Girl in Ice(49)

“Has all this been a waste of time, Val?”

A fresh wind savaged my cheeks; in vain I tried to feel my fingers in my gloves, to feel the contours of Andy’s lead heart. Cold shivered from the crevasse, calling me down.

“Because that’s what we should be discussing here. Have I wasted four precious weeks? Would we all be better off without you? What do you think?”

He stood legs spread apart, spiked boots dug into the ice, a human wall. Behind his shoulders, mountains sliced black daggers up into the sky, dove gray in the purplish light.

“Enlighten me, Val,” he said. “What the fuck do you want from me? Do you want to go home? Is that it? Because I can arrange that. I can get Pitak here in a day and a half—”

“I want to stay.” My voice barely audible over the siren call of the fissure.

“I think—no, I know you know more than you’re telling me about the girl. That’s what concerns me. You keeping secrets from me.”

I took a step away from the abyss and toward him, close enough to hug. He didn’t budge. “I know this, Wyatt. You have zero chance with Sigrid without me.”

Jeanne fired up the cat. Swung it in a tight circle away from us, idling as she faced toward home, as if whatever happened between us was something she didn’t want to witness. Without a word, Wyatt turned and trudged across the bleak stretch of ice toward the cat. Each of his steps left me more alone in the Enormity, set me deeper into a bloodless blue-gray world, the light ominous over the shimmering expanse. He did not look back. Climbed into the cat next to Jeanne. All pride erased, I broke into a run, crying out to the both of them to wait for me, begging not to be left behind.





twenty


Wyatt ordered all of us to gather in the living room that evening at seven sharp. No word why. I took a seat on one end of the sofa, while Nora perched stiffly next to Raj on the other. Jeanne hummed as she cleared the dishes, her CD player churning out “Luck Be a Lady.” Sigrid had gone to bed early, refusing dinner, refusing to talk. She’d been pouty—I theorized—because I’d left her alone with Nora and Raj all day. But in truth I didn’t know whether to be touched that she’d missed me or worried that she wasn’t feeling well. I held my revelation about Sigrid counting down days close to my chest, filled with dread as to what it might mean.

Wyatt blew in at the stroke of seven, a yard-long ice core encased in a wooden tube under one arm. Reverently he set it down on the coffee table, turned toward us, and unzipped his parka.

“Jeanne, would you turn that shit off and get in here, please?”

Wordlessly she snapped off the player, strolled into the main room, and took a seat between us.

“I’ve had a chance to look at the cores we drilled today.” He glanced at Jeanne, then at each of us, as if to say, Pay attention. He lifted the wooden lid from the core. Twisted the business end of a gooseneck lamp directly on it. Frost smoke sizzled up, floating along the length of ancient ice. Hundreds of slim bands of alternating pale blue, gray-white, and murky storm-cloud colors glistened, even sparkled here and there. At about the midway point, a thin, coal-black ring encircled the tube. “Here,” he said, pointing with the blade of a hunting knife. “Around the seven-hundred-year mark. See it?”

We all leaned forward to get a better look.

“Human remains.”

“Christ,” Nora breathed.

Raj knelt on the rug, peering at the black ring. “How do you know they’re human?”

“I looked at the cells. Human bone cells are shaped differently from those of other mammals. They’re like concentric rings. Animal bone cells look more like bricks. Want to have a look?” He gestured at the microscope behind him.

Raj didn’t take his eyes off the black ring. “No.”

Wyatt continued. “I don’t believe Sigrid was encased in ice a few months ago, with her family chasing caribou. I think something happened to her between 1300 and 1400 or so, around the Little Ice Age. I think she’s ancient.”

We were all silenced, but the rightness of Wyatt’s words slammed me in my gut, illuminating Sigrid’s every mystery. This was why everything—from markers to beds to snowmobiles to heat flowing from a box—fascinated her. This was why modern Greenlandic was mostly noise to her. If she was alive in 1300, she could have been Dorset or from the culture that conquered them, the Thule.

“What’s the Little Ice Age?” I asked Wyatt, breaking the spell of quietude.

“This was a cataclysmic, compressed, natural climate change event, where extreme changes—severe and dramatic cooling and warming events—happened in a matter of years or even months. From around AD 1300 to 1800.”

Raj rocked back on his heels. “Okay. All right. This is getting—”

“Here’s my theory. Could Sigrid have been caught in some naturally occurring piteraq in 1300, similar to what we’re calling ‘ice winds’ today? Think about it. Around 1250, there’s evidence that pack ice in Greenland had grown beyond what anyone had ever seen. Summers disappeared. Temperature fluctuations were crazy fast.”

“This has nothing to do with—” Raj said.

“Just listen!” he snapped. I kept my eyes on the slim black band, lost in my own amazement. “These katabatic winds—these piteraqs shooting down off the glaciers—they can easily kick past a hundred miles an hour, hit seventy, eighty degrees below zero—the question is, are these being roiled up by insane temperature swings happening around the world right now?”