Girl in Ice(68)

Massive bergs floated on the horizon, an eerie Arctic skyline. My ears rang as distant blocks split and calved, exploding in the swells. Closer to us, along the beach, several dozen walruses dozed, a wide brown wedge along the line of foaming surf.

We called out to Sigrid. She ignored us. In the middle distance, she paused at a small, dun-colored lump, knelt down briefly as if to examine it, then tore off again toward the beach. Nora and Raj approached it, slowed, stopped.

From a few yards away, I realized it was a baby walrus, pulling itself along by its flippers, its old-man mustached face low to the ice; leathery wrinkled skin shuddering at our approach. It whimpered softly as if in pain. I ventured a few steps closer.

“Val, stay back,” Nora said. “He’s probably sick.”

Sigrid stopped at a relatively calm stretch of beach. Just beyond her, waves broke in a slurry of foam over chunks of ice that ground against one another with raucous squeaks and groans. Permeating the air, an overpowering fish smell from the walrus herd.

Exchanging looks, we slowed as we approached so as not to spook her. Finally, she turned to look at us. Nora uttered a little gasp. Sigrid had blackened the area around her eyes—she must have used the charcoal pencils from my box of markers and crayons. Her droopy eye looked terrible, its inflammation emphasized by the black.

“Tahtaksah,” she said. Sad. “Baby dead.”

She removed the knapsack—mine, I now realized—and laid it gently on a scattering of ice-glazed pebbles. Kneeling, she loosened the drawstring of the main compartment and eased out the towel-swathed body of the little boy. He wore a pink doll’s hat from one of the dolls she’d never played with.

Raj got down to help her, but she pushed him away. He held up his hands in defense, said, “Okay, Sigrid. Okay.”

“Don’t take it personally,” I said. “Women are the last to touch a body in her culture.”

Several yards from us, a thousand-pound bull walrus grunted and barked, eyes bulging from his regal head. He jacked himself up on his front flippers, broke from his herd, and began to waddle toward us, his bulk rolling and quaking.

“Keep your voice down,” Nora whispered. “You don’t want to startle them. Any loud noise and they’ll charge.”

I nodded. The animal paused, lowering his great muzzle to the snow as if to size up the level of threat, before wrenching his colossal bulk back in the direction of the brood.

Stumbling slightly, Sigrid made her way to the nearest floe and lay the baby down facing the great purple dome of sky. Even as she retreated from the beach, a wave, lead-colored and syrupy with cold, skulked under the berg, lifting and sucking it back among its brethren. In his pale green towel and pink hat, the child looked like a doll that had fallen from the sky. In seconds, a stronger, angrier wave lifted and swept him out several dozen yards. No one could reach him now. We all stepped back as though the ocean might take us, too.

On his floe, the baby drifted and twirled, bobbing with the ebb and flow of the swell until, one last time, he dipped down and out of sight, and all was a wash of blue and white again.

Without a word, Sigrid trudged toward the baby walrus, which had stopped moving. We rushed to join her there. It had rolled onto its side, closed eyes black slits, mud-colored flesh motionless under a dusting of fresh snow.

Sigrid dropped to her knees, excavated her crescent knife from deep inside her parka, and without hesitation sliced open the walrus’s belly. I think we were all too stunned to come near; we only watched as she plunged her bare hands into the steaming cavity and removed the purple slab of liver, tossing it onto the snow. Shrieking, an Arctic tern shot down out of the sky and snatched it up, flying away with his prize. While a dozen more circled above, screaming and cawing with excitement, she cut into the stomach, withdrawing several blood-slicked pieces of plastic: a toothpaste cap, a tampon inserter, cellophane sandwich wrapping, a length of tangled dental floss, and last of all, a tiny troll, the size of a toy in a kid’s fast-food lunch. This she took and wiped clean in the snow, peering with fascination at its buggy eyes and bubble-gum-pink hair before pocketing it.

While we adults stood silently, she cut deeper into the walrus’s abdomen, carving out chunks of meat and blubber and throwing them onto the snow. The big birds folded their wings like fans and plummeted from the sky, diving at the entrails, screeching as they carried long strings up and away. Sigrid took off her parka. In no time, most of the meat was gone, until—in a battle for the last shred—three birds dive-bombed at once. An explosion of feathers, beaks, claws. They fought one another so viciously they paid no attention to Sigrid as she pounced over them using her coat as a net. Two escaped easily, but the third struggled under the parka, its beak caught up somehow in her sleeve. She lay on top of it and reached down under the hood; the snap of its neck a dull reality.

We all exhaled, none of us with a clue as to what she might do next. Very sweetly, with imploring, blackened eyes and blood-slippery hands, she held out the dead bird to me, said, “Sigrid want bird.”

I knelt, eye to eye with her and the limp creature in her arms. There was no mistaking her pride and satisfaction. “You finally got your bird, Sigrid. Verohnsaht.” Joy.

She said, “Sigrid want sahndaluuk.” She looked from Nora to Raj and back to me. “Sahndaluuk.”

“The drawings,” Nora said. “Of the snakes and birds. I just thought of something. Let’s go to the Dome, and I’ll show you.”