The Bone Seeker Read online

  ‘Oh, OK, you had a dream,’ he said.

  • • •

  She forgot about Martha for a while in the afternoon. The effort of trying to teach a class of kids who didn’t want to learn a bunch of stuff the government insisted they must took up all the space in her head. And if that wasn’t enough the heat in the classroom made her hands worse. Whoever had designed the building hadn’t understood how things worked up on Ellesmere and failed to make any allowance for the continual summer sunshine blazing through the picture windows, which barely opened. There was no air conditioning and either no one had thought to order blinds or they’d not had the money.

  At 3.30, Edie thought the hell with the geography of British Columbia, set some homework and let the class out early. She was rubbing the whiteboard clean when Martha’s father, Charlie Salliaq, appeared.

  ‘Martha here?’ The old man swung about, scoping out the class as if his daughter might be found among the empty desks and vacant chairs.

  ‘No, and she hasn’t been in all day,’ Edie said. The faint, distant shimmer of unease which had accompanied her most of the day suddenly condensed into a dark, forbidding cloud.

  Charlie leaned back and pinched his chin between his fingers. ‘We were expecting her over at the camp on Saturday afternoon. I figured maybe she’d got tied up with schoolwork. I had to come into town anyway. Ran into that friend of hers at lunchtime, Lisa. She told me Martha hadn’t shown up for the morning session.’

  Derek had warned Edie about Charlie the moment she stepped off the plane. As one of the oldest men in town he felt entitled to respect and, for the most part, got it. Unlike most Inuit, Charlie could be as blunt as a duck’s beak. Most folks respected his achievements. For more than a decade he’d lobbied the Defence Department to cede land at a Cold War era Distant Early Warning radar station back to the people of Kuujuaq. When the department had finally given in to his demands five years ago, he’d begun another campaign to force them to pay for a full decontamination and clean-up of the site, known as Glacier Ridge, a battle he’d won only last year. All that fighting had made him uncompromising and ill-tempered and most people preferred to keep him at arm’s length.

  ‘You checked the house?’ Edie asked.

  ‘Do I look senile to you?’ Salliaq’s brow knitted. ‘I don’t know what could have gotten into her,’ he went on. ‘She hangs out with her uncle Markoosie when we’re out of town and he hasn’t seen her since Saturday morning. She picked up a schoolbook she’d left at his house. Her ATV’s still parked outside.’

  ‘I’m sure she’ll turn up,’ Edie said, to reassure herself as much as anything. The dream came to mind again but she decided not to mention it. She realized that Martha hadn’t talked much about her life out of school. ‘Is there anywhere else she’d be likely to visit?’

  ‘The bird cliffs up by Glacier Ridge, but I went by there on my way here.’ Salliq’s face locked into a series of frowns and lines like some glacier-scoured rock. ‘I’ll go over to the town hall and put out a message on the red radio.’ The local CB network was always the first port of call for any urgent requests or news. ‘But I don’t like it,’ Salliaq went on. He was leaning against the desk now, as though having to steady himself. ‘Not with all those unataqti just outside of town.’

  The thought had already occurred to Edie. For the past week, several hundred soldiers, Marines and Rangers, had stationed themselves at Camp Nanook, a temporary encampment a few kilometres from the settlement. This year the Sovereignty Patrol, or SOVPAT, forces were headquartered in Resolute, a few hundred kilometres to the south of Kuujuaq, on Cornwallis Island. It was the first year they’d deployed on Ellesmere. Camp Nanook was their farthest flung satellite and something of an experiment.

  The sudden influx of qalunaat into an otherwise quiet and remote Inuit settlement had, unsurprisingly, created a few problems. In the week since they’d arrived, several dozen unataqti had made their way into town in the evenings, looking to drink and gamble and meet young women. There had been a few insignificant cases of harassment, a couple of minor brawls. Many local families had decided to take no chances and moved off to their summer camps on the coast earlier than usual. Others were happily profiting from the new arrivals, setting up impromptu bars to cater to their desire to drink and even, rumour had it, establishing a brothel, though none of the locals seemed to know where it was or who was working there.

