Agviq

by Michael Armstrong

  Claudia giggled, shook her head. “Ivory. It’s a keeper, Rob. You take it.”

  “You don’t want it?”

  She fingered the carving of agviq on its thong around her neck. “No.”

  “Well,” he said, taking the tusk from her, “maybe I’ll make it an ice probe.” He reached back, shoved it in an outside pocket of his pack.

  Beach. Sand and beach. They walked on, past hunks of dense oak timbers—relics of century-old whaling shipwrecks—where vegetation had taken root in the lee side of the timbers, the first step in the construction of a dune. Fibrous mats of pale orange rootlets had packed the soil hard around the timbers, and now the drifting snow settled where the sand had built up: frozen pockets of moisture for the spring. New life, Claudia thought, seeds of villages being born. Copper spikes stuck up from the dark brown wood, the copper weathered to a bright green patina. Occasionally they’d kick up copper plates a foot square, one side dusky reddish brown, the other side gleaming green like the spikes, ice frozen into little windows in the dents of the metal. Things last up here, she thought. The cold preserves them.

  The beach rose up to another dune complex, like the slightly elevated terrace Pingasagruk had been on. Rob and Claudia hiked over the tundra, up and over frost cracks cutting like little gullies in the dune. Claudia had a theory about such cracks, that they acted like black holes for artifacts, slight depressions that storms pushed things into. She’d tested the theory at Pingasagruk, and found beneath the more recent driftwood a little treasure trove of harpoon points, bolas balls, even a set of delicate ivory earrings.

  On this dune the cracks trapped fragments of plywood, fishing nets, tampon holders, whiskey bottles, and millions of little Styrofoam packing beads. She flipped over one piece of plywood and saw faded, stenciled Cyrillic lettering.

  “Zavod imeni,” she read aloud, recalling her college Russian. “‘Factory named—’”

  “Factory named what?” Rob asked.

  Claudia shrugged, set the Soviet plywood down. “Doesn’t matter—it’s probably gone anyway.”

  One large frost crack led to a square thaw pond, rusty-colored mud on the bottom and edges, clear ice six inches thick on its surface. They took their packs off, sat down and leaned against them.

  “I wonder if the water’s good,” Rob said.

  Claudia stared at the pond, shrugged. “We used stuff like that to bathe in at Pingasagruk. Got to drink sometime.” She rummaged in her pack, unstrapped an E-tool—a folding shovel—from the side, then pulled out a little plastic pump attached by a short tube to a little plastic cylinder. “Filters out giardia parasites and radioactive particles,” the label on the little cylinder read. She shook her head. Let’s hope, she thought. With the E-tool she broke through the ice, then pumped and filtered the pond water into two Sierra cups, and handed a cup to Rob.

  “Cheers,” she said, and drained the cup. The water tasted cold, brassy, but not bad, not salty or briny. She pumped another cup, drained that. Rob dug through his pack and handed her a piece of grape fruit-leather.

  Claudia stuffed the wad of thin pulp into her mouth, chewed it quickly. She repacked the filter, reached down, strapped the E-tool back on her pack and tightened the straps holding her shotgun across the pack’s top. Jerking the backpack up, she backed into the straps and snugged the pack tight around her shoulder. Claudia looked out at sea, at the sun below high noon and sinking toward the west.

  “Burning daylight,” she said. “You want to camp here for the night or keep going?”

  Rob leaned back against his pack, staring south across Peard Bay, at the flat and shiny new ice. He turned toward her, looked up at her pack already on her shoulders. He looked down the coast, down the dune complex. “Dunes seem to go a ways. We can camp anywhere—might as well keep going. That site down the coast, Ataniq? How far is that?” He stood, reached down to pick up his pack.

  “A few miles—six miles from Pingasagruk. It’s where Peard Bay narrows and the barrier dunes meet the coast.”

  “A few miles . . . You want to try to make Ataniq?”

  She smiled. “You got it, babe.”

  * * *

  The greenish light of the setting sun shined on the bleached driftwood cabins at Ataniq. Claudia’s main adviser at the State University of New York at Binghamton, a Professor Cassell, had done his thesis work there; it had been a passing reference in his dissertation that inspired her to excavate Pingasagruk. Ataniq, he’d written, might have been contemporaneous with Pingasagruk. If they were, he’d wondered, why were they so close? Cassell had postulated that shifting leads in the ice had caused the ancient inhabitants to move from one site to another.

