“Great goddamn cocktail hour this is,” Pengelly yelled over my shoulder from behind.
You pretty well have to yell, on a snowmobile, or not talk at all. I preferred not to talk at all, so I didn’t answer. Not that I figured the hills had ears. It is just that taciturnity on the trail is a cultural heritage of great antiquity, which no doubt is why none of the early explorers ever recorded in his diary meeting up with an Eskimo windbag.
“I said, ‘Great goddamn cocktail hour this is!’” Pengelly roared again.
I gave the throttle a little twist, upping the speed and shutting him up. Speeding across the snowy wastes at night in a snowmobile isn’t all that bad, given the conditions we had. Clear sky, full moon, frosty breaths whipped out and gone. We were both in parkas with the wolverine fringe covering much of the face, heavy pants tucked into kneehigh boots, face-masks, gauntlets reaching almost to our elbows. We’d been lucky. There’d been no snow and not a great deal of ground drift in the last twelve hours since I’d driven in. That made my trail easy to follow in the headlight.
That morning I’d had to be wary, drive dead slow every time I rounded a bend or topped a rise. Never knew what was ahead. Now I could drive much faster because I knew exactly what was ahead: a blue towel on a stake marking a body.
Only one thing slowed us now and again: the sled bouncing along behind us was heavier than it had been this morning. We’d loaded it not only with what we needed, including extra fuel, but also with everything else that might have given away who had been in or near what I now was identifying in my mind as William’s Secret Garden. The various tracks would tell him everything except, who? There’d been an aircraft, a snowmobile, someone on snowshoes—but who?
I remembered the book The Secret Garden from childhood, the first one I’d ever had read to me. The teacher read it to our class in my first school term at Inuvik, I didn’t remember a lot of details, except that it was a place where a little girl went but nobody else knew about. William had been coming out here winter and summer since his teens, No Legs had told me. It was William’s place to be alone. I wondered if Morton had ever come out here with him. More probably, being a good man, he had simply accepted that there was a place where his son liked to go, by himself.
I could imagine William coming here in spring or fall, months when the tractor road was just an impassable cut through the bush. He’d be trying to miss the worst of the mosquitoes and black flies, maybe traveling by outboard or canoe against the slow current of the Big Smith or maybe close to the east bank of the Mackenzie. Along the shores and in the walk in from either river the brief summer’s flowers would be a gentle, varied carpet leading to his secret place.
I didn’t know where that had been. Maybe it wasn’t right on the pond. More likely, I thought, it was between the pond and the banks of the Mackenzie. There he’d have been able to camp and fish and hunt the days away with nothing else moving except an occasional barge tow on the river or some of those venturesome couples or families who’d planned for a year and got themselves outfitted in Simpson or Wrigley to travel downriver, camping at night, taking home movies to show back home in Chicago or wherever.
“Want me to drive for a while?” Pengelly yelled. I knew the feeling. He had a firm grip around my waist, but being a passenger on a snowmobile isn’t exactly going first class.
“No. We’re almost there.” As he’d come in by air, he didn’t have the little landmarks I was using. The ride didn’t seem as long to me.
Soon we came to where I’d turned away from my camp and the remains of Billy Bob to look for William’s tracks. I cut to less than half speed climbing a rise. There in my headlight was the stake with the blue towel on top.
I stopped at the crest of the rise. The idling engine seemed almost silent after the noise of hard driving. Pengelly jumped off, flapping his arms against his body for warmth.
“Where’s his snowmobile from here?” I called.
He pointed out the direction and got back aboard. It wasn’t more than two or three hundred yards along, north a hill or two from William’s trail. The key was in it. I’d figured on that. When I’d searched him there was a fair amount of Canadian and US currency, but no key. When you leave a snowmobile to kill someone, you don’t bother taking the key.
“Now we hope it goes,” I said, pumping the primer and then pulling the starting cord. The engine burst into life and after a minute idled smoothly. I got on and drove, Pengelly following on the other machine. Near where Billy Bob’s body lay we pulled in to park with the headlights focused on the grotesque snowy lump under its blue towel marker.
“We gonna camp here?” Pengelly called hopefully.
This was where I had to start explaining, so I did.
