Between Two Worlds (8 page)

The light revealed an eerie scene: in the distance, the
Windward
was stuck in shallow waters, tilted away toward a shoal of rocks that thrust up like a whale’s jagged teeth. I could make out Captain Bartlett and others, some in the blue uniforms of officers, wading in waist-high water. They gripped ropes tied to the ship’s masts. On a second reef, closer to the shore, several more crewmembers
struggled to secure the lines around massive boulders, trying to keep the ship from toppling over.

The fate of the ship did not look good. But the passengers had managed to get off. As many as thirty men, our men in addition to the crew, crowded a small, snow-covered spit of land. Some of them unloaded cargo from rowboats and stacked it into large piles at the water’s rocky edge. Others rolled barrels and dragged crates up the beach past the irregular line of seaweed that marked the tide.

I saw Bag of Bones stacking boxes, but no Angulluk. I’d find him later.

I spotted Marie, a small figure in a green cloak alongside Mitti Peary. They were heaving and rolling a big barrel up from the shoreline.

I made my way along the beach as fast as I could go over the rocks and huge drifts of snow. I waved. “Marie! Mitti Peary!”

Marie ran toward me, stumbled on a rock, and picked herself up. She threw her arms around me. “Oh, Billy Bah!” Her eyes were bright. “We’ve had such adventures!”

“What happened? The ship has almost tipped over!”

“I nearly fell out of my bunk, but my blankets held me in. We could hardly walk when the ship was turned on its side! Mother made me put on all three of my dresses and my cloak.”

I laughed. She
did
look plump. I was so grateful that she was alive that I hadn’t noticed.

Her breath puffed into the frosty air. “Mother and I slid down the deck on our bottoms. Right into the rowboat!”

“You’re a brave girl, Marie.” I looked over at Mitti Peary struggling with the barrel. Her long skirts were soaked at the bottom. “Let’s help your mother.”

Mitti Peary’s eyes offered me half a smile. She was too out of breath to say much.

While Marie skipped around us, her mother and I heaved the barrel above the tide line. We went back and pushed another; then we dragged a crate. Marie carried tackles and ropes. The growing piles on the upper beach, shielded by snow-covered tarpaulins, looked like sleeping walrus.

Mitti Peary sat down on the crate with a weary sigh, shivering. I sat beside her on a barrel and we faced the water and the tilted ship. Mitti Peary turned to Marie, who was climbing up the pile. “Marie! This is not a place to play. Go run on the beach.”

“Come with me, Billy Bah.” Marie grabbed my mittened hand.

“Not now,” I said. “Maybe we’ll have time later.”

“Don’t go far!” Mitti Peary called to Marie.

Already dashing away, she ran through the snow, heading toward the upper beach. Beyond it rose snow-covered hills and icy mountain peaks.

“Heaven knows how she can keep going like that,” Mitti Peary said. The feathers on her hat were soggy and
crumpled. Her long brown hair hung damp about her shoulders.

The tide had gone out farther, and the ship, tied to boulders by two long ropes, leaned at an even sharper angle than before. The ropes seemed strained to a breaking point.

Mitti Peary sighed again. “I don’t know what we’ll do if the
Windward
is lost.”

“The ship could right itself if there’s water under it,” I said, making sure to pronounce every word correctly. “The tide will start coming in.”

Mitti Peary nodded. “We can only hope and pray for a miracle.”

“How did the ship end up against the rocks?”

“During the night, the sailor on watch wasn’t doing his job. He must have wrapped himself heavily against the wind and fallen asleep. The gale blew the
Windward
from its mooring, and it drifted against the shoal. Before the crew could move it, the tide had pulled out, and the ship was stranded.”

“Did anyone freeze? Or drown?”

“Everybody made it to shore. For a few hours last night, Marie and I took shelter in an igloo. The Eskimos here welcomed us.”

“The people did the same for my husband and me.”

She sprang to her feet. “Good Lord, I think that’s my trunk!”

We hurried down to the shore. Duncan, his red hair frozen in points that stuck out from beneath his blue wool cap, came wading through the water, protected by high slick boots.

Kiihal
. I stopped in my tracks and breathed a sigh of relief. He pulled a rowboat loaded with goods. With some effort, he wrapped his gloves around Mitti Peary’s trunk and heaved it onto the beach.

He gave a weary smile, his face raw and red, and I guessed he’d been out in the storm all night. “Hello, Billy Bah.” His voice was hoarse. “I was looking for you. Glad to see you made it through.”

I greeted him with my eyes, and copied his words. “I’m glad you’re safe.”

Mitti Peary and I each took a handle of the trunk and dragged it up the beach, often stopping to rest. At last we reached the tide line. She sat and caught her breath. “Thank you for your help.”

“You’re welcome,” I remembered to say.

Pleased and proud, I turned toward the village. Marie appeared in the distance, running alongside a child about her size. “Marie’s found a friend.”

“So I see.”

They reached the top of the hill and disappeared from sight.

“Marie is very naughty. I warned her to stay close by,” said Mitti Peary. “What if she gets lost?”

“I’ll fetch her.”

“Billy Bah,
thank you
again. I couldn’t manage without you!”

I trudged up the beach, following Marie’s footprints: Her boots had heels. Next to hers were the softer oval prints made by a child of our people.

The prints followed tracks that were round and spiked by claw marks. They’d spotted a fox. I followed the tracks beyond the hill and into a little valley where the fox tracks met with the hopping trail of rabbit feet at a frozen pond.

