Ice Drift (9780547540610) (2 page)

The six dogs paddled ashore, and Alika watched as they climbed up onto the bank and shook the water from their tough coats. They moved out into the closing dusk as a pack. Ideally, they'd run straight to the village,
unless
they encountered a bear. They'd surely attack it, Alika knew, and all six could be killed. He hoped the
inuas,
the always watching and listening heavenly spirits, would direct the dogs away from any prowling
nanuks.

Alika thought that if the dogs arrived safely, his papa and the other villagers would quickly figure out what might have happened.
Only Alika could have
unharnessed the dogs! He must he injured or, worst of all, adrift on a floe with no way to reach shore. Sulu has been missing all day and is undoubtedly with Alika. Poor Little One.

Alika put his arms around his brother and said, "Don't be afraid. Papa has put everything on the sledge that we'll need. Once the dogs reach home, Papa and the other men will launch the big boat and paddle out to find us. We'll build a small house. We'll stay here near the
aglus
and hunt after we build the house, all right?"

Sulu nodded. He was almost too frightened to speak but did manage to say, "We can't use the sledge. The dogs are gone."

"We can use parts of the sledge, and everything that's on it," Alika said. "You'll see."

"What happened, Alika?"

"An iceberg hit the floe and broke it from shore."

"Why did the berg hit us?"

"Bergs have no brains, Little One."

Like Alika's, Sulu's intense eyes were black; his hair, straight and black, too. His caribou-fur parka hood framed a reddish-brown face that was holding back tears.

Rather frail and sometimes sickly, Sulu was an apprentice to the old ex-hunter Etukak, and his soapstone carvings of birds, a most difficult subject, were already the talk of Nunatak. Etukak said young Sulu was very talented.

Everyone in the village knew that Sulu was different and remarked about it. Mama called him "the gentle one." And he had that strange love of birds. He'd never put an arrow through a dovekie or an owl or a raven. And in the summer hunts, if he found a bird with a broken wing, he'd try to fix it.

Alika had seen him turn away when a seal was killed; when a caribou or musk ox was brought down; even when one of the thousands of hares was trapped and killed by Mama.

Out of Sulu's hearing, his papa and mama had talked about him—Papa dismayed that he might not hunt, his mama understanding. Alika had overheard them several times.

Suddenly the storm raged in from the west, with roaring wind gusts driving the snow. Alika turned the sledge over and gathered Sulu and Jamka behind it. These western storms were usually short-lived, and the boys had no choice except to huddle together and wait for it to pass. Alika shielded Sulu with his body. Storms were routine for Jamka. He just went to sleep.

Alika thought of home and the safety of their village, which was located fifteen miles from the west coast of Greenland across the strait. They could walk or sledge to Greenland on solid ice during the winter. Nunatak was the most modern settlement in the High Arctic, because of the nearby wreck of the American ship
Reliance,
a three-masted sail-and-steam vessel. Wooden hulled, it had been crushed by floe ice ten years earlier.

When its crew of fifty-five men, plus sixty dogs, abandoned the
Reliance,
the villagers stripped its hull inside and out, even to the ship's brass bell. Only the steam engine was left to rust away. The
Reliance,
a fine new ship, had been headed for the Arctic Ocean, with plans to send four sledges, the captain, and sixteen crewmen to the North Pole. They would have been the first humans to reach that celebrated geographic goal. But the
kabloonas,
the white men, had no idea of the power of huge slabs of ice and the tides.

Although it was home to some of the animals he needed to hunt, Kussu and the other villagers had always feared the ice. Alika did as well. It could crush anything in its way. With wind and currents pushing it, with its rumbling, screeching, thundering, or sawing noises, it could send towers of frozen water into the air and create vast ice landscapes of sharp hummocks, or hills. The
Reliance
had offered little resistance.