  ‘Listen, avasirngulik,’ Edie said – she was careful to use the respectful ‘elder’ with him – ‘you want help looking for your daughter, I’ll come along. I’ve hunted this way a few times, though I don’t know the land around here real well. Either way, I think it’s best if we go see Sergeant Palliser at the police detachment. Maybe he’ll organize a search plane.’

  Sergeant Derek Palliser was the more senior of the two members of the Ellesmere Island Native Police, who between them were responsible for policing five hamlets and a couple of weather stations scattered across a frigid desert of mountains, fjords and rocky scree the size of Wyoming. Right now, Derek’s deputy, Constable Stevie Killik, was on a computer course in the south, so Palliser was on his own, but he knew the land, he knew the people and, more to the point, he was Edie’s friend. They’d solved a couple of tough cases and she trusted him to know what to do.

  ‘The Lemming Police got nothing to say that I want to hear,’ Salliaq said. The local people found Derek’s scientific interest in lemming population dynamics quirky at best. Salliaq had nothing but contempt for it. For Palliser himself too. Edie wondered if it was because Derek was half Inuit and half Cree. Charlie made no secret of the fact that he didn’t trust Indians or qalunaat. There were exceptions, of whom Edie was one. He’d heard about her going after her stepson Joe’s killer and seemed impressed.

  ‘They tell me you’re half qalunaat, but you don’t play by qalunaat rules,’ he’d said when he’d first met her.

  ‘Only set of rules I know is mine,’ she’d said. ‘And I don’t have any.’

  That tickled him.

  Now, though, his mood was more sombre.

  Edie picked up her bag and made a move towards the door.

  ‘Well, I don’t suppose you have any objections to my talking to him?’ She’d already decided she was going to do just that whether the old bigot liked it or not.

  ‘You can try. Won’t do anyone no good, though.’ Salliaq shrugged. For a moment their eyes locked.

  ‘You do what you like,’ the old man grumbled, finally. ‘What I heard, that’s what you always do.’

  ‘I’ll take that as permission granted,’ Edie said. As she followed him out into the corridor, Martha’s face reappeared as it had in her dream and a rush of foreboding rolled towards her like a low, dark wave.

  2

  Derek Palliser lit his seventh cigarette of the day, put down his empty coffee mug and returned to plugging the hole in the window frame of his lemming shed. He was making slow progress, though, on account of the stiffness in his fingers, which had continued to plague him long after his hands had healed from the frostbite he’d suffered last spring. He’d planned to spend the morning working out a route for the summer patrol, but the weekend rain had swollen the window frame and busted out the glass. Once Constable Stevie Killik returned from his combined computer course and summer leave, Derek intended to start a programme of exterior renovations in preparation for the winter, but the window on the lemming shed was one chore that wouldn’t wait. If there was one thing the rodents couldn’t stand it was draughts.

  The cigarettes and coffee were keeping him just the right side of alert. Truth was, he could have done with a few more hours in bed and would have taken them if he’d thought that there was a chance in hell he’d sleep. He had to remind himself that he’d felt this exhausted every summer since he’d first arrived on Ellesmere nearly thirteen years ago. The constant light – and absence of anything approaching a normal ‘night
’ – from March through to September always left him wired and ornery. White noise cascaded through his brain, as if a permanent avalanche had set up inside his head. He knew from bitter experience there was nothing for it except to keep himself pepped on nicotine and coffee, but this year, somehow, everything seemed even more of an effort than usual.

  Hearing something behind him, he turned to see Edie Kiglatuk, waving and trying to get his attention. He stubbed out his cigarette and went over. Her face was strained.

  ‘Trouble?’ he said, swatting away an eddy of mosquitoes. He’d allowed himself to get bitten while he was working. Thin, braided rivers of sweat and blood made their way down his forearms.

  ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you inside.’