  “A close analysis of house types, ownership marks on harpoon points, and other comparative features,” he had written, “would answer the question of whether the same people lived at both places within a generation.” Cassell told her he’d put that in there as an open invitation for another dissertation, but she’d been the first person to bite at the bait.

  More modern buildings had been built over the ancient ruins, an old trading post. Cassell said he’d found whiskey bottles under one corner of a building, but Claudia never knew if he had been kidding or not. Wind off the ocean whistled through the collapsing buildings, shreds of gray canvas from someone’s more recent tent whipping in the wind. A caribou skull and rack glared down at them from one shack’s cross beams.

  Claudia shuffled up from the beach, around the lee side of the largest cabin. She stared down at her feet, out of habit scanning the tundra for bits of chipped chert and idly noting a profusion of recent .30-06 rifle shells, still-shiny golden brass. Rob came up behind her. She looked around for bones, curious what else the hunters who had been here had killed; so intent on the ground was she that she didn’t see the aviator until she almost stepped on his body.

  His right leg folded back in an unnatural hinge, and his bare, swollen feet poked out from a ragged flight suit. Claudia stopped, jerked her head up, one hand reaching back for the shotgun strapped across the top of her backpack. Rob stopped short behind her, glanced down at the body, then began to help her with the gun.

  The man’s face had been ripped or shot away, and his belly had been chewed open and the entrails removed. Enough remained of his flight suit and insignia to identify the man’s nationality: a red flag on one sleeve, the letters CCCP stitched over a remaining pocket. Soviet. Claudia looked up from his shoulders, above his face, to where frayed ends of parachute cord flapped in the wind from the loops of a chest harness. A Soviet flier. Good, she thought, good that he’s dead.

  Something had chewed off his left arm, so that the end of his scapula poked out from his shoulder, little strings of muscle still attached. Footprints the size of Frisbees led away from the body. Claudia backed up, bumping into Rob.

  “Give me that goddamn gun,” she said, holding her left hand out to him. He slapped the shotgun into her hand, and she pulled it forward, clicking the safety off, sliding the action back and forth, ejecting three rounds, the first two number-four buckshot, the last one a rifled slug. Shaking, she reached down, picked up the rounds, pocketed the buckshot, and slid the slug back in the shotgun.

  “A polar bear’s been here,” she said, “there’s a polar bear around. We are not camping here, Rob, we are absolutely not camping here. Did I load slugs in this thing?”

  Rob put a hand on her shoulder, steadied her. “You had it loaded two buckshot, three slugs, like we decided. You ejected the buck and one slug, and put the slug back in.”

  “Three sluggers left?”

  “Yeah. You want me to take the gun?” he asked.

  “I can handle it,” she said. “Better put more slugs in.”

  “Good idea,” a voice said to her right.

  She whirled around and raised the gun, her finger starting to squeeze the trigger; then she relaxed, clicked the safety on, and let the shotgun hang from the crook of her arm.

  “Jim,” she said.


  Jim, Jim with the sea otter cap and the wolverine-trimmed green parka, stood on the dune edge. A .30-06 rifle hung from his shoulder, his right hand tugging at the strap.

  “It’s the anthropologists,” he said. “What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be in Barrow?”

  “The, uh, bush pilot never came, Jim,” Claudia said.

  “Probably had a lot on his mind.” Driving up the beach behind Jim were Horace and Oliver on four-wheelers, something large and white strapped to the back of Horace’s Honda.

  Claudia tried to smile at Jim, but couldn’t shake his grimace. His lips looked pale, light pink, and a thin trickle of blood oozed out from his mouth. Little sores dotted his forehead. “Yeah,” she said. “I guess the bush pilot got preoccupied.”

  Horace and Oliver stopped their four-wheelers, got off, walked over and stood next to Jim. The strap over the holster of Horace’s .22 revolver had been unsnapped; Oliver held a .375 Ruger rifle by the butt of the barrel. Claudia could identify the white thing on the ATV: a bear skin, a polar bear, ursus martimus, she thought to herself. She nodded at the two men, and they nodded back.

  “So where you headed?” Jim asked.

