thought, fear turned immediately to anger, which gave her a new courage. She felt for the knot around her wrists with her fingers, tracing the contours of the rope once, twice and a third time to be sure, then she smiled to herself. The rope was hemp. Hemp had elasticity, she could work it. Better still, the blond had tied a square knot. So long as she could find a way to ease the tension, it would give. She pressed her wrists together experimentally. Slowly, she began to twist them away from each other, pressing the flesh until it burned to give her more room to manoeuvre, thinking about her escape.
There was no other way back to the boats except by retracing the path along the cliffs and she would be visible all the way. Then there was the matter of the outboard on the Zodie. The men hadn't thought to remove the oars but she could never out-row them if they chose to come after her in the launch. As for the larger vessel, she'd need the ignition key to start the engine, unless she found a way to pull-start it. That might be possible, but she'd only ever hotwired the kind of small outboards which came attached to skiffs and Zodies.
She laid her hands flat against one another as though she were praying and pressed, repeating the action until she felt the sides of the square knot loosen. Within minutes she'd prised it open and was untying her feet. There was a flood of pain as the circulation returned.
The wind was coming in from the east now, whipping across the tundra and making it sing. The moon was rising, part obscured by cloud but she was confident that she could remember the way back to the boats. The camera tripod was standing just inside the doorway. For an instant she thought about stealing a gun and shooting the men as they slept, but what if she woke them first?
White Heat Page 25