North Child

by Edith Pattou

  She gestured for me to sit beside her, and using the blunt side of the blade to smooth the snow in front of us, she then used the tip to sketch a picture into the smooth surface.

  The designs were simple – stick figures to represent people and crude symbols for other elements, such as the sun, a tree, and a river. But oddly, I could recognize each thing she drew right away. She spoke as she drew, identifying and naming the figures and their surroundings.

  The first tale she told was about a mother seal that cared for an Inuit girl after the girl’s parents were lost at sea in a hunting accident. Malmo was a gifted storyteller and I sat enthralled, watching the knife deftly etch out the pictures that told the story. The characters she drew came alive like performers on a stage.

  As the days passed, the story knife made the boredom bearable. Malmo even taught me how to use the story knife myself. I used it to memorize her stories, telling them back to her, as well as to tell her stories of Njord – the old stories of Freya and Thor and Odin. Some were the same stories that I had told the white bear back in the castle, and the memory of that time came rushing back. At such moments I would hand the story knife to Malmo, unable to continue. She understood.

  Day followed day in the snowhouse, the storm howling around us. Even telling tales with the story knife began to seem tedious. But finally, just as we were reaching the end of our food supply (and I, the end of my wits), the blizzard ceased. I was lying on my back, staring listlessly up at the white ceiling, when I suddenly realized that the sound of the wind had stopped. I looked over at Malmo. She nodded at me. “Negea is done,” she said simply.

  The snowhouse had gotten buried under several feet of snow during the storm, so we had to dig our way out. Putting on our skis, we resumed our journey.

  After several more weeks we came to the end of Gronland and the beginning of a large expanse of frozen sea. Malmo removed her skis and calmly explained that we would cross the sea of ice. The shoreline was too rough for skis, she said, adding that we should be able to use them again farther out. Looking at the broken, jumbled mass of ice lining the shore, I could see that what she said was true, and I bent to remove my own skis.

  “The sea ice is thick?” I asked a little nervously.

  “It will hold us,” she answered with a smile.

  Following Malmo I gingerly stepped from land to sea. I could hear the ice groaning and creaking under my feet as swift currents moved beneath it.

  I grew used to that sound and eventually stopped worrying about the ice cracking or giving way beneath me. We threaded our way through the jagged ice of the shoreline, and as Malmo had predicted, the ice smoothed out, with only small ridges that our skis could navigate.

  It took us more than a week to cross the frozen sea. One afternoon we stopped to hunt seal. Malmo found a breathing hole in the ice, and pitching our tent we began a patient vigil. She had set on the surface of the water a thin rod made of antler, which she told me would bob up and down at the slightest disturbance. We were stationed downwind of the breathing hole so our scent wouldn’t reach the sensitive noses of any seals nearby. Hours passed. Then the antler rod gently bobbed on the surface of the water. Malmo moved with a calm but amazing speed, grabbing her harpoon and striking down into the breathing hole with all her force. She held fast until the seal grew tired, its struggle lessening. Handing me a knife she told me to enlarge the hole so we could bring the seal up. I worked as quickly as I could, and finally Malmo was able to drag the seal up onto the ice. It was still alive, barely, and she used a club to finish it off.

  I had had plenty of experience butchering animals on the farm, but killing the seal was eerie to me, with the vivid red of its blood against the sheer white ice.

  By the time the moon was directly overhead, we had fresh seal meat. Before eating, Malmo sang. She did this every time she was about to eat what had been caught in a hunt, and that night, out on the frozen sea, I asked her why she sang.

  “It is the way we live in peace with the animals in our world. We are not separate from the animals or the sea or the ice but part of the whole. And so we must treat the animals, the sea, the ice with respect.”

  “But is it not disrespectful to kill?” I asked hesitantly, not wishing to offend Malmo.