  “Wainwright,” Rob answered. “Your village.”

  “Uh-uh,” said Jim. “I don’t think you want to go to Wainwright. Wainwright’s had a little trouble.”

  “I guess,” said Claudia.

  “There was a war,” Horace said. He smiled. “You know, huh?”

  “We know. Heard it on KBRW,” Rob said.

  “Ain’t no KBRW anymore,” Horace said. “You see our Russkie?” He walked over to the dead aviator, kicked the body. “Nanuq got the Russkie. We got Nanuq. Like winter, you know? Winter’s going to get Russia, but we’ll get winter.”

  “Right on,” said Oliver. “We’re Eskimo, man. Big winter coming, that’s what my old man says. Freeze-up’s never come this early. Big winter coming, but it don’t mean shit to us. We’re Eskimo, you know?”

  “Inupiaq,” Jim said silently.

  “Right, Inupiaq. The Real People, you got it?”

  “Sure,” said Rob. “So things are bad in Wainwright, huh?”

  Jim shrugged. “Lots of people dying from the radiation.” He picked at his sores. “A little hungry, yeah. We got a polar bear, though.” He kicked at the Russian. “Better off than him.” He glared at Claudia and Rob. “You don’t look so bad. Smile.”

  “Huh?”

  Jim tugged at the rifle strap. “Smile.” They both smiled, foolish grins like in old family photos. “Yeah, you look good. Your gums aren’t bleeding? Your hair isn’t falling out? No sores, no shits? How come?”

  Claudia shrugged. “That house we dug up? We filled it in, made sort of an iglu, and stayed underground.” She looked down at the ground, shuffled her feet, looked back up. “Wainwright—we were heading to Wainwright. We . . . well, if there’s anything left, any—”

  “No,” said Jim. “You can’t go to Wainwright. Wainwright doesn’t want you.”

  “But, we . . . maybe we can help,” said Rob.

  “Fuck you, honkey,” Horace said. “We don’t want your goddamn help.”

  “Jim,” Claudia said, “Jim, I know—well, where else can we go? Rob’s right, we can help, we’ll hunt, fish, whatever. We’re stuck out here, Jim. Stuck.”

  “You want to help, woman?” Jim asked. “Sure, you can help. Make babies, sew parkies, chew hides: women stuff. Him?” He jerked his head at Rob. “He’s a dumb shit. He’s no hunter. He can’t help. You want to come? Fine. Horace will give you a ride. But him? We don’t need him.”

  Claudia glanced at Rob, smiled at him. Dumb shit? No, she didn’t think so. “We can’t do that, Jim. You know that.”

  “Our terms, lady, our terms. This has always been our land, always, even when the whites took it, even when our own people sold it. See? We’ve always controlled this land, and now . . . now we rule this land, understand? If you want to come to Wainwright with us, it’s on our terms, got it? You want to come to Wainwright, woman?” Jim walked toward Oliver’s orange Honda, and Claudia shook her head and turned away.

  “But where will we go?” Rob asked. “We can’t survive on our own. We need you.”

  Jim turned and smiled, showing his bleeding gums, the empty holes in his mouth. “It makes me feel good to hear that, honkey. ‘We need you.’ No white man has ever said that to us. But it’s too late, man, it’s too late. Where can you go? Go back to Pingasagruk and crawl back in your iglu and see if you can survive. Or”—he paused, jerked his chin north—“go back to Barrow. Bunch of assholes up there, maybe they’ll take you.”

  “Barrow?” Claudia asked.

  “Barrow,” Jim said. Horace and Oliver had mounted the four-wheelers. Jim waved his arm around, up and down the coast. “All of Peard Bay, Kugrua River—this is our land, and we don’t want you here. We’re going back to Ulguniq—Wainwright, to you—because our people need this meat. But we’ll be back, and if we find you here, or any place south of Ataniq, we’ll shoot you. You understand?

  “We’ll shoot you.”

  Jim got on the four-wheeler, Oliver and Horace started up their Hondas, and the hunters roared down the beach.

  Chapter 3

  GREEN sky, brown ice: the mouth of Kugrua Bay stretched a mile wide before Rob and Claudia, colored by sediments and scoured by snow and sand into a glossy brown plain. The sun rose from straight-on east, over the bay, sneaking between the ashy clouds and the horizon, turning the sky pea green, searing the band between land and clouds a brilliant orange: green sky, orange horizon, brown ice.

