I. DAY
Departure
Posing in full dress uniform at the bow of the little brig Endeavor, rigid as the mast looming behind him, he raises a stiff arm in acknowledgment of the small send-off parties spotting the Kings’ shore of the Narrows. With his perfect posture, immaculate uniform and manicured mustache, he looks very much the Hero, a reincarnated admixture of Henry Hudson, John Paul Jones and El Cid.
His solemn eyes scan the bandless, bannerless shore. A paltry crowd, he reflects, for an occasion so momentous. After all, he is sailing cheekily off into the frigid unknown, beyond the reaches of men’s maps, to probe regions whose very existence is but rumor. Yet such, he supposes, is the lot of Heroes: all but ignored by the self-satisfied Present, revered by Posterity. Glebe cows. If it were up to them Kentucky would be a wilderness still.
Beyond the Narrows, the open Atlantic, rolling pleasantly underfoot to a gentle June breeze. Captain John Pennington Frank (M.D., U.S.N.) breathes deeply, closes his eyes, and removes his cap to let the Seabreeze tickle through his hair. As he does so, the last spangles of confetti are sucked up in the wind and shot away to starboard (this the confetti that his mother and two unmarried sisters had solemnly flung at him just half an hour earlier when the brig had been launched at the Brooklyn Naval Yard). Like Ishmael too long a-land, he feels the salt breeze raking up all the old sailor’s pluck: Ah! The Open Sea! Adventure! Man against the Elements! It is then that the brig pitches forward and an icy slap intrudes itself upon the Captain’s meditations. His eyelids snap-to like the surprise of a stroke and he lurches forward against the rail: the cap sails out from his hand in a graceful arc, to be sucked down by the frothing waves below. When he recovers himself he glances furtively about before digging out the handkerchief, thankful that none of the crew had been watching. The ceremonies over, and the voyage begun, the Captain retires to his cabin, where the crisp and neatly lined pages of the logbook await him.
Of course he knows nothing as yet of the Arctic Night.
Captain’s Log, June 2
Set sail from NY Harbor at 1100 hours Eastern Time. Momma, Evangeline and Euphonia saw us off with a not inconsiderable crowd. As we passed the Narrows, quite ten thousand I should think turned out to cheer us. It was heartening thus to witness the deep reverence and goodwill the people of this great nation show for our venture.
My party consists of fifteen: eight officers (myself included); five crewmen; Phillip Blackwark, cook; and Harlan Hawkins, cabin boy. Our stores include a large supply of navy ration salt beef and pork, hard biscuit, flour, some barrels of exsiccated potato, two thousand pounds of pemmican, a quantity of dried fruits, and twelve barrels of pickled cabbage. (Surreptitiously, I laid in a supply of party hats and whistles, to cheer the men during our winter confinement.) It is my expectation to reach the northern coast of Newfoundland by the twentieth. There we will supplement our stores with a few sides of fresh beef, God and Governor Pickpie willing.
Glut at Anoatuk
Kresuk’s bare chest is bespattered with blood, his face a smear, the oily black hair at his cheeks congealed with blood and birdfat. His incisors dig at the purple vein along the breastbone, his lips suck at the tatters of pink flesh still clinging to the pink ribs. As he gnaws, the denuded breast and its few dangling particles flap flat against his greasy knuckles. The remains of nine eider-ducks lie beside his bare thigh, a wet neck and ribcage beneath it. His right nostril is crammed white with fat and bits of raw meat.
Ooniak, his woman, patiently cracks auk eggs and drains the contents into the yawning maw of Sip-su, their defective son. Mouth agape, head thrown back, Sip-su is a birdling in the nest, begging the sky for food. Five winters, thinks Kresuk, looking hard at his son. I give him one more. Then he lies back with a sigh, his head buried in a heap of bloodied feathers. He breaks wind. He picks his teeth. And thinks of walrus, bearded seal, narwhal. He does not suspect the existence of New York Harbor 2800 miles to the south, nor does he suspect the existence of the brig Endeavor, already making its way north to ripple the placid waters of his life. There are legends telling of tribes of gaunt, pale men, but Kresuk has no time for legends—the Night, the season of frozen ice, of terror and of want, is over, and the birds have returned to Anoatuk.
