The Shaman's Knife Read Free

demanding to know why Maxine and I went along year after year as we did. Maxine had met my eyes and laughed. It may sound simpleminded, but I felt more comfortable evading the issue than going through the torture I’d seen in some others who tried to shuck off the remains of one marriage and head for another in what might seem to be love—but might not work either. If Maxine had been demanding I might have felt differently; but she never campaigned for more than we already had. In that, we were alike. Sufficient unto the day?
    I thought of mother and Maxine, the first time they met, years ago. I was in Inuvik with a prisoner locked up and his statement being typed as to why he had killed one of his cousins (he hadn’t liked this cousin, and besides they were sleeping with the same girl). Anyway, I had a couple of clear days. Maxine had time off coming to her. We were in her kitchen having coffee, talking about what we might do when she suddenly exclaimed, “Hey, Matteesie, two days! Why don’t we go see your mother?”
    We’d flown over to Holman. It was a risk. Not a risk on the married side of my life as it might be for a white man who would have to fear some sharp-eyed do-gooder hastening to call and tell the dear little wife at home what a faithless bugger she’d married. That was a different world entirely. The risk was that Maxine was part Indian and my mother was from a generation where relations between Inuit and Indians, especially among elders, had not quite recovered from earlier centuries of territorial warfare, fighting, murder, ambushes, bloody encounters almost every time the twain did meet. The north’s distant history was full of such events.
    Mother had been wary, at first, as if accepting Maxine only because she was with me. Then Maxine had taken over. After asking Mother’s permission, she had mixed flour, salt, baking powder, and water into a stiff dough, fried in lard, browned on both sides—bannock. She had eaten muktuk, the edible part of beluga whale found between outer skin and blubber, with every evidence of enjoyment, while exclaiming as she listened to mother’s blow-by-blow account of the successful beluga hunt that had produced enough muktuk for the whole settlement. She had scrutinized carefully and admired the tattoos on my mother’s cheeks and chin and upper lip. Braided my mother’s long unruly hair that she couldn’t get her arms up to do by herself anymore. Tied ribbons around the ends of the braids. Asked my mother many questions and then listened as one should to the elders of a people, treating my mother as I imagined she treated her own grandmother.
    There was also the matter of the pipe. Normally Maxine smoked many, many cigarettes. But on that trip she smoked a pipe that, with an excited (for her) call of “Hey, this oughta help!” she’d resurrected from a drawer just before we left her townhouse in Inuvik. Claimed it had belonged to some man who had stayed overnight sometimes with Gloria. She even had boiled the pipe to get rid of germs. “Germs must live to a hell of an age, especially that bastard’s!”
    There was an almost holy moment, for me, like watching a one-on-one for an Olympic gold medal, when Maxine produced her pipe and accepted some of the ferocious cut plug that my mother smoked. They lit up. Mother inhaled happily. Maxine went pale and her eyes bulged at her first puff but she did not gasp or choke, only wiped her eyes a lot from time to time. Images . . .
    Maxine and I are about the same age, middle forties. Years ago, when we had just become lovers, both single, she a probationary bedpan jockey at the lnuvik hospital and I an RCMP special constable in the Inuvik detachment, we laughed a lot and figured our lowly lives were not that bad, especially in the loving part. But we never talked about a future, even then. The Mounties didn’t encourage their men to marry and thus become