But the pit still beckoned. Upon our return to Bruceneset, Helga’s face, which in contentment could fold itself into a thousand creases that belied her youth, froze back into something more like granite. The light in her eyes grew dim. Her teeth, which she was generally reluctant to expose but which flashed all the more brilliantly because her smiling seemed unbidden and spontaneous, were veiled again.
I grasped and scrambled, trying to recapture the fleeting joy of our voyage, hoping to spur her from the mire. I even went so far as to greet the next group of sailors myself so that I might formally arrange for the purchase of the Biscayarhuken buildings, but when I presented this to her as a real triumph, she was unmoved. If anything, her melancholy seemed deeper and less tractable than before, and Skuld, ever the even-keel, grew fractious in the wake of her abandonment. I was beginning to consider less obvious approaches, such as shipping Helga back to Longyear, or even to Sweden, but the barest mention of a return to civilization was unwelcome. I now kept watch on her at almost all times, fearing suicide. I slept little and neglected my duties.
Then the other thing happened.
Eberhard died. I do not wish to articulate the details, for a form of spiritual or emotional rift in time and space was created on that day, and no matter how many years pass, I can always stretch back and know that pain as though the hole in me were being torn anew, or the sorrow may reach through with its icy finger and fell me when I’m least prepared. It is a part of me. A shadow that accompanies my shadow. There is no healing.
I will say only this. My friend had been diminishing since the arrival of Helga and Skuld, as though their sudden and continuous presence was more of a disruption from his fastidious routine than he could be expected to tolerate. I wanted Skuld to grow up knowing him as I did—I wished them to bond, as it were. But Eberhard made his loyalties clear, and he had only a few. He did not like children. Several times the baby had attempted to engage him by means of pulling his tail, or climbing on his back, and his response was to snarl halfheartedly and retreat to his place by the fire, where he curled into the tightest ball he could achieve. He watched all child-related proceedings with wary skepticism, as though they might spill over into his realm at any moment if he lapsed in his vigilance.
It may be that his time was simply up. His age was a mystery. When Tapio found him in Longyear, in 1918, he might have been two years old, or possibly four. Tapio declared himself a poor judge of dog age, and MacIntyre and I were no better. So when he died in June, he was perhaps eleven or thirteen. Old enough.
He had begun showing signs of decline that winter, yet somehow he weathered the usual cruelties of the long polar night as well as the unusual: the intrusion of two new cabinmates, my illness and slow recovery, my mounting responsibilities toward Skuld. But he was little more than a brittle, lumpy shell—in shape only, for he was a willing, tenacious, and eminently present shell—by the time we made our journey to Basque Hook.
I will skip over the impossible decision and the sense of betrayal that will follow me to my grave. Suffice it to say that on the day of his death, in a grand, absurd gesture I built a small raft, placed Eberhard’s body upon the driftwood, waded it out into Alicehamna, and set it afire. My hope was that the dog would float, burning an improbably long time like his Viking forebears, all the way to the North Pole. In the morning, however, he had washed back ashore like so much jetsam. The foxes had their way with his corpse before I emerged from the cabin. When I found the wreckage, I could still hear them yelping beyond the ridge in their spiteful joy. I like to think that the indigestion he must have caused them, for he was liberally soaked in paraffin, was his last and most successful act of violence against them.
I spent an inordinate amount of time weeping. Spontaneous, hideous fits of weeping. The wracking sobs would pinch my body in half as though two great fingers had thought to reduce me. I tried to labor my way through it—I truly did. I pictured Tapio in a similar situation (though it was hard to conceive of him in dog-related distress), and emulated his punishing work ethic as best I could. I did not wish to fall into dangerous inertia in my despair, as I had once before. And I had Skuld to maintain. But I failed. I failed in almost everything I did. My uselessness would have been shameful in any other instance, but I had no shame left. I merely fumbled about like a drunk who imagines that he was born with a gut full of liquor and that life has never been any other way.
For a day or two, Helga eyed me worriedly as I botched or avoided all my tasks. And then she transformed. I could never have predicted it. Hers was a sudden mutation from one species to another. She seemed positively to leap from bed, leaving her damp reindeer sleep sack behind and with it her melancholy. She wasn’t simply putting on a brave face, or suppressing her own despair out of necessity, which would have been deeply uncomfortable to witness. On the contrary, my utter ruin seemed to have driven the pain from her as though it were lanced. Not a trace of cold granite was left upon her face, not the thinnest wisp of death in her eyes.
I didn’t improve, but Helga’s return to life kept us going. While I neglected my duties, she shouldered all of them, including the care both of Skuld, who I believe was pleased for the change, and of me. Helga showed a depth of tenderness I hadn’t even guessed at, particularly in someone her age, though her relationship with Eberhard had been civil at best.
For my part, I spent a great deal of time in Helga’s skiff. So long as the swells were tolerable, I would motor out to the other side of Alicehamna, as close as I could come to the glacier without endangering myself, or perhaps closer than that, and then kill the coughing engine and sit there bobbing like a misshapen cork, waiting for the great blue sheet to calve. Its thunderous report was the only thing that could draw me forth. It was as though I lay prone in a clear tidal pool, unsure whether to freeze or drown, every so often rising to the surface just long enough to breathe. I wondered if this was how whales felt when events transpired to separate them from the pod. Life becomes a long cold sleep, and only the body knows to breech the blowhole and keep going.