Dining at St. John’s, Newfoundland
(A dainty tinkle of silverware, china and crystal accompanies the dialogue.)
Oh, excellent, You know I haven’t titillated my palate with such northern delicacies as these since—oh, ‘47 I guess it was, up in Finland.
It’s only on special occasions that I can get them myself, you know, Captain. I don’t expect you picture me glutting on poached wapiti tongue all the time—
No, no, no. And I’m deeply flattered that you consider our visit one of those special occasions, Governor Pickpie … these smell ducky—what are they?
We call them St. John’s marbles. The genitalia of the male musk-ox, braised in port. Care for some more wine?
Oh yes, thank you…. Quite tasty, these marrrbles. Ho. Ho-ho.
Have you tried the smoked salmon in soured cream? Cochlearia salad?
Um yes. Superb. You know, Governor Pickpie, I think the memory of this feast alone will sustain us through the long winter to come.
You’re very kind, sir. At any rate, I wish you greater success than the last party that came through—Sir Regis Norton’s expedition.
Oh?
Yes. Their ship was found by a Swedish fellmonger no more than a month ago, frozen solid as a rock into the ice sheet—all hands dead from frost. Preserved like pickles.
Down
Kresuk smiles to himself in the loud sun, mirror-whiteness, bird squabble. He stoops to collect eider-down from around the eider-nests, occasionally pausing to poke a hole in an egg and suck its contents. Ooniak squats on a lichen-crowned rock, stuffing a new walrus sleeping bag with eider-down and the ass feathers of the arctic tern. Nearby Sip-su sits: circular, drooling, eyes focused on nothing. Work a son should be doing, thinks Kresuk. The seal are back. I should hunt. I give him one winter more.
Captain’s Log, June 28
Entered Baffin’s Bay, bearing to northwest by north, looking for open water. Great bergs like floating mountains hem us in. We keep in sight of the dramatic coastline, navigating from headland to headland—it takes us steadily westward, and always to the north.
The sixty-two Esquimau dogs we purchased at Fiskarnaes are perhaps not even half-a-step removed from their lupine ancestors. One is afraid to go on deck anymore—they surge about one in a snarling pack, nosing about for food, snapping and tearing at each other. Yesterday they pulled down two sides of beef from the rigging, and before Mr. Mallaby could get through the seething pack, they had reduced the rock-hard frozen meat to bare bone, like a swarm of those carnivorous Amazonian fishes. The men complain bitterly of these ravening wolves infesting our decks, and I explain that we shall need them to pull our sledges during the fall and spring explorations. Still the men grumble. Perhaps I shall break out the party hats this evening to brighten their spirits.
UFO
Metek is agitated. He can barely contain himself. Nervously he cuts strip after strip from the walrus carcass and nervously he wedges them in his mouth. Across from him squat Kresuk and Ooniak, their faces slimed with the buttery wet liver that had served as an hors d’oeuvre—they too are now cutting strips of walrus-beef and feeding them into their mouths. Sip-su sits on, an autistic little Buddha. It was big as the floating ice, Metek says finally. No one looks up. The assiduous gorging continues, to the accompaniment of lip-smacks, grunts, booming eructations. It had great white wings, and it flew atop the water like a flock of eider coming in to feed. I saw it from Pekiutlik Lookout where I am hunting. A great creature, of color like the summer fox, and wings that hum like the auk.
Kresuk, without breaking the studied hand-to-mouth rhythm he has established, looks up and utters a single word: Sealshit.
Berg-Beleaguered
Like a foundling among wolves, a shot-glass of Wild Turkey among winos, a bridge over the River Kwai, the Endeavor drifts among ice peaks that rear malevolently a hundred feet above the water. The bergs are drifting too: battering together like gargantuan rams, shattering the arctic stillness with explosions as the ship-sized blocks thunder down. The brig rocks dizzily in the concussive waves; the men are panic-struck; the sixty-two dogs beshit the decks in fright. But the Captain seems unmoved, absorbed as he is in thinking up names for salient coastal features. Aunt, Aunt, Aunt? he thinks aloud.