Pengelly was incredulous. “If you’re going back there, why the hell didn’t we just hide out someplace and wait for him?”
“The dog,” I said. “It is a smart dog and it has seen us go and heard us until the sound faded right away. He will believe that we are gone.” I could tell that Pengelly didn’t share my belief in the necessity to outwit Smokey. “If we were anywhere around there, the first thing the dog would do when William let him loose was run straight to where we were.”
“Yeah, but what’s going to stop him doing that just because you’re back there by yourself?”
I realized we could be there all night debating the capabilities of dogs. Sometime, I wouldn’t mind.
“Look,” I said, “I’m sorry about this, but I’m going back and you’re going on.”
“You’re pulling rank!” Pengelly said, full of incredulity. “Jesus!”
“Think of it this way,” I said, “Bertha will be pleased.”
He started to say something that started with an f and had to do with Bertha, but realized it was not applicable in the circumstances, swallowed hard and let it go.
I tried to placate him a little while repacking the sleds.
“When William arrives—if he arrives—he could stonewall us until hell froze over, or until a plane arrived to take us all out, and we’d be no further ahead than we are now. I’d like a chance to see what he does if he’s sure he’s alone.”
Meanwhile I was loading my tent, sleeping bag, gas, food, primus, axe, guns and everything else I’d need for a few days, onto Billy Bob’s trailer and putting everything else on the trailer Pengelly would tow back Pengelly had fallen silent, helping me, his big jaw sticking out glumly, bereft of wisecracks. Finally we pulled Billy Bob’s body out of its snow covering and tied it, in all its frozen-stiff awkwardness, on the top of the load Pengelly would pull.
While doing this I looked once more into the face of the man I had killed. When I’d looked at him the first time, right after those three shotgun blasts, his body was loose and slack with a lot of blood splashed on his face.
Now I could see that the real mess was more from the neck down. I must have stood there for a minute or more looking at him. I was thinking that here was somebody his mother no doubt loved, which goes to show you. Maybe others, too. Still, I was thinking of the time I killed a polar bear so close to me that when he fell dead, he fell partly on me. I was also thinking of a time I’d found a wolverine in one of my traps. He was busy chewing his trapped leg off so he could get away and when I came up on him he turned and tried to spring at me, snarling. I remembered that in killing the polar bear and again in killing the wolverine, both times I’d said something, always said it when I killed an animal or bird. I’d said, “I’m sorry,” and felt it. But when I looked at Billy Bob now I was thinking of that instant when he’d placed that .45 against Morton Cavendish’s unconscious head and fired. Three times. Same number I’d fired into him. And I knew I would never be sorry.
His sprawled legs and arms made handy places to lash the ropes around and pull them tight.
“I’ll keep in touch,” I said to Pengelly. “I’ll call you as often as I can, but don’t you call me. And tell everybody else, Inuvik included, not to call me.”
He got it. I didn’t want the radio suddenly squawking just when it would blow my cover, or interrupt (I could only hope) something that would answer all the questions.
“All set?” I said.
“Yep.” he said. “How about you?”
“Ready to go,” I said.
I could see him in the light of our headlights as he looked at me across Billy Bob’s body, and grinned.
“You forgot to pack the ammunition,” he said, and handed me two boxes of shotgun shells.
I stuffed them into my parka pockets, laughing, couldn’t help it. Trust Pengelly to exit laughing.
An hour later, I stopped and made camp, still miles from the pond. The moon now was playing peek-a-boo with the clouds, but with that and my flashlight, I could see well enough as I unhooked the sled and pulled it around parallel to the snowmobile and lashed the tent between the two vehicles as I had—jeez, was it only last night?—so that I was protected from both sides against wind and weather.
Inside and snug I started the primus. Snow translates into water at the rate of about ten to one so periodically I reached my plate out through the flap and got more. When I had enough boiling water I made tea, dropped in a package of boil-in-the-bag beef stew, drank tea while it got hot, slit the bag with my Swiss Army knife, poured its contents into my plate, dipped in frozen bread, ate ravenously, cleansed the plate with snow and crawled into my bag.
