Email:
Lespion@msn.com
“This is Sergius and his wife Kirima,”
said Melissa, “or that is what I think they call
themselves. I wasn’t able
to understand much from them except through sign
language. Anyway, they saved
my life.”
Larra returned the shy smiles of the beaming Inuit
couple. Like Melissa she understood
no Inuit, except for the fact that they did not like being called
“Eskimos,” which was a Cree word meaning “Eaters of raw
meat.”
She was amazed at how comfortable she was in the crude shelter the Inuit
family called home. She had taken
off her heavy parka and was sitting on a musk oxen
robe. She guessed the temperature
must be slightly above freezing and she was quite
comfortable. Amazingly, the only
source of heat was a small animal fat lamp and the body heat of the people
in the shelter. There were eight
altogether. Herself and Melissa,
and the two Inuit adults and their four
children. Right in front of her
a naked baby crawled about on a caribou
skin.
She had been in the shelter now for about a
day. When she had arrived, Melissa
had been sleeping soundly. The
surprised Inuit family had welcomed her into their winter home, somewhat
amazed to have two white visitors in just a few hours, and women at
that. During all of that time,
Melissa had been out like a light, obviously exhausted from her
ordeal. When she had wakened,
she had been most surprised to see Larra.
“I thought you dead,” the girl had blurted out, and then had burst
into tears.
“And I feared you might be,” replied
Larra. They had both had a good
cry after that, much to the further confusion of the Inuit
family. But now things had settled
down. Melissa had made the
introductions, and now they were sharing
rations.
With only the small flame to cook on, much of what was offered to Melissa
and Larra was raw or half-cooked.
Melissa, turned out to be more enthusiastic about eating it than Larra,
but then, she had eaten ravenously when she had stumbled upon the Inuit
encampment the day before.
Larra rummaged in her pack and found a package of hard
chocolate. It was far from the
best quality, but the Inuit family accepted it with
enthusiasm. Larra suspected that
they had never eaten chocolate before.
Half-cooked or not, Larra ate whatever was given to
her. She had eaten far worse
during her 31 years, and her labours in the snow while trailing Melissa had
given her quite an appetite.
While she ate, she and Melissa exchanged
information. Larra admired the
girl’s courage. Taking off
into the middle of the barrens in the middle of winter was a gutsy move,
if somewhat poorly thought out. She
wondered what she would have done in the same situation and decided that
she probably would have done the same thing.
On her part, Melissa found herself wondering at Larra’s heroic
escape. Maybe one day she would
be able to handle herself that well.
The cold of night settled over the barrens, and the Inuit family snuggled
down for the night. Larra suddenly
realized how tired she was. She
had not yet fully recovered from her ordeal at the hands of
Featherstone. Settling down in
the soft robes provided by the Inuit family, she was asleep in
seconds.
Lemaire frowned at Sawatis.
“Larra said we were to wait until she gets
back.”
“She also said that she might crash the
plane. We could be here next
spring and still be
waiting. You do what you
want. I’ve bought the dogs
and I’m ready to go.”
Lemaire frowned. He didn’t
like the idea of not being here when his gorgeous employer
returned. But he knew that Sawatis
was right. She had been gone
two days. God knows what might
have happened to her. She was
a real greenhorn when it came to knowledge of the
north. A single mistake and the
brutal climate would kill a novice
quickly. “Alright,”
he said with a smile.
“I’ll go with you, if for no other reason than to keep you
out of trouble.”
The usually undemonstrative Mohawk slapped Lemaire on the
back. “Let’s go,”
he said simply.
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