Free The Shaman's Knife by Scott Young Page B

side for access to the freight and flight deck.
    As soon as we were airborne the stewardess stopped in the aisle beside me. She was tall with long fair hair and a very womanly figure, and wore little or no makeup.
    Leaning over to speak, she said, “You’re the only new one, except the ones who are crying, and I don’t think we have to disturb them. Would you mind if I just explained the safety measures to you personally instead of me getting up in the aisle at the front like we’re supposed to do?”
    â€œGo ahead,” I said.
    She explained seat belts, oxygen, exits, the usual. All in about fifteen seconds. With that over, I said, “I want to change to heavier clothes. Could I do that behind the partition?”
    She gave a radiant and amused smile. “I won’t peek.”
    I had to bend my head and turn sideways to get through to the freight compartment, where I stopped with my bag beside big boxes strapped into freight racks. Some were addressed to Sanirarsipaaq, many to Inuvik. Others were for transshipment to Arctic Red, Fort McPherson and Norman Wells. I dumped out the warm clothes I’d worn a few days earlier in Labrador, when I helped the sergeant from the local detachment get a few caribou for his freezer.
    I pulled on a thermal undershirt due for laundering as soon as I could arrange it, caribou-skin pants with the fur side against my body, wool socks, knee-high mukluks with white felt liners, and over it all a long brown oversweater that Lois had knitted for me long ago. Into my parka pocket I stuffed an old woolen balaclava that I carried more out of habit than anything else. Then my hat, very official RCMP, the force’s badge in front.
    The co-pilot emerged from the cockpit just as I was finishing. He stared. “Back to nature, is it, Matteesie?”
    Even before he spoke I had presumed he was Irish (the name badge on his left chest read: Kieron O’Kennedy). Many foreign nationals are part of the scanty population (some fifty-five thousand at last count) of our North—Germans, Americans, Vietnamese, Russians, English, at least a dozen nationalities co-existing with, and working alongside, the much greater majority native population of Inuit, Indians, and Metis. The newcomers, including many from southern Canada, go north for all kinds of reasons, from leaving trouble behind to looking for a new meaning in life. I could not even guess what had brought Irish Kieron O’Kennedy to fly co-pilot on an Arctic airline. Whether he was from Ireland’s Protestant-dominated north or Catholic south, the thousands of sectarian murders committed by terrorists of both religions bothered good people in all parts of Ireland. Drove some out. He had the Celtic red hair and a very fair skin and backed up the Irishness by talking like a cast member of a sometimes ribald Irish play I’d seen once in Ottawa,
Playboy of the Western World
.
    â€œSome kind of a disguise is it you’re puttin’ on now?” he asked. “Somebody’s husband after you, then? I thought you Inuit fellas didn’ worry about technicalities like that . . .” He laughed at his own joke. “Anyway, what I came back to tell you is that we’re laying over in Sanirarsipaaq for an hour or two, in case you want to solve the murders fast and come back with us.”
    â€œVery funny,” I said.
    â€œWell, we’re concerned about time. I mean, if yer man up front there”—I deduced he meant the pilot—“doesn’t get to Inuvik tonight his girlfriend says she’s going to look for a bank clerk or somebody with regular hours.”
    None of this really affected me, but what he said next did.
    â€œWe’re lucky the weather has changed enough already, thanks be t’ God, to let us get down with this crowd of sad people. The Otter guy we saw in Cambridge, I know him, he can fly anything in near any weather. Still, he said in normal