  She smiled as if at a child. “No. Because it is part of the cycle. We must hunt to survive. Disrespect would be to hunt when you are not hungry and then to treat the dead in a wasteful, unclean way. The words I sing are to ask forgiveness for taking the seal’s life, and to send its soul safely to the spirit world.”

  As we reached the other side of the frozen sea, the surface became rough again and we had to take off our skis. The ice looked like it had exploded upwards, making a towering forest of white. It was extraordinary. The glassy pinnacles rose as high as ten feet above us, and there were long, deep cracks in the surface. And the groaning, creaking sound was louder as the edges of the ice pack pushed more aggressively against each other. Occasionally there would be a loud cracking sound, like that of an enormous whip, and I would jump, my heart racing. Adding to my nerves was Malmo’s warning that she smelled white bear around us and that we should be wary.

  “I thought the white bear was your animal,” I said uneasily.

  “That will not protect us from a white bear that has not eaten in several weeks. Or a mother bear with hungry cubs.”

  We carefully made our way through the mazelike ice forest. My whole body was stiff with tension, my icicle-rimmed eyes darting from side to side as I watched for a white bear around every jutting spire of ice. And the cracks in the ice were widening; I could see black freezing water through some of them. The harsh cracking sounds grew more frequent.

  It seemed to go on and on, the ice forest. I got occasional glimpses of what I took to be a shoreline, but it never got any closer.

  As I rounded a particularly large tower of ice, my senses numb from constantly being on edge, there was a sudden blur of motion, white on white, and a snarling. I felt a burning line of pain along my jaw and was knocked to the ground, unable to breathe. I saw a spreading pool of red on the snow and realized it was blood – blood leaking from the throbbing on my face. But something was over me, blocking out the light, and I looked up into the face of a white bear, standing on its hind legs, teeth bared.

  My breath came back then, ragged and gasping, and the strangest thing of all was that it wasn’t the thought that I was going to be killed that frightened me the most but the primitive animal ferocity I saw in those small black eyes. They were nothing like the eyes of my white bear. In fact, there was nothing recognizable there at all, just the staring, voracious eyes of a predator that had found its next meal.

  My favourite place in the old monastery was the reading room. It was located in what had once been the chapel, and tall arched windows of stained glass lined the walls. There were ornate bookcases filled with handsome gilt-titled volumes, though the majority of books and manuscripts were housed in other rooms of the building. In the centre of the room were several long tables at which one or two people usually were seated on wooden chairs.

  Hours passed by like minutes in the reading room. Blurred shapes of ruby red, emerald green, and rich sapphire blue from the stained glass would dapple the pages as I read the old manuscripts. And I feasted on the words handwritten by men who had lived hundreds of years before me.

  It was on a sunlit morning in late winter when a curious thing happened. I had already finished my assigned work for the day and, for pleasure, was reading an account of a sea voyage undertaken by a Viking called Orm. This Orm was an explorer of sorts, and he had told his tales of discovery to a monk back in the days when the old Viking ways were beginning to fade and the church was becoming more and more the centre of life in Njord. The monk had written down the Viking’s stories, apparently just as Orm had told them, and I read the stories with deep interest.

  Perhaps because of my ancestors, I had always been drawn to accounts of journeys of exploration. Unlike
my grandfather and great-grandfather, however, my interest had never been in the actual exploring, and unlike my father, I had only a passing interest in charting the world. Instead I was interested in the history of exploration – who went where, when they went, and why they had gone at all. And I had always been particularly intrigued by tales of northern exploration, because of that time in my life when I had taken it upon myself to learn all I could of white bears.

  As I sat in the reading room that morning, poring over the long-ago Viking foray into the frozen waters well beyond the northern tip of Njord, I turned a page to find a drawing that made me catch my breath. It was a simple line drawing, apparently done by the monk from a description by Orm the Viking. The drawing depicted a large white bear standing on its four paws facing a man (or I suppose it could have been a woman – the figure was too swathed in fur-skins to tell anything about it but that it was human). The two figures were virtually nose-to-nose, with only a hand’s length between them, and they looked, for all the world, as if they were conversing.

