Ice Drift (9780547540610) (9 page)

The Arctic Ocean is perpetually covered
with ice, and a persistent circular current feature,
the Beaufort Gyre, sweeps the sea ice southwestward
along the northwestern coast of Canada.

Thick snow, driven by a high wind, attacked the floe for two days. Lighted by the
qulliq,
Alika busied himself scraping meat off the sealskin. Sulu helped. Alika dressed out the flippers of the new seal, saving every morsel. Then he used the
Reliance
ax to cut several lengths of wood off the sledge so Sulu could carve to pass the time.

The storm stopped the second night, while they were asleep. In the morning, with the temperature probably thirty below, Alika saw two sets of bear tracks near the snowhouse and also sighted the ever-present white fox tracks.

"We had visitors last night," he said to Sulu. "Look!"

Sulu said to Jamka, "Why didn't you wake us up?"

"The wind. He didn't smell them."

Sulu said, "You'll have to do better, Jamka."

The bears were likely on the prowl after burrowing down during the storm. Jamka sniffed the tracks but didn't seem disturbed by them. Apparently, the
nanuks
weren't nearby. "Better we stay inside for a while anyway," Alika said.

Then he double-checked the carbine to make certain it was ready for use. There were ice crystals on the barrel, but it cocked easily. Alika well knew that against a charging bear, he'd likely have only one shot. He'd have to depend on Jamka to slow the charge and not get in the way.

To pass time, he resharpened every knife and then began kneading the sealskins, though they'd need sunshine for stretching and softening. What else was there to do? Finally, Alika said, "Let's hunt. I need to get out of here." But Jamka's holes weren't active, and they returned to the
iglu
for another harrowing night.

The wind moaned and, combined with the creaking of the floe—now and then a muffled collision, perhaps a bergy bit crashing against their floe—and the eerie darkness inside the snowhouse, made each hour agonizing. Alika wondered how long they could take it. How many days and nights could they last, not even counting the dangers of the weather and
nanuk?

Sulu asked, "Will there be another summer for us?"

"Of course," Alika said. But he had no proof. Maybe not even another night?

Sulu said, "I can't wait."

"Just keep thinking about it, brother," Alika said. "Close your eyes and think about all the sunshine. You'll get warm just thinking about it."

All Inuit lived for the spring and summer, delighted in each day and night, especially those who lived north of the Arctic Circle. The sun would stay above the horizon from mid-May until late July, and even though the temperature could dip to thirty below in the spring for a day or two, or snow could fall, those seasons were like heaven to Alika and Sulu and their people.

As the snow disappeared, the tundra would be covered with willow catkins and poppies and buttercups and mountain avens and purple saxifrage and Lapland rosebay and heather. Orange lichen covered the rocks; yellow-green moss filled the valleys. Huge Arctic bumblebees came out of nowhere to suck nectars. Summer was goodness and happiness to Alika and Sulu.

In the late winter and spring, occasionally there were sun dogs, twenty-two degrees on either side of the sun, caused by airborne ice crystals, sometimes accompanied by luminous arcs and bands. The Arctic sky, Qilak, was a place of wonder to every Inuit.

Summer was the time of year when the moon slept. If it could be seen at all, it was the color of pale white cheese. No stars could be seen. Sun flooded the northland, and the Inuit collected eggs and hunted and fished around the clock. Who wanted to waste the good light and relative warmth bedded down?

Sulu said, "Will I see the birds again?"

Alika said, "Of course."

Sulu's papa and mama had no idea why he had fallen in love with birds. Neither did Alika.

The only birds that Sulu could see during the winter were the ravens, the dovekies, the gyrfalcons, the ptarmigan, and the snowy owls. So Sulu worshiped the flocks of birds that came in the spring and summer. He couldn't wait each year until the migrating waterbirds were seen, the snow geese and the ducks, the common eiders and gaudy king eiders,
the red-throated loons, the black guillemots and the piratical, nest-robbing jaegers. Almost thirty different kinds of birds visited during the spring and summer, millions of them. Sulu could identify most. He knew the perching birds as well as the seabirds that skimmed low over the melting ice.

When a peregrine dived on a horned lark, he would shout, "Look out, lark!" When the jaeger plundered the nest of a phalarope, he'd yell, "Thief!"

"Yes, you'll see the birds again," Alika assured him.

Sulu kept talking about the birds for a long time, until his small voice faded out. He was different from all the other boys in Nunatak, Alika knew, a carver and bird lover.

Alika had his own memories of the springs and summers onshore. They paraded through his mind after Sulu had gone to sleep.

He remembered riding, as a child, on the sledge as the dogs drew it across the new grass of May. He remembered gathering bird eggs toward the end of the summer, when he was not much higher than Jamka.

He remembered picking heather to line the caribou-hide sleeping mattresses for the sealskin tents in which they slept. He remembered gathering cotton flowers for use with dried moss to make wicks for the seal-oil lamps. He remembered picking crowberries and blueberries and cranberries to be dried for Mama's winter cooking. Red bearberries ripened in the fall.

Most of all, he remembered going hunting for the first time with his papa for musk oxen and caribou and wolves and hares. Hares were hunted by the thousands, as much for their skin, which would be made into socks, as for their meat. Eider ducks were snared.

Fishing for Arctic char, food for man and dog, began in the spring through lake and river ice. In the fall, the ice was sometimes so transparent the fish could be seen swimming beneath Alika's boots.

During the spring and summer hunting, fishing, and food gathering, Alika's family often met friends and neighbors from Nunatak, sharing food and talk and songs, sometimes throat singing. Standing face-to-face, they'd make a sound in their throats without opening their mouths. The sounds were inspired by those of the birds or other animals. Mama was very good at it.

