by Ken Altabef
“Sit still,” she whispered.
Empty the mind. Concentrate. With a series of deep breaths, she woke up a tiny fire within her chest and grew it to the size and shape of a little ball. Her concentration was not quite good enough to achieve the intense flush of the full tumo, but soon her skin had dried and the children had settled down.
It was just as well. She had reservations about using the tumo in the center of the crowded encampment. She’d never learned the secret of where the heat came from and suspected it was drawn from whatever elements were at hand — the skins, the air, and everything else. She didn’t want to steal warmth from the other families.
She settled in for sleep, Ben still tossing and fretting beside her.
A horrific crash sounded nearby, startling everyone awake.
“What was that?” hissed Kigiuna. Even exhausted he remained, as ever, a vigilant sleeper. This skill, Alaana thought, came from many nights spent out in the wild with an ear cocked for roving bears and wolverine.
“Was that Maguan’s tent?” asked Alaana. Her two brothers, Maguan and Itoriksak, had joined their families in the tent next door.
Kigiuna stood up, stepping over Alaana on his way to the flap. A blast of wet, cold air flew into the tent. “I can’t see anything. Let’s go.”
Groping for her boots, Alaana heard strained voices in the night.
“Angatkok!” someone cried. “Angatkok!”
“Hai!” she answered.
Her boots frozen stiff, it was all but impossible to push her feet in. She reached out to the remnant of the spirit of the seal still within the boot. Will you soften, my dear friend? she asked in the secret language of the shamans. Can you yield just enough so that I may get my foot in? It was no use. The spirit was willing, but the sealskin was frozen too hard. Alaana groaned, forcing her foot in.
Her mother had already put some tea to boil over the lamp and had one of her father’s boots in her mouth. Kigiuna was chewing the other.
Ben sat up, holding the children close. “What’s happened?”
“I don’t know,” said Alaana. “Give me my coat.”
The voices outside took on a frantic pitch. “Hurry, please! Murder! Murder in the night!”
Alaana stepped out into the drifts. Starlight painted the snow-covered tents in a hazy silver light. Two people, her cousin Avilik and another man, were at work outside the tent, shoveling snow from the entrance.
The fierce wind slapped Alaana’s face hard. This was the most intense cold she had ever experienced.
“We can’t stay out here long,” warned Kigiuna, “even in two heavy parkas.”
Several people were waiting. “Over there.” They didn’t say anything more. They hung back, not eager to get in her way.
Scraps of frozen meat lay scattered all about the fresh snow, the collapsed tent, everywhere.
Puzzled, Alaana bent to touch them. One of the small, blood-red pieces stuck painfully to her fingers. She had never felt anything so cold. Alaana tried to brush it off against her coat, but couldn’t remove the frozen bit of meat without tearing her skin. In the end she left it alone thinking maybe later, if she warmed her hand over the lamp, she might get it off.
The larger pieces told the grisly tale. They were the remains of a dead body, the flesh frozen a deep icy blue.
“I’ve seen people freeze to death, surely,” said Kigiuna, “but not like this. How could such a thing happen?”
Alaana had no answer. One thing was sure, this death was not natural. The victim’s body had been frozen and then shattered, the fractures taking bizarre directions rather than along natural lines. She saw segments of an arm, broken every inch or so, the bones exposed in clean little circlets. Half of a face.
In addition to the pieces having irregular shapes, there seemed far too many. It was a mental nightmare assembling the frozen parts into a coherent human form. How much blood did a human body contain? Surely not this much.
“Who did it?” asked Avilik.
“This is not murder,” said Alaana. “It looks like a body, burst apart from the inside.”
“It’s Asatsiak,” said someone.
“Where are her children?” Alaana asked.
“Safe,” said another. “With her sister. They ran away.”
The shaman nudged one of the parts with her foot. As her boot touched the frozen flesh and blood it shattered into fine crystals. She saw the face dissolve away, bursting into tiny grains of ice.
