Girl in Ice(69)

thirty


Sigrid crouched on the floor of the Dome with the dead tern. Charcoal-saddened eyes intent, she studiously severed one of its wings. Picking two of the hollow, straw-like feathers clean, she sliced one of them on the diagonal, creating a sharp point, inserting the thinner feather into the larger one, like a plunger.

Nora pulled down several glossy magazines from a high shelf wired to the struts of the Dome. On the cover of Marine Invertebrates, an octopus wrapped its many arms around a barnacle-encrusted anchor. She flipped the magazine open to a spread featuring different kinds of eels. Brought it to Sigrid.

“Here, sweetheart. Have a look at this.”

Crying out excitedly, Sigrid dropped the feathers and wrested the magazine from Nora’s grip. She pointed to one of the eels.

“That’s an ice eel,” Raj said.

Sigrid ran to me with the magazine, jabbing at the eel and talking fast.

I said, “Sahndaluuk?”

Yes, she nodded. Yesyesyes.

Of course, the word meant “eel”!

“They’re not as common as they used to be,” Nora said. “But—Raj, we haven’t sorted through yesterday’s specimen bucket.”

Raj hauled a sloshing plastic bucket from the far end of the Dome and the diving hole to where we were gathered on the fur-covered chairs under the heater. “We drag for specimens every day,” he said. “This was at ten meters down.”

Sigrid peered into the bucket. In the frigid seawater wriggled a baby octopus, a bright orange-and-black jellyfish, several small slender fish, and a nearly transparent eel about a foot long. “Bahl,” she said, pointing at it.

“Get it out of the bucket, Raj, can you?” I said.

He reached in with a sieve-like tool. The eel squirmed in the contraption, seeking an exit. “Looks like a juvenile, nearly dead, I’m afraid.” He lay the sieve on the floor; the eel zigzagged out onto the ice, looking much more alive than it had appeared in the bucket.

Sigrid brought her knife down, slicing its head off neatly. As black blood spurted from the headless creature, Sigrid held the tip of her hollow, sharpened feather at the artery, where lines of blood mapped the eel’s translucent length. She shoved the sleeve of her parka up her arm and inserted the sharp tip into the crook of her elbow, working the tapered feather into the larger one, injecting herself until what little eel blood the feather held was gone. Uttering something unintelligible, she stumbled a few paces, then scrambled along the ice as she tried to catch the eel. Even headless, it wriggled with eerie vitality, its blood quickly draining out. Practically transparent except for its black veins, it nearly disappeared where it lay on the ice, lifeless.

“My God, that’s what she’s been asking us for all this time,” I said. “A bird and an eel, not a snake. Not seaweed.”

Sigrid scrambled to her feet and grabbed my pants, resting her weight against me. “Sahndaluuk,” she moaned.

“Are there any more?”

Nora dumped the bucket over; the contents sluiced out. The little octopus rippled across the ice, sliding into the diving hole with a plop. Raj nudged the rest of the fish into the opening with the toe of his boot, but there were no more eels.

Stricken, Sigrid squatted at the edge of the hole, said, “Sigrid ice alive.” As if coming to terms with the fact of just the one eel, she wandered back to me and held out her arms. “Taimagiakaman.”

“What is she saying?” Raj asked.

I lifted her onto my lap; she collapsed into me, the black kohl from her eyes smudging into the orange of my parka. “It’s an Inuit word that means the necessity of staying alive through knowledge of the natural world. That means all traditional wisdom—the caribou migration patterns, where the good fishing holes are, and for her, surviving the ice winds by injecting blood from this eel.” Sigrid burrowed into me, moaning the word for eel over and over. “But look at her. This one eel—it can’t be enough. How can we get more?”

“They used to be everywhere. Very common species.” Nora knelt next to us, stroking Sigrid’s hair. “But the climate’s probably pushed them farther north. They need very cold water to survive. They used to hang out just under the ice, but now?” She turned to Raj. “What do you think? Could be they’re near the ocean floor.”

“We don’t have the equipment to dive that deep,” Raj said, taking a seat on the upturned bucket.

“But maybe… the traps,” Nora said. “We could drop them much deeper, to the seabed.”

“We’d have to dive down and anchor them.” He shook his head as if to say, Not a good idea.

Sigrid excavated from the pocket of her parka a balled-up piece of paper, took my hand and wrapped my fingers around it.

“What’s this, Sigrid?” I smoothed the picture out over my knee.

“She was drawing that last night,” Raj said. “While we were with the baby.”

I could make out a rough depiction of two sets of people, barely more than stick figures, facing each other and holding arrows. A child’s rendition of what we’d all seen in the flesh from the surface of the ice lake. Between the two groups she’d drawn a vertical line, dividing them.

“Sigrid, are you in this picture somewhere?” I pointed at the drawing. “Where is Sigrid?”