Girl in Ice(47)

She hadn’t spun the dial.

The lid of the freezer resisted me at first, then let go with a snap of suction. Steam swirled up, momentarily blinding me. Through the mist, the faint outline of an animal. My first thought was: Frida. The little mutt Andy and I had as kids.

I blinked. Of course this wasn’t Frida. But what was this thing? I’d only seen them in photos, but it had to be an Arctic fox. It was curled up as if sleeping or trying to stay warm: paws tucked under its chin, tail wrapped around its body, kohl-rimmed eyes shut tight. Lace-ice fans feathered out across its glistening white pelt. It was so beautiful I wondered if it was real, but its bloodstained muzzle—clearly it had enjoyed a meal just before death—cast a pall on its Disneyesque perfection. I touched its black nose: a frozen marble.

Next to it, tucked into ziplock bags: several frozen Arctic lemmings; small, thick-bodied rodents; an antediluvian-looking fish with flat eyes wide as quarters; and a puffin, its cartoon-orange beak and webbed feet bright even under the plastic. All in perfect condition, no marks, icebound. How much had they suffered, I wondered; how quickly had death come?

With great care, I slipped my hands under the fox. A filigree of ice crackled free, tinkling into the box. He was so light—a sparkling cloud of opalescent fur. Underneath him, the mother lode. Three full fifths of Smirnoff vodka. I carefully laid the fox on the sawdust-covered floor, picked up a bottle, unscrewed the cap, and drank.

Two swallows later, a wave of self-loathing crashed over me. Why not do it? Why not just take Dad’s offer and get out of here? Have him call in that favor to his friends at Thule and go home. The world would happily close in around me again, and I’d welcome it; I’d hop on my M?bius strip of seeking safety and—not finding it—conclude I needed to make my circle smaller still, just tighten that noose…

The sputter of an engine firing up outside the Shed startled me back to the present moment. I squeezed my eyes shut. My head swam. I’m a mess, but I’m all Sigrid’s got. Heart smashing against my rib cage, I tucked the bottle of vodka in my parka, wiped my mouth, and ran to the door. Wyatt and Jeanne were just turning the cat to face the glacier. I took off as fast as I could across the field of ice toward the idling machine.





nineteen


Buffeted by winds lashing down from the glacier, the snowcat rocked on the ice lake, its small, tattered American flag on the hood snapping crazily. I sat buckled in the back seat like a child left in a car waiting for her parents to finish shopping. Through half-closed eyes—my head swimmy but functional—I watched Wyatt and Jeanne drill ice core after ice core, loading the gray tubes on a metal sled. Each new drill site brought us closer to the crevasse where Sigrid had been found. It seemed wider that day, a deeper blue. Impossible to look at for more than a few seconds at a time without hyperventilating.

Through slitted eyes, I took in the sun, a sizzling fat ovoid resting on the horizon, set to lurk there for the next couple of hours before our three-hour “day” came to an end. I reached out my gloved finger, tracing its perimeter on the steamy glass, just as I’d seen Sigrid do countless times. Traced another, and another, until I’d drawn a row of circles. My finger hesitated on the glass. The circles were suns! Days!

The perimeter of the setting sun pulsed red…. Why were the last circles Sigrid drew red? What would happen to her on the final day?

I stopped drawing; my hand fell from the window. Sigrid drew a picture of suns every day, each day with one less sun. She was counting down.



* * *



WYATT LIFTED HIMSELF into the driver’s seat with a blast of icy air. He unscrewed the cap on a thermos and filled it halfway with hot coffee, offered it to me. I shook my head. A few yards from the cat, Jeanne knelt on the ice, struggling to free a core from the corer with a plunger. Wyatt downed his coffee, rubbed and blew on his hands, slipped his gloves back on. “Last chance to see the crevasse up close. You change your mind?”

“I’m coming.”

I flipped up my hood, tightened the drawstring around my face. Climbed down onto the ice. A barbarous wind whooshed up; I teetered, took a step. Kept my focus on the mottled blue-and-gray surface, following Wyatt’s wide red back as he crunched across the snow in his rocking gait.

We stood only ten feet from the abyss. The fissure had indeed widened; the sharp edges around the block that had imprisoned Sigrid now softened from exposure to the sun; the deep blue of the ice had soaked in the heat. Now it looked hard and glassy, evil and grim.

“Why are you taking samples from here?” I called to him. “So near to where you found her?”

His glacier glasses repeated the serrated black peaks beyond, lonesome and windswept. “Question is, why did it take me so long to think of it?”

We followed Jeanne as she walked parallel to the chasm. In the distance, a herd of several dozen caribou picked their way down the glacial pass in a jagged black line.

“Val, keep way back from us. At least twenty feet, okay?”

I backed up awkwardly, away from the abyss, not having much of an idea what twenty feet felt like.

Jeanne, a smudge of red and black behind veils of fine falling snow, yanked at a cord on a small yellow engine. It started up like a lawn mower, its whine crashing into the silence. She and Wyatt hoisted a twelve-foot pole, the last five feet or so a bright red screw-shaped device. It was already turning fast. They struggled to hold the pole perpendicular to the ice—clearly they needed all their strength to keep it going straight down—then hauled it up bit by bit out of the ice. Working full tilt, they laid the corer down, gently bumping out into a wooden trough a perfectly cylindrical yards-long core that glistened blue and silver gray. Finally, they loaded the core and equipment on the sled we’d towed from the Shack for this purpose. I couldn’t help admiring their coordination, their grunting efforts, this dance in which each knew precisely what steps to take and when.