Last thought I had was to hope that William had caught a fast transport going north from Wrigley, or had bummed, borrowed or stolen a snowmobile to bring him here. I couldn’t envision any other option he had, having left Johns not dealt with and knowing that by now Smokey would be famished. If I was right, sometime soon he would be arriving at the Cessna, seeing where the Beaver had landed and taken off, signs of my snowmobile arriving and departing, and my snowshoe trails. He’d be trying to figure out what all that activity meant, who was involved, where they’d come from and how much they knew. And he’d be thinking that he didn’t have much time.
When he came back—that’s when I wanted to be either watching, or following. On that thought, I slept like a baby.
It was therefore a very long and disappointing day, the next one. When I woke and was still for a minute or two I thought that only a week ago Morton was alive and none of this had happened; I’d wakened in Maxine’s bed with the sound of the shower running and thought I’d walk down with her in the dark and then loaf around until I had to catch the plane.
I rolled over and looked outside. Heavy grey cloud seemed to fall right to the deck, off to the east. A little wind was blowing, a little snow falling. The temperature, I guessed, was maybe ten below, practically sweltering.
I must have had some kind of premonition that morning.
Otherwise why would I start thinking about William’s dog? Let’s see, I thought, William was here Saturday with, at least in the very early stages, Christian, Batten and Johns. Why he left after getting Christian and Batten off to an early start, couldn’t say, maybe thinking he had to attend to his father’s funeral, but probably he had fed Smokey well before leaving. Working dogs can go days without food. Water supply isn’t a factor. They constantly gulp snow. For seven or eight months of the year they never see water as such. But remembering how Smokey had seemed to warm to me a little when I threw him that corned beef, I put a few extra frozen meat-bags into my backpack. The sun was a rosy glow to the south-southeast when I packed the rest of the food into the animal-proof (well, let’s not count barren-ground grizzlies) food box, lashed down everything lashable, added the rifle to my backpack, and set off on my snowshoes at an easy trot.
My plans were fairly simple. I was heading for a spot a little east from the north end of the pond. The prevailing wind was from the northwest, meaning I’d be downwind from Smokey. I figured about an hour would take me to where I could edge up into some of the trees overlooking the pond.
My intention was to be well off William’s course when he appeared, as I felt was certain, from southwest of my look-out point. With the wind direction and the vast silence all around me, I was sure I’d be alerted by any sound from the tractor road, either a big rig or a snowmobile. I could see through the binoculars that most of the time Smokey was curled up in a snowbank near the Cessna. He got up once in a while to trot the length of his chain and howl.
It all worked, with the exception of William. Hours passed. I heard nothing and saw nothing. I ate chocolate biscuits, drank tea that went from hot to warm to cool to cold, sometimes paced stiffly around for a few minutes out of sight of the Cessna. Around five in the afternoon, temperature falling with the close of day, I had to ask myself I say, Matteesie, what now? I obviously couldn’t stay in this stake-out all night.
The snowshoe run back to my tent warmed me up fine everywhere, even between the ears—giving me time to consider that maybe it was all over, everyone in the bag, and I’d spent that day in the snowbank for nothing. Almost believing that and thinking, Well, I tried, I grabbed the radio.
“Matteesie here. Over.”
Pengelly’s voice was relieved. “Hey! What’s happening? Over.”
Even those few words told me I was still in business for tomorrow. Somehow, I was relieved. I don’t like to work a thing hard and not be in at the end.
I told him what I’d done, batting zero.
He told me: No sign of William, Batten or Christian. No more sign of Bonner. Inuvik, meaning Ted Huff, was worried about me and wanted to know how long was I going to stay out if nothing happened?
“Not forever,” I said. “A day or two more if it’s still a dead end.”
I could be ordered back, Pengelly said. The commissioner had pressured Ted on that but Ted had said it should be left to me.
Good man, Ted.
Lois had been calling the commissioner and asking when I would be home and did he have any messages for her from me.
Oh, yeah, and Edie had been around in the morning early. Nice woman when you got to know her. “I told her what a hero you were, very good with a shotgun.”
“You bastard.”
“I meant it! Anyway, she wondered if it would be a help if she took some time off and drove her dogs out there with a lot of hot water bottles and a nice duvet and a few soft pillows and I told her that was a hell of an idea.”
