Agviq

by Michael Armstrong

  The walls of the house and tunnel dripped water from the melting permafrost. Claudia hoped that once covered, and with the decreasing air temperature, the melting would slow down and stop, else they would be awash in water. Out from the side of the entrance tunnel, where the kitchen of the original house would have been, they dug another short tunnel and a pit: their latrine.

  Rob tacked sheets of butcher paper on the inside of the shelter—his idea. The paper had originally been used to make crosses for an aerial photograph session shot earlier in the summer. Now, as Rob had explained, the wax-lined paper should make their shelter airtight and keep the radioactive dust out. She laid out her orange three-man tent on the floorboards while Rob finished up, then they both climbed out of the pit.

  On a tarp spread over the ground Claudia and Rob sorted through their supplies. In the middle of a pile of supplies before them was what she called her paranoia pouch. On every trip she had taken—backpacking, driving, canoeing—the little nylon pouch had come with her. She’d carried it with her since she was ten, when she had sat terrified watching The Day After on the family’s VCR. She had kept the pouch handy, a talisman against the nuclear war she had been convinced would someday come. Modified and altered over the years, she had developed a tool kit that might keep her alive: wire and fishing line, hooks, waterproof matches, her Swiss Army knife, needle and thread, and a crystal scintillator, for detecting radiation. Paranoia, she thought. You’re only paranoid if what you believe isn’t true.

  Rob flipped through a dog-eared paperback book, a bright orange mushroom cloud exploding behind the Golden Gate bridge on the cover. Pulling Through, by some guy named Ing. He’d found it in a used bookstore, Rob explained, and had brought it with him on the trip to read. It was all about some people who survived a nuclear war, but half the book was a bunch of stuff about how they did it.

  Holding the book open with two rocks, he carefully examined a diagram in the appendix. Rob punched an inch-wide hole in one end of a coffee can, then taped the hose of a foot-operated air pump to the can—the pump for an inflatable raft they had brought with them, thinking if they had time they could try to recover a whaling ship’s anchor spotted the summer before in Peard Bay. He laid the can next to six rolls of toilet paper set out along an eviscerated cardboard box, rolled the cardboard around the can and tissues, and taped it together with duct tape in a long tube. Another coffee can, both ends opened up, went on at the other end, and then he wrapped the whole thing in a plastic garbage bag split in half.

  “Ah,” Claudia said, “so this is what the toilet paper’s for.”

  Rob nodded. “An air filter. We don’t want to be breathing radioactive particles, do we? Watch.” He stuck a loose piece of flagging tape over the hole marked “inflate” on the foot pump, then screwed the tube from the toilet paper over the “deflate” hole. Squeezing the bellows on the pump with his foot, the action sucked air through the toilet paper, and the flagging tape over the “inflate” hole flapped in the small breeze.

  “Ing’s idea,” he said. “An econo air filter for a homemade fallout shelter. We’ll build an air shaft just above the entrance tunnel, make a rock filter using the dirt screen at the top of the shaft, and suck air down with this. The rocks will get the coarse stuff and this will get the fine stuff.”

  “What about the stale air?” she asked. “How will you get rid of that?”

  “Ah.” Rob picked up a tin can, triangular holes punched along the bottom. “Bounty of the sea,” he said, tapping a piece of sun-bleached Styrofoam and strapping it with a tape hinge over the open top of the can, a penny stuck on top of it. “Simple valve: suck air in with the pump, it closes. Stop pumping, and the stale, hot air rises enough to open it slightly and push out. Ing’s idea again.”

  Over the tin can and at an oblique angle he stuck a slightly larger length of plastic pipe—more junk from the sea—and stuck the pipe through a hole in the north wall, just above the level of the floor, so the open end of the pipe would be exposed to the surface. Rob then laid the toilet paper filters in a shallow trench outside the house walls and above the entrance tunnel.

  They took a nap in the early morning, shortly after the sun came back up, and finished the shelter by the next day. The blue tarp stretched behind their cooking area reminded Claudia of the wind direction; as long as the wind didn’t shift, and kept coming from the northeast, they would be safe—until the winds brought the deadly clouds in over the poles. Claudia had tried to calculate how long that would take, tried to remember the wind patterns of the Chernobyl accident; about two days was what she figured, two days before the first fallout hit. Within forty-eight hours she and Rob had to be in the shelter.