  My eyes eagerly sought the text that explained the drawing:

  Driven off course, in a northwesterly direction methinks, we are pressed on all sides by ice. My men clamour to turn south. They fear being trapped in ice for the long winter. Nevertheless, I press onwards.

  The ice comes and we are hemmed in. My men are afraid. It is the full moon and one night, unable to sleep, I wake and walk the deck. The moon is bright and there before me, on the land, is an extraordinary sight. As clear as if it were day, I see them. A small man in fur and a white bear. They stand on the ice facing each other. I felt a thrill of terror; the bear was surely about to devour the man. I have hunted white bear and there is no fiercer foe. But, most strange and awesome, the white bear did not eat the man. Indeed, they seemed to be gazing into each other’s eyes, with the look of blood brothers, or father and child. The hair on my neck stood up and I called to my men so that I should not be the only one to see such a sight. But the sound of my voice must have carried over the sea and ice, for bear and man turned towards me, as one, and then they turned back, as though annoyed at the interruption, and moved quickly away over the ice, side by side. By the time any of my men were awake enough to heed my words, the man and bear were lost to sight.

  The narrative ended abruptly, with a sentence stating that only Orm and two of his men survived the voyage.

  I stared down at a band of blue across the parchment, caused by the sun shining through the stained glass. My heart thudded in my chest, and I was suddenly aware of someone standing beside me. Except that when I turned my head to see who it was, there was no one there. And yet there was. Rose. I felt as sure of this as of my own name. I could smell her. And I could even feel the soft touch of her hand on my arm. She was wearing fur mittens.

  I closed my eyes.

  “Rose?” I whispered.

  And, clearly, I heard Rose say, “Neddy.”

  I was not sure of her tone. It might have held fear, but I did not know. And then I could “see” her, with my eyes closed, though her features were indistinct and blurred.

  “Rose?” I said again. I wanted her to tell me where she was, that she was safe and had done as she wanted, but most of all, when she was coming home. I closed my eyes, concentrating all my thoughts on the soft feel of her hand on my arm, willing her to speak.

  “Neddy,” she said again, and that time I was sure there was fear in her voice. And then I felt the touch of her hand leave me.

  “Rose!” I shouted, leaping to my feet. The few other people in the room looked up, startled. They must have thought me mad, watching as I groped like a blind man at the space beside me.

  But it was no use. She was gone.

  Everything went very still as I lay there, staring up at the animal. I thought of Neddy. I thought of my white bear.

  Then I heard Malmo’s voice. She was singing, and I sensed rather than saw her step around my prone body until she was behind me, facing the bear.

  Distracted, the white bear looked up, and Malmo’s eyes caught his and held them. Still murmuring her song, she began moving sideways, away from me. The bear dropped to all fours and, eyes fixed on Malmo, followed her.

  I watched them, too dazed to move. When they were a stone’s throw from me, Malmo stopped and the pair stood quite still, facing each other, continuing to look into each other’s eyes. If their mouths had been moving, I would have thought them to be conversing.

  Finally Malmo gave a nod and the white bear turned and padded away, going in the direction from which we had just come.

  Malmo crossed to me then and kneeled beside me. She reached into her pack and pulled out something that she pressed against the pain in the side of my face.

  I looked again at the splash of red, so vivid on the ice. I saw that the blood was already starting to freeze.

  “There may be a small scar. Hold this,” she said calmly, indicating the cloth. She drew an ivory box from her pack and, taking off her mittens, dipped a finger in the cream inside. She rubbed the cream across the wound. It hurt, but then a warmth spread and the pain eased somewhat. “Can you travel?” asked Malmo.

  “Yes,” I said, sitting up, though a wave of dizziness passed through me.

  Malmo sat beside me. “Let us wait a few moments,” she said.

  “How…” I began. “I mean, what did you do?”

