White Heat Read Online Free PDF

the staff room, an idea sprang into Edie's
mind. It was something the headmaster, John Tisdale, would no doubt call
'unorthodox pedagogy', a disciplinary offence, if he found out about it. Not
that Edie cared. She'd been up before him so many times for flouting the rules
- his rules, southern rules - that she'd come to expect it. In any case,
she suspected Tisdale secretly approved of her methods, even as he was rapping
her over the knuckles for them. The man had come a long way. A few years ago,
when he'd first arrived with a brief to 'broaden education in the Arctic',
she'd asked him what exactly he thought they were educating Autisaq's children for.
        'To
take their place in the world,' he'd replied. He really had been a pompous ass
back then.
        She'd
waited until the look of self-satisfaction had faded a little from his face
then said: 'Maybe you don't realize, this is their world right here.'
        Tisdale
had marked her down as a troublemaker but Edie hadn't been bothered by his
condescension. She knew it wouldn't last. Pretty soon he'd begin to find
himself out of his depth, then he'd come looking for her with his tail between
his legs.
        It
happened sooner than even she had anticipated, after a sermon he gave Autisaq's
parents on the dangers of violent computer games. What a blast! Everyone had
laughed at him. Hadn't he noticed where he was? Up here, violence was embedded
in almost everything: in the unblinking ferocity of the sun, in the blistering
winds, the pull and push of the ice.
        In
any case, most Autisaq kids had neither the time nor the money for computer
games; their leisure hours were taken up with snaring ptarmigan and trapping
hare or fox, or helping their fathers hunt seal. They spent most of the time
they weren't at school being violent.
        The
day after the talk, the headmaster found a dead fox hanging across his snow
porch, but instead of heading south on the next plane, as many in his position
would have done, he'd knocked first on Edie's door then on others, asking where
he'd gone wrong. He'd stuck it out until, over the years, he'd come to realize
that 'broadening education in the Arctic' included him.
        He'd
pretend to disapprove of today's 'unorthodox pedagogy', but it was all a sop to
his masters back in Ottawa. Head down, so she wouldn't have to make
conversation with anyone on the street, Edie trudged through dry and squealing
snow to the meat store at the back of her house, picked out a small harp seal
she'd hunted a few weeks earlier, attached a rope to its head and dragged it
back along the ice to the school building. She waited until no one was around
then smuggled the dead animal into the school through the side entrance.
        The
moment the kids returned from recess and caught sight of the creature, their
faces, sensing an end to the abstractions of language lessons, lit like
lanterns. Edie got two of the oldest boys to help her lift the animal onto the
table. Then she handed over two hunting knives and left the kids to get on with
the business of butchering, instructing the older children to show the others
how to handle the knives, and to write down the name of everything they touched and the verbs to describe their actions in English and Inuktitut on the
whiteboard.
        It
worked. Before long, the seal lay in a number of neat pieces on the table and
the kids were encouraging one another to dig deeper and cut more finely,
jostling to be the first to the front to write 'spleen' or 'whiskers' or
'flense'. Butchering the animal and noting its parts had become a gleeful and
very Inuit kind of a game. Even Pauloosie Allakarialak was joining in. He'd
forgotten the white man's death and the fact that he didn't know how to spell
'blubber'.
        
        
        At
lunchtime, Edie trudged across to the Northern Store, thinking to buy some
Saran Wrap and plastic sacks she could use to package the chopped seal before
it thawed and became