She heard sobbing. It was a woman’s voice. Alaana shifted her perceptions into that of the spirit-vision and the silvery lighting of the scene melted into a purplish hue. The soul-lights of the people burned like oil fires in the snowblind night. But there was no woman. The weeping continued.
“Be calm,” she said. The words not enough, she concentrated her will, projecting a soothing radiance into the air around her. The wailing stilled for a moment.
“Breathe easy,” she said.
The figure of a woman materialized before her, kneeling on the ground a few paces away. The shape came slowly into focus as if gathering itself from the star’s silvery light.
Asatsiak’s ghost looked much as she had during life. She gave the impression of being poorly fed, though it was lack of appetite that kept her lean and no fault of her husband. She was dressed in a grimy sleeping shirt that was little more than a ragged coverlet. Asatsiak was generally disliked among the Anatatook because she coughed incessantly and had the foul habit of spitting all the time, even in other people’s houses. She had not the decency to project it out the door but instead allowed the phlegmy saliva to trickle slowly out of her mouth in a long string onto the floor.
The heaving of her nightshirt gave the impression she was panting, though she no longer need draw breath. Her eyes darted fearfully within the pale silver glow of her face.
“Hurts,” she said. “It hurts!” The ghost broke into a long moan of pain and sorrow that devolved into another fit of panicked weeping.
“Be calm,” said Alaana soothingly. “It doesn’t hurt. You’re free from pain now. It won’t hurt any more.”
Kigiuna touched her elbow. “You see something?”
Alaana nodded, pushing her father gently back.
Asatsiak looked through Alaana as if the shaman appeared insubstantial to her, instead of the other way around.
“Alaana?” she said. “Angatkok, is that you?” Her voice cracked as she spoke the words, as if she were hoping for the appearance of the shaman, but afraid for it to be true. For her presence here meant the unthinkable.
“Yes,” said Alaana.
“Ohhhh,” she moaned. “No. No!” She cried out again, her entire body shaking. Her hair flapped around her face, wild and disheveled. Tiny red lines appeared in the silvered complexion, the fault lines where her face had broken apart. Her gaze found the shaman. “You’re supposed to help us, to protect us!”
Her words cut like knives. Alaana flinched, choking back tears.
“I will set things right,” she said. Her wavering voice sounded insincere, even to her own ears. Is this what she had come to? Promising the impossible?
The ghost reacted badly. She ran her hands down along her spirit-body to see if it was whole. Suddenly realizing how insubstantial she felt, her eyes bulged, understanding as if for the first time that she was dead. The red lines darkened in her face. Alaana heard a cracking sound.
“Koonooyah! Koonooyah!” she cried. “Where are the children?”
“They are safe,” said Alaana. “Can you tell me what happened?”
“Ahhhh,” she cried, pink foam spewing from her lips. “It hurts! It’s cutting me. Freezing. Inside me. It hurts so much!”
“There is no pain,” said Alaana. “Hear the whispered hoot of the snowy owl.” She pointed to the ethereal figure of a bird glowing brightly not far away. It rested unruffled atop the tent pole of a neighboring house. “Go with the owl. She will lead you to the ancestors. Go now. Don’t remain here. There is noth
ing for you here. Be at peace.”
“Don’t let it come back!” Asatsiak said, her eyes agog. “Oh please, it’s cutting me. Ohhhhh.”
“Hush!” said a man’s voice. “The snowy owl will take you. Don’t linger.”
Alaana was surprised to see another ghost standing beside the woman. It was her husband Koonooyah. He had always been a man of good reputation, had a steady hand with the bow, sometimes bringing in three or four caribou at a time, and had used his largesse to adopt several orphaned children. Even in death he stood straight and tall, with eyes that seemed to penetrate deep into the night.
“Tell me, Koonooyah. What was it? What happened?”
“It was a fearsome thing,” he said grimly. “So cold, the night, the wind. Ripping at the tent with an angry hand. It came out of the storm.”
“Was it a bear?”
“A bear with a thousand claws. A mouth with a hundred teeth.”
Asatsiak shrieked.
“Hush!” Koonooyah hissed.
“Did you see it?” asked Alaana.