Marie should know better than to stray
, I thought.

I followed the tracks up the valley. Here the children’s voices must have chased the wary fox away from the trail. I could see only the rabbit’s tracks continuing around a big boulder. There they were!

“Marie!”

“Shhh,” whispered the other child. Her hood was round, the shape of a girl’s
kapatak
.

Just beyond the boulder, an enormous rabbit as white as the snow sniffed the air. Marie crept toward it, and it vanished behind rocks.

Marie brushed snow off her coat, forlorn. “I wanted him for a pet.”

“Keeping animals in cages is foolish,” I said. “And you can’t catch rabbits without traps.” I added, “You shouldn’t have wandered off. I spent a lot of time looking for you.”

“Sorry.” Marie looked down at her boots.

The other girl looked up, eyes smiling. It was Tooth Girl. “I’m Akitsinnguaq. I know you. You’re Eqariusaq.”

“That’s right,” I said, still cross. “Let’s go. We need to go see about the ship, and find my husband.”

The girls bounded ahead like sled dogs let out of a harness. I hadn’t seen Marie run off on her own like this—so foolish, in this land she did not know.

“Don’t run on the icy patches.”

Marie fell, but jumped to her feet again.

The sun, now partway down to the horizon, told me that it was mid-afternoon. Time to find Angulluk, see what kind of a camp he’d made, and if he’d caught us anything for dinner. Even more than that, I wanted to know if the
Windward
had escaped the icy waters and sharp rocks.

The girls raced over the last hill that separated us from the beach. I followed, breathing fast. As I neared the top, I heard shouting.

Marie called, “Billy Bah! Look!”

The
Windward
, still tilted on its side, slowly moved out from the shoal in the blue-black water. It rocked one way, then the other, then stood upright. The water had risen on the rocks and was climbing the sloping beach toward the tidemark.

I half slid down the bluff and ran as fast as I could toward the crowd on the beach. The
Windward
’s crew were making a storm of their own by their yelling. “Hip, hip, hooray!”

Their happiness made me shout for joy.

Angulluk came toward me. “There you are, woman!” His bushy eyebrows knit together. “Where did you go? I wanted you to help me raise the tent.”

“I didn’t know where you were, either. I was busy unloading the ship.”

Though Angulluk still frowned, I rubbed noses with him. The familiar smell of his damp furs mingled with the cold, salty wind.

“Lucky for the
qallunaat
,” I said. “They won’t be stranded here.”

“I suppose not.” The righting of the ship didn’t mean
much to Angulluk if it wasn’t going to return us to Itta. He didn’t seem to care if we were stranded here; a village that didn’t know his reputation for laziness was an opportunity to prove himself.

All the
qallunaat
possessions lay stacked on the sand. The ship couldn’t be leaving for America right away. Could it?

Angulluk said firmly, “Let’s tend to our tent.”

Dogs barked as we climbed toward the village. Our dogs were tied together with many others on the bluff, though a few slept curled outside the entranceways of their masters’ igloos. Our small tent stood between two igloos, shielded from the wind. Soon I had my two seal-oil lamps filled and lit; our home was cozy enough as we ate the seal meat Angulluk had hunted during our journey. With our fur covers, our cooking pot, my chest of keepsakes, and all our other tools, hunting gear, and belongings around us, life was almost the same as in Itta. No, not quite. Angulluk untied my pink ribbon, which wasn’t so clean now, and ran his hands over my hair. “No trades. Tonight you are mine.”

I was glad to be with him, too. Perhaps I’d forget all about the
qallunaat
in a few days. But during that night, when I awoke to the howling of the wind, I wondered what had happened to Duncan and the ship.

The next day, a bright sun shone without giving much heat. As we sat outside our tent, making a meat rack
from bones and sinew, blasts of sound rumbled over the ridge. “That’s not like any gunshots I ever heard,” Angulluk said.

“Dynamite.” I’d seen Peary’s sailors use it to break apart ice floes.

“For once, woman, you must be right.”

“A man is admitting his ignorance?” I let my work fall and leapt up. “Let’s go look.” Others came out of their tents and rock igloos as we neared the water.

During the night, the wind had shoved great masses of ice into the harbor. The ship was visible in the middle of the channel, high walls of ice on either side. In its path loomed a blue iceberg several times the height of the ship. The mountain of ice leaned over the ship like a monstrous wave about to break, blocking the
Windward
’s passage to the ocean.

A deep roar cut across the sparkling sound, followed by an even louder rumble as a piece of ice fell from the iceberg. The ship might be smashed, with Duncan, Marie, and Mitti Peary on it. My legs grew weak.

“They’re trying to blow up the whole iceberg,” Angulluk said. “Impossible!”

I nodded. Another explosion echoed. The ship swayed and seemed to move forward as a thin curl of smoke climbed the face of the ice.

I pictured Duncan and the sailors clinging to the rigging, hacking at the mountain, sections of ice crashing and
shattering. Was Marie below deck, holding tight to her mother? Or did she think it was another jolly adventure?

A tremendous boom! The
Windward
rocked violently. Black smoke surrounded the ship and then parted into two clouds.

The iceberg stood, immovable.

All was silent, except for the whistling of the wind.

“That iceberg won’t be going anywhere until next summer,” Angulluk said. “Why such a mournful face? Do you really care what happens to them?”

I felt a lump in my throat.

“Even if the ship sinks, the
qallunaat
can get to land by rowboat,” Angulluk said. “It’s only a matter of time, anyway, until the ice freezes over. Then they can walk here.”