Four Quarters of Light (41 page)

‘You haven't told me where you want to go with this,' Debra said out of the blue.

For a moment her query threw me. It seemed not in her nature to put herself forward with questions, but I sensed that what she was asking me was not about where our hike was taking us. We had been discussing many things as we negotiated our way upland; now here we were with the way ahead clear and inviting. It was still an upward climb, but the air was cooler and we could see the distance in front of us.

Debra and I had not really had much time to talk during our stay. She was always talking and ‘working' on Charlie, or I was working for Lena or else off on my own, tramping around the place. In the evening we all sat together sharing food and stories. Yet something beyond my knowing or planning had impelled me to come to this place. And here I was, as lost psychologically and intellectually as I was geographically. I had planned to come here to live with the Eskimo and learn something about their life and cultural understanding, but now the focus was away from them and on me.

‘I don't really know, Debra,' I said. ‘You are my guide on this trip in more ways than one.' It was all I could think to say, and I knew Debra would understand.

‘Okay,' she responded. ‘Maybe if I begin first with a healing it may help.'

I knew Debra's proposal was only a step on this journey. She had remarked to me days ago that she saw I had some trouble with my back. It was true. I had had back pains come and go for a long time and had simply put it down to age, lack of fitness and being overweight. I jokingly remarked that maybe Lena was not working me hard enough.

‘I have seen you with her. You enjoy doing anything she asks, so don't blame Lena. And all those things you mention might contribute to your problems. Remember, I was a nurse in another life, Brian.'

Humour was not going to let me off the hook, and before I could say anything else Debra suggested we find a place somewhere. I had no idea what kind of place might be suitable for a healing ceremony, but I suggested we climb further.

The going was easier now, without fallen trees or the dense growth of high summer to impede us. But, noticeably, a raven stalked us as we climbed. Occasionally I thought it was trying to attack us, making sweeping dives out of the sky and screaming some abuse just feet above our heads before flapping off to some rocky outcrop to monitor our ascent. Then he would be up in the air again, cawing out to us, before settling back down once more to watch. He did this several times over and I forgot my ideas about him attacking us. He seemed rather to be continually calling us onward. Every time we approached him he flapped up into the air and flew about backwards and forwards in front of us, as if tracing out an imaginary path while all the time seeming to be calling out with his throaty cackle, ‘C'mon, c'mon, slowcoaches, c'mon, c'mon!' We climbed after him and his antics reduced our effort and speeded our progress.

Then, as suddenly as he had arrived, he was gone. His disappearance amplified the silence incredibly. We had reached an area where the hillside levelled out. We were above the tree line, and even the dwarf trees and bushes seemed to have long ago ceased trying to colonize where we stood. After a few minutes' resting and taking in the land rolling away into eternity, Debra suggested that it might be a good place to work on me. I looked around. In front of us, the hill continued to rise but only for what seemed like another few hundred yards. ‘No, let's carry on to the top,' I said, hardly knowing why. So we climbed on to see what was on the other side.

The top of the hill proved to be as barren and bleak a place as anywhere you could imagine in the Arctic. Nothing grew here beyond a tight skin of tundra grass. Here and there, rocks broke through the surface. It was a superb natural crow's nest from which you could look out on thousands upon thousands of miles of emptiness in that strange Arctic sunlight that seemed to multiply your normal horizon. At one side of me, the huge ocean glinted like polished pewter; the other three quarters of my vision, at each side and behind me, threw up the endless Arctic. It was profound and magical and terrifying all at once, and for a
moment it wasn't a place at all, but rather the allegory of a place – somewhere imagined, the backcloth of fairy-tales and myths.

‘Where is that?' I asked, pointing to the boiling grey ocean.

Deborah's soft voice beside me answered, ‘That's where the Chukchi Sea and the Arctic Ocean meet.'

I looked round at the land. The tree line below us seemed to be waiting in a semi-circle, afraid to come any further. Beyond that, the endless tracery of mountain and valley. ‘This seems like a good place, let's do it here,' I announced. I hadn't a clue why; the words seemed to have been sucked out of me.

