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were
somehow being drawn into something. It was nothing she could put her finger on
yet, but she didn't like the way Simeonie Inukpuk had spoken. Never trusted the
man much, even when he was kin. Trusted him even less now.
        She
waited downstairs in the hotel until she could hear the sound of Taylor's
snores, then went home. The moment she reached the steps up to the snow-porch
door, she knew .Joe was already inside waiting for her. In the same way that a
frozen ptarmigan would gradually revive when put beside the radiator, it was as
if the house gradually came to life when Joe was there. She pulled the door
open, peeled off her boots and outerwear in the snow porch and went in.
        Joe
was sitting on the sofa staring at a DVD. Charlie Chaplin was playing table
ballet with two forks stuck into two bread rolls. She plunked herself down
beside her stepson and stroked his hair.
        'I
can't help thinking this is my fault, Kigga.'
        'Are
you crazy? No one's going to blame you, Joe, not for a minute. And if they do,
they'll have me to answer to.' On the TV Charlie Chaplin continued to twirl the
bread rolls into pirouettes and pas de bourees. 'This was an accident.
Someone from Autisaq, or maybe one of the other settlements. Maybe he couldn't
see, maybe he'd had a bit to drink. It happens.'
        Joe
said: 'You think?'
        'Sure,'
she said. 'It'll blow over, you'll see.'
        The
bread roll ballerina took her bow and Edie flipped off the player. A moment of
regret drifted between them.
        Joe
said: 'Only thing is, a man's dead, Kigga.'
        She
looked at him, ashamed at her own momentary lapse of principle. She was her
best self when she was with him, he made sure of it.
    ----
        

Chapter Two
        
        'Bee
El You Bee Bee Ee Ar.' Edie drew the letters on the whiteboard as she went.
She'd hadn't slept well and was finding it hard to focus, thinking about
Wagner's death and the council of Elders meeting where she was going to have to
account for her actions.
        Pauloosie
Allakarialak put up his hand.
        Edie
underlined the word with her finger. 'Blubber.'
        Pauloosie's
arm started waving. 'Miss, did someone kill that qalunaat?'
        Edie
rubbed her hand across her face. Shit, if Pauloosie knew, then everyone knew.
        Edie
pointed to the word on the whiteboard. 'You know what this says?'
        The
boy looked blank. Poor kid. Sometimes Edie had to wonder what she was doing,
spending her days drumming into Autisaq's youth words they would almost
certainly never use in English - 'baleen', 'scree', 'glacial', 'blubber', words
so much more subtly expressed in Inuktitut, and prettier, too, written in
script. Of course, the hope of the federal government in Ottawa was that some
of them would go on to graduate from high school and even take degrees in
southern universities, just as Joe planned to do, but it was a rare kind of
Inuk who harboured such ambitions. Going south meant leaving family, friends,
everything familiar for a city where the streets were flustered with buildings
and ears crowded in on one another like char in a shrinking summer pond and
where, for at least six months of the year, It was intolerably hot. Why put
yourself through that in the hope that you might finally land the kind of job
back home that had, for decades, only gone to qalunaat?
        No,
the fact of the matter was that most of the faces before Edie now would be
married with kids by the time they were old enough to vote. Most would be lucky
to get as far as Iqaluit, the provincial capital, let alone to the south, and
the vast majority would never once have occasion to have to spell 'blubber' in
English. And the irony of this was that, all the time they were sitting in rows
learning how to spell 'baleen' in English, they could be out on the land, learning
traditional skills, discovering how to be Inuit.
        
        
        The
recess bell rang. On her way to