  If Derek had been honest with himself, he’d have seen a long time ago that the interior of the detachment was no better than the outside. The old wooden floor was warped and the boards needed replacing and the blinds at the windows were cracked from sun and frost. He’d lived quite happily in a state of bachelor-style semi-squalor until Edie had arrived. Now he was a little embarrassed by it. Something about her presence made him want to fix the place up, make it look nice. He scouted around for a spare chair.

  ‘Now, that trouble . . .’

  The instant she mentioned the Salliaq family, his spirits sank. Years back, when they’d been having a really bad problem with loose dogs, he’d impounded several huskies belonging to Charlie Salliaq and made the old man pay a fine to retrieve them. Ever since, Salliaq had taken gleeful pleasure in bad-mouthing him. In Derek’s mind the animosity between them had nothing to do with stray dogs and everything to do with the fact that Derek was half Cree. Inuit and Cree had never been the best of friends. The word Eskimo derived from the Cree for ‘head louse’. Just one reason why Eskimo in the eastern Arctic preferred to go by the name Inuit. These days, though, most folk had got over the old hostility and learned to rub along, conscious that both their futures depended on presenting a united front. But Charlie Salliaq was old school; he held on to grudges the way others held on to their hats in a blizzard.

  As Edie’s story unfolded, he felt a growing sense of relief. Everyone went a little crazy in the summer and it sounded very much as though Martha had just gone AWOL for a while. Ten to one she was visiting friends in some distant summer camp and, either through thoughtlessness or teenage defiance, hadn’t told her parents she was going. Maybe she’d picked herself a boyfriend from among the soldiers. The military camp had only been up and running a week but already there were plenty of lean young unataqti hanging around town in the hope of meeting local girls. And succeeding. He’d seen them, half cut, clinging on to their conquests like they were life-vests. Broke his heart a little, tell the truth.

  ‘Who saw her last?’ he said.

  ‘So far as we know, her uncle, on Saturday morning. She went round there to pick up a schoolbook. Charlie said he’s gonna put out a message on the red radio, hope someone will call in to say they’ve seen her.’

  ‘They won’t if she’s with a soldier.’ No one was going to volunteer to be the person who broke that news to old Charlie Salliaq. ‘But, look, even if she’s on her own somewhere she won’t have gone far.’ It would have been different in winter. But the polar bears had left for the north with the ice and the wolves were too busy feasting on lemmings to bother humans and he thought it was unlikely she’d come to any harm. In this weather she wouldn’t freeze.

  ‘I wouldn’t be too worried,’ he said. ‘Even if she’s twisted an ankle or something, there’ll be someone passing who’ll pick her up. The place is swarming with soldiers out on exercise.’

  ‘It’s the soldiers Charlie’s worried about.’

  Derek took out a cigarette, lit it and hungrily sucked in the smoke.

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if Charlie Salliaq isn’t using this as an excuse to make trouble. He’s made his views on the military clear. Doesn’t like them and doesn’t want them up here. The old man wields a lot of power round these parts. He’s managed to keep control of the Council of Elders for years and he likes to remind everyone of the fact. People don’t necessarily like him but they don’t feel they can oppose him. There’s not many old folk around here with the authority.’

  ‘I noticed that. Assumed they were all at summer camp.’

  Derek stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Some of ’em are, but a lot of Charlie’s generation died young. Problems with game numbers back in the seventies and eighties I believe.’ The name of the place meant Big River, but for years even the fish had stayed away, he said. No one knew the reason and there didn’t have to be one. The Arctic was unpredictable that way.

  Edie sat back and thought about what Derek had said and decided it didn’t add up. So what if Charlie Salliaq was troublemaking. Nothing she knew about Martha suggested that she was the kind of girl who went off on flights of fancy. One thing she sensed above everything else was that Martha was hungry for an education. She wanted to have options in life.

  ‘I guess it just doesn’t make sense to me that she would skip class unless something serious had happened,’ she said.

  Derek smiled. ‘The girl’s eighteen. What you think is serious and what she thinks is, are probably two totally different things right now.’

  Edie frowned. ‘I had this weird dream about her on Saturday night.’ The stirred feelings from the dream hadn’t gone away.