Alika went with his papa to the explorers' ship before and after it was crushed, amazed at what he saw; amazed at how the white men lived aboard that three-masted giant
umiak,
with its steam engine. It burned something called coal. The men gave him fancy food that made him throw up. What they clearly did not understand was ice. They were helpless when the hull popped open like the full stomach of a musk ox. Earlier they'd shown the villagers the huge timber ribs of the ship, saying they were unbreakable. The villagers had laughed and laughed. The
tuvaq,
the sea ice, could destroy anything.

After the crew and the three Inuit dog handlers left on sledges for the few settlements en route to Canada's Hudson Bay, far to the south, the residents of Nunatak put every inch of wood on their sledges as well as every single pot, pan, sheet, blanket, every item of left-behind food, and every lump of coal. They made trip after trip back to the village for a whole summer. Alika had helped.

And so what had been one-room sod-stone-and-sealskin dwellings were now made of wood, with roofs and wooden doors and wooden floors. There was even a proud community hall building, courtesy of the
Reliance
wood.

Nunatak then became remarkable and exceptional because the few coastal settlements from Ellesmere on down to Baffin Island and the Hudson Strait were really just summer tented and winter
iglu
hunting camps. Unlike Nunatak, those camps were not meant to be permanent. Nunatak, once a collection of temporary makeshift huts and
iglus,
could now properly be called a village.

Fom the ice rises steam fog, sea smoke,
frost smoke, silence, or angry noise. The Inuit had
to live with the ice and sometimes die on it.

The six sledge dogs, Nattiq in the lead, arrived in the late night at the snowbound village. The dogs often fought one another if not harnessed, mainly over food, but they seemed to sense the urgency of this event. Fortunately, they had not encountered a bear since leaving Alika and Sulu.

In the wind and swirling snow, they howled loudly outside Kussu and Maja's timber-and-sod dwelling. Kussu opened the door within seconds and went out, shocked to see the team without the sledge and his sons. As if the dogs might answer, Kussu yelled at them, "Where are the boys? Where is Jamka? Where are they? Tell me!" Kussu and Maja had been worrying since late afternoon. Sulu was always around the village; not this time.

Ice sparkled on the dogs' coats and hung down from their underbellies. Maja cried out, "They've been in the water. Look!" Snow pelting her smooth brown face, she yelled again, over the wind, "Could Alika and Sulu be adrift?" There was always that dreaded possibility when the villagers were seal hunting on the floe ice, but it happened rarely.

"Maybe!" Kussu yelled back, face taut with fright.

"We must go after them!"

"Of course!" Kussu shouted. "Of course!"

He ran to the village bell from the
Reliance
and began to ring it. Their sons were in danger. The boys might die.

Maja yelled at the dogs, "Why did you leave them?"

Inside again, Maja asked, "What happens if Alika is hurt? Sulu doesn't know enough to help."

"Sulu probably knows more than you think," Kussu answered. "He's hunted with us. He's seen
us
get hurt."

"If only the other men were here, we could have a search party, go out with all the dogs and sledges," Maja said. There were more than 150 dogs in the village. "The young women could go, too."

All the men of the village, except for the shaman Inu, the spiritual leader, and two feeble male elders, had gone inland to kill caribou and musk oxen for meat and skins. Each family needed thirty full skins every year to make clothing. It was a must, the final land-animal hunt before the long darkness. Kussu had planned to join them in the morning, after Alika returned with the sledge.

"Wishful thinking," said Kussu. "We have only our team. We have to make a decision, Maja: Go out alone with the dogs or try to find the floe from kayaks and hope they're on it."

Maja shook her head. "You decide."

Kussu thought a moment. "Let's find the floe."

Knowing the chances of finding their sons were slim if they were on a floe, Kussu said, "We'll look for them as soon as the storm blows over." Rescue attempts would depend solely on Kussu and Maja. Inu was too old to help, as were carver Etukak and Miak.

