Ice Drift (9780547540610)

by Taylor, Theodore

  He could hear Sulu shouting from below, "Keep going!" And even Jamka howled. Alika was afraid to turn his head to look at them, so instead he pressed his body against the ice, ready to ascend another five feet.

  He worked the gaff out of the berg's grasp and hooked it again, another five feet higher, then rested a moment. He kept thinking that if the berg was close to the shore on the other side, it would act as a bridge, even if they had to wade a little. He didn't know how far south the floe had traveled, but being anywhere onshore would be better than continuing to ride it.

  Alika took several deep breaths and once more pulled himself up. Sulu shouted, "Don't fall!" Alika decided to go over to the next crevasse, which was wider and sloped more deeply inward.

  Five feet at a time, resting after each pull, it took Alika almost half an hour to reach the fortresslike top of the berg. When he looked down the other side, he tried not to weep, but failed. The shore was at least two hundred feet away, an impossible distance to wade. Even if he succeeded, he'd be soaked, and there'd be no way to dry off.

  As he stood on top of the berg, the wind dried his tears. He realized it was a useless mission. Any plan for hauling Sulu and Jamka up the icy wall would not have worked. He didn't have even enough strength left to climb it again himself.

  He looked around. To the west was endless tundra, no sign of human life; to the east, across the strait, the white mountains of Greenland were outlined in the moonlight.

  He stayed atop the berg for a few minutes, then used the gaff to help himself slide down. Finally feeling the floe with his boots, he heard Sulu ask, "Can we go ashore?"

  Alika shook his head. "There's too much water on the other side. We're stuck here, Little One."

  "I was afraid of that," Sulu said.

  "I've got to kill a seal right away," Alika said. The day before he'd seen that Sulu trembled as he walked, from lack of food.

  Moonlight was now their only hope.

  The next two days, a light wind blew from the northwest, good for hunting, chasing the clouds. The moon was again shining down, and a most beautiful halo encircled it, as bright as Tatkret himself. Horizontal and vertical rays extended from it to form a perfect cross.

  Alika had instructed Sulu to stay in the iglu and conserve his energy. Meanwhile, Alika spent hours at two different seal holes that Jamka had chosen. At last, on the third night—when Alika had to crawl, because of weakness, to the hole selected by Jamka—a seal rose to the surface for a quick breath, and Alika used the last of his strength to drive the harpoon into its thin skull. Then he found new energy to widen the hole and pull the animal out onto the snow, where it died.

  Alika and Jamka teamed to drag the carcass to the snowhouse, Alika shouting, "Sulu, come out here and look at what we have!"

  Sulu soon appeared, grinning widely. "I knew you'd do it, big brother."

  This time Alika had no freshwater with which to anoint the lips of the seal, and he prayed to the animal's fleeing spirit to allow him this error. He promised he'd never do it again.

  Inside the iglu, away from any bear's snooping nostrils, he began to use the woman's knife to butcher the seal, saving every drop of warm blood that he could for Sulu, Jamka, and himself. They needed it badly and drank it greedily. In the faint shaft of the moon's light through the ice pane, provided at a lucky angle, Alika skillfully cut the seal, first saving every ounce of the blubber so that he could light the qulliq. Later he would boil the meat as needed. But now they ate it raw, slicing the delicious liver into three pieces.

  After filling their stomachs, which soon ached from being so stuffed, they went to sleep, Alika and Sulu thanked the seal and the moon for saving them. There was enough food to last four weeks if they ate very little of it at a time.

  In the morning, Alika chopped some ice out of the berg, melted it, and filled the pair of walrus intestines with the freshwater. It could still be obtained on the surface of the floe, but the frozen snow-coated pools of it were difficult to locate.

  A week later, a strong gale from the northwest ripped the grounded berg loose from the bottom, and Alika heard the ice cracking and felt the floe move, too. With the wind driving it, the berg would sail on south at a much faster rate than the floe.

  It was now late December. They'd managed to survive since mid-October. Alika knew that the sun would faintly return late the next month. Until then the almost constant night would remain.

