The Shaman's Knife Read Online Free Page B

morning, about minus seven Celsius. I walked to the hospital and rode with Mother in the ambulance the few blocks to Franklin House, where Erika and a lanky young man from Justice, Al Hopkins, were waiting. Mother seemed to have continued to improve overnight. When she was settled in her wheelchair in the lounge with other Inuit nearby sewing, talking, reading, watching a game show on TV, I explained to her why the man from Justice was there (he’d told me he was normally a court clerk), and who Erika was, and that we just wanted to hear her recollections of what had happened.
    Fairly quickly she warmed to the idea. She spoke in Inuktitut. I translated. I could sense that Al Hopkins from Justice, although white, hardly needed the translations. When I asked how come, he told me that his parents had been schoolteachers in Gjoa Haven. He’d learned in schoolyards and on the street and at the weekly all-Inuktitut service at the church to speak Inuktitut fluently. Later he had gone to high school in Iqaluit, earned a scholarship to Lakefield College School in Ontario, and intended to go back to school in Alberta and study law. He taped both the Inuktitut and the English (in case the tape had to be used later in a court where lawyers wanted to split hairs about meanings in either language). Erika was also taping and making notes.
    All this took place under the shyly watchful eyes of other Inuit waiting for operations or to give birth or, like my mother, convalescing after a stay in hospital. Franklin House is all Inuit, including the cooking (or lack thereof, in cases where some older ones, from habit, might prefer their fish or caribou raw and frozen). For people from settlements and hunting families far to the north Franklin House helps smooth the heavier aspects of culture shock and loneliness for home and family. All seemed to listen, but unobtrusively, as my mother got to the part about hearing screams and shouts and other sounds of fighting next door to where she’d been staying in Sanirarsipaaq. She told how she had pounded on the wall and when that brought no results, had gone outside and was slipping and sliding across the hardpacked snow and ice to see what was happening when someone burst out of the door and knocked her down and ran over her.
    I had a sudden idea. “A man?” I asked.
    All the earlier reports had said, or seemed to assume, a man, but in the north men and women often wore the same type of clothing. She started to answer, then paused, shrugged, and said she thought so, but wasn’t certain.
    She demonstrated with waving hands that the running person was just a silhouette against the light from the doorway, so she really hadn’t been able to see clearly.
    I asked what happened next. She shook her head hazily, didn’t know. Erika took up the slack. “According to the story we had, a man who lives out that way was coming home and saw her lying there outside the open door. He didn’t know how long she’d been there. He went into the house a few steps and saw a lot of blood then ran next door to your relative’s house, Matteesie, where she’d come from, and called police. Then he helped your mother to her feet and back home. When the duty Mountie got there and went inside the house he found the young guy dead, badly beaten, in his upstairs bedroom. The guy’s grandmother was on a sofa downstairs, everything covered with blood. She died before she could be moved.”
    I told my mother this in Inuktitut. Then she took over again, quickly skipping over the next time period until she used the word for a medical evacuation which is the same in both English and Inuktitut,
medivac
. When she said that and I repeated it in my translation, her eye flicked briefly from me to other members of the audience, touching her head and murmuring, “
Aannipaa
,” the word for “hurts,” and paused to light her pipe before she went on.
    In that way, from her