Soon the black channel before them vanishes—two titantic bergs roll gently together and lock with a kiss: the open passage has become a cul-de-sac. Accordingly, First Officer Mallaby orders the brig turned 180 degrees. But wait! Even the channel they’ve just passed through is stoppered tight as a nun’s orifices—the brig’s wake trails off into the gullets of two implacable bergs, tall and white as the chalk cliffs at Dover. The open sea becomes a lake—no, a pond—inexorably the ring of ice closes in, like a mountain range seen creeping in time-stop photography through ten million years. Captain Frank! shouts Mallaby. Captain Frank! The Captain looks up, and for the first time assesses the situation. How embarrassing, he mutters, and returns to his notebook, annoyed with the interruption—he’d almost had it, the name he’d been searching for—his great aunt on his mother’s side.
Two hours later the Endeavor bobs in a puddle, surrounded by the sheer ice faces, kicked about now and again by their feet—the feet which even now, deep in the black and secretive depths, are welding themselves together, freezing across in a grim sort of net.
Five hundred yards distant, from their vantage point in Pekiutlik Lookout, two figures, swathed in the hair of beasts, are watching. One grunts: Hmph. What’d I tell you. The other, incredulous, mouths his reply: Mother of Walrus!
Captain’s Log, July 17
It is with great sorrow that I must report the loss of our ship. In searching for a northwest passage we entered a blind bay, became beleaguered by ice, and were finally crushed by the shifting floes. All hands escaped without incident, and due to my own foresight, much of our stores were saved, including a great quantity of wood from the crushed hull. She was a stout little brig, and we all hated to see her go—especially as it means making the eight-hundred-mile journey to Fiskarnaes, on the South Greenland coast, by foot. I have given orders to establish a winter camp here, as the season is so far progressed as to render any attempt at escape impracticable. About five hundred yards from the scene of the Endeavor’s demise is an outcropping of greenstone. I have named it Pauce Point, in honor of my great aunt, Rudimenta Pauce. It is in the lee of this cliff that we shall make our winter quarters with the heavy timber salvaged from the brig, insulating the walls and ceilings with packed ice, Esquimau-fashion. God willing, we shall live to see the spring, and other eyes will come to peruse what I have written here—the record of our tribulations.
The Glare
Out on the floes Kresuk is bent over a tiny hole, no more than two inches in diameter. His ear is to the ice, his fist curled round the harpoon. The seal responsible for this hole is at that very moment gamboling about the ice-blue depths, gobbling fish, undulating sealishly through the water, out of breath now, darting back to the airhole for a heaving gasp of oxygen. It will be his last gasp, smiles Kresuk.
Some distance off, the man with rifle and notebook is busy naming headlands, cliffs and glaciers after himself and members of his family. The jagged pencil line of the coast grows northward on the paper as each day he hikes farther, ostensibly in search of game. Soon, he thinks, he will have a team of dogs trained and will be able to cover twice the distance in a sledge—but for now he must walk, and haul back meat for the crew and ravenous dog-pack. Up ahead he catches sight of a movement out on the ice—he strains his eyes, but with the glare, and his sun-blindness, the object drifts and melds with the red and blue spots before his eyes. But isn’t it a bear? A fat bear, rich with meat and suet, bent now over a hole in the ice? The man folds the notebook into his parka and begins his stalk. When he gets within two hundred feet he lies flat, braces the rifle on an ice pedestal, takes careful aim, and fires.