  At Ataniq they had buried the dead Soviet flier in a shallow depression, piling gravel and loose timbers over his body. A peace made with their enemy, and with polar bears who might be attracted to the smell of raw flesh. Claudia and Rob then hiked as far from the old trading post as they could before darkness enveloped them and cold stopped them.

  A swampy hunk of land sprawled south of Ataniq, from where the easternmost tip of Peard Bay poked into a little inlet between Ataniq and the sea, and to Kugrua Bay, a smaller bay off Peard Bay. From Ataniq the long spit of land began that ended in Point Franklin, and from Point Franklin the Seahorse Islands extended down in a chain across the mouth of Peard Bay to the mainland. The archaeologists had thought of hiking back up to Point Franklin, stopping at Pingasagruk to retrieve the rubber raft, and then hopping across the Seahorse Islands if the sea ice hadn’t frozen. Too long, too risky, they’d decided; after camping for the night, they had gone south instead.

  Walking down the coast of the swamp, over the frozen marshes and puddles, they had come to the mouth of the bay, where the Kugrua River expanded into a bay that looked like an embryo on the map: head a little bay to the east, body a blob, the Kugrua River a long umbilical cord connecting the bay to the heart of the tundra. Claudia had studied and studied their maps, three one-to-quarter-million USGS quadrangles of the coast from Wainwright up to Barrow, and she’d thought, No way around it, the only way to walk to Barrow is to hike around the south—and mainland—side of Peard Bay.

  But to get to the mainland and the broad beach stretching north to Barrow, Claudia and Rob would have to cross the mile of ice between the bit of beach they stood on and the safety of Eluksingiak Point across the bay. Rob walked up to the edge of the ice, to the ice that looked like frozen, weak coffee, dirt and sediment trapped in the ice. After they had discussed crossing the ice the night before, Rob had made an unaaq, an Inupiaq hiking stick, by attaching the ivory tusk Claudia had found to a five-foot piece of driftwood. He stared down at the ice, tapped it with the unaaq.

  “I don’t know, Claudia,” he said. “Looks mighty thin.”

  “You want to wait a few days? Maybe Jim will come by and give us his opinion. We could discuss ice conditions right before he blows our heads off.”

  “Shit, I didn’t say that . . . If we’d gotten the rubber raft, we could just slide over the ice, safe and sound.”

  “Would have
taken us two days to get the raft and come back, Rob. We’ve been over this.”

  “I know, I know: ‘We don’t have enough food, we have to take the risk, blah, blah, blah.’ But it’s a mile, Claudia. You know anything about ice? I don’t.”

  “One unaaq thrust and it’s safe, that’s what Richard Nelson says. Coastal Subsistence in Wainwright, right out of the elders’ mouths. Try it.”

  “But what’s ‘one unaaq thrust’? A hard thrust? A light thrust?”

  “Just hit the fucking ice, Rob, and see if the damn stick goes through, okay?”

  He pulled back his arm, raised the staff down, and hit the ice with the ivory point. It dug in, chipped a hunk of ice away, but did not penetrate. Rob shrugged. “That’s a thrust. It didn’t go through. But I’m still not convinced . . .”

  “Shit,” she said. “Why don’t we just pretend we’re skating?”

  “What?”

  “You want honkey folklore? I’ll give you honkey folklore.”

  She took her pack off, dug out the E-tool, and started whacking away at the hole started by Rob. The little chunks of ice cracked away, the point of the collapsible shovel biting into it, until she had made a fist-size hole in the ice. Water splashed up, spreading across the ice. Claudia enlarged the hole, evening out the sides. She put the E-tool down, grabbed her measuring tape from her pack, and calculated the ice’s thickness.

  “All right,” she said, “how’s this: ‘One inch, keep away; two inches, one may; three inches, small groups; four inches, okay.’ Skating rules-of-thumb. It’s three inches thick. I think we can go across.” She repacked the E-tool and tape, slung the pack over her shoulders.

  “If you think it’s safe . . .”

  “I don’t think it’s safe. I think it’s a little risky. But I think doing anything else is just as risky, so I’m going across.” She turned from him and started across the ice.

  “Claudia . . .”