The Swarm

by Frank Schätzing

  Anawak forgot everything around him as he gazed at the strange beauty of the High Arctic. Colossal snow-white crystals stuck out of the white sheet of the Sound: icebergs. Beneath them the tiny forms of two polar bears raced across the ice, as though the turboprop's shadow was chasing them. Shimmering dots swooped through the air- ivory gulls. Further on, the glaciers and precipitous cliffs of Bylot Island rose into view. Then the plane dropped down, heading towards a shoreline as a marbled brown landscape appeared before them, a settlement of houses and an airstrip – Pond Inlet, or Mittimatalik in Inuktitut, 'the place where Mittima rests'.

  The sun glared into their eyes from the north-west. It wouldn't set completely at this time of year, merely come to rest on the horizon for a few minutes at two o'clock in the morning. When they landed it was nine in the evening, but Anawak had lost all sense of time. He looked at the scenes from his childhood, and felt as though a weight had been lifted from his chest.

  Akesuk had succeeded in doing something that, twenty-four hours earlier, Anawak would not have thought possible.

  He had brought him home.

  POND INLET WAS of a comparable size to Cape Dorset, but in most other respects it had little in common with the south of the island. The region had been settled for over four thousand years, but no one had embarked on any daring architectural experiments of the kind that Anawak had seen in Iqaluit. Akesuk explained that tradition played a more important role in this area of Nunavut than anywhere else. Some people even practised shamanism, he said cautiously, and hastened to add that they were good Christians too.

  They stayed overnight at a hotel. Akesuk woke him early, and they strolled down to the shore. The old man sniffed the air. The mild weather would continue, he announced. They could look forward to the hunt.

  'Spring hasn't kept us waiting this year,' he said, in satisfaction. 'I heard at the hotel that it's half a day's journey to the floe-edge. Or maybe a full day, depending.'

  'On what?'

  Akesuk shrugged. 'All kinds of things can happen. It depends. You'll see plenty of animals – whales, seals, polar bears. This year the ice is breaking up earlier than usual.'

  Now that was hardly surprising, thought Anawak, given what else was going on.

  The group was made up of twelve people. Anawak recognised some from the aeroplane; others he met in Pond Inlet. Akesuk had a word with the two guides, who were putting together the equipment for the trip. Anything that wouldn't be needed was left in the storeroom at the hotel. Four qamutiks were waiting. In Anawak's memory, the sleds had been pulled by dogs, but now they were hitched to snowmobiles and skidoos. The qamutiks hadn't changed, though: two wooden runners four metres long, curving up at the front, to which horizontal slats were tightly lashed. No screws or nails, the sleds were held together with rope and cord, which made repairs considerably easier. Open-topped wooden compartments mounted on three of the quamutiks would protect the passengers from the worst of the weather while the fourth was the pack sled.

  'You won't be warm enough,' Akesuk warned him, glancing at Anawak's jacket.

  'I checked the temperature. It's six degrees.'

  'You're forgetting the wind chill from the sled. And I hope you're wearing two pairs of socks. We're not in Vancouver, you know.'

  There was so much that he had forgotten. He was only just regaining his instinct for what it was like to be out there in the cold. He felt almost ashamed of himself. The challenge was in keeping your feet warm – it always had been. He pulled on another pair of socks and an extra sweater. In their padded clothes and snow goggles, they all looked like Arctic astronauts.

  Akesuk and the guides made one last check of the equipment. 'Sleeping-bags, caribou pelts…'

  There was a shine in the old man's eyes. His thin grey moustache seemed to bristle with pleasure. Anawak watched as he hurried between the sleds. Ijitsiaq Akesuk was nothing like Anawak's father.

  His thoughts turned to the unknown force in the sea.

  Once the expedition started, their decisions would be governed by Nature. 'To survive on the land, you had to adopt an almost pantheistical attitude: you were just part of the living world that manifested itself in animals, plants, ice and sometimes humans.

  And in the yrr, he thought, whoever they are, whatever they look like, however and wherever they live.

