by Robbi McCoy
But the villagers weren’t past hope. They still hoped for a good summer each year, for healthy crops and animals, for good fishing and hunting. And, most importantly, they were still alive.
Asa smiled at her daughter with her milky upper lip.
The sound of excited voices outside drew her attention. She pulled on her coat and opened the door, seeing a group of men nearby. Bjarni saw her and walked rapidly toward her, his towering frame bulky in his layers of clothing. He grinned and pointed toward the shore.
“We got a whale!” he said triumphantly. “We’ll have a feast!”
He brushed the hood off his head, letting his ginger hair fall loose. His lined face was rugged, his jaw hard and square, his chin broad. His thin lips were stretched into a seldom seen exultant smile.
“A whale!” she exclaimed.
“Big enough to feed everyone for weeks.”
As the thankful villagers butchered the whale, the story of the hunt was told and retold by each of the hunters to his friends and family members. They had spotted it close to shore and had gone after it in two boats. Halvard had been first to land a clean hit with his harpoon. The wounded animal had put up a fight, but was overwhelmed by several weapons. While they were battling the whale, three Skrælings had appeared in one of their narrow boats. The men had vowed that they would not lose another catch to Skrælings, so while one boat finished off the whale and lumbered toward shore with it, the other boat put itself between the Skrælings and the whale. They shadowed each other into shore where all three vessels were pulled onto the rocks and the whale was secured. The Skrælings ran toward them, brandishing spears and yelling. There were only three, so five of the men ran out to meet them. A hand-to-hand fight took place with knives and clubs. One of the Skrælings was killed by a stab wound to the chest. The other two then ran back to their boat and paddled away.
“They ran away!” the men boasted, proud that they had defended themselves and their catch successfully this time. “And left their dead brother to be eaten by bears.”
“Heathen dogs,” Bjarni chuckled. He was still excited by the day’s events.
During the course of harvesting the whale flesh, they were surprised at the discovery of a broken-off harpoon tip embedded in the whale’s side. It was a Skræling harpoon made of bone, not iron like their own. The hunters grew less boastful after that, understanding that the first blow landed on this whale had not been Halvard’s after all.
The villagers went to their chapel and gave thanks to God for providing food and asked for protection from the Skræling devils.
Asa said a special prayer for her unborn child, that he or she would not live in suffering. What she meant by that, she didn’t allow her imagination to pursue.
Chapter Seven
Kelly stumbled again and went down, landing on two hands and a knee. She lowered herself to rest on the rock she’d tripped on. Her legs were wearing out. The few miles between their break spot and town belied the difficulty of the journey. Without finding the official trail, she was left to scramble over loose rocks, climb steep hills and skirt dozens of lakes. She had ended up having to backtrack for an entire mile at one point because the route she had chosen dead-ended at an impassable fjord. Now she was a quarter mile into crossing a low area that had seemed like an easy path when she’d chosen it. But it had been a mistake. It was a bog. Her boots were soaked through. Her legs were splattered with mud up to her knees.
If it was winter, she thought, my feet would freeze and fall off. But it wasn’t winter. What would she be doing here in winter anyway? She shook her head, realizing she was having trouble staying focused.
She again conjured up the image of the coconut bunny cake and tried to remember if she had gotten her first bicycle for that birthday. Or was it Christmas? Her memories from that early age were too sketchy. She began to realize that she couldn’t really even remember the bunny cake itself. The clear memory she had of it wasn’t a memory of the actual cake at all. It was the memory of a photograph taken that day. In the photo, she sat on a booster seat at the kitchen table, wearing a pastel yellow dress with a yellow ribbon in her hair, her eyes wide with the prospect of the amazing cake. Her mother faced the camera, standing beside her with the most wonderfully happy expression on her face. That was why she loved that photograph so much. It was because of her mother’s beaming smile. That sort of happiness had gone out of reach for her later, in times Kelly remembered much better. But the photo proved it had once been possible.
