Girl in Ice(70)

She put her finger on a diminutive figure in the crowd on the left side. “Sigrid,” she said softly.

I traced my finger across the figures near her, on the left side of the vertical line. “Is this your village? Your family? Mother, father?”

She nodded.

“And the baby? Where is the baby in the picture, Sigrid?”

She moved her finger to an oval shape near the feet of the people on the right side of the picture. A look like shame passed over her face, and she snatched the sketch from me.

“What, Sigrid?”

I stretched out my arm toward the drawing. “Sigrid? Please?”

With a good deal of reluctance, she handed it back, resting her finger on a squiggly shape just above the drawing of herself. The same snakelike image she’d been churning out for weeks. An ice eel.

“So your family, you, Sigrid, and your mother, father, here,” I said, touching the people to the left of the line, “had the ice eels, had sahndaluuk, but these people”—I ran my fingers over the stick-drawn figures on the right, “had no sahndaluuk?”

“Tahtaksah.” Sad. “No ice alive.”

“Good God,” Raj said. “People were killing each other for these eels.”

Nora sat down heavily next to us, head in her hands. “And the other village didn’t have the eels, which is why the baby died in the ice wind, and why we couldn’t revive him.”

Raj flipped through the magazine to the spread featuring eels of the Arctic. “Maybe there was some secret about where the ice eels were, or how to get them,” he said. “Maybe they were scarce and people were fighting over that knowledge.”

I turned Sigrid’s face to mine. Already her eye was drooping less severely. I said, “Ice alive. Tukisilitainnaqtuq.” The word meant “the sensation of seeing or understanding a thing for the very first time.”

Smiling, she repeated the word back to me. My heart fell open. Here was another loanword, an expression from her language that had persisted across all these centuries.

Raj took the drawing and flattened it on the specimen table. “I never would have believed this if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. I mean, look at her. She’s shaking less, her color’s better. And her eye… It’s incredible.”

Sigrid slid off my lap, went to the table, and turned her drawing over. Drew two circles. Scribbled over the second one and handed it to me.

I said, “She has two days, maybe just one.”

The walkie-talkie on the table crackled to life. Wyatt’s voice was low and raw. “You need to get your asses back here right now.”

We all looked at one another.

“Fuck him,” Raj said. “Nora and me—we’re going to get cracking on these traps. Figure out how to get them as far down as we can.”

A surge of hope rang through my body as I suited up to head back to the Shack, a sense of being so much less alone, so much closer to understanding how to save Sigrid. I prayed she felt this as well, but all kinds of exhaustion had flooded back into her face, and her hand felt limp and lifeless in mine as we made our way across the ice.





thirty-one


In the spectral gloom of the Arctic twilight, Wyatt sat hunched over his desk, the beam of his headlamp lasering a spotlight into Odin’s dissected body. Paws pinned in four directions on a rubber mat, the mouse lay spread-eagled on his back, his tiny intestines piled in a glossy knot.

I slipped off my parka. Sigrid took one look at Wyatt and the dead mouse and vanished down the hall, slamming the door of my room behind her.

“You let this happen,” Wyatt said, not looking up from his project.

I dropped down on the couch and took off my boots. “She was already at the beach by the time I noticed she was gone—”

“You’re telling me you couldn’t catch up with an eight-year-old?” He spun around; I squinted into the burning light. “Why couldn’t you bring the body back?”

Beyond him, framed by the window, mountainous bergs limned in black shadow loomed in the bay. I pictured the tiny boy, a dash of pink and green floating in an incomprehensible Enormity, under towering ice arches, past bergs shaped like mosques, dragons, monsters, gods.

“It was impossible. She’d already put him on the floe.”

“I see.”

He kept the blinding light in my face until I dropped my gaze down toward the ratty braided rug, rubbing my hands together. Warmth melted into my fingers. “It’s what she wanted to do, Wyatt.”

He turned back to his work. With a needle-nose tweezer, he extruded something gristly from the body cavity, draped it over a slide. “Like that’s some sort of respectful burial. Some polar bear’s having himself a tasty snack right about now, I’ll bet.”

“She did what was traditional in her culture.” My shoulders slumped. Fatigue pummeled me. “I’m going to get some sleep.”

“Where are the lovebirds?”

“They’ve got things to do. What happened to Odin?”

He flipped the light up on his head, rubbed his eyes. “He died last night. Must have happened while we were busy with the boy.”

“He wasn’t looking too well, I noticed.”

Wyatt pulled off his headlamp and tossed it on the desk. “His eye was drooping and he was starting to stumble around, starting to get clumsy. He was just a fucking mouse but he was my pet, too. Loved the little guy.”