Captain’s Log, August 15
Have made contact with the Esquimaux. I found one of these savages unconscious on the ice, suffering apparently from shock as a result of a recent flesh wound in the gluteus maximus. With the aid of a sledge drawn by six of the crew (we’ve not yet been able to train the dogs), I brought the poor fellow back to camp, where I was able to perform a crude operation, dressing his wound and treating the shock with a dose of morphine. He lies asleep now in the main cabin the fellows have constructed from the remains of the Endeavor. In appearance, he is very much like his Christianized counterparts to the south, but in size he greatly surpasses them, measuring six feet from toe to crown, and weighing nearly one hundred ninety pounds. He is dressed in rude garments fashioned from the pelts of his prey—he wears a sort of breeches fabricated from the hindquarters of the polar bear, the claws still attached and trailing upon the ground as he stands. His boots are of sealskin and his parka of arctic fox. He exudes a strong odor of urine.
I am quite anxious to speak with our primitive guest (hopefully through the office of my interpreter, Second Officer Moorhead Bone), as information regarding the indigenous Esquimau tribes and their seasonal wanderings should prove invaluable to us in effecting our spring escape.
Gaunt, and Pale
Kresuk awakes groggy, and with a distant ache in his anak, from a dream in which he had harpooned Osoetuk, the great narwhal, God of the Seas, and been dragged through the ice, down to Osoetuk’s lair in the icy depths. There Osoetuk had given him a wonderful elixir, the spirit of fishes and heart of walrus, and it had made him warm beneath the ice and the dark waters—warm, and drowsy.
Now he lies still, eyes closed, listening to the beat and wash of a strange tongue, remembering the flank attack and the lost seal. He struggles to open his eyes but the elixir prevents him. It takes all his concentration to crack the heavy lids just enough to catch a glimpse of the ceiling, its wooden beams. Wood! The last thing he’d expect to see at Pekiutlik. Hard and carvable, just the ticket for tools and totems—but up here the best he’d ever done was a forked branch washed up from the south. His conclusion is inevitable: I am dead, he thinks, and lifted into another world. The voices drone. His eyes open, close. He looks again: wood all around him, so precious, so rare, a forest above his heavy lids—the lids which now close as if weighted, while the dream seeps back into his consciousness. When again they open he twists his head in the direction of the voices, strains to see, focuses finally … on legends! Men with hair on their faces, gaunt and pale as winter, legends incarnate.
II. NIGHT
Captain’s Log, November 7
So cold your axillary hair shatters like glass, and the spittle freezes in your throat.
Captain’s Log, November 8
We have just enough light at noon to read the thermometer without aid of a lantern. Temperature at noon today was −38 degrees F., with a stiff breeze kicking up. Mr. Mallaby is lost somewhere out on the floes. At ten this morning he went out to feed the dogs and has not been seen since. I have sent out a search party.
The supply of fresh meat I commissioned from Kresuk in early September is nearly gone. It was well worth the price (some three hundred pounds of walrus and bear in exchange for a string of glass beads and six red wooden buttons). Judging from his look of idiot delight as I dangled the beads before his nose, I think I could have got another six hundred pounds of meat in the bargain. My only complaint is that the savage has not returned since, and we are in dire need of further barter. I presume he is wintering at Etah, the Esquimau village sixty miles south of us.
Captain’s Log, November 12
The search party has not returned; no trace either of Mr. Mallaby. I regret to report that of the men remaining (five went out on the search) only four are well enough to be up and about. Frostbite has been our biggest enemy, with scurvy running a close second. All the men suffer from the latter, and to complicate matters, our meager supply of dried fruits has been already exhausted. Even the pickled cabbage is beginning to go quickly—yet all of us show signs of scorbutic weariness and bleeding at the gums.
The incessant hacking and wheezing, and the groaning of the amputees, is trying on my nerves. Besides which I am bored witless—nothing to do but tend the sick and wait for the sun—nearly 140 days distant. Nursing is not exactly my idea of an heroic occupation—I long for the more active fight.
The remains of Mr. Mallaby’s fur suit have been found by Mr. Bone among the dogs: I can only conjecture his fate. The dog-pack, incidentally, is now down to twenty-seven survivors—it appears they have been eating one another, as we have been unable to provide them with fresh meat, and the pemmican (unpalatable though it is), we must conserve for our own use. Yet Mr. Bone reminds me that without dogs we should be hard-pressed in making our spring trek to civilization. Something must be done.