Debra looked at me for several seconds saying nothing, then walked in a slow circle around me, studying the place as if she was absorbing something from it. I watched her briefly, and then looked back at the sea. This might be a meeting place of the oceans, but the sky and the sea also seemed to flow into each other. The liquid grey of the water and the metallic blue of the sky were in perfect harmony. The silence of the place was rushing up from all around me.

‘Come, come over here, Brian,' came Debra's voice out of the quiet.

I turned and saw her standing beside a cleft of rock that had pushed itself out of the earth, as if waiting to receive me. I walked towards it.

‘Your Celtic intuition is very strong in you,' Debra said. ‘This is a powerful place. The winds from the four quarters blow right through here and will carry away anything that needs to be got rid of.'

‘Which way shall I face?' I asked.

‘Whichever direction you wish,' she replied.

I chose to look out on the elemental fusion of sky and sea. I could throw myself into its tranquil emptiness.

‘Best remove your coat and shirt, but leave on one layer as it's cold up here.'

I did as I was bid, like a child undressing for a doctor's examination, half curious, half fearful.

‘I'll work on your back first, as that's what we both know about. But let me first look at the problem.'

I sat on my altar of Arctic stone while Debra squatted invisibly behind me. A sense of approaching somewhere quite profound was strong in me. Here I was, a million light years away from anything I had previously experienced, in an alien landscape, yet one I had instinctively chosen, as if there was some correspondence between it and me. What had I really got to know of Debra in the few days we had spoken together? Practically nothing. But at the same time, everything I needed to know to hand myself over to her ministrations.

I sat, as oblivious as the stone that supported me, while Debra's hand searched and manipulated my back. We said nothing to each other. Then she stopped and walked round to my side where I could see her. She spoke softly but matter of factly, explaining that she had been doing much ‘travelling' in the spirit realm, consulting with her advisers about me and this trip. There were certain things she could not ask as she had not been given permission, and there were many things she didn't know as she had been unsure about what I sought from her. She now understood my back pain, but it was worse than she had speculated. I looked at her, my curiosity and fear levels shooting up several points. She read my anxiety instantaneously, though I was sure my features had not changed in any way. I was still half entranced by the supernatural magic of the place.

‘Do not worry,' Debra said. ‘I can help you and take this thing away from you and you will feel no pain. Do you still want me to continue?'

She was not so much asking me as reassuring me, so I nodded and answered, ‘Do what you have to.'

She looked at me for a moment, then explained that what she had diagnosed was that my back was covered in scales. They were not scales such as you find on a fish. They were huge, and they had been growing on me for many, many years. Many of them protruded up and out like porcupine quills, only much larger; others were large, solid formations the shape of shark fins, only bigger and thicker, like a dinosaur's skin. I looked at her, beginning to feel a mixture of fear and shame at the hideous creature
she had seen. Again, she must have read my thoughts. ‘Do not let this worry you. This has been your armour for many, many years, even since childhood. It has protected you and kept you safe. It has made you strong and unafraid. But the dinosaurs have gone away now and your dinosaur must go too. You do not need it now. It is old and burdensome. But maybe you do not want to let it go. This is what is causing your pain. You must let this go or it will get heavier and more hurtful. I can take this from you. You must not be afraid.'

‘Yes,' I said, my voice almost inaudible.

There was the smallest flicker of a smile on Debra's face and then she was gone again behind my back.

I sat breathlessly, trying to cope with what I had been told. Then I heard a voice behind me mumble something. It was an incredibly old voice and it sounded very unearthly. Slowly, the sound and the cry of the ancient hag's voice rose in tempo. This primordial thing behind me was wailing and moaning. The pain of this being reverberated inside me. The anguish that was semaphoring behind me was almost unendurable. I couldn't have turned to look at this thing even if I'd wanted to. Something was happening inside me and behind me that held me where I sat. The power of it immobilized me. I didn't experience any fear, only that awful pain associated with what was happening behind me.