“Okay, okay. I got a camp to make.”
“One more thing,” Pengelly said. “The media. What we got so far is a woman named Rosie from the Toronto Star and guys from Globe and Mail and Edmonton Journal and Janet from News North, you know her, the one-woman bureau chief for what it takes us Mounties about sixty people to cover. Also, five separate CBC departments called, including “The Journal” and Jack Farr in Winnipeg, that wild guy with the Saturday radio show.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Over and out.”
In the tent again I drank tea, ate, settled in, all the time wondering if I was losing my touch. It wasn’t just a hunch that had gone bad, it was a carefully considered plan. I’d been so sure William would show up and that somehow, somewhere, I’d learn something until now hidden from me—what, I didn’t know. Something nagged on the edge of my consciousness; something that didn’t jibe. In fact, several things didn’t jibe.
From what I knew about him, he would not have contemplated leaving Johns with a broken leg to some uncertain fate. And he would not have left his dog chained and likely to starve, barring rescue by someone else. That wasn’t all that didn’t jibe, but the something else I just couldn’t bring into focus.
I knew that night, settling for sleep, warm inside and out, that I had to change the plot tomorrow. To what? I still had a feeling deep in my gut that if I could find the place where William had spent his solitude for so many years, I would get some answers. If I didn’t pretty soon, the situation might outwait me. I would become a pervasive Arctic legend like the Mad Trapper, a little old Inuk tottering around the Barrens muttering to himself who didn’t have the sense to know when he was licked.
The next day I packed up everything in dawn light, traveled most of the way by snowmobile and then, just in case, went the last half-mile on snowshoes to my vantage point. Nothing had changed. Smokey was pacing less than the day before. I had a decision to make so I made it. I went back for the snowmobile and returned to run it down the hill to Smokey. He bristled and growled until he saw that I was the last man who’d fed him, then whined. I took out a bag of frozen meat. He set up an uproar that could have been heard for miles. I slit the package and tossed it to him. He wolfed it down. I made sure the last of it had disappeared, even the reddish-stained snow where I’d tossed it, then I went in talking softly and released him from the chain.
He bounded up the trail I’d left, presumably to look around for more visitors, then came back
My idea was that wherever William’s Secret Garden, or cave, or hut, or whatever, was, Smokey had been there and would show some kind of recognition, if I could just catch him at it.
I began a dead slow tour by snowmobile around the pond, up and down the hills, in and out of patches of thicket. Then I made the circles wider, each one taking us closer to the smoke from the Burning Hills. Smokey mostly trailed along behind. Once he took off at high speed, me after him, and when I rounded a bend within sight of the tractor road for the first time, I could see he was losing a race with an Arctic hare. He just didn’t seem awfully interested in any of the country we’d been covering. Maybe I’d given him too much to eat, I thought, taken the edge off his desire to please, if any—and then thought, Jesus, I’ve been away too long, to a husky happiness is a full stomach and the chance for more.
Well, I thought, if the way to a husky’s heart is through his stomach I’ll make him think I’m the greatest thing since the invention of frozen meat. I rummaged in my food box for another bag. He went crazy, jumping around. I thought he was going to rush in and take it from me. I’d seen huskies in that frame of mind, uncontrollable. I remembered everything No Legs had said about how smart this dog was, how easy to train, how he would stay when told to, just like a well-trained sheepdog.
“Stay!” I ordered.
He stayed, tail wagging, eyes on the chunk of meat.
I cut the bag and threw it to him. He caught it in midair and swallowed in three convulsive gulps, then stood there licking his lips.
I could see what a hell of a dog he was, why William wouldn’t sell him with the rest of the team. But that didn’t make me feel any less frustrated. “Come on,” I said. “Where is it?”
Smokey looked at me expectantly. As if he was waiting for me to put it in plain English, where was what?
And then I had what, it later became obvious, was the best idea I’d had in a week.
“Go home!” I ordered.