  There was a jerk as the snowmobile set off, pulling them over the snow-covered sea. Anawak, Akesuk and Mary-Ann shared a sled. From time to time they saw puddles of water on the surface, where the ice was melting. 'They curved round the settlement on the coastal hill, and headed towards the north-east, moving away from Baffin Island, which now protruded from the ice behind them. Across the sound the soaring-peaks of Bylot Island towered into the sky, surrounded by icebergs. An immense glacier poured down from the mountains and on to the shore. Anawak reminded himself that the surface beneath them was the frozen crust of the ocean. Fish were swimming below. Every now and then the qamutik's runners lifted as they hit a patch of rough ground, but the sled cushioned them from the impact.

  After a while the two Inuit in the first qamutik changed course and the other sleds followed. For a moment Anawak was puzzled, but then he saw that they were making their way round a gaping crack in the ice, too wide to be crossed in a sled. Dark fathomless water appeared inside the blue-tinged icy chasm.

  'This could take a while,' said Akesuk.

  'Yep, we'll lose some time.' Anawak knew what it meant to drive a sled round cracks.

  Akesuk's nose wrinkled. 'I wouldn't say that. Time stays the same whether we travel due east or take a detour further north. Out here it doesn't matter when you arrive. Don't you remember? Your life doesn't stop unfolding because you take a longer route. No time is wasted.'

  Anawak was silent.

  'You know,' his uncle added, with a smile, 'maybe the biggest problem we've had to face in the last hundred years was the qallunaat bringing us time. They believe that time spent waiting is time wasted – wasted lifetime. When you were a child, we all thought so. Your father did so too, and because he couldn't see any way to do something useful with his life, he decided that it was worthless, just wasted time. A life not worth living.'

  Anawak turned towards him. 'Don't feel sorry for him. Feel sorry for my mother,' he said.

  'Well, she felt sorry for him,' Akesuk retorted, and said something to Mary-Ann.

  They had to travel several kilometres until the crack had narrowed enough to cross. One of the Inuit drivers unhitched his snowmobile and revved it at high speed over the gap. Then he threw ropes across to the qamutiks and pulled them one by one to safety. The journey continued. Anawak's uncle pushed a strip of something fatty into his mouth. He held out the tin to Anawak.

  It was narwhal skin. During Anawak's childhood, they'd always taken it on journeys to the floe-edge. It was an excellent source of vitamin C, he remembered – far better than oranges or lemons. He chewed, and the flavour of nuts filled his mouth. The taste evoked a string of pictures and emotions. He heard voices, but they didn't belong to this expedition: they came from the people he'd been travelling with twenty years earlier. He felt the caress of his mother, stroking his hair.

  'Cracks in the ice, pressure ridges…' His uncle laughed. 'Well, this certainly isn't a freeway. Come on, be honest, you must have missed something of this?'

  Anawak shook his head. 'No,' He said and immediately felt ashamed.

  ANAWAK HAD SPENT most of his life on Vancouver Island, and had dedicated himself to marine biology, so he was bound to feel more of an affinity with nature than with any man-made construct. Yet whale-watching in Clayoquot Sound was quite different from sledging across a featureless expanse of white, gliding over the strait towards the ocean, with brown tundra on the right and the glaciated peaks of Bylot Island to the left. While the climate in western Canada seemed to have been designed with humans in mind, the Arctic was spectacularly hellish: fantastically beautiful, but sufficient unto itself, and fatal to anyone deluded enough to
think that humans could conquer it. The settlements looked like a stubborn attempt to take ownership of a land that defied subjugation. The ride in the qamutik to the floe-edge resembled a journey into the unconscious.

  Anawak's sense of time had abandoned him after another night in the midnight sun. They were on their way to the earth's primal source. Even someone as rational as Anawak, who could find a scientific explanation for everything, suddenly saw the logic in the old Inuit story of why the polar bear padded mournfully over the ice. Its love for an Inuk woman had clouded its judgment. The bear had warned the woman not to tell her husband about their illicit meetings, but when the hunter returned after weeks of tracking in vain, she took pity on him and told him where her lover could be found. The bear heard her treachery, and while the hunter went to look for it, it crept to her igloo, intending to kill her. Raising its paw, it was overcome with sorrow. Not even her death could undo the betrayal. It trudged away.