  Derek pulled his chin towards his neck and gave her a long-suffering look. ‘Oh, you should have said.’ He went on, his voice laced with the banal sarcasm of the sceptic.

  Edie stopped listening. She’d heard it all before, most recently from Chip. Instead, she gazed out of the window to the muddy road and further, to the rotting snow banks piled up against the fishing shacks, and thought about the girl.

  Derek was pulling on his jacket now.

  ‘I need to get back to that shed. Martha’ll be fine, you’ll see. Let’s wait this one out a bit.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ she murmured.

  He smiled to himself. ‘It has been known.’

  • • •

  She made for the pile of sleeping skins at the back of her tent. For a while she lay down and stared at the soft light filtering through the canvas. She was beginning to realize that neither her head nor her heart had yet fully recovered from the ordeal of the spring, when she’d first stumbled on the dead child in Alaska. She was conscious of feeling raw and oversensitive, like some nocturnal creature suddenly brought out into the midday sun. The midnight sun too, come to that. Sometimes it felt exhilarating to be around so much light, other times only painfully exposing. Maybe Derek was right about Martha. Maybe a dream was just a dream. She pictured the girl’s face, the black hair tinted raven-blue, the eyes wide with life, and she thought of herself at the same age, heard her voice saying, Going somewhere special? The words repeating themselves over and over in her mind.

  No, she thought, she wasn’t prepared to let this one slide. She got up, walked back out into the white, crystalline light towards the lemming shed and called Derek’s name. His head appeared from around the roof of the shed.

  ‘Remember last spring?’

  He turned, squinting at her. ‘I’ve been trying to forget.’ They’d been dumped out on the sea ice and left to die and Derek would have done just that if Edie hadn’t built a shelter and kept him alive until help came. He owed her one.

  ‘Look,’ he sighed. ‘I know why you’ve come.’ He stepped down from the ladder and rested his hands on his hips. The sun shining on his face lent him a ghostly air. ‘You had some dream and now you want me to send out an SAR. Do have any idea how expensive a search and rescue is? Or how hard it is to bring this detachment in on budget?’

  He wiped his hands on a rag and picked up a can of wood preserver. ‘This can, that ladder, the brush I’m about to use. All that comes straight out of my own pocket.’
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  It was a lot to ask, she knew. Budgets, reports, justifying spending decisions to HQ, but none of that meant anything when someone’s child was missing.

  ‘I just want to find her.’

  He pressed his lips together. She could see he was softening. ‘Look, it’s not that I don’t trust your instincts or respect your concern. It’s your motivation I worry about,’ Derek went on. She could see impatience in his eyes. ‘You can’t turn back time. You can’t mend people, Edie.’

  He’d seen what she was only just beginning to realize was there. This wasn’t only about Martha. It was about her stepson, Joe. About the knots she’d tied herself in wondering if Joe would still be alive today if she’d acted more decisively after he had gone missing. About living with the guilt, the endless nagging doubt. She didn’t want anyone else to have to go through that. Not ever.

  ‘What if we don’t look and it turns out that something bad has happened to her?’ she said. She tried to put herself inside his head. ‘What about your credibility in the community?’

  ‘Ha!’ His laugh was as bitter as old coffee. ‘I represent qalunaat law, remember? In the eyes of the Kuujuamiut I have no credibility. I’m irredeemable. A scumbag.’ He met her gaze for a moment then rolled his eyes. ‘OK, OK. If the girl doesn’t show up in the next hour we’ll fly.’ He held up a hand. ‘But you’re not coming. I don’t want the compliance folk on my back.’

  She stood her ground. He pulled off his work gloves

  ‘Holy walrus, Edie.’ He was half exasperated, half amused. ‘All right, you can come in the plane, but not in any official capacity. Now, if you wanna make yourself useful, go ask Markoosie to put a message out on this evening’s radio show. He’s the nearest we’ve got to a proper shaman in this town. The way that show works, it’s kind of like the old shamanic drums and song duels. Come back here after. We’ll ride to the airstrip together.’ He leaned in and trained a steady eye on her. ‘And listen, this makes us evens. In fact, if anything, you owe me one.’