A Walk Through a Window (7 page)

A
drenaline surged through Darby and she raced toward the figure. Almost right away she could see it wasn’t Gabe. It was just some little kid, all wrapped up against the cold. All the same, she was so happy to see another human being, Darby thought the kid looked like an angel. As she moved closer, she could see so many layers of leather and fur on the small figure, she couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl. Darby got within yelling distance, took a giant breath and then stopped dead. The dreamlike feeling came back in a big way. What if she couldn’t talk—couldn’t call for help?

Just then the kid looked straight at Darby for the first time. She could see little more than the eyes, but something about the walking style told her it was a little girl. The child raised a hand in greeting and Darby’s heart lifted in her chest. Even though this child was so much smaller, she could at least lead Darby to someone who could help.

“I’m so glad you’ve found me. Where are we?” Darby babbled. The child didn’t reply immediately but instead did something very odd. With one hand, she reached up and pulled away the soft fur scarf obscuring her face. She took two steps closer.

And sniffed.

Darby instinctively stepped back.
How weird was that?
But things quickly got worse.

She opened her mouth to speak again, but the child brushed past.

“Atlée!”
the child called, and Darby spun on her heel in the snow, trying to grab the child’s arm as she went past. “Mama!”

“Look, kid,” Darby began, “I’m not your …”

A large group of people was standing immediately behind her.

Even after all that had happened in the last fifteen minutes or so, this was really disturbing. There must have been ten people there. How did ten people manage to sneak up on her like that? One of them stepped forward and the small child ran over to her.

The people were all Darby’s size or even a bit shorter. Maybe a group of teens out playing in the snow? The one who stepped forward was talking to the little kid. Darby thought they must be babysitting or something, but if they had to take the little kid back home, they could take her, too. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she really wanted the company of an adult.

“I cannot see her, Mama Atlée. I looked
everywhere—I walked right to the breathing hole in the ice, but she is not there.”

There was a low murmur of sound and several members of the group exchanged glances. The person the small child had spoken to bent down.

“You must not do that again, Sha’achi. Not even for Nukum. I know you are a big girl now, but it is not safe to go away from the family group all by yourself. If you travel alone on the ice, the
qallupilluq
will come along and steal you from our family. Do you want them to pull you under the water? Grandmama Nukum will be back soon.”

Darby tried to shake off the strange feeling of dread that had settled into her stomach. Why hadn’t the little child said anything about her? Even if the kid’s grandma was missing, surely a shivering girl in cut-offs standing with snow up to her skinny white knees would warrant some kind of comment.

Darby stepped forward.

“What is the bad smell, Atlée?” asked Sha’achi. She pulled the fur off her face and sniffed the air again. “It smells like the breath of the bears. Are the bears here, mama?”

Darby shook her head in amazement. She’d been the subject of a few serious insults in her time, but no one had ever said she smelled like a bear.

But she was anxious and desperate enough to swallow her pride. She took another step forward in the snow. “Um, excuse me. Could one of you help me? I have no idea where I am …”

The person talking to the child stood up and pulled back her hood. Without the shelter of the encircling fur, her eyes creased against the brilliant light of the sun. “I do not know what the smell is, but it is not bears, little one,” she said, not responding to Darby at all. “Come back inside and take some food. You must eat before we journey.”

The group encircled the small child protectively and moved away from Darby. She closed her eyes in despair. This was too much. She’d asked for help and they’d just ignored her? The whole situation was so bizarre, all she could do was follow her only hope for information. She scurried after them, trying to place each step in the footprints they left behind in the snow.

In a moment, they began to disappear from sight and Darby wondered once again if she was seeing things. Then she realized they were dropping, one by one, into a low tunnel that led into the snow.

Her tunnel!

Darby picked up speed, slipping a little in the deep footprints, when she noticed that one person was standing apart from the others and had turned back to face her. The figure was slightly taller than the rest.