  But this day there was about an hour of twilight at noon. Alika, Sulu, and Jamka stood outside to celebrate. The winter darkness was always bad at home, but there on the drifting ice, it seemed much worse. Any thin sign of light was celebrated.

  Then they returned inside and climbed up onto the sleeping platform, and Sulu said, "Tell me about the places where there is day and night during the winter. I want to go there."

  "So do I," Alika replied. "But maybe Jamka wouldn't want to come with us."

  Sulu laughed and said, "How do we get there?"

  "It is too far for our kayaks."

  "Tell me about those places anyway," Sulu demanded.

  "The year you were born, Papa took me to where the ship was waiting to go to the North Pole," Alika said. "One of us from the village of Iqaluit, far to the south, had been to the places where there was night and day during the winter. He took care of the ship's sledge dogs. He told Papa about warm waters and trees that were called palms. People swam in the warm waters and soaked up the sun on sandy beaches."

  Sulu said, "Brother Alika, take me there someday."

  "I'll take you there, I promise," Alika answered.

  From time to time over the weeks that passed, Alika had thought how lucky he was to have Sulu with him. Now and then, Sulu had pestered him, but Alika couldn't imagine being stranded on the floe without someone to talk to, someone he knew and loved. He loved Jamka, too, and realized that without the husky they already would have died, but having someone to talk to who could talk back was critical.

  From time to time on sleepless nights, Alika had thought about old Miak surviving on the drifting ice with no human or dog around. Miak should have gone crazy, should not have survived. But he had killed a bear, Alika remembered, with his harpoon, and the nanuk meat had kept him alive for four months. Alika had a dream about old Miak one night, saw him moving around his iglu, talking to himself.

  Only in the Arctic could humans be trapped on a great mass of ice, drifting on a sea that had no mercy. Yet Miak had been rescued by hunters. Maybe he and Sulu and Jamka would have the same luck.

  The Arctic Ocean is perpetually covered

  with ice, and a persistent circular current feature,

  the Beaufort Gyre, sweeps the sea ice southwestward

  along the northwestern coast of Canada.

  12

  Thick snow, driven by a high wind, attacked the floe for two days. Lighted by the qulliq, Alika busied himself scraping meat off the sealskin. Sulu helped. Alika dressed out the flippers of the new seal, saving every morsel. Then he used the Reliance ax to cut several lengths of wood off the sledge so Sulu could carve to pass the time.

  The storm stopped the second night, while they were asleep. In the morning, with the temperature probably thirty below, Alika saw two sets of bear tracks near the snowhouse and also sighted the ever-present white fox tracks.

  "We had visitors last night," he said to Sulu. "Look!"

  Sulu said to Jamka, "Why didn't you wake us up?"

  "The wind. He didn't smell them."

  Sulu said, "You'll have to do better, Jamka."

  The bears were likely on the prowl after burrowing down during the storm. Jamka sniffed the tracks but didn't seem disturbed by them. Apparently, the nanuks weren't nearby. "Better we stay inside for a while anyway," Alika said.

  Then he double-checked the carbine to make certain it was ready for use. There were ice crystals on the barrel, but it cocked easily. Alika well knew that against a charging bear, he'd likely have only one shot. He'd have to depend on Jamka to s
low the charge and not get in the way.

  To pass time, he resharpened every knife and then began kneading the sealskins, though they'd need sunshine for stretching and softening. What else was there to do? Finally, Alika said, "Let's hunt. I need to get out of here." But Jamka's holes weren't active, and they returned to the iglu for another harrowing night.

  The wind moaned and, combined with the creaking of the floe—now and then a muffled collision, perhaps a bergy bit crashing against their floe—and the eerie darkness inside the snowhouse, made each hour agonizing. Alika wondered how long they could take it. How many days and nights could they last, not even counting the dangers of the weather and nanuk?

  Sulu asked, "Will there be another summer for us?"

  "Of course," Alika said. But he had no proof. Maybe not even another night?

  Sulu said, "I can't wait."

  "Just keep thinking about it, brother," Alika said. "Close your eyes and think about all the sunshine. You'll get warm just thinking about it."