  While Rob shoveled dirt around the sidewalls of the shelter—backfilling the excavated triangles beyond the house—Claudia pitched the orange tent inside the shelter. Two tubes of nylon poked out at either end of the tent. One tunnel went around the air valve, the end cinched tight like a sphincter. She crawled out the other tube, down into the katak, out the entrance tunnel and up to the surface. With three ragged planks of plywood she and Rob built their roof, the windbreak’s tarp placed over that, with random boards and sticks supporting.

  A small piece of wood went over the trench with the air filters, the end of the filter tube poking out into a narrow shaft rising to the surface. On top of the air shaft they laid the wire screen, and sprinkled loose gravel on top of that. Loose dirt got packed around the air vent, another tin can with holes on top of the tube. The sod they’d cut to first expose the ancient house went back over the new roof. More sod was peeled back from the tundra and laid in three courses on top of the original sod, a foot thick. Enough? Claudia thought, trying to remember how dense dirt walls would have to be to block out the hard radiation. Is a foot enough?

  All the artifacts, all the gear they wouldn’t need in the shelter, everything not necessary for the next weeks of their life, they put inside the collapsed supply tent, buried in another ancient house only partially excavated. When they had finished, the site looked the way it had when Claudia had first seen it: low sod mounds against the sea.

  “Ready to go down?” Rob asked.

  Claudia looked out at the Chukchi Sea. No whales. Had she seen agviq, or his larger cousin, agviqulaq, the gray whale? She didn’t know. No barge—the tug had probably gone on to Barrow, to whatever fate awaited it there. The ice hovered off the coast, miles out still, but she knew that same ice could come rushing into shore, like it had in 1871 when a freak storm trapped the whaling fleet, which probably provided the timbers for Pingasagruk’s houses. The ice could come rushing in, and with it high winds pushing pulverized, deadly bits of Europe at them.

  “Yeah,” she said, “ready to go down.” Claudia crawled down after Rob into the entrance tunnel. She pulled a heavy board across the entrance, and followed Rob’s flashlight up the katak, into their shelter.

  When he sealed the tent’s tube around the air pump and turned off the flashlight, they were plunged into darkness, and into night.

  Chapter 2

  FROM the stink of their sweat and piss and feces the archaeologists emerged three weeks later into the Arctic night. Huddled in their dark shelter, Rob’s and Claudia’s pupils seemed to have dilated to the edges of their irises; it had been Rob’s idea that they come out at night, so as to not blind themselves with the dawn. Dressed in fallout suits made of butcher paper, visqueen, and duct tape, they looked like astronauts from a bad B-movie.

  A light snow had fallen, and Pingasagruk seemed to glow in the moonlight. Claudia squinted through her scintillator, watching for the tracks of gamma rays. The square crystal flickered briefly, and as she held it against the sky, it shimmered with a blue-green light. She sucked in her breath, yanked the scintillator away from her face, glancing back at the open hole of the shelter. Still hot? she thought. It should be over. Claudia looked back up at the sky.

  Through a break in thick clouds a curtain of blazing light rippled down from sou
th of Polaris, violet rays like cracking whips shooting out from the fluorescent sheets. The edges of the curtain rose and fell, crinkling and expanding, out and back and in, the lungs of the heavens breathing. In her fallout suit Claudia heard the slight pants of her own breathing, the roar of the skies echoed in the hiss of her heart. She peered through the scintillator again, watched a brief burst of flashes in the crystal, then smiled.

  “Is it okay?” Rob asked.

  Claudia nodded, pointed up. “The aurora borealis—it’s just cosmic rays, an ion storm.” She handed the square crystal to Rob, shrugged. “The hard rays won’t get us now.”

  “Made it?”

  “Well—yeah, for now.” She ripped the butcher paper suit off, tore off the cardboard box helmet, and turned to go back into the shelter—their house. “A hot meal—that’s what we need: canned stew, coffee, nothing cold. Real food.” She smiled. “And hot water. Let’s wash this stink off; let’s get drunk and make a roaring fire.”

  Rob grinned back at her, ripped his suit off, tossed it on top of hers. “And then?” he asked. “And then?”