Koonooyah’s ghost shook his head. “It came out of the storm. It went inside me. I felt it freeze my heart. It was quick. And then…” Even the brave hunter faltered for a moment, recalling the terrible pain. “Then it broke me apart.”
These words stunned Alaana. She hadn’t seen this coming. She hadn’t been looking out for trouble. She’d been in her tent, wracked by her own personal problems, trying to sleep. Another failure.
“I don’t hold you to fault,” said Koonooyah. “But I want you to kill it. I want revenge.”
“You’ll have it,” said Alaana. “Rest now.”
Koonooyah glanced over at his wife.
“She needs you,” said Alaana. “Go with the owl. Follow her home.”
The hunter’s ghost nodded gravely, then helped his wife up from the ground. He spoke softly to Asatsiak with words Alaana couldn’t hear. The snowy owl fluttered her blazing wings. With a last look at the Anatatook camp, the two figures turned away. Alaana watched them go.
“They have gone across the divide,” she announced to any who might hear. “Go back to your tents.”
The people were eager to comply. Kigiuna was rubbing his arms across his chest to keep from shivering.
“Go on,” Alaana said to her father. “I’ll be right behind you.”
Alone in the night, the shaman took a deep breath and held it, keeping the enhanced perceptions of the spirit-vision. If some monster was out here, she couldn’t see it. As the pressure built in her lungs, she held fast, listening. She felt the blood rushing through her body, listening.
Alaana’s spirit reached out into the night.
She felt something, a noxious buzz in the distance.
“Go!”
The strangeness of the voice sent a chill all the way to her bones. The message broke her concentration, causing her to draw breath at last. As she pulled in a frigid gasp, she heard something more.
“You don’t belong. This is ours.”
CHAPTER 31
THE FACE OF THE WIND
“Amazing! Look at them out there working.” Peeking out the flap, McPearson had to admire the natives. “Piling up blocks of ice against the wind, lashing and bracing the tents. Tirelessly. No matter how hopeless it seems. They never give up.”
“They must be used to it,” said Oakes. He lay huddled on the floor of the tent, a misshapen figure beneath a bulky parka and a fur blanket.
“Maybe so, but I doubt it,” returned McPearson. “These flimsy tents weren’t meant for this kind of weather, I’m sure. They make ice houses in winter. Much warmer.” He glanced over at Ivalu and her children, three indistinguishable lumps buried beneath a mass of furs on the other side of the headman’s tent. Occasionally a frightened sob leaked out of the pile. Did it come from the children or the wife?
“Well, we’re better off than any of the others,” said McPearson. He gestured toward the lamp, which burned hotly. “As long as our coal-oil holds out, anyway.”
Oakes held his thermometer up, squinting at the numbers. “Twenty below! Inside, with the lamp at full bore and its twenty below! Oh Christ, we’re going to die.”
“Buck up, why don’t you? You’re worse than the children.”
“I wonder what it would read outside,” said Oakes. He shot a vacant-eyed glance at the entrance.
“Don’t try it. The mercury will explode.”
McPearson turned away from the flap. He stomped his foot on the hard pack floor, trying to get the circulation going. His partner’s constant squawking was jarring his nerves, as if the situation wasn’t bad enough. But McPearson thought the blame was mostly his own. He should never have chosen Oakes for this trip. It took a certain type of man to brave the polar regions, to step out so far away from the comforts of civilization. Placing yourself at the mercy of these natives was no different than casting oneself into the fickle hands of fate. Oakes didn’t have what it took to be a trapper or an explorer. He was a rugged man, but far too concerned with the life and comforts waiting for him back in Europe. Out here, one had to stand on one’s own two feet, play one’s cards and let them fall as they may.
It was quite possible they were going to die on this trip, but McPearson could be as stoic about it as any of these hard-bitten Eskimos. After all, there were a lot of ways to die, and from what he’d heard, freezing to death wasn’t a bad way to go.
Aquppak came bursting into the tent, accompanied by a blast of intensely cold air.
Oakes whined like a baby. When he looked up and saw the state of the headman he said, “Oh, Christ.”
