The Shaman's Knife by Scott Young Page A

freezer and raises the alarm? Yet I can’t have
my
bodies stay in one place for even an extra goddamn day or two! Why? Answer me that?” I didn’t actually say any of that. But it sometimes helps, making up speeches that I never actually get to say.
    My angry reverie was interrupted by Bouvier. “You okay?”
    Suddenly I was back in the police van on the road into town.
    â€œWhat do you mean am I okay?”
    â€œYou’re squirmin’ around.”
    I stopped squirming and wiped the frosty condensation off the window on my side. We were passing houses with chained dogs curled up, backs to the wind, beside old komatiks that maybe once in a while were still pulled by dog teams instead of by the snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles parked at every door. In all the ice and snow and wind I suddenly had a random thought that I still liked this better than spring in the south, with crocuses coming out and empty beer and rye bottles and Big Mac containers beginning to peep shyly through the other crap in the ditches. And people on my street thinking they’d better get the snow tires off.
    â€œYou got a family, Bouvier?” I asked.
    He was making a turn and almost blew it, maybe surprised to hear from me. “Yeah. Four boys. Why do you ask?”
    â€œWhen the ice goes out do you take ’em fishing?”
    â€œWell, I’ve never had a springtime here, you know, but around Spence Bay in the summer me and the wife and kids would pack a cooler with beer and food and take a tent and lots of fly dope, and go out to a lake a few miles inland and stay out until we had enough Arctic char to fill the freezer.”
    My belligerence was gone. Probably we were both glad. He slowed almost to a stop and let the momentum carry the van a few yards in neutral before he turned the wheels a little. When they caught he eased back into four-wheel drive to get up a small rise before he skidded, again in neutral, this time to a stop alongside a solitary terraced row of townhouses.
    They stuck up like sore thumbs, looking laughably out of place, the only dwellings of their sort in town.
    He waved one arm in that direction. “That’s where your mother was staying with Annie Kavyok. Annie’s probably home from work. The kids’ll be home from school either now or soon. I’ve got the key to the place next door where the bodies were. Turned the heat way down or it’d be smelling pretty bad. Still ain’t no hell as it is. Wanta have a look?”
    I thought about it. “Maybe. Better give me the keys, just in case. I’ll leave my bag in the van and pick it up later.”
    I got out. I think Bouvier was glad to see me go. I would be, in his place. But look on the bright side. Barker was gone, about to enjoy, if that’s the word, a holiday lumbered with a wife who for some reason had him by the balls. Not to mention missing his big chance to solve a couple of murders all by himself and show Matteesie the big-shot Inuk that this really was
his
town. The dumb bugger.
    Bouvier reversed out of there and disappeared in a cloud of snow particles. I stood for a few seconds and just looked. There was no one around outside, but suddenly I felt very good. The weather was getting worse instead of better. I didn’t care, I was headed for family.
    The older I got, the more my relatives meant to me. Maybe if I’d been born a lot sooner or a lot later I never would have left the north. But then maybe I’d never have had the other times, good and bad, making my way in the police, going on courses to universities, loaned once for a couple of years to Northern Affairs. I thought of a battered old book I’d found secondhand and still had; one of those old orange-colored Penguins. It’s called
An Anthology of War Poetry
, published around 1942, one chapter per war, poems going back centuries, from the “heigh ho, off we go,” stuff of old wars right down to the last two