  She looked out to the ocean, at the surf frothing as it hit the shore, at chunks of ice lapping in the surf, and at the pack ice moving in closer. “No more ‘and then,’ Rob. New rule for survival: no more ‘and then.’ Take it as it comes.”

  “But we’ve got to plan, figure out how to last the winter. Our food—”

  Claudia turned, shoved his chest. “No more ‘and then,’ Rob, you got it? We’re alive; take that for now, okay? Alive.” He stepped back from her, frowning, eyes squinted nearly shut. “Aw, Rob.” She put an arm around him. “I’m sorry. We’ll figure out what to do.” They stared up at the borealis, at the majesty of ions shedding their charge in their upper atmosphere. Wisps of clouds spread across the auroras.

  “We’ll figure out what to do.”

  * * *

  Dawn came suddenly, swiftly, not the gentle easing of light earlier in August, but the raising like a shade of the fall equinox: one moment, darkness, the next, light—but a strange light.

  The sun rose up from behind the two towers to the east, almost directly behind the shorter tower—the signal tower—whose sides were oriented to the compass. Light reflected off the freezing thaw ponds at the northeast end of Pingasagruk. A haze permeated the horizon, deep purples and orange reds glowing in thick bands. Like the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, Claudia thought, sunsets would be colored differently from so much ash in the upper atmosphere. A blue-green sun pushed its way through the red bands and seemed to burn with half its usual brightness. The sight of that oddly colored sun confirmed in her what the radio had insisted was true. The tremendous amount of debris in the sky—enough to turn sunrises into alien events, enough to turn the sun blue—convinced her of what she had before only intellectually accepted: her world had ended.

  Claudia stared at the sun until even its pale beams hurt her eyes, and dug out her glacier sunglasses. Rob pulled a baseball cap with the KBRW logo low over his forehead, put his own sunglasses on. Day. Daylight come. Claudia turned to face the new day.

  “Okay,” Rob said. “Should we go to Wainwright?”

  “Yeah.” She shrugged. “Longer hike to Barrow.”

  They had laid out their supplies: a dozen cans of food, a gallon can of stove fuel, two boxes of Pilot bread, miscellaneous spices, two jars of peanut butter, her twelve-gauge shotgun, some freeze-dried food, two rolls of fresh toilet paper—the filters had been buried in an old test pit—a box of shotgun shells, a first-aid kit . . .

  “We can’t take all this stuff,” Rob said.

  “Take all the food, all the gear we can, leave the rest in the house. Cache it.” She opened her backpack, stuffed in her sleeping bag, selecting clothes that she had to have, clothes she could do without: socks, lots of socks, yes; shorts, no, T-shirts, no; heavy rain suit, yes—no; wind parka, yes; long johns, yes . . . What she didn’t take she double sealed in two big plastic garbage bags. On top of the pack she lashed her shotgun, the old Winchester Ranger she had inherited from her dad. She ran her hand down the barrel, brushed away a bit of sand.

  “What about the artifacts?” Rob asked.

  “Take a few—for models.” Models she thought. Models for what? “Leave the rest.” She picked up her notebooks, the site map. “I’ll take the notes.” Agviq on a thong around her neck; yes, that she’d take. The notes, of course, Murdoch’s 1892 report, Ethnological Results of the Point Barrow Expedition—the Arctic archaeologist’s Bible—the maps, the drawings . . . Claudia looked at the small mound of paper, sat down. “Damn. I’ll never write this site up.” She jerked her head up, realizing what she had said. “Never. No Ph.D., probably no fucking university, my thesis committee’s probably not even alive . . . damn, damn, damn.” She balled her fists, pounded the notebooks, scattering them to the ground.

  “Claudia . . .” Rob knelt next to her, held her. “It’s only a piece of paper.”

  “It’s not!” She whirled, gripped his shoulder. “It’s a process. It’s grabbing fucking nature by the throat and making her tell her secrets! I had it, I had it . . . this site, I began to understand it. And then—” She let go, wiped her eyes.

  “But you understand Pingasagruk?”

  Claudia stood, looked northeast, up the dunes. “Yeah, I think so. Yeah.”