  All Inuit lived for the spring and summer, delighted in each day and night, especially those who lived north of the Arctic Circle. The sun would stay above the horizon from mid-May until late July, and even though the temperature could dip to thirty below in the spring for a day or two, or snow could fall, those seasons were like heaven to Alika and Sulu and their people.

  As the snow disappeared, the tundra would be covered with willow catkins and poppies and buttercups and mountain avens and purple saxifrage and Lapland rosebay and heather. Orange lichen covered the rocks; yellow-green moss filled the valleys. Huge Arctic bumblebees came out of nowhere to suck nectars. Summer was goodness and happiness to Alika and Sulu.

  In the late winter and spring, occasionally there were sun dogs, twenty-two degrees on either side of the sun, caused by airborne ice crystals, sometimes accompanied by luminous arcs and bands. The Arctic sky, Qilak, was a place of wonder to every Inuit.

  Summer was the time of year when the moon slept. If it could be seen at all, it was the color of pale white cheese. No stars could be seen. Sun flooded the northland, and the Inuit collected eggs and hunted and fished around the clock. Who wanted to waste the good light and relative warmth bedded down?

  Sulu said, "Will I see the birds again?"

  Alika said, "Of course."

  Sulu's papa and mama had no idea why he had fallen in love with birds. Neither did Alika.

  The only birds that Sulu could see during the winter were the ravens, the dovekies, the gyrfalcons, the ptarmigan, and the snowy owls. So Sulu worshiped the flocks of birds that came in the spring and summer. He couldn't wait each year until the migrating waterbirds were seen, the snow geese and the ducks, the common eiders and gaudy king eiders, the red-throated loons, the black guillemots and the piratical, nest-robbing jaegers. Almost thirty different kinds of birds visited during the spring and summer, millions of them. Sulu could identify most. He knew the perching birds as well as the seabirds that skimmed low over the melting ice.

  When a peregrine dived on a horned lark, he would shout, "Look out, lark!" When the jaeger plundered the nest of a phalarope, he'd yell, "Thief!"

  "Yes, you'll see the birds again," Alika assured him.

  Sulu kept talking about the birds for a long time, until his small voice faded out. He was different from all the other boys in Nunatak, Alika knew, a carver and bird lover.

  Alika had his own memories of the springs and summers onshore. They paraded through his mind after Sulu had gone to sleep.

  He remembered riding, as a child, on the sledge as the dogs drew it across the new grass of May. He remembered gathering bird eggs toward the end of the summer, when he was not much higher than Jamka.

  He remembered picking heather to line the caribou-hide sleeping mattresses for the sealskin tents in which they slept. He remembered gathering cotton flowers for use with dried moss to make wicks for the seal-oil lamps. He remembered picking crowberries and blueberries and cranberries to be dried for Mama's winter cooking. Red bearberries ripened in the fall.

  Most of all, he remembered going hunting for the first time with his papa for musk oxen and caribou and wolves and hares. Hares were hunted by the thousands, as much for their skin, which would be made into socks, as for their meat. Eider ducks were snared.

  Fishing for Arctic char, food for man and dog, began in the spring through lake and river ice. In the fall, the ice was sometimes so transparent the fish could be seen swimming beneath Alika's boots.

  During the spring and summer hunting, fishing, and food gathering, Alika's family often met friends and neighbors from Nunatak, sharing food and talk and songs, sometimes throat singing. Standing face-to-face, they'd make a sound in their throats without opening their mouths. The sounds were inspired by those of the birds or other animals. Mama was very good at it.

  The shared food cooked by the women always tasted better than the food of winter. It could be smelled a mile away as the hunters returned to the campsites. The men occasionally did something special, like placing hot rocks in caribou stomachs filled with blood, to make an instant pudding. Alika loved that.

  Beginning in May, the musk oxen shed large parts of their underfur, and it was gathered to be woven by the women. Almost everything on the tundra—animals, birds, and plants—was gathered. The migratory birds would begin to arrive, pleasing Sulu. And seal pups would be born out on the strait.

