Free The Shaman's Knife by Scott Young

their minds and learn something that no one else knew.
    I began thinking of carvings. As far as I knew, carvings had nothing to do with the problem I had to solve, but the shaman in Sanirarsipaaq was a master carver. My mind kept struggling to come up with carvings I’d seen from time to time. What I was seeking seemed to be a particular carving. I couldn’t visualize it clearly but was getting
something
, maybe a memory from childhood.
    I stared from the porthole and tried to
will
that particular carving into revealing itself to me. For a brief few seconds, a moment, I thought I was getting it, some kind of an angry-looking bird, and then the beak dropped off and it all became fuzzy and was gone and wouldn’t return. Passing the endless procession of frozen lakes I refused to let their outlines register, instead registering an endless procession of shamanistic carvings, calling up anything I’d seen or heard.
    But what I sought eluded me.
    Then I began to think of shamanistic masks I’d seen, the kind a shaman might don when going into his trance as he tried through his helping spirits to bring our people better hunting, better fishing, a healing power that would drive out sickness or madness. Not that would lead to murder.
    Then I fastened on the passages in the report I’d seen in Yellowknife that mentioned the amount of money found on the murdered man. The later information I’d received from Buster, not in the report, that his bankroll had been larger than the money he’d been paid that night, might take us somewhere. Meaning someone had paid him a debt? If so, who? What debt?
    I must have dozed. When I woke we were coming into Cambridge Bay, landing, wheeling in beside two other aircraft. One was the First Air milk run Hawker Siddeley that I would catch for Sanirarsipaaq. The other was a Twin Otter from Adlak Air. The Hawker Siddeley was parked as close as possible to the terminal building.
    As I gathered up the bag of winter clothing that I’d packed—was it only yesterday?—in Labrador, had not unpacked in Ottawa, again had not unpacked in Yellowknife, our pilot up front could be heard swearing into his radio about whoever had parked “that god damn First Air blocking the terminal entrance so that nobody else can get near, for Christ’s sake.”
    There are social distinctions among aircraft in the north. Citation pilots look upon themselves as deserving precedence, like a Mercedes in a flock of Fiat 850s. So our pilot beefed, but in vain. As I looked outside I wished I was wearing something warmer than my Ottawa clothes. The court people, carrying their own bags, fought their way out of the aircraft into the wind. Even though dressed for the cold, they were wincing from the stinging whip of ice particles blowing almost horizontally off the winter banks of snow and ice lining the runway. The official start of spring was two weeks past, but official is one thing, actual another. The radio that morning had given a Celsius temperature of minus thirty for Cambridge Bay. The thin woman and the lawyers protected their faces by walking backward as they ducked around the offending Hawker Siddeley. The judge had his parka pulled low over his face but didn’t walk backward, as if to say “to hell with it.”
    With all those impressions fighting for attention, it wasn’t until I got inside the little terminal building and the wind slammed the door shut behind me that I found that the whole place was packed with weeping people. The court party had stopped dead, astonished and abashed at the scene around them. Deborah, the pretty young court reporter, ran back to me. “Matteesie! What is it? Why all this?”
    I said, “It must be for someone who has died. Maybe for the murdered people. I’m not sure.”
    Then among the mourners I saw the thin and wasted figure of Lovering Oquataq, the Anglican priest who was twin brother of Jonassie the shaman in