She slowed her pace as the last of the others disappeared into the black mouth of the tunnel. Her eyes had better adjusted to the light, and she could now see how the snow banked behind the tunnel. The person standing to one side raised a hand and pulled off his hood—for Darby could now see he was male.
He wore a carved bone tied with some kind of leather strip across his eyes for protection from the sun. As he pulled the bone away, she gasped in shock.

It was Gabe.

Before she could say a word, he put a hand up to his lips and gestured for her to be quiet. She found she had no words to say at that moment, anyway. He reached out and took her cold hand into his mittened one.

“I know you have questions, Darby, but time is very short. Just know that all is as it should be and while I am beside you, you are safe.”

“But,” she said, finding her voice at last, “why won’t they help me? Why don’t you? I want to go home.”

He squeezed her hand. “You nearly
are
home, Darby. And they would help you with their very lives if they could. But you are not of their world and they do not really know you are here.”

Darby shook her head in despair. This made no sense at all.

“What on earth does that mean—
not really?
They either know I am here or they don’t. Which is it?” she peered closely into his face. It was such a relief to have someone to speak to—to touch. “Is this some kind of dream, Gabe?”

“This time is for listening, Darby, and for watching. I know it all must seem strange, but you will learn and next time will be easier. Now take heed.”

He pointed with one arm and shouted.
“Nukum!”

Immediately a rumble of voices came from the
tunnel, and several of the people spilled back out onto the snow. Gabriel pulled his hood up and slipped on his eye covering. He joined several other members of the group as they hurriedly strapped snowshoes to their feet, lashing them to their soft boots with leather laces.

Darby scanned the horizon, but apart from a small black dot in the distance, she could see nothing.

“Gabe!” She struggled through the snow to where he was standing. “What are you doing?”

She could just make out the flash of his smile inside the thick fur of his hood, but once again he ignored her and turned instead to the small child.

“Sha’achi, you must take your mother inside and get everything ready for Nukum. She will surely be very hungry and thirsty after her long journey.”

He stood up, looked straight into Darby’s eyes and inclined his head to indicate she was to go in the tunnel. Then he and a group of two or three others trudged off across the snow. The rest of the group slipped down into the dark hole.

But Darby remembered that tunnel. And the memories were not good. She did
not
want to go back in there, so she stayed right where she was.

Shading her eyes, she looked up. In a matter of those few moments, Gabe and his small party had travelled quite a distance across the sheet of snow. She was amazed at how quickly they could move on their snowshoes.

She was alone again.

Maybe it was the clear air, or more likely the pure rush of human contact, but Darby’s panic began to roll back a bit. Her brain started thinking again.

Gabe’s strange words danced through her head. “You are not of this time,” he’d said. But how could that be? She patted her arms and gave herself a bit of a hug. She was definitely there. She was there and she was cold.

And yet not
that
cold. Not as cold as she should be. She was wearing regulation summer wear: an old yellow T-shirt of her mother’s with a picture of Che Guevera on it, cut-off jean shorts and flip-flops. Correction: one flip-flop. She must have lost the other one in her scramble out of the tunnel.

The whole interaction since she had emerged into the blindingly white day had taken maybe ten or fifteen minutes. If she had been standing outside her Toronto house in December for this long, she’d have hypothermia by now. Sure, she was cold. But it was goose-bump-quality cold, not freezing-to-death–quality.

But maybe a person couldn’t freeze to death when they were already dead.

What other explanation could there be? The whole dream scenario didn’t stand up—she’d just had a conversation with Gabe. Not a logical conversation, but they had talked all the same. And there had been that tunnel with the white light …

Yet, somehow, she just didn’t feel dead. Of course, she didn’t really have a basis for comparison. But her arms were covered in goose bumps and the spot over
her eyebrow where she’d cracked her head the second time was very tender to the touch. And she couldn’t even begin to list all the ways this place was different from any sort of afterlife she had pictured.