  Alika clearly remembered summers when the wolves got to a herd of musk oxen before the hunters. The musk oxen formed a circle, with the cows inside, and the wolves attacked. The bulls on the outside of the circle rammed the wolves as best they could, and the hunters shot the wolves and then the musk oxen.

  Thinking about those days, from the time of childhood until the past spring and summer, Alika felt desolate and sad, lonelier than ever.

  He reached across Jamka's belly to put his hand on his brother's shoulder. Sulu stirred but did not awaken. Alika soon went to uneasy sleep.

  The floes, common in the Greenland Strait during

  the long winters, were sometimes occupied by seal hunters,

  going out in their kayaks, risking high winds

  and blizzards.

  13

  In the first week of the kabloonas' January, the moon was very near the horizon, so it was not much assistance to Alika's hunting. Two days later, Jamka found three possible seal holes, but it was too cold for Alika to sit at them. Sulu stayed home.

  Alika took the carbine with him, of course. But he shook with cold and could not hold the rifle steady. His fingers were numb despite his mitts. He would not have been able to pull the trigger should a bear have appeared.

  Every day they'd go outside for a few minutes to stand in the blackness and look at the iglu, seeing the warm light of the qulliq through the nearly transparent blocks of snow. It seemed to be the only light in a planet of ebony.

  On the tenth morning of January, a towering berg slammed into the stern of their ice ship, shaking it, pushing from behind, and then finally spinning away in the wind and the currents.

  Watching it go, Sulu asked, "What else can happen to us?"

  Alika forced a laugh. "Not much. A berg knocked us loose from shore. A bear stole our food. We almost got lost in a blizzard. We got frostbitten. What did I miss?"

  "We've been missing the feast every week!"

  "I hadn't thought about that," Alika said.

  "I have. Everybody is in the meeting hall, eating and laughing and singing."

  Alika said quietly, "Those are good things to think about. It won't be too long until we're there with everyone again."

  Alika didn't want to talk about the future, when the floe would come apart, though it certainly would happen. But not a day or night went by that he didn't think about it.

  By mid-January, the moon was full again, and Alika and Jamka were out hunting. Sulu huddled a few feet away, staying near his big brother. The moon was shining so brightly that they could see miles ahead. Mock moons were on e
ither side of it.

  Without warning, Jamka tensed. His tail rose straight up, front legs rigid.

  Alika held his breath and slowly raised the harpoon. The indicator rod trembled, and the nose of a seal plugged the breathing hole as Alika drove the harpoon head into it, Jamka howling and Sulu yelling, "We can eat! We can eat!"

  Alika yelled triumphantly, "Yes, we can!"

  The animal was fat, and Alika dressed it in the main iglu, having learned his lesson about storage in the small house and guarding their meals from nanuk.

  The crosscurrents began playing tricks in the afternoon, steering the floe westward, then eastward. It was a ship without a rudder.

  "What's happening?" Sulu asked, face showing alarm.

  "I don't know. Every day we go farther south and there's nothing we can do about it," Alika answered. No one really understood the waters in the strait and how they changed night and day. "Let's just hope the currents push us toward shore."

  Early the next afternoon, when they were down at the floe edge with Jamka intently watching a hole, Sulu yelled, "Nanuk!" and Alika turned around, grabbing the Maynard.

  Thirty feet away, coming in their direction, was one of the largest bears Alika had ever seen. Jamka leaped away from the seal hole, and the bear headed in a run for the Little One, about ten feet away.

  Alika heard the bear puff and fired, hitting it in the head, blood spurting as it hurtled down the short slope, plunging into the water.

  Sulu had dropped into the snow face-first, and Alika sank down, shaking all over.

  Jamka appeared puzzled as he watched the nanuk beginning to float away, leaving a red streak behind. It had all happened so quickly that none of them could move. The bear would have provided at least three months of food. Old Miak had lived on bear meat his last four months.

  Finally, Alika said, "It was bound to happen." He went over and sat beside his brother, an arm around Sulu's small shoulders. "Papa warned that the bear would make a puff before it attacked. I pulled the trigger when I heard the puff."