Hours later Sam, driving his father’s car, managed it back to the Berger house in Outremont without incident. Moses had considerable difficulty with the front-door key. Sinking to his knees, the better to concentrate on threading the key through the slot, he began to giggle foolishly. “Sh,” he cautioned himself, “L.B.’s sleeping.”
“Dreaming of unstinting praise,” Sam said.
“… Pulitzers …”
“… Nobels …”
“Statues raised in his honour.”
“His hair, for Christ’s sake. Beethoven.”
“Knock it off.”
They sat down together on the porch steps and Moses started in on the Gurskys again. “I’m told the real bastard was Solomon, who died in the thirties.”
“Molly will be waiting up for me.”
“Can you arrange for me to go through the Solomon Gursky file at the Gazette?”
“Why are you so interested?”
“Remember Shloime Bishinsky?”
“Of course I do. What about him?”
No answer.
“You want to shove it to L.B., right, comrade?”
“Can you arrange for me to go through the Solomon Gursky file or not?”
“Yeah, sure.”
But the file had been stolen. The large manilla envelope in the library was empty. And when Moses dragged out the old newspapers that dealt with the trial, he discovered that somebody had cut out the relevant stories with a razor blade.
He was hooked.
Five
Late one winter afternoon in 1908 Solomon Gursky tumbled out of school into the thickly falling snow in Fort McEwen, Saskatchewan, to find his grandfather waiting on the stern of his long sled. Solomon was a mere nine-year-old at the time. Ephraim, whom the Indians called Mender-of-Bones, was ninety-one and running short of time. He was rooted in a tarpaper shack out on the reservation, living with a young woman called Lena. A team of ten yapping dogs was harnessed to the sled. Ephraim, his eyes hot, stank of rum. His cheek was bruised and his lower lip was swollen.
“What happened?” Solomon asked.
“Not to worry. I slipped and fell on the ice.”
Ephraim tucked his grandson under the buffalo robes, laid his rifle within reach, and cracked his whip high, urging on the dogs.
“What about Bernie and Morrie?” Solomon asked.
“They’re not coming with us.”
George Two Axe was waiting for them, pacing up and down in the failing light of the platform behind his general store. He hastily loaded large quantities of pemmican, sugar, bacon, tea, and rum on to the sled. “Go now,” he pleaded.
But Ephraim wouldn’t be hurried. “George, I want you to send somebody to my son’s house to tell him that the lad is spending the night with the Davidsons.”
“You can’t take the kid.”
“Steady on, George.”
“Anything happens to you out there he hasn’t got a chance.”
“I’ll write to you from Montana.”
“I don’t want to know where you’re heading for.”
“I trust you,” Ephraim said. His eyes glittering with menace, he thrust a wad of bills at George Two Axe. “Make him a proper pine coffin and the rest is for the family.”
“You are crazy in the head, old man.”
Instead of turning right at the railroad tracks, Ephraim took a left fork on the trail leading out to the prairie.
“I thought we were going to Montana.”
“We’re heading north.”
“Where?”
“Far.”
“Are you drunk again, zeyda?”
Ephraim laughed and sang him one of his sailor songs:
They travelled all through the night, Solomon snug under the buffalo robes. Ephraim didn’t waken his grandson until he had already built their first igloo, warmed by a stone lamp. Then he asked Solomon to help him sort out their things. “But mind how you go,” he said.
Surprisingly, among the supplies that had to be unloaded, there were a number of books, including a Latin grammar. “Right after breakfast,” Ephraim said, “we’re going to start in on some verbs.”
“Miss Kindrachuk says Latin is a dead language.”
“That school of yours is no bloody good.”
“I don’t have to stay here with you. I’m going home.”
Ephraim tossed snowshoes and his compass at him. “Then you’re going to need these, my good fellow. Oh, and no matter how tired you get don’t lie down out there or you could freeze to death.”
Outside, an indignant Solomon wandered in a sea of swirling snow. He was back within the hour, his teeth chattering. “The Mounties came to our school yesterday,” he said, testing.
“Have a cup of char. I’ll make bacon.”
“They came to get André Clear Sky. There was a big fight on the reservation.”
Ephraim undid a canvas bag and laid out fresh clothes for Solomon. “This,” he said, indicating a parka with a hood attached, “is an attigik. And these,” he added, holding up wide pants, reaching only to the knee, “are called qarliiq.” Both garments, he explained, were made of caribou hide and were to be worn with the skin side against the body. There were also two pairs of stockings, the inner pair to be worn with the animal hair inside, the outer pair the other way round; and a pair of caribou-hide boots.
“Where are we going?” Solomon asked.
“To the Polar Sea.”
George Two Axe was right. He is crazy in the head.
“Now you eat your bacon and then we’ll get some kip.”
“How long will we be gone?”
“If you are such a baby and want to go home that badly, take the dogs before I wake and beat it.”
Ephraim propped his rifle beside the sleeping platform and drifted off, his mouth agape, the igloo resounding with his snores. Solomon briefly considered knocking him out with the rifle butt and making his escape, but he doubted that he could manage the dogs, and he didn’t want to go out into the cold again. Tomorrow maybe.
“You still here?” Ephraim asked, wakening. He didn’t seem pleased.
“So what?”
“Maybe you were worried about how I would manage without the dogs.”
“I’ve never seen the Polar Sea.”
Ephraim brightened. He actually smiled. They travelled through the night again, conjugating Latin verbs, Ephraim taunting him, “Now I’m stuck with you, and I don’t even know that I brought along enough food for two.”
The next evening on the trail Ephraim said, “Why don’t I keep warm under the buffalo robes tonight and you run the dogs for a change?”
“What if I took the wrong direction?”
“You see that big diamond there, low in the sky, well you just keep heading right for it.”
After the first week they no longer travelled by night. Neither did Ephraim bother to destroy all evidence of their igloo before they broke camp. He taught Solomon how to harness the dogs, looping the shortest traces through those of the laziest ones stationed closest to the whip. Before chopping their food with an axe, Ephraim made a point of overturning the sled, securing it as tightly as possible to the slavering dogs so that they couldn’t run off with it in their excitement. Then he hurled the meat at the pack, laughing as the strongest ones, a couple of them with their ears already torn, lunged at the biggest chunks. “From now on,” Ephraim said, “this is going to be your job.”