  Anawak's skin prickled with the cold.

  Whenever Nature had allowed man to approach, her trust had been betrayed. Since then, so the legend continued, man had been attacked by polar bears. This was the bears' kingdom. They were stronger than man, but in the end mankind had defeated them and, in so doing, had defeated itself. Although Anawak had turned his back on his homeland for the best part of two decades, he was well aware that industrial chemicals, like DDT and highly toxic PCBs, were transported by the wind and the currents from Asia, North America and Europe to the Arctic Ocean. They accumulated in the fatty tissue of whales, seals and walruses, which were eaten by polar bears and humans, who fell ill. Breastmilk from Inuit women contained levels of PCBs that were twenty times higher than the amount listed as harmful by the World Health Organisation. Inuit children suffered from neurological impairments, and K levels were falling. The wilderness was being poisoned because the qalhinaat still couldn't, or wouldn't, grasp the way in which the world worked: sooner or later, everything was distributed everywhere, through the winds and the water.

  Was it any surprise that something at the bottom of the ocean had decided to put a stop to it?

  After two hours of sledging over the ice they veered right towards the coast of Baffin Island. Stiff from sitting down for so long and from bracing themselves against the bumpy ground, they trudged over the flat ice and up on to the land, past rocks covered with lichen and towards the snow-free tundra. Individual flower buds dotted the mossy waterlogged ground: crimson saxifrage and cinquefoil, colours glowing against the boggy soil. The group had chosen the right time of year to come here. In summer the place would be buzzing with flies.

  The ground rose gently. One of the guides led them on to a plateau with a view of the ocean and the snow-capped mountains. He pointed out the remains of an ancient Thule settlement and showed them two plain crosses that marked the graves of German whalers. Some siksiks, or Arctic ground squirrels, chased each other over the plains, disappearing into burrows in the ground. Mary-Ann picked up some stones and juggled them deftly. It was an Inuit sport, as old as the hills. Anawak tried to copy her, but his efforts provoked a roar of collective laughter. The slightest thing, like someone slipping, always had the Inuit in stitches.

  After a quick lunch of sandwiches and coffee, they crossed an even wider lead in the ice and headed for Bylot Island. Meltwater spurted in all directions beneath the skidoos' rubber tracks. Pack ice piled up in odd formations, blocking their path and necessitating further detours, but it wasn't long before they were gliding beneath the cliffs of Bylot Island. The noise of squawking birds filled the air. Kitti wakes were nesting in the rocks in their thousands. Great flocks circled the cliffs. The convoy halted.

  'Time for a walk,' announced Akesuk.

  'We've only just had one,' said Anawak.

  'That was three hours ago, my boy.'

  Unlike Baffin Island's gently sloping tundra, the shoreline of Bylot Island rose precipitously out of the water. The walk turned into a climb. Akesuk pointed to a trail of white bird droppings leading down from a crevice in the rock, high above their heads. 'Gyrfalcons,' he said. 'Beautiful creatures.' He made curious whistling noises, but the falcons wouldn't be tempted out. 'If we were further inland, we'd have a good chance of spotting them. We'd probably see a few foxes, snow geese, owls, falcons and buzzards.' Akesuk smiled ironically. 'On the other hand, we might not. That's the Arctic for you. You can't count on anything. An unreliable lot, these animals – just like the Inuit, right, Leon?'

  'I'm not a qallunaaq, if that's what you're suggesting,' Anawak protested.

  'Good.' His uncle sniffed the air. 'We'll spare ourselves the trouble of going any further. Seeing as you're no longer a qallunaaq, you're bound to return. Now, let's head out to the floe-edge – we should make the most of this weather.'

  FROM THEN ON time ceased to exist.

  As they made their way east, leaving Bylot Island in their wake, the ice became rougher and the runners took even more of a battering. Cold winds had left thin layers of ice on the surface of the puddles, which tinkled beneath them like shattering glass. Anawak spotted a narrow lead and called to the driver, but the man had already seen it – he turned as the skidoo raced over the ice, pulling the qamutik behind it, and grinned.

