The Shaman's Knife Read Online Free

hospital.
    â€œYour mother is still dazed sometimes,” the tall young duty intern told me matter-of-factly and went on with more or less a condensed version of Dr. Butterfield’s report. “She’s improving amazingly fast, for her age, but if she’s asleep when you go in, wake her, it won’t hurt.”
    I didn’t have to. When I walked in with the nurse, a small and tidy Inuk who told me she was from Baker Lake and had heard a lot about me, mother was awake. She looked confused for an instant, then with her eye gleaming joyously reached out her arms to me. The nurse smiled approvingly, no doubt a story to be told later, then asked in Inuktitut if she wanted anything.
    Mother reached into a glass for her upper denture, then said yes, she wanted her pipe and tobacco.
    The nurse smiled politely but shook her head. Smoking in the room was forbidden, she said. Hospital rules. That’s why the pipe and tobacco had been taken away . . . But what are sons for? I said, aw, come on. Without much persuasion, the nurse relented. I went into the corridor for a wheelchair and lifted my mother into it—so light now, this woman I could remember long ago walking straight and fast beside me while she carried a caribou carcass as easily as I was now carrying her.
    The patients’ lounge was nearly empty. We nodded around. I loaded her pipe, puffed on it, got it going, and handed it to her, rewarded by a thousand smiling wrinkles and the gleaming eye. If any passing hospital staffers noticed the clouds of pipe smoke, they looked the other way.
    We talked quietly, with long pauses, some about family things, some about the trouble in Sanirarsipaaq. There were brief times when she fell silent and seemed disoriented. During one of those times she muttered something about “the shaman” and distinctly said “the shaman’s knife is lost.” When she was lucid again I asked her to explain what she’d meant by the reference to the shaman and a lost knife, but she didn’t remember that at all, so I dropped it. There were also times when she moved her head suddenly, forgetting, and winced. After one of those times she had me feel the bump at the back of her head and explained that her braid, that thin braid that used to be a thick rope, and the thick hood of her second-best parka, which she had made herself long ago, had helped cushion the blow when she fell.
    It was near one when I got back to the Yellowknife Inn, checked in, and was handed another message from Erika, saying to call her no matter how late, I thought about asking her up for a drink. I could use one, and some company. In the end I voted no to drink and company but did call and while the phone kept ringing I thought of Erika, white, thin, in her midthirties, sexually predatory in a pleasantly friendly kind of way, and originally from Edmonton.
    At nineteen, a junior at
News/North
, she had married another reporter. She later referred to him only as “that shit,” but the marriage did produce two sons. About all else I knew was that a year after her husband moved to a job in Vancouver they were divorced and she went back to
News/North
and was raising the children herself.
    After the first sleepy hello she was wide awake. “Is your mother going to be okay, Matteesie?”
    I still had reservations, but ignored them. “I think so.” At the same time, I had a sudden worrying thought, a cop’s thought, that mother was the only witness known to have seen whoever ran from the house, perhaps the murderer. Such a person would certainly realize that any witness could be a threat. I’d have to do something about that. For some reason I thought again of my mother’s mutterings about the shaman and a knife he had lost, something that I could not connect to anything.
    â€œFirst word we had was fractured skull.”
    â€œYeah. But now it looks like bad concussion and a big headache.”
    â€œI