  “The white bear was hungry,” Malmo said. “I told him about the seal’s breathing hole we found. Perhaps he will be lucky.”

  “You spoke to him?” I asked in wonder.

  “We do not use words,” she replied. “I asked if he knew anything about your white bear.”

  My heart thudded unevenly. “And did he?”

  Malmo nodded. “He knew of the man-bear. That is what they call him.”

  “Did…did he know where the ‘man-bear’ is?”

  Malmo shook her head. “But he told me that he has heard that the man-bear came from the land across the ice bridge. That at some time the man-bear has travelled over the ice bridge from Toakoro. He did not know in which direction or when. Toakoro is their word for Niflheim. They do not go there. No animals do.”

  “Why not?”

  “They consider it unsafe.” Then Malmo stood, breathing in and testing the wind. “We must travel on. It is still a long way to the ice bridge and I must return to my people soon.”

  Shakily I got to my feet. The bleeding had lessened, and Malmo fashioned a bandage out of the clump of cloth she had pressed to my face. And then we resumed our journey.

  We came to the end of the ice forest, and I stepped onto the shore with an immense sense of relief.

  We donned our skis, and after that our journey took on a wearying sameness. Day followed day, although you could not call it day at all. It had been a long time since we had seen the sun in the land of endless night. There was no way of keeping track of time passing, though Malmo had an innate sense of when it was time to eat and sleep.

  But the endless night in the frozen land at the top of the world wasn’t like night back in Njord. Because of the unending whiteness that surrounded us, there was not the same kind of darkness. There was always a dim grey light; the closest thing I could compare it to was twilight back home – the twilight just a few moments before the complete black of night takes over. Yet you could still see a billion dazzling specks of light in the night sky. And when the moon shone, especially the full moon, an eerie pearly-blue light washed the white landscape.

  We fell into a rhythm, Malmo and I, working together almost as a husband and wife who had been together for many years. I became nearly as adept as Malmo at skinning a seal, making a snowhouse, telling tales with the story knife. There was an immense satisfaction in doing the jobs well, although satisfaction was beside the point in a place where doing the job well meant surviving another day.

  Living in the frozen world became second nature, and I grew to love the breathtaking beauty of the vast white landscape. And yet a part of me l
onged for the sight of a green blade of grass, or the smell of rain and wet earth. The only colours in the land were white, grey, and pale blue, with the occasional burst of red from the spilled blood of a seal, and even then there was no smell at all.

  We travelled a long time, long enough for the sun to make an appearance in the form of a thin band of light on the horizon. And each day I could see Malmo becoming more restless. Finally, as we crested an icy summit, she said, “I need to return to my people. If we do not reach the ice bridge soon, I will have to turn back.”

  I began to worry that there was no ice bridge at all, that it would turn out to be nothing but a fragment of an old myth. But, I reminded myself, the white bear we had met up with “spoke” of the ice bridge.

  It was during this time that I began to think about the man-bear I was seeking. The man, not the white bear, kept entering my thoughts. I had seen his face only briefly, and sometimes I could not remember it, but once in a while it would come clear in my mind, complete with that expression of desolation that ate at my insides. Even when his face was a blur to me, the one thing I never forgot about the man was the colour of his hair in the candlelight as I had leaned over him.

  I realized I knew nothing about him. Not even his name. To me he was “white bear” or “the white bear who had been a man”. But the man with the golden hair had had a name – as well as a life – before the pale queen took it from him. A father, a mother, brothers and sisters perhaps. Friends.

  Was he a craftsman? A farmer? A prince? How long ago had the pale queen taken him from his life? If by some miracle he got free of her, would his old life still be there? Would his family be long dead and buried? It seemed likely, from the few words he had spoken of his long captivity. Would there be even a building that once had been home waiting for him, or would it be occupied by strangers? My stomach twisted. And I felt a white-hot surge of anger at the pale queen. Her cruelty.