The search party has not yet returned. I have dispatched a second search party, composed of our three ablest men (Tiggis, Tuggle and Mr. Wright), to search for the missing search party.
Barter
Kresuk returns. His round cheeks, white furs, slit eyes. His shaggy frame in the doorway. The stiff seal flipper clutched in his mittens.
The Captain beckons him in, slamming the door against the wind. A dying wood-fire glows in the corner, shadows mount the walls. The men snuff and wheeze. The Captain nods at Kresuk, smiling. Kresuk nods back, smiling. “Bone!” shouts the Captain. “Bone!”
Mr. Bone lifts himself from his pallet, breath steaming around his head like a pot of coffee, and hobbles out to join his superior. “Mr. Bone, speak with this fellow. I feel certain that he’s come to exchange meat for beads, and I don’t think I need emphasize how sorely necessitous we are at this juncture.” Bone coughs, relieves himself of a wad of sputum. “Wuk noah tuk-ha,” he says. Kresuk stares past him for a moment, then turns to sift through the murky low room. He pokes into each cabinet, each bed, beneath each man’s pillow. “What’s he about, Bone?” demands the Captain. “Here now!”
Kresuk is collecting things: fine glittering knives, pewter mugs, pocket watches, axes. A sack of red wooden buttons. He clatters them down in the center of the room, holds out the seal flipper to Mr. Bone.
Captain’s Log, November 21
Kresuk has been back. We exchanged a few of our things for a new, if small, supply of fresh meat. The savage drives a hard bargain. He has us, as they say, over a barrel.
Mr. Bone’s great toe has suppurated to such a degree that I fear gangrenous infection if it is not removed. Once again, I think, as the surgical blade splashes through to negotiate the bone in a quick down-and-across stroke, the damnable frost has cost us another part of our bodies. We’ll all of us be amputees by the time the sun returns to us—a pack of sniveling, scurvied cripples.
No word from either search party. I would organize a third search party to search for the two missing search parties, but there are just five of us here, and I am the only one with two serviceable legs and feet, arms and hands. Really, I feel like chief attendant at a leper colony.
Captain’s Log, November 22
Funeral obsequies for Mr. Mallaby today. My bedridden mates hobbled outside where we gathered round a memorial plaque and sang hymns. What with the coughing and slobbering of the men, and the groans of the wind, it was difficult, but we did manage a fairly respectable job of “Art thou weary, art thou languid?”—one of my personal favorites. Young Harlan Hawkins wept as I read “ashes to ashes, dust to dust, ice to ice” (I thought the insertion quite apposite), and scattered the remaining strands of Mr. Mallaby’s furs to the wind. It was a pitiable sight indeed—the poor boy swabbing at the frozen tears with his right stump as the soul of his valiant shipmate was set free to be gathered to the bosom of his Maker. The boy’s own soul, I’m afraid, will not be long with us either.
Lost on the Floes
The wind howls a gale, the cold shatters steel, splinters wood, transubstantiates flesh to ice. Misshapen ice-hummocks rear up like bad dreams, gray and ghostly in the perennial dark. All living things perish here: only the ice belt lives on—thrives—in the searing winds and falling temperatures.
The search parties, having found one another, are faced with a secondary problem: finding their way back. Their progress for the past six hours has been geometrical—on feet long dead, they have plodded out the shaky hypotenuses of a dozen right triangles, one atop the other. They are drunk with the cold, enraptured with it; cold no longer, they lie down to rest. Pekiutlik Lookout (known variously as Pauce Point) lies but half a mile south of them. Half a mile through the black moonscape of the Arctic Night.
Natural Selection
In his igloo at the Etah settlement Kresuk and his neighbors are lounging about naked, skin on fur, sunning in the prodigious heat put out by their seal-blubber lamps. At this particular moment Kresuk is bending over to display the tiny circular scar on his anak, the badge of his first encounter with the gaunt men. The badge of his later encounters with the gaunt men dangles beneath his chin: a necklace of red wooden buttons, glass beads and gold pocket watches. His neighbors are threading similar necklaces, chipping away at the icy floor with their steel knives, trying their teeth against the smoky pewter mugs. They look up as Kresuk begins retelling the story of the wound, a story they’ve heard as many as ninety-seven times. They are fascinated nonetheless. Beads, knives and mugs drop, mouths hang open. And pairs of quick black eyes follow the necklace twisting and slapping against Kresuk’s breastbone as he pantomimes the action of his sealhunt. When he speaks, the gibbous cheeks part to reveal his smile, and his eyes flash like headlights beneath the fleshy lids.