Darby looked down at her bare foot. Her toes were cold, but not freezing. In fact, the foot with the sandal felt just as cold as the foot standing in the snow. Gazing down, she noticed something else. Neither of her feet left marks in the snow. She was standing in a spot near the mouth of the tunnel where the snow was packed down by footprints, so she tried a little experiment. She took a step over to one side into a nearby snowdrift.

Big mistake. The snow had frozen and was crusty on the surface, but as soon as she put her whole weight onto the drift, she sank in right up to her thighs. She flailed around in panic for a few minutes before managing to drag herself back up onto the packed surface. In a moment she was back on her feet, hands on her knees and gasping for breath. Strangely, the effort to get free had actually warmed her up a little.

Once she had caught her breath, Darby glanced over to see if she’d actually made a snow angel with all her thrashing about.

There was no mark in the snow.

No sign of even a footprint, let alone evidence of a 110-pound girl flailing around for five minutes.

Maybe dead people can’t make snow angels.

Carefully staying on the packed area of snow, Darby started pacing.
I should have listened to Gabe. If I
went down in the tunnel, maybe I could get back home
. But the mouth of the tunnel was so black in contrast to everything around it that she just couldn’t make herself do it. It was too much like crawling into her own grave.

Suddenly, Darby heard a shout. Gabe and his group! She looked up to see them hurrying back across the snowy plain, followed some distance behind by a bounding yellowish dog.

They hadn’t taken ten more steps when Darby realized that the animal was as much a dog as she was a chicken.

“BEAR!!!” she screamed, jumping up and down and pointing. Gabe and one of the other group members were supporting a tiny person, no bigger than Sha’achi. How they were moving so fast, Darby had no idea. But they were not moving as fast as the bear.

Thinking about it afterwards, she was pretty sure it wasn’t a full-grown polar bear. She’d looked them up in the encyclopaedia and knew they could grow to be eight feet tall on their hind legs. The one chasing Gabe and his group was not eight feet tall, but he was plenty big enough. He had kind of a bumbly running style, and at one point he actually stopped chasing the group and rolled for a minute in the snow, like he was playing. Gabe and the people with him didn’t stop to watch, though. They were pretty close now, and she could see the strain on their faces as they tried to make it back to the tunnel ahead of the bear.

As they staggered up, Gabe and one other guy in the group half-pushed, half-carried the tiny person
toward the entrance to the tunnel. Darby turned to see Sha’achi’s little face framed in the opening.
“Nukum!”
she squealed.

“Nanuq,”
corrected the old lady, for Darby could now see that this must be the missing grandmother. “Inside!” she commanded, and Sha’achi’s face disappeared as the others thrust Nukum into the black tunnel and scrambled in after her.

And in what had to be the strangest moment of Darby’s entire life, she turned to find herself face to face with a polar bear.

Darby had done her share of school reports on Canada’s mammals. In grade five she did a huge project on the Kodiak, a very large type of grizzly bear found in the North. She distinctly recalled writing in her report that Kodiak bears were the biggest bears in Canada, even bigger than polar bears.

Standing on his hind legs, this guy was the biggest thing she’d ever seen. Seconds before, she had been terrified of plunging back into the black tunnel, but it was amazing how the close-set eyes of a polar bear gazing at her changed her mind.

The bear bounded up to the spot where the snow was flattened and suddenly stopped. With careful steps and a rolling gait, he moved toward the tunnel, shaking his massive head back and forth as he walked. Down on all fours, she noticed he was a little pigeon-toed, but the size of his paws soon drove anything resembling a clear thought out of her mind. They looked as big as frying pans, with
claws as big as—well, as big as any claws she had ever seen.

He paused to one side of the tunnel, with his body directly between the snowdrift where Darby was standing and the tunnel. He put one front paw on the roof of the snow structure. In a moment he was towering over her, standing on his back paws and full out leaning on the top of the snow house behind the tunnel. The fur on his belly was pure white, or at least a little less yellow than the rest of him against the white ice of the snow house. She could actually see where his skin was almost black under the thick layer of fur, a black that seemed to emerge only with his sharp nose and again within his tiny eyes.