He turned immediately and headed toward the river. He could move faster than I could, because a rock or fallen tree or any other obstacle was just a leap and bounce for him. He even stopped a couple of times and looked back to make sure I was following, and then he’d bound on again. He led me along gullies and over ridges. When we came to the tractor road there were patterns left by big truck tires, I figured from the slight drift in them none less than a day old. He crossed in a few leaps with me after him, close now. A bit of a run through the bush on the west side of the road caused me to lose a little ground but when I came into the open he was waiting alongside a line of haphazard piles of great ice chunks along the Mackenzie’s shore.
He turned north there, with me after him. Up the shore a bit he plunged into a small grove mainly of evergreens, a jumble of spruce and willow. It was indistinguishable from other groves along the bank. He disappeared from sight. I couldn’t get in there with the snowmobile, so I got off and went in on foot, not even stopping for my snowshoes. I could hear him ahead of me as I broke off willows so I could get through, remembering that time long ago in an igloo near the Arctic shore, the old woman with a few handfuls of willow twigs trying to coax those twigs into enough fire to boil water for tea. It had taken about half an hour, and the lea was warm, not hot.
I had lost Smokey. All was quiet.
I called and heard a whine just ahead to my left. I went cautiously. I would have passed it a few feet away if I hadn’t been sure the whine was close. It looked like just another close-knit clump of willows, until back among them I heard the dog again, this time in a low snarling growl that changed to a full-throated howl interspersed with barks, the way a wolf howls and barks at the same time.
I couldn’t get through to where he was, standing up.
Then I noticed what seemed to be almost like the entrance tunnel to an igloo, a shallow runway in the snow under a cover of twisted willows. I didn’t feel real good getting down on hands and knees and starting in, thinking I might meet Smokey coming the other way.
Then I saw a fragment of torn cloth, no bigger than my finger. Beyond it were other threads. Something had been dragged through here, but not in the last day or two. There was an inch or so of soft snow on the bed of the shallow indentation, enough to show Smokey’s big paw marks.
It was not a cave, not a teepee, but looked like a little bit of both. Maybe a rock had been rolled out long ago leaving behind a shallow hollow, or a chunk of ice long ago had gouged a hole in the bank. Willows and spruce around it had been pulled in to form a sort of roof frame, which in summer could have been covered with a tarpaulin against the rain, although it was bare jumbled twigs and branches now. In a patch of bush around a city elsewhere in Canada this would have been what the neighbourhood kids called their cave, or their hut.
I pretty well knew it was William’s place even before my eyes adjusted to the dim light and I could see what was in it now: the bodies of Albert Christian, I could tell by his black hair, moustache, beard, and of Benny Batten, I could tell by his thick cap of white hair. They were stretched out side by side a couple of feet apart, facing upward into the tangled branches above.
Smokey growled and showed his teeth. I spoke to him sharply and he retreated to a back corner, howling from time to time.
Christian had been shot in the face, three clean holes from his upper lip to his forehead. There was hardly any blood. Batten had been shot from behind, both in the head and the upper body. Those bullets must have spread after entry. Frozen blood was everywhere.
Both corpses were frozen solid, still in their parkas and heavy pants and mukluks, exactly as they would have been dressed when heading out with William last Saturday to look for a ride south on the tractor road.
Somewhere in this case, the story went, there was a half million dollars in cash. It isn’t the kind of thing one carries in a wallet. Crouching between them, I searched carefully. It wasn’t easy with their bodies rock hard, totally unyielding, but I found nothing in the pockets, no suspicious bulge anywhere. With difficulty, I rolled them over: nothing.
I sat back on my heels, considering. My first thought was of the radio. It was back on the snowmobile. So was my flashlight. I wanted a closer look around this place, in case there was a parcel or bag or knapsack or something that would hold a lot of money.
I started to crawl back out the way I had come when suddenly Smokey started to whine and dashed precipitously past me, literally shouldering me out of the way. I somehow didn’t think it was because he was afraid to be left alone, but my head was too full to think about that much at all.
I kept on crawling, hearing his mad barking not far away. I was near where I’d first got down and started to crawl, and was noticing bits of cloth I hadn’t noticed before, wondering how far William had had to drag the bodies, when something made me look up and see, not six feet away, legs.
“Keep on comin’,” William said. “Just don’t do nothin’ funny.”