When the tale is finished and Metek sits up to tell his story of the great winged whale that brought the gaunt men, the others turn back to their beads, knives, mugs. Kresuk stretches out and begins picking at his sealhaunch. He chews thoughtfully, only half-attending his friend’s narrative, his mind on the glory he’s won, glory that will pass down through generations. He sees himself a king, his sons princes. It is then that Sip-su raises himself and waddles over to his father, where he squats to deposit a turd, wet and shapeless, on Kresuk’s foot. The friends laugh. Ooniak stares down at her toe. And Kresuk explodes, slaps the fat-headed child across the igloo—Sip-su totters, spins off the kotluk, scalds himself, wails. The neighbors look down at their beads and laps, faces elongate, and fight to suppress chuffles and snorts while Kresuk pulls on his furs, orders Ooniak to dress the child. Wordless, he snatches up the screeching Sip-su and crawls out the door. The old men nod.
Outside, in the wind so sharp it takes away the child’s squalling breath, Kresuk harnesses the dogs, straps the child to his back, and starts off toward Pekiutlik Lookout, tomb of his ancestors.
Plaint
Driven by the insufferable stench of the accumulated slops, he determines to make a slop-emptying expedition. Doggedly he hefts the slop bucket and doggedly he steps out into the glacial dark: the hairs in his nostrils fuse with his first steaming breath. When he exhales he can hear the vapor crystallize, whisper to the ground in tiny pellets. Already the reeking paste has become a bucket-shaped block, no more offensive than an ice cube. He stops, whale-oil lantern in hand, intent on checking the thermometer for his meteorological records. As he stoops to clear the glass an exceptionally virulent gust extinguishes his light, and brings to his ears the unmistakable plaint, weak and attentuated, of a child in distress.
He drops the bucket, holds his breath, uncovers his ears (the lobes freeze through instantaneously). Yes, there it is again—borne down on the wind from above, up on Pauce Point!
Captain’s Log, January 5
The Esquimau child is doing well, fully recovered from the effects of his exposure. I only wish I could say as much for the men. Blackwark and Hoofer are alternately comatose and delirious; young Harlan Hawkins has contracted erysipelas in his left stump; Bone, who could hardly walk in any case, is suffering from a new attack of frostbite. Yesterday he reeled out to chop wood from our scrap heap to keep the fire going. After half an hour I began to wonder what had become of him, and went out searching. I found him asleep in the snow, his cheek frozen fast to the beam he’d been chopping—it was necessary to hack half his beard away in order to extricate the poor fellow. On one of my downward strokes I inadvertently swiped off his left ear. Little matter: I hardly expect the poor beggar to make it through the night.
The child, though about five or six years of age, appears to be defective mentally, from all indications suffering from mongoloidism. He must be hand-fed, and insists on fouling himself. I can only pity the savage heart that left him to the cold.
Captain’s Log, January 10
Disaster. The dogs have broken loose and got at our cache of pemmican—practically all we had left, better than two hundred pounds, is gone. I’ve managed to round up five of them, bloated as they are. Four will pull my sledge (or be whipped raw) and the fifth will grace our table. I can’t see how we’ll survive—we’ve almost no provisions left, and the night has barely begun.
Captain’s Log, January 11
Bone and Hoofer dead, Blackwark on the brink. I must leave them in their bunks, as I’ve barely the strength to drag them outside, and I must conserve my resources for the days ahead. With an interior temperature of +35 degrees F., I do not expect an overly rapid decomposition. Temperature outside at noon today was −54 degrees F.