Photography was a kind of magic. Some aboriginals wouldn’t allow themselves to be photographed because they thought the image would steal their souls. Remembering that photo of her mother, Kelly could see how one could imagine it had stolen something from her. Because there it was in the photo, a joyful vitality in her eyes that had gone out in later years. But the magic of a photo wasn’t that it stole your soul. It was that it stopped time.
In those days, her mother had dutifully put the photos in albums in chronological order. Like everyone’s albums, the pictures were of special occasions—holidays, birthdays, vacations. The albums ended by the time Kelly reached her teens. That was when everything fell apart and happy family occasions no longer took place. Pretend happy took place for a while. Then even that ended. Dad left and their house became a place of mourning.
Some people grow stronger from defeat. Wiser and more determined, they take life’s lessons into the future with them. Some people let disappointment break them. That’s what her mother had done. Her disillusionment turned to despair and she remained stuck there, full of bitter regret, to the present day. When anybody asked her if she would ever remarry, she would answer, “Why? So I can be tossed on the trash heap again?” She was afraid to risk her heart. But one thing Kelly knew was that you can’t win if you don’t throw the dice.
No, Kelly didn’t remember that birthday. She couldn’t have said who else was around that table or whether or not she got a bicycle or who took the photo. It was her mother’s happy memory, not hers. Funny how you think you remember something when there’s a photo. It begs a philosophical question: what was the difference between a memory of an event and the memory of a photo of the event?
In a way, those ever-joyful photos could seem ironic, and that’s how her mother saw them. Her mother looked at them and thought, It was all an illusion. But it wasn’t like that for Kelly. The photos were her proof that for many years they were all happy. At the time, life was wonderful, and the fact that the happy period ended didn’t change that. It had still happened. It was her childhood. She thought it was a mistake to turn bitter about the good times just because they didn’t last forever. The way to avoid regret over the past and fear of the future was to live in the moment. For Kelly, a photograph was a symbol of that philosophy. It was a true, unchanging glimpse of a moment in time.
Rousing herself from her thoughts, she contemplated her surroundings, trying to decide how to proceed. Ahead of her was more of the same terrain, ground soaked with the water from melted snow and ice. Spotty patches of dense green plants marked the danger zones. She had to try harder to keep out of them. Unfortunately, that meant slowing down.
She felt like crying or screaming. I should have stayed and waited, she thought. Pippa would have come back, eventually. She had probably come back right after she left, found her note and cursed her for leaving. She had probably walked back to town already on her own, on the proper trail, and was in the midst of arranging a search party to look for the stupid American woman who had gotten herself lost on a simple hike from point A to point B.
I am not lost, she assured herself. She knew exactly where she was. All she had to do was look at her GPS receiver to see that she was sitting on the west coast of Greenland beside Disko Bay just a few miles north of a little dot labeled “Ilulissat.”
She was struck with the oddity that a place so alien just two weeks ago, a place she had never even heard of, had now become her symbol of refuge. Ilulissat represented eve
rything that home ever did to anyone: safety, comfort, people who cared.
Yes, Kelly sighed, Ilulissat and the cozy boarding house with its hazardous balconies and dour-faced landlady was the only place she wanted to be right now. She checked her phone again just in case she had wandered into a pocket of reception. “No service” flashed across the screen, just as it had every other time she’d checked. Not a lot of demand for cell phone coverage out here in the unpopulated Arctic, she mused.
How easy all of this would be if I could just dial 911. She shook her head mournfully, realizing that even if she could make a call, she didn’t know the emergency number in Greenland. The day was full of ironies.
She took the last birke out of her pocket and ate it, wishing they had brought more food.
Trying to entice her to come to Greenland, Chuck had promised her “the adventure of a lifetime.” Of course that had piqued Kelly’s interest. She wasn’t someone who would turn down the adventure of a lifetime. She looked around at the vast, hostile wilderness she was trapped in. You were right, you son of a bitch!