Aquppak was a vision in white, his hood and parka completely encrusted with snow and ice. What little could be seen of his face was as pale as death, his mouth hard-set and blue-lipped. Beneath frosted eyebrows his dark eyes seemed heavy-lidded and dull.
McPearson pulled the tent flap closed behind him. He took off his mittens to work the lashings, and the frozen sinew bit at the skin of his bare hands.
“Ivalu,” said Aquppak, his voice a raspy whisper. His wife pulled herself out of the furs, saying nothing, and rushed to her husband. She began unlacing his mittens with her teeth. The older boy, Choobuk, set upon his father’s back with the snow beater. McPearson was familiar with the tilugtut, a whalebone rush meant to to knock the clothes free of snow so they wouldn’t melt wet inside a warm house. No chance of that today in any case, thought McPearson. The boy, it seemed, was simply beating the frozen parka so that his father might pry it off his body.
With his coat removed at last, Aquppak sat on the floor. His wife handed him some lukewarm tea in a large bone cup, then set about removing his boots. Aquppak drank down the entire bowl of the stuff as if he’d not seen water for days. The child retreated back under the furs, but McPearson noted now that both little heads peered silently over the rim of the blankets.
“Did you find anything?” McPearson asked.
“No,” said Aquppak, his voice sounding a bit stronger after the tea.
“Any chance the storm will lift any time soon?”
Aquppak shook his head.
“Idiots! What the hell did we come up here for?” raged Oakes. “I don’t give a fig for their pelts. I don’t care. What good is the money?”
McPearson didn’t answer.
“I’m freezing,” moaned Oakes. “I can’t even think.”
“Strange, your lips are still moving and your tongue wagging,” quipped McPearson. “There’s nothing for it but to sit and wait. We’re trapped here.”
“Trapped!” whined Oakes. “We’re trapped here.”
A voice called to them over the wind outside the tent. The entrance flap rustled.
Aquppak flicked his head at McPearson, saying in English, “Let her in.”
Oakes moaned again at the blast of frigid air that accompanied the shaman into the tent. Overall Alaana looked much less frozen than Aquppak. Her outer coat was still dark, having only a few ice crystals clinging to the long ha
irs at the collar. She flipped her hood, only mildly frosted and apparently still flexible, down off her head.
“Did you find anything?” she asked.
“No,” replied Aquppak. “No tracks. Everything’s all washed away. It couldn’t have been a bear. Not in the camp.”
“Wolverines?” asked McPearson. He had picked up enough Inupiat over the years to follow the conversation.
Aquppak shook his head. “Somebody would’ve seen something, smelled something. Heard something.”
“How far did you go?” asked Alaana.
“Believe me,” grumbled Aquppak, “if there was anything out there to kill, I would have killed it.”
“So you don’t know what killed them?” asked McPearson.
Aquppak glared at him. “Their house fell down. They froze. Probably some loose dogs got at them. That’s all.”
“That’s not what Koonooyah said,” remarked Alaana.
The headman snickered.
“Who’s that?” asked McPearson. “Koonooyah?”
“The dead man,” explained Aquppak.
“You mean a ghost?” McPearson asked. Though he could understand their awkward language, he couldn’t dredge up their words himself. He could only speak in English. He turned toward Aquppak, “She saw the man’s ghost?”
“She sees ghosts all the time,” Aquppak returned in English. McPearson thought by his tone that Aquppak thought the shaman a bit silly, and didn’t ask about the matter further for fear of causing insult to Alaana.
“It’s over,” declared Aquppak. “I don’t care.”
“If it kills again?” asked Alaana.
“Then I expect you to do something about it,” snapped Aquppak. He used the same demanding, irritated tone she had often received from Tugtutsiak.
“The people are in a panic,” said Alaana. “This is no good. We have to tell them something. We have to keep them calm.”
“You are the shaman,” observed Aquppak.
“Yes. I am.”
“So why don’t you do something about it?”
“What can she do?” asked McPearson.
Aquppak ignored the question. He looked intently at Alaana. “Are you the shaman or aren’t you?”