Maja nodded. She was a strong woman, with high cheekbones, penetrating eyes, and powerful hands. She was almost as good as Kussu at hunting and trapping out on the tundra or paddling a kayak—and just as brave.

Kussu soon went back outside and placed the dogs in their shelter. He fed them and then checked the kayaks, which had not been used since summer.

Maja quickly prepared dried fish from the summer hunt and they ate. In some respects, they were twinlike in size and appearance, except Kussu had a thick black mustache and goatee.

Kussu said, "If Alika went where I told him to go, the floe will pass here. But with luck the wind will drive it toward Greenland." There might be safety in Greenland. There were more villages over there.

"Why did you send Alika to the ice?" Maja asked, suddenly angry. "Winter is almost here."

"To hunt seals, of course. He's a man."

"He's still a boy. And why didn't you check the sledge to see if Sulu was on it?" Maja continually worried about Sulu's health.

"I was too busy talking to Niuinia about going out for caribou tomorrow to even think of Sulu."

Maja let out a disgusted breath.

They both knew that the size and depth of the floes controlled the speed of drift. The depth in the middle of the floe could be ten or fifteen feet or more, like a keel, but it would be thinner along the edges where it had been attached to land. The floe might run aground. They could hope for that. It had happened before.

After the three darkest months, the white man's November, December, and January, hunters sometimes went out on the moving ice for seals to feed their families. They'd even set up camps on the floes, going back to the mainland by kayak. But there was no guarantee this would happen. Kussu knew there could not be a worse time for his sons to be on the ice, if that's where they were, due to extreme cold and often thick darkness.

 

In the early hours of the new day, the gale died out as suddenly as it had begun, and Kussu and Maja dressed in their sealskin jackets with drawstrings at the hoods and wrists. The jackets also cinched at the waists, where they attached to the kayaks. Inuit inventions, the light ocean kayaks were made of wooden frames and covered with sealskin. Hunters sometimes attacked walrus or whales in them, two kayaks tied together, and sometimes they disappeared in their frail boats, blown out to hostile seas. Kussu and Maja knew that it was into this heaving theater of ice that Alika and Sulu may have gone.

Finally, Kussu and Maja lifted their kayaks and carried them several hundred yards to the shore. Chunks of pancake ice mingled with the dark waters in no pattern. The winter freeze, thick enough to carry the weight of man or animal but not enough to stop a moving floe, would soon set in.

Without speaking, they launched the boats and slid into them, fastening themselves into the cockpits. Each kayak was twenty feet long, nineteen inches wide, and ten inches deep. If Kussu and Maja were lucky enough to locate the floe, they'd insert Sulu and Jamka into the covered bow of one boat and Alika into the other one, snug as fingers in gloves.

As the storm clouds vanished to the east over Greenland's mountains and the gale wind became a cold breeze, the waxing moon lit up the slivers of the kayaks. The water was calm again but littered with glittering pieces of ice. There was only one human sound, the rhythmic slosh of their paddles. Inside the cockpits, Maja and Kussu were already beginning to sweat, despite the subzero temperature. They guided around the chunks of frozen pack ice.

The sky was impaled with stars. Some Inuit believed that the stars were holes in the sky created by the passage of dead bears into the eternal light.
Kussu and Maja knew the Big Dipper as a herd of reindeer; the Pleiades as a dog team in pursuit of a bear; the belt of Orion was a cut by an Inuit into a steep snowbank to enable him to climb to the top. But they did not navigate by the stars this night. They paddled straight east. They could see Greenland's mountains in the distance.

 

Frost smoke set in during the first hour, coming up like fog. Kussu shouted across to Maja, "We must keep going!..."

She shouted back her agreement.

Four hours later, they still had not sighted the suspected floe in the brilliant moonlight. The muscles in their arms could no longer guide the kayaks away from the random ice impacts. The current had carried them south, but they finally made it safely back to shore, perhaps six miles downstream. They were exhausted.