The shared food cooked by the women always tasted better than the food of winter. It could be smelled a mile away as the hunters returned to the campsites. The men occasionally did something special, like placing hot rocks in caribou stomachs filled with blood, to make an instant pudding. Alika loved that.

Beginning in May, the musk oxen shed large parts of their underfur, and it was gathered to be woven by the women. Almost everything on the tundra—animals, birds, and plants—was gathered. The migratory birds would begin to arrive, pleasing Sulu. And seal pups would be born out on the strait.

Alika clearly remembered summers when the wolves got to a herd of musk oxen before the hunters. The musk oxen formed a circle, with the cows inside, and the wolves attacked. The bulls on the outside of the circle rammed the wolves as best they could, and the hunters shot the wolves and then the musk oxen.

Thinking about those days, from the time of childhood until the past spring and summer, Alika felt desolate and sad, lonelier than ever.

He reached across Jamka's belly to put his hand on his brother's shoulder. Sulu stirred but did not awaken. Alika soon went to uneasy sleep.

The floes, common in the Greenland Strait during
the long winters, were sometimes occupied by seal hunters,
going out in their kayaks, risking high winds
and blizzards.

In the first week of the
kabloonas'
January, the moon was very near the horizon, so it was not much assistance to Alika's hunting. Two days later, Jamka found three possible seal holes, but it was too cold for Alika to sit at them. Sulu stayed home.

Alika took the carbine with him, of course. But he shook with cold and could not hold the rifle steady. His fingers were numb despite his mitts. He would not have been able to pull the trigger should a bear have appeared.

Every day they'd go outside for a few minutes to stand in the blackness and look at the
iglu,
seeing the warm light of the
qulliq
through the nearly transparent blocks of snow. It seemed to be the only light in a planet of ebony.

On the tenth morning of January, a towering berg slammed into the stern of their ice ship, shaking it, pushing from behind, and then finally spinning away in the wind and the currents.

Watching it go, Sulu asked, "What else can happen to us?"

Alika forced a laugh. "Not much. A berg knocked us loose from shore. A bear stole our food. We almost got lost in a blizzard. We got frostbitten. What did I miss?"

"We've been missing the feast every week!"

"I hadn't thought about that," Alika said.

"I have. Everybody is in the meeting hall, eating and laughing and singing."

Alika said quietly, "Those are good things to think about. It won't be too long until we're there with everyone again."

Alika didn't want to talk about the future, when the floe would come apart, though it certainly would happen. But not a day or night went by that he didn't think about it.

By mid-January, the moon was full again, and Alika and Jamka were out hunting. Sulu huddled a few feet away, staying near his big brother. The moon was shining so brightly that they could see miles ahead. Mock moons were on either side of it.

Without warning, Jamka tensed. His tail rose straight up, front legs rigid.

Alika held his breath and slowly raised the harpoon. The indicator rod trembled, and the nose of a seal plugged the breathing hole as Alika drove the harpoon head into it, Jamka howling and Sulu yelling, "We can eat! We can eat!"

Alika yelled triumphantly, "Yes, we can!"

The animal was fat, and Alika dressed it in the main
iglu,
having learned his lesson about storage in the small house and guarding their meals from
nanuk.

 

The crosscurrents began playing tricks in the afternoon, steering the floe westward, then eastward. It was a ship without a rudder.

"What's happening?" Sulu asked, face showing alarm.

"I don't know. Every day we go farther south and there's nothing we can do about it," Alika answered. No one really understood the waters in the strait and how they changed night and day. "Let's just hope the currents push us toward shore."

Early the next afternoon, when they were down at the floe edge with Jamka intently watching a hole, Sulu yelled, "
Nanuk!
" and Alika turned around, grabbing the Maynard.

Thirty feet away, coming in their direction, was one of the largest bears Alika had ever seen. Jamka leaped away from the seal hole, and the bear headed in a run for the Little One, about ten feet away.

Alika heard the bear puff and fired, hitting it in the head, blood spurting as it hurtled down the short slope, plunging into the water.

Sulu had dropped into the snow face-first, and Alika sank down, shaking all over.

Jamka appeared puzzled as he watched the
nanuk
beginning to float away, leaving a red streak behind. It had all happened so quickly that none of them could move. The bear would have provided at least three months of food. Old Miak had lived on bear meat his last four months.

Finally, Alika said, "It was bound to happen." He went over and sat beside his brother, an arm around Sulu's small shoulders. "Papa warned that the bear would make a puff before it attacked. I pulled the trigger when I heard the puff."

"It is probably the same bear that came here before, the one that broke into the storage
iglu.
It knew we were here," Alika said.

"And he could have eaten all of us," Sulu said, still breathing hard.

That was true, Alika thought. Bears ate seals; wolves ate caribou and musk oxen; foxes ate lemmings and hares, and dined on the leavings of bears, quarreling with ravens over which got the last bites. Bears also ate unlucky humans. And humans ate all of the animals.

Looking at the bear floating away, the blood running down over its black nose and spreading, Alika felt sorry for it. He'd never really liked to look at the five
nanuk
skulls in his front yard, although he knew it was tradition to save them, and he knew all hunters had great respect for the beautiful bears and their spirits. He also believed there was indeed a place where bears lived somewhere in the sky. Inu said he'd been there, and Alika believed him.

Alika had never thought he would have to kill one. But his family had slept on bearskins for years, and they all wore bearskin pants. Bears had been good to them.

He had watched, and even helped, as his papa and mama had cut up the carcasses of bears, rejoicing that they'd have the meat and hides. Yet they expressed sorrow each time that such a beautiful animal had to die.