The incidents with the dogs multiplied. Another day, for instance, between two transparent prisms of sharp ice, they came upon the body of a pachyderm that had been lying there since God knows when. Half buried, the corpse was sugared with ice, better preserved under the floe than a pharaoh in his pyramid: ice embalms just as thoroughly as it kills. Despite the guides’ outbursts, curses, and whip cracks, the dogs swooped avidly down on the mastodon, and what ensued was only the panting, viscous, repugnant crackings of busy jaws. Then, once the animals were gorged, having gnawed down the exposed portion of the beast without even letting it thaw, the humans had to wait for the end of their siesta before getting back on the road. The humans were getting a little fed up with those dogs. This would be the last day they relied on their services. They continued to advance in the perpetual light ever more obscured by clouds of mosquitoes.
Let us recall that in this place, in this season, nothing separates the days: the sun never sets. You have to look at your watch to know when it’s time to rest, to blindfold your eyes to sleep after dusting off the tent floor with a seagull’s wing. As for the mosquitoes, their larvae having reached maturity in innumerable puddles, they attack all the harder. Now it’s no longer by dozens but by hundreds per cubic yard that they lead their assaults in tight formation, entering your nose, mouth, ears, and eyes while you tread and trudge over the permafrost. On Angoutretok’s advice, contrary to the prescriptions of the medical profession embodied by Feldman, Ferrer started smoking again, even though the rediscovered taste of tobacco, in this cold, made him gag. But it was the only way to repel the diptera: in their moments of fury, it was an even better idea to smoke two or three cigarettes in a row.
On they went, over a path they could barely make out, signposted every few miles with regularly erected cairns. Simple tumuli of stones piled up by the region’s first explorers to mark their passage, the cairns had at first served as reference markers, but they could also contain objects bespeaking past activities in the area: old tools, calcified food remains, nonfunctioning weapons, and even, sometimes, printed or bone matter. Such as, once, a skull in whose eye sockets a little moss was growing.
And so they advanced, from cairn to cairn in lessening visibility, for the mosquitoes weren’t the only ones darkening the environment: fog did its work as well. Not content with disturbing the air’s transparency and thus removing objects from sight, fog could also enlarge them considerably. Unlike objects in a rearview mirror, which are always closer than they appear, sometimes in the white expanse they thought they were at arm’s length from a cairn that was still an hour away by sled.
The pachyderm incident had finally outstripped the guides’ patience. At the first station after Port Radium, at a Ski-Doo rental, they swapped all the dogs for three of the snowmobiles, to which they hitched light trailer sleds. They proceeded on these machines, which putt-putted away pathetically in the Arctic silence. Leaving numerous oil stains and greasy tracks behind them on the dusty ice, they continued to weave between the blocks, sometimes tracing long loops to skirt around the frozen barriers without ever meeting a single tree or the humblest blade of grass. It’s only that things have changed quite a bit in the region, in the last fifty million years. Back then poplars grew here, and beech trees, vines and sequoias, but that’s all finished now. Little more than yesterday, a bit to the south, you could occasionally spot some lichen, a vague briar, a weak birch, a crawling willow, a little Arctic poppy, an occasional mushroom; but these days, nothing, not the humblest vegetable as far as the eye can see.
They were still subsisting on the same individual rations, balanced, designed for this kind of enterprise. But in an attempt to improve on the standard fare, they once gathered a few angmagssaets, with an eye to a fry. After a huge block of glacier fell into the sea, a high wave had spilled those little sardine-sized fish onto the bank; more than anything they had to chase off the gulls who, threatening to dive-bomb, hovered silently above the catch. Another time, Napaseekadlak harpooned a seal. Now, it’s well known that everything is usable in a seal; it’s a little like the polar equivalent of pork: its flesh can be grilled, poached, simmered; its blood, which tastes like egg whites, makes a decent sausage; its fat provides light and heat; with its skin you can make excellent tent flaps; its bones yield needles and its tendons thread; and with its intestines you can even make lovely transparent curtains for the house. As for its soul, once the animal is dead, it rests in the tip of the harpoon. So Angoutretok prepared a dish of seal liver with canned mushrooms on the brazier, near which Napaseekadlak had laid his harpoon so the soul wouldn’t catch cold. And while they ate, Angoutretok taught Ferrer several of the 150 words for snow in Iglulik, from crusty snow to squeaky snow to fresh soft snow, hard undulating snow, fine powdery snow, wet compact snow, and snow lifted by the wind.
The farther north they went the colder it got, as was to be expected. Icicles had clustered in perpetuity on all of Ferrer’s facial hair: bangs and lashes, beard and brows, rim of the nostrils. He and his guides advanced behind their dark glasses past craters, cirques caused by meteorites, from which the locals, once upon a time, extracted iron to forge weapons. Once they spotted a second bear in the distance, alone on the ice, standing watch next to an air hole for seals. Too absorbed in his lookout, the polar bear ignored them, but just in case, Angoutretok acquainted Ferrer with the correct procedure to follow in event of an untimely encounter with a bear. Do not run away: the bear can run faster than you. Instead, try to distract him by tossing aside some colored piece of clothing. Finally, if a confrontation appears inevitable, remember as a last resort that polar bears are lefties: if you’re stuck trying to defend yourself, might as well attack the animal from its weaker side. It’ll probably do no good, but at least it’s something.