Then Debra's hands were on my back – strong, muscular hands. I could feel her making ripping gestures and sighing with the effort. Then she was tearing and wrenching. The voice I could now hear was not the voice I had heard only moments ago. This was Debra's voice, straining with effort and moaning with pain and exhaustion. It was dreadful, and I could barely endure it. Great sighs of relief and sympathy sounded up from within me. Tears flooded out of me, though I felt no pain. For the next twenty minutes or more Debra invisibly flayed me. Towards the end of this bloody work I could still hear the incredible strain in her voice. She was almost screaming. There was no other living soul to witness her pain and I could do nothing but sit there stunned and endure the psychic recoil coming off it.

Then it was over. I could sense Debra standing behind me, her hands resting heavily on my shoulders.

‘It's finished,' she said in a quavering voice. I could feel the whole weight of her body leaning on me. Then she pulled back and I stood up.

‘Are you okay?' I could only ask, my voice low with anxiety.

‘Yes, yes,' she answered. ‘Now, go and do whatever you have to do. I need to go away for a few minutes to do something.' And with that she walked off.

Respect, courtesy, apprehension and confusion washed over me and I walked off in the opposite direction, not daring to let my eyes follow her. I didn't know what I was expected to do. I possessed no well-defined spiritual understanding or ability to deal with what had just happened between us. I walked towards the shining emptiness where the sea and the sky met, hoping that maybe it would expunge all the conflicting emotions that were circling around me. When I thought I was far enough away from that stone post on which I had been exorcized, I stopped. I remembered Debra's comments about the winds of the four quarters. For a few moments I stood and faced the polar extremes. It was some kind of obeisance, and I let the winds of the north, south, east and west blow over me in turn. But there were no winds. I can recall only the constancy of a balmy breeze at every point of my salutation.

I waited for a moment after this rudimentary ritual, then walked back. Debra was already there and she asked me to sit again. I hunkered down on the stone and buried my head in my hands. Debra brushed me down with a handful of spruce telling me only that there were healing properties in the branches.

Everything had changed. All the unbearable tensions and agonizing distress were gone from me. Whatever had taken place on this stone, I was not the victim.

Debra's mood was light. ‘How do you feel?' she asked.

‘Like I have just had a bath,' I answered, without trying to analyse my response.

‘Well, that is exactly what you did have,' she confirmed, and
suggested that we should go back soon. I knew what she meant. We needed a chance to catch our breath and maybe let things embed themselves. We talked easily, sure of this safe place.

‘A Spirit Bear came almost immediately we began,' Debra explained. ‘It had white flashes across its maw. It was a creature of much power. Normally things don't happen with such powerful immediacy. My hands were burned almost to the bone.'

I didn't want to question what had happened. Words often get in the way of experience, or they transmute it. Both Debra and I knew that. I just wanted to sit and soak up everything, let everything find its own place.

‘I want you to come and see something,' I said. ‘There is a very curious arrangement of stones over here, as if someone had been writing.' Debra followed me as I retraced my steps to where I had stood facing the winds. ‘You see, look at this. That's no natural occurrence.'

Debra looked down at the collection of fist-sized stones. ‘I think it says “oneson”,' she said.

The rubric of the lettering was not precisely outlined as winds or passing animals had disturbed it, but the formation clearly spelled out the word ‘oneson'. The lettering was approximately nine inches to a foot long and was about three and a half to four feet in width. I foolishly thought it might have been a land marker for a helicopter. I knew how far Charlie and Lena's camp was from civilization, but because of his reputation many people knew where he was. If he or Lena were ill, a helicopter would be the fastest way to get them to a hospital. Debra soon put my thinking straight. This hill would be so deep in snow for ten months of the year that nobody would be able to find it from the air, let alone read these words. In the winter, if it was necessary, a dog sled and driver could get to the camp and get people out quicker than a helicopter. If either of them was so ill as to require evacuation during the winter, how could they have got up this hill anyway? I gave up. My urban thinking had easily been swept away. We walked around for perhaps another hour looking for something else that might explain the imprint of the stones. All
we discovered were animal bones, the debris of wolf or bear kills.