Girl in Ice(85)

“Are you all right, Jeanne?”

She pushed me away with a grunt. With a couple of spastic steps, she listed toward the ridge as if following Wyatt down to the eels, but stopped. As his form threaded through the gap between the two bands of walrus, the mood seemed to shift among them. Mammoth flippers slapped ponderous backsides. Rumblings rippled through the two broods, snorts exchanged. First, just one massive bull forded the narrow pass between the two throngs; then the smaller females dragged themselves toward one another, as if recognizing family; finally the infants—two, three hundred pounds—wriggled toward each other, until the mob had merged once again. Only Wyatt’s head was visible beyond the herd as he crossed under the arch.

Still hunched over, Jeanne watched the roiling mass of flesh and blubber. In her face, I read longing, fear, then—something else. Her eyes hardened. Head down, chin set, decision made. Blood from her wounds staining the snow, she stomped past us to the cat, animated by whatever possessed her. Wrenched open the door, climbed in, and started the engine. Slammed it into gear.

She didn’t have to go far.

Because what she’d wanted was already happening. The confusion, fright, and alarm clear in rounds of panicked barks and squeals. Halfway down the hill, she banged the machine into neutral. Revved it hard, the engine noise echoing between the steep banks of the fjord.

But she didn’t need to do more, because the walruses had been on the move the moment the snowcat blasted to life. It wasn’t like they steamrolled over Wyatt; their crushing charge didn’t seem intentional. There was just no place for him to go as they climbed over one another in their stampede to reach the sea and safety, flippers smacking, whiskered faces shuddering with terror, yard-long tusks cracking together. Shoulders colliding like blubbery waves, they crushed their own infants in their exodus as they filled the bay en masse, Wyatt’s cries barely audible over their grunts.

Sigrid stared at the scene in silence; I pulled her toward me. I didn’t dare take my eyes off Jeanne.

For close to a minute, she sat unmoving in the snowcat, then reached down and switched off the motor. Just walruses bellowing; no more sounds from Wyatt. She fumbled at the door and climbed out of the machine. Took a few wobbly steps down the slope.

She dropped to her knees crying Wyatt’s name. The grief in her voice stunned me, this raw pain loosed from some cavernous place inside her, like she was turning herself inside out. I thought to comfort her but couldn’t seem to move my limbs. After a minute, her manner changed; she dropped her chin to her chest. Seemed cried out, drained of energy and purpose.

I assumed she would stay there, wedged in the snow like that, but no. Gravity helping, she found her footing. Bolted with stunning agility down the bank toward the undulating mass of walrus flesh. Two big noisy females turned to her, shocked quiet at the sight of this woman jumping into their midst. Jeanne climbed onto one of their backs, teetered crazily as she tried to leap from there, but lost her balance and slipped down between them. She screamed once and was silenced.



* * *



THERE WAS NOTHING Sigrid and I could do for anyone except ourselves. We gathered the dregs of the eels that remained in the bay—no trace of Wyatt or Jeanne—and drove the snowcat from cairn to cairn, back to the empty Shack. My first call was to Pitak, who told me the winds would be calm enough the next day for him to safely fly out to the station and bring us to Thule.

A few tries later, I reached my dad on the sat phone. At first there was only dead air as I spoke that terrifying word love to him; in fact, he was quiet for some moments after I’d finished telling him all that had happened.

When he finally spoke, his voice was full of so much tenderness, I hardly knew him.

“You’ve been through hell, Val. How can I express my…”

“It’s okay, Dad. Are you doing all right?”

“Don’t change the subject. I wish… I wish your brother could know somehow what you’ve done. That I could have taken Wyatt’s life with my own hands… that I could have spoken with Andy one more time. Fantasies, all of them.”

“I have them too, Dad.”

“Mostly I wish I could tell you to get on that plane with Sigrid and come home right now. Order you to come back and see your old man—”

“I can’t say what I’m going to—”

“I understand. You’ve got to see this through in your own way. But promise me one thing.”

“Name it.”

“When you do come back, I hope you’ll tell me about yourself. Let me just be a dad for a little bit, for the time I’m here. It’s like I hardly know you, Val, and that’s my fault, I know. Here you are, bringing me my favorite candy every time you visit, and I—I haven’t the faintest clue what you like.”

“I like strawberry licorice.”

He laughed. “Strawberry licorice it is. I’ll get my hands on some. And I’ll shut up this time. I’ll listen. Just let me get to know you. That would be a gift.”





forty


In the rock-strewn yards of simple, brightly painted wooden homes, caribou antlers lie in tangled heaps. Tied to wooden racks, strips of drying fish flutter in the wind as sled dogs yip and howl, one round stopping just as another begins. Polar bear pelts hang over porch railings, black claws grazing the frozen turf.