White Heat by Melanie Mcgrath

years.
When they weren't busy pissing one another off, they were recounting tales of
the historical injustices perpetrated
        Upon
them centuries before by the scumbags on the other side.
        Derek
took a cigarette from his pack, lit it and waited for Jono Toolik to kick off.
Whatever he was about to say, Derek had heard it before. He'd um and ah to give
an impression of attentiveness and use the time to take a smoke and think about
lemmings.
        He
was probably thinking too much about lemmings. People were beginning to tease
him about it, but thinking about lemmings stopped him dwelling on how Misha
Ludnova had ruined his life. For three summers she had burrowed into his heart
and now she was gone there was nothing left but a hole. Initially, she'd come
up to help lead a bunch of summer camps for kids. She'd been hopeless at it, of
course, forever complaining about the conditions at camp and the squandering of
her artistic talents on children who were more interested in killing caribou
than painting them. Despite all this, perhaps in some perverse way because of
it, within the first week of her arrival, Derek had fallen hopelessly in love.
Her looks had only added to his feelings for her: her long, slender limbs,
spring sky eyes and hair the colour of cotton grass in the fall. Even though
she'd shown no interest whatsoever in him that first summer, he'd nurtured the
hope that she'd change her mind when she returned the next year, as indeed she
did. It was during that second summer that Maria Kunuk's boy had nearly drowned
while in Misha's care - or, rather, lack of it; there had been an outcry in the
village and a call for her to be let go. But he'd stood up for her, pointing
out that Kuujuaq was a dangerous place to live and that what had happened had
nothing to do with Misha and everything to do with the Arctic. The Kuujuaq
council of Elders had imposed a line, and it was not long after Derek paid it
that Misha began to take an interest in him. By the time she left at the end of
that summer, she'd made him giddy, like a man half his thirty-nine years and
he'd been fool enough — or vain enough — to suppose she loved him.
        The
third summer she came up to be with Derek and to paint. Her real vocation, she
said, was as an artist, and she'd persuaded some foundation or other to sponsor
her towork on a project 'negotiating the interface between global
warming and the disappearance of selfhood', whatever that meant. Turned out the
sponsorship was more in the way of an honour than any financial award, so Derek
had invited her to move in with him. They'd spent what Derek had thought was a
blissful summer together, after which Misha had gone back to Yellowknife and
refused to return his calls.
        The
most painful part of all this was not that he had been used; it was the fact
that knowing he'd been used made no difference to his feelings. There is no
getting around it, when it comes to that woman I'm a sap. Even now, months
since she'd left, he could still see no future for himself that did not involve
some continuation of his saphood. Though he was embarrassed to admit this, even
to himself, he'd spent far too much of the winter thinking long and hard about
how he might win her back and concluded that he had two options. The first was
to crack some high profile crime that would get his name in the papers and
result in a promotion. He might even be able to persuade his bosses to grant
him a secondment to Yellowknife. Being one of only two police on an island the
size of Great Britain and a population of a couple of hundred gave you a lot of
freedom but it stopped you from plugging into anything bigger than the
small-time hustle going on around your ears. No one in Kuujuaq or any of the
other tiny settlements making up the population of Ellesmere Island and the
surrounding areas had done anything worth investigating. There was that event
in Autisaq a few weeks back, the death of the qalunaat hunter