  “Then the process . . . ?” Rob shrugged. “Maybe you did it. Knowing how these people lived . . . maybe that’s still worth something?” He squeezed her shoulder. “Maybe it will be worth something?”

  She smiled, a thought occurring to her. Keep the artifacts for models? Models. “Yeah,” the anthropologist said. “Yeah. Maybe it is.”

  * * *

  They left Pingasagruk as they had found it, a series of mounds hiding the cast-off tools and toys of people who had used the land: the ancient Inupiaq, and now, them. Everything they couldn’t take—the rubber raft, the pump, the supply tent, extra clothes, extra gear—got left in the old house, the fallout shelter. Rob placed a piece of plywood over the tunnel entrance, piled loose sod—frozen stiff like bricks—over the intake air vent, and poked a driftwood pole wrapped with flagging tape into the little vent. Maybe they’d come back some winter or fall, Claudia thought—use it as a hunting camp.

  Southwest. The beach stretched flat and straight almost to the horizon, a few mounds off in the distance. A little frozen finger of Peard Bay poked along the southern edge of the beach. Tromping through the light snow, they walked away from Pingasagruk, back to where the bush pilot had set them down two months ago.

  Claudia stopped at their old staging area, on the firmer sand as far as their bush pilot had dared to go, and looked back through her binoculars at the site. From the southwest, Pingasagruk seemed higher, the taller mounds clustered at the point where the dune narrowed to a point. Blocks of sod and earth, timbers jutting out of the edge, lay in piles at the point. Early explorers had said it had been haunted, had said spirits had wailed screeches at hunting parties hiking by the abandoned village. Let it rest, she thought. Let the people be. Past is past and future is future. She put the binoculars back in their pouch, fingered the carving of agviq. Thank you for this knowledge, she said to the land. Thank you for the opportunity to share your secrets.

  She turned and left Pingasagruk behind.

  * * *

  The coastline rose and fell in low dunes, sometimes a flat expanse of narrow beach between Peard Bay and the sea, sometimes a series of hummocks like Pingasagruk. Claudia and Rob plodded on, the internal frames of their packs digging into the smalls of their backs. Despite the below freezing weather, Claudia stripped to a turtleneck, her jacket and sweater draped over the top of the pack. She couldn’t get away from the archaeologist’s habit of staring down at the ground as she walked.

  Pingasagruk’s relics had been scattered well beyond the site’s edges. Reinhardt had written about that, had developed a theory about how the artifacts were distributed by wind and wave action as they eroded out of
the site. Depending on its specific gravity, some artifacts settled out near the site. The heavier material, the denser material, got carried hundreds of meters off site.

  Claudia walked through the heavier stuff. Whipped by the wind, the light snow had blown away, revealing hundreds of bleached bones: caribou, seal, walrus, bear. She picked up a driftwood stick, and as she walked she idly flipped over bones, yanking them out of the slightly frozen sand. One bone in particular rolled over less easily than the lighter caribou bones, or even the walrus bones. The underside glowed golden in the morning light. She reached down, picked it up.

  “Look at this, Rob,” she said.

  He came up beside her. She held out a twenty-centimeter chunk of ivory, the sharp end of a tusk, fat end broken off. Like a new moon, one side of the tusk was dark and yellowed, the other end bright white. Along the keel of the tusk, where the bleached and unbleached sides met, someone had sliced away a section of ivory, so the point of the tusk came together like the prow of a ship. Where the tusk had been sliced away the cortex was porous, rougher, not smooth like the outside of the tooth. Claudia hefted the tusk, handed it to Rob. It seemed to weigh about half a pound.

  “Ice probe?” he asked. “Murdoch describes one, I think—a nauligaq: a retrieving seal harpoon, with the probe at the end of the shaft to test the ice.” He turned the tusk over and over in his hand. “Nice piece.”

  She nodded. “Nauligaq? Richard Nelson calls ’em unaaq. Same idea.” Claudia took the tusk from him, imagined it fixed to the end of a staff and used to judge the weight of ice. “Or it could be a root digger.” She hunched over, dragged her foot behind her like a mad scientist’s assistant. “Ivory, ivory,” she mumbled.

  Rob mimicked her, continuing the game: early in the season they had gone beachcombing, and had played fools mad with ivory lust. “Ivory, ivory . . .”