She wondered how long it would be before he would miss her. If he even would. He probably wouldn’t notice her absence until tomorrow morning when she didn’t turn up for breakfast. No, she reminded herself, she would be there for breakfast. It was only a few more miles. Chuck would remain cheerfully oblivious to her ordeal and walk into the dining room tomorrow morning, failing to notice her scratches, bruises and haggard appearance and say, “God morgen, alle!” Then he’d tell them how well he had slept once he found that horrid little pea under his mattress that had kept him tossing and turning until midnight.
Then Kelly would strangle him.
She uncapped her water bottle and drained the last of it. The standing water everywhere around her was probably safe to drink. It wasn’t like there was a herd of cows grazing anywhere nearby. But there were musk oxen, she understood, and reindeer. Still, it didn’t seem likely there was anything to worry about. She hadn’t seen a single animal other than sled dogs since she’d set foot in Greenland.
All she had seen so far of marine mammals were a couple of black dots in the water reputed to be seals and a whale carcass on the shore. Just the skeleton, left there by hunters after they harvested the meat. In ancient times, the bones wouldn’t have been left behind. They were valuable, like every part of every animal. According to Chuck, the Greenland Inuit used to make their winter houses out of whale bones, using them like other people use framing lumber, then layering on animal skins and turf to create a cozy den. They knew all the tricks for survival here in the Arctic. Goes without saying, she thought. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been around very long. Like the doomed Vikings.
A mosquito buzzed near her ear and lit on her cheek. She slapped at it and got up. Sitting still was a sure way to get eaten up by mosquitoes. She glanced at her phone to see the time. It was just past five o’clock. The “No Service” message persisted. She had wasted so much time. She began to worry that she wouldn’t make it before the sun fell low on the horizon and gave no warmth. She worried that Pippa might be lying somewhere exposed to the elements. Summer nights in Greenland could get very cold. No more breaks, she told herself, hoping she had the strength to keep moving until she reached her destination.
Aiming hopefully toward what she thought was a trail cairn, she slogged slowly through the muck, thinking that if she could just regain the official trail, she would make much faster progress. It wasn’t a cairn after all, just a jumble of rocks. She was hot, tired and increasingly frustrated. Mosquitoes swarmed around her. The repellent was surely saving her life, but a few intrepid insects had their way with her anyway.
Her only goal now was to get out of the bog. She aimed for a passage up ahead that would lift her out of this mire and onto a higher path. Her pace had slowed to a miserable crawl since she’d entered this valley. She climbed upslope and finally onto solid rock. She kept climbing and emerged at a point where the bay came into view a mere quarter mile away. She stopped walking just long enough to congratulate herself on surviving the bog ordeal.
With the sun low on the horizon, the light had a golden hue, casting long shadows and changing the appearance of the sea ice. The icebergs were yellowed, the color of old newspaper and glowing in an entirely different way than at mid day, with a soft aura. The air had gotten noticeably cooler, so she took her jacket out of her pack and put it on. The bay was as beautiful as ever, but she wasn’t as charmed by it as she had been before today. Everything seemed cold and sinister now.
She continued walking, her feet wet and her boots heavy. Then she caught a flash of color further along, near the shore. She stopped and focused on the spot. There was something orange in the distance, solid bright orange, like fabric or plastic. It wasn’t a natural looking color or shape, but it was too far away to identify. Whatever it was, it was likely a rare sign of human habitation. What if it was a piece of fabric or plastic? It was probably some debris that had washed up on shore. Some careless person’s trash, likely nothing of interest to her.
She let her gaze wander in that direction as she dipped and climbed along a ridge. The orange object went in and out of view, coming gradually closer.
On the other hand, she thought, it might not be trash. It might be a sign of a campsite or even a homestead. She stopped walking again, trying to decide what to do. If she went to investigate the mysterious orange blob, she’d take up a lot of extra time on the detour. She’d have to find a way to get down there and, if it turned out to be nothing, get back up again. After her march through the bog, she was in no hurry to leave the comfort of the ridge. But if there was someone there, if she could get help… If there was any chance at all that there was someone there, how could she pass up the possibility?
