Squeal of boots on snowpack as Ray walked away from us, one hand touching the wall of the mess as if he were on board ship. He muttered curses in French as he went.
Look at his clothes, I said, pointing at the dead youth. He’s not contemporary. Not even this century.
Incredible, Wyndham said.
We’ll put him in one of the unoccupied huts. We’ve got an Otter due in five days. They’ll have to take him back.
Grab an end, Vanderbyl said. We’ll put him in Paris.
Some camps do this-they give whimsical names to various locations so that it’s easy to explain where things are. No one knows who started it, and not all camps do it, but ours did. My cabin was called Pluto because it was farthest from the mess.
And so Kurt and I lifted the boy and carried him to Paris, his body having no more give than stainless steel.
For some reason-and barring a high wind-an unheated interior space always feels colder to me than the outdoors. It was only on stepping into that darkness that I remembered it was near fifty below zero outside. My face, despite the hood, was on fire.
We decided against waking Jens Dahlberg, there being nothing in his medical bag that was going to be of use to this young man, and tramped back toward the mess. Ray had thankfully gone to his cabin. The dog team lay in quiet formation in front of the sledge.
I asked Vanderbyl how it was that our own dogs had not woken up.
It’s strange, he said, the smoke of his words issuing from his hood. The whole thing is strange. Christ, it’s cold.
He won’t sit, Wyndham said when we were back inside. I invited him to, but he won’t. Won’t even warm up by the fire.
The Inuk stood in the shadows by the door, his hands, encased in enormous sealskin mittens, folded before him.
Wyndham had pulled his own chair over to the stove. The kettle whistled and he got up and poured hot water into four mugs flagged with teabag labels.
Vanderbyl hung up his coat and went to stand beside the man, taking, as it were, his point of view. It’s a thing I’ve noticed with some of the more isolated peoples: they prefer to talk side by side rather than face to face, sharing a point of view even in disagreement.
Thank you for bringing this boy to us, Vanderbyl said. It cannot have been easy for you. His family will be very grateful. A plane will land here in a few days and take him to a place where he can receive a proper burial.
The Inuk bowed his head. Impossible to tell if he was nodding in agreement or merely ruminating or registering nothing at all. If this sounds like the cliche of the silent Indian, it is. In my time, I have met the stereotypes of the absent-minded professor, the hot-blooded Latin, the stiff-upper-lipped British officer, and it just can’t be helped. This was his behaviour.
The Inuit in general are not particularly quiet people. Hunter Oklaga could make a story last all night, if you let him, and his wife was the same. I had dinner at their home in Resolute one evening and was thoroughly exhausted by the experience. His two teenage daughters gave an impromptu throat-singing recital, an eerie Inuit custom. Two females-it’s always females-stand face to face, lightly gripping each other’s elbows. One begins a rhythmic bass line consisting of a phrase that may or may not be nonsense, while the other develops a sort of spinning, buzzing melody line above it. The sound is closer to that of two mating furry creatures, or even to a didgeridoo, than to anything recognizably human. They look intently into each other’s eyes or at each other’s lips, standing only inches apart, and combine the sounds with a shuffling dance. The effect is slightly erotic but the intent is amusement-the object being to see who can last the longest without giggling.
But this solid ghost who stood before us, threads of steam rising from his sealskins, was a different creature entirely. It was as if he lived in a different medium. It was like talking to a fish, a flash of silver below the surface, a hydrodynamic shadow in the depths. It seemed idiotic to speak at all, let alone expect a response.
Vanderbyl told him he was welcome to stay the night, or longer if need be. We would be happy to feed and shelter his dogs as well. He spoke in Tuk and repeated it in English.
Wyndham carried over two mugs of tea and offered one to the Inuk, who ignored it. He handed the other one to Vanderbyl and came back and sat beside me.
He doesn’t understand a word, Wyndham said.
He’s Polar Inuit, I said, from the tip of Greenland. They don’t get out much.
That’s four hundred miles away. What the hell would he be doing out here? Vanderbyl said, warming his hands over the stove.
Lika-Lodinn, I said.
What?
In the Norse sagas, Lika-Lodinn collected the frozen bodies of adventurers and returned them to the people they came from.
Well, he’s making it pretty clear he wants nothing to do with us, so what’s he doing hanging around in our mess?
He’s waiting to be paid.
7
When they got to Ottawa, it was grey and just above freezing, with a cold rain falling. Technical difficulties had delayed their takeoff, and by the time they arrived at the Forensic Centre on Vanier, the autopsy on Marjorie Flint was over and they had to have the pathologist paged.
Dr. Motram was a young man who chewed gum constantly while he listened to them and even between his own sentences. Cardinal had an irrational prejudice against gum chewers and had to remind himself that it didn’t mean a person lacked intelligence. In the pathologist’s case, it might represent a token defence against his sometimes fragrant clientele.
“She’s still on the table,” he said. “Would you like to see her?”
The autopsy suite was like all such places except a lot bigger. There were eight tables, though only one was occupied.
Dr. Motram pulled the sheet back. A moment you never quite get used to. Pitiless Y incision coarsely sewn. As Motram spoke, he pointed to various parts of the woman’s body, points of interest on a map.
“As you can see, we have frostbite to both hands, even the nose and ears. Those violet-coloured patches over the hip joint and over the knees are called frost erythema-probably caused by capillary damage from the cold and plasma leakage. Ottawa’s one cold city, surrounded by rugged country, and we’ve got the same homeless problems as anybody else, but I’ve never in my life seen frostbite this bad. She was out there a long time before she died.”
“She went missing nearly two weeks ago,” Cardinal said.
Motram nodded. “There’s post-mortem damage as well, notably a skull fracture from freezing of the brain. Internally, we’ve got Wischnewsky spots on the stomach mucosa. Those, in combination with the frost erythema, make hypothermia the cause of death. The electrolytes get totally out of whack and you end up with a ventricular fibrillation. That’s finally what killed her.”
“What day do you think she died?”
“The freezing makes it impossible to be precise, but I’d say she’s been dead five or six days.”
“So she lived through the cold for several days,” Delorme said. “He left her food and coffee. He wanted to make it last.”
“Or maybe he didn’t really want her to die,” Motram said. “Maybe he thought someone else would come along.”
“You didn’t see where she was found.”
Motram folded his arms and chewed his gum for a moment. He pointed to the wrists and ankles. “Restraint marks obviously-padded restraints is my guess. They would have contributed to the advanced frostbite in the