  'So you haven't forgotten everything,' laughed Akesuk.

  Anawak hesitated. Then he joined in. He felt ridiculously proud to have spotted a crack in the ice.

  The afternoon light conjured sun dogs in the sky. That was what the Inuit called the peculiar apparitions that formed on either side of the sun, coloured luminous spots created by the refraction of the sun's rays through tiny frozen crystals in the air. Pack ice had stacked up in the distance, forming steep, jagged harriers. Then smooth, open water appeared on their right. A seal rose up, glanced at them and dived. After a while its head popped back up to stare at them inquisitively. They left the water behind them and headed for a larger pool, which seemed to Anawak to stretch forever, until he realised that it wasn't a pool but the open ocean. They had reached the floe-edge.

  Before long they saw a collection of tents ahead. The procession halted. There were greetings all round – some people knew each other already. The group at the camp came from Pond Inlet and Igloolik. They'd caught a narwhal earlier and had carved it up, leaving the carcass further to the east near the floe-edge, in the direction that Anawak's expedition was heading. Pieces of its skin were passed round, and the talk turned to the hunt. Two men joined them, hunters returning from the floe-edge on skidoos, on their way home. Their qamutiks were loaded with hunting kayaks and the bodies of two seals they'd shot the day before. One man said the seals would follow the retreating ice, arriving at their feeding and breeding grounds earlier than usual. He swung his Winchester 5.6 as he talked, and advised them to be careful. The slogan on his cap read, 'Work is only for people who don't know how to hunt.' Anawak asked if he'd noticed anything odd about the whales, whether they'd seemed aggressive or had attacked. Apparently they hadn't. Suddenly the whole camp flocked to listen. Everyone was au fait with the reports and knew every last fact about the phenomena that had terrified the world. As far as Anawak could tell, though, the Arctic had been spared.

  As evening drew in, they left the camp.

  The two hunters headed back to Pond Inlet, while Anawak's party continued in the direction of the floe-edge. After a while they passed the remains of the dead narwhal. Flocks of birds were squabbling over the meat. They carried on, trying to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the carcass, but when they finally stopped it was still within sight. The guides set up camp thirty metres or so from the floe-edge. Boxes were unloaded from the sleds, and the radio mast was erected so that they could keep in contact with the outside world. In no time the guides had pitched five tents, four for the travellers and a kitchen tent, all with wooden flooring and camping mats. Three sheets of plywood daubed with white paint served as a toilet, housing a bucket lined with a blue plastic bag and topped with a scratched enamel seat.
r />   'About time too,' beamed Akesuk.

  While the others finished setting up camp, he was the first to disappear into the honey-pot, as the Inuit nicknamed it. The guides detached the skidoos from the sleds and proposed a race. Anawak was shown how to manoeuvre one, and soon they were shooting past each other on the shimmering ice. Anawak's heart lightened. He loved being there.

  The races continued until one of the men from Igloolik was declared the overall winner, and their thoughts turned to food. Mary-Ann shooed them out of the kitchen tent, so they stood outside, leaning up against the sleds and huddling together to fend off the cold. A young woman started to tell an Inuit story of the kind that was told and retold but never the same way twice. Anawak could remember such stories lasting for days.

  It was getting on for midnight when Mary-Ann served dinner – grilled Arctic char, caribou chops with rice, roasted Eskimo potatoes, and to wash it all down, litres of tea. The kitchen tent was supposed to accommodate everyone, but it was unquestionably too small – Akesuk was furious, and cursed the man from whom he'd hired it- so they took their plates outside and balanced them on the sleds and boxes.

  One after another, the travellers retired to bed. Then at half past one in the morning, Akesuk reached into the depths of his bag and brought out a bottle of champagne. He winked slyly at Anawak. Mary-Ann turned up her nose and said goodnight, so Anawak and his uncle were left alone, with the exception of the man on bear-watch, who was standing on a mound of pack ice with a rifle at his feet.

  'In that case we'll have to drink it by ourselves,' said Akesuk.