She reluctantly altered her plan, looking for a navigable path down to shore and keeping the orange blob in view, hoping it would reveal itself in more detail before she had wasted a trip down to investigate. Unfortunately, she lost sight of it completely while she forged a nonlinear path through the rugged landscape.
It seemed to take forever to get down to sea level and by the time she was almost there, she was afraid she’d overshot Orange Blob. She looked north and south, trying to get a glimpse of it. Instead, she saw something wonderful up ahead. On the sloping gravel shore stood a house! A yellow house! Wood siding, pitched roof, white-framed windows. Like the houses in Ilulissat. Like the houses in Rodebay. She closed her eyes and reopened them, urgently hoping she wasn’t hallucinating. The house was still there. The sound of barking dogs reached her ears, sounding like the most beautiful music she had ever heard.
She knew she was nowhere near Ilulissat, that this was merely one isolated dwelling and that many such houses and even towns stood abandoned on the Greenland coast, but the fact of the dogs meant this house was inhabited. Her pulse raced with excitement as she scrambled down the last stretch of rocky slope, feeling a huge sense of relief that she had finally found help for Pippa.
Chapter Eight
Everything had happened so fast: a blur of bodies, blood spattering, screams, a jumble of horrific images that Asa could make only partial sense of. She had seen Bjarni go down, felled by a powerful blow to the head from one of the Skrælings. But she hadn’t been able to get to him before she herself was caught up in the rough arms of one of the attackers. She was flung over a broad shoulder and held fast. She struggled, but made no impression on the mute savage who ran with her to the frozen bay, his feet silent, his breath labored, the musky smell of him flooding her nostrils. She screamed to attract the attention of her friends, but they were in the midst of their own battle and unable to assist.
The buildings of her village sank behind a hill until she saw nothing but the black smoke rising from the burning chapel. Her kidnapper tied her to the back of his sled with leather straps, then covered her with a heavy bearskin, blocking her view. Amid his yells and the terrifying barking of dogs, the sled jerked and took off across the
ice as Asa lay silent and petrified in the womb of her bearskin.
That had been two days ago. She and her abductor had eventually arrived at a Skræling village where she had been put in a dark and stuffy tent. There was a cold fire pit in the center of the floor, a smoke hole at the top, and an opening in the side to crawl in and out of. She wasn’t bound, but she’d already discovered the doorway was guarded. When she had tried to crawl out, a savage with a spear hollered at her and threatened to poke her. He had a round, brown face, dark brown eyes and straight black hair. He had opened his mouth wide and laughed at her in a thick, mocking tone. She had immediately withdrawn into the tent.
She sat huddled against a wall on a musk ox skin, wondering what had happened to the rest of her family and kinsmen. She could hear the voices of the Skrælings throughout the day. Their language was gibberish to her. It barely sounded human. She heard the barking of the sled dogs and smelled food cooking. Hours went by during which nothing happened. She was hungry and thirsty and had no idea how long she had been sitting there.
Finally she lay down on the thick fur and fell asleep. She woke to the sound of scuffling at the tent entrance. She bolted to a sitting position. The flap opened and a woman came in holding a bowl. She looked like a female version of the man Asa had encountered guarding the tent, brown-skinned and black-haired. She moved cautiously toward Asa, as if she were afraid of her, her dark eyes wary, and put the bowl down just out of reach. Then she grinned nervously and backed out.
Famished, Asa reached out and took the bowl, sniffing. She tasted it. Boiled whale meat. Was this the whale they had stolen from her village? She hesitated before taking a piece of the oily meat between her fingers and putting it on her tongue. She thought maybe she shouldn’t eat. Maybe she should let herself starve to death. She didn’t know what these horrible savages had in mind for her, but she knew there were limited possibilities. She would either be killed, enslaved or be forced to be some brute’s mistress. That would be worse than death.