Captain’s Log, January 21
Mad with hunger. The last two days we’ve had nothing to eat but a broth made from bits of wood and the more tender portions of Mr. Bone’s boots. Blackwark expired early this morning—there were no hymns, as Harlan Hawkins is in a coma, and the Esquimau child, my only other companion, can do nothing but wail for food and defecate. Clearly, without edibles, there is no hope for us here. As a result, I’ve come to a decision—I’ve determined to strap Hawkins and the child to a sledge drawn by the four curs I’ve spared (what a temptation it’s been to roast them!) and make for the Esquimau settlement at Etah. When they see the condition we’re in, and when they see the child—one of their own—I trust they’ll help us.
A Hero indeed! he triumphantly thinks as he brings the lash down across the muzzles of the four dogs. If only Momma and the girls could see me now! But it is dark as Styx-mist and cold as Proserpine’s breath—so cold the thoughts begin to freeze in his head. Beneath his feet the ice is a jagged saw’s edge, cutting into each agonizing step, overturning the sledge, abrading the hard pads of the dog’s paws as if they were wax. Sip-su and the comatose Hawkins are lashed to the sledge, greatly impeding its progress, and from time to time the dogs stop and begin devouring one another and it is all he can do to whip them back to order. But indomitable, he presses on, a navy fight tune frozen in his cerebrum. Ard! he bellows (he had meant to yell “On you Bastards!” but the wind had driven the words back at him, right down his throat and into his shocked lungs). Soon his fingers will become brittle, and the fluid in his eyes will turn to slush.
At Etah
Outside the wind tells of a gale as it sweeps smooth over the glassy surface of the igloo. Inside it is sweating hot, and the three seal-blubber lamps, burning simultaneously, circulate a thick greasy smoke which stings the eyes. In the center of the domed ceiling a black helix winds and dances as it is sucked up through the chimney-piece and out, to rush before the deadly gusts.
Kresuk is sitting on the floor, dressed in furs, breathing heavily, his eyebrows white with frost. The carcass of a big bearded seal is wedged in the narrow entrance passage, its head and whiskers and cold dead eyes at Kresuk’s feet. The seal’s tail is outside, in the wind and dark, the bloated belly jammed like a cork in the neck of the entranceway. Kresuk turns, tugs at the animal’s head. He smiles. He’d been improvident in his early dealings with the gaunt men, trading away half his winter cache of meat for a few buttons and beads. And so he’d been forced out on the dark floes, hungry, hunting. There was no choice about it: Ooniak grumbling, the dogs howling, Metek muttering every time Kresuk stepped next door for dinner. But now he looks down at the seal. And thinks feast.
Then the voices outside: Ooniak, Metek, Metek’s woman. Kresuk rises to his knees, works a hand under each flipper and leans back. He can feel the others pushing at the seal’s fat flank. There is a moment of inertia, effort in suspension, and then a lewd wet sucking release and Kresuk is on his anak, the seal in his lap, Ooniak and his friends scrambling in: laughing.
Later, his belly full, Kresuk crawls over to Ooniak and lies beside her, the string of beads and watches clacking as he throws himself down. She is rounder than normal. He puts his ear to her stomach, and then barks out a laugh: something is moving, just beneath the skin. He sits up, grinning. Metek says something about sons sturdy as bears. The wind howls. And Kresuk looks down, suddenly startled. Beneath the smooth crystal, inching like an insect, the second hand has begun to trace its way around a watch face, and the watch has begun to tick.
A Soporific
A soporific, it lulls, soothes, spreads its uterine warmth—and you want to lie down on the floes, tired, ineffably tired, impervious now to the sting of it—bed down right there, on the floes. The child and Hawkins are still lashed down, but stiff as flagpoles: a patina of frost glosses their lips. The dogs have given up, ice-blood crusting between their toes: they lie doubled, nose to tail, whimpering, and still in their traces. Have you the strength to crack the whip? Hardly. It’s all you can do to grip the sledgehandles, woozy and reeling as you are. But warm, strangely warm, and tired. This is no gale, but gentle windsong, a lullaby in your tired ears. If only to lie down … for just a moment …
(1973)