The Ice Child (10 page)

“She heard about Dad and came to tell me,” he said.

“Did she,” Amy said. “Jolly good.”

“Now, look …” John began.

Amy waved his protest away. “I thought I’d drop by and see how relieved he was,” she commented, stony faced, looking directly at Catherine. “I guess you beat me to it.”

“I’m sorry,” Catherine said.

“Don’t be,” Amy said.

“Come on,” John said. “Sit down.”

Amy turned her gaze, at last, on him. “I’ve been sitting down for the last three hours,” she said. “Waiting.”

“I didn’t work tonight,” he muttered. “I was celebrating.”

There was an awkward silence. Catherine looked as if she wanted the floor to open up and swallow her.

“I ought to warn you,” Amy said. “You’ll wait around a lot here. You’ll never find him, because he’s always out there.” She gestured toward the desk and the books stacked on it. She paused, almost out of the door. “You’re welcome to him,” she added.

John strode across the room toward her, but Amy was out of his grasp in two seconds and already running down the stairs.

“Amy!” he called. “Amy!”

The slamming of the street door was the only reply, and a grumbled complaint from behind the door of the opposite flat.

“Shit,” John muttered.

“I think I’ll go,” Catherine said.

“No,” he said. “Look, please. Please come in. It’s not like it looks. I didn’t ask her here.”

“She has a key,” Catherine observed.

“Yes, look …” He paced back into the room, exasperated. “Come in, shut the door. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for all this.…”

Catherine’s gaze was taking in the room. The desk flooded with paper, spilling onto the floor. The Canadian Hydrographic maps above the desk. The photocopied picture of
Erebus
, cross-sectioned, that was taped to the wall by the bed.

He followed her look to the picture. “She was a warship before they took her to the Arctic,” he said.

“I know,” she murmured.

He sat down on the bed. No girl had ever known what he was talking about before. The fact that Catherine Takkiruq knew exactly what
Erebus
was struck something basic in him.

“You have hurt your friend’s feelings,” Catherine said. She closed the door, but she still didn’t sit. Instead she walked to the desk and picked up the first book to hand. She inspected it, opened it, flicked through the first few pages.

“
The Barren Ground of Northern Canada
,” she said. She picked up another. “
A History of the Canadian West to 1870–71; Being a History of Rupert’s Land (the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Territory) and of the North-West Territory.…
”

“I buy them,” he said.

“These are antiquarian books.”

“It’s—it’s my thing. What I like.”

She sat down on the edge of the desk, looking at him without commenting.

“I meant what I said,” he told her. “One day I’ll go there. I’ll find Franklin.”

She laughed suddenly. “Find Franklin?” she echoed. “How are you going to do that?”

“Maybe your father could help me.”

Her face clouded. There was a silence of some time before she spoke again. “So this is why you talk to me all night,” she said finally. “But Arctic Bay is nowhere near Gjoa Haven. Gjoa Haven is on King William Island, the Franklin island. So you have wasted your time. My father couldn’t help you.”

She made a move to the door. He sprang to his feet. “No, that’s not it,” he said. “I’m not trying to get to your father through you.”

“My father hunts narwhal,” she said. “He doesn’t hunt Franklin. He lives hundreds of miles from the Franklin sites. He’s no good to you. You wasted your time.”

“You’ve got the wrong end of the stick,” he objected. “Forget I said anything about him helping me. I’ll get there on my own.”

“Oh, yes?” she said. “How?”

“Some way.”

She stood looking at him, one hand on her hip. “People don’t do that on their own,” she said.

“I will.”

She shook her head. “Now I know you’re crazy.”

“So,” he said, “I’m crazy.”

“And when are you going to go, exactly?” she demanded. “In April, like now? Thick snow, John. June, maybe? The runoff. You know what that is? The ice melting. Can’t keep your footing in that. July, August?” She shook her head. “I go in August. You have to tolerate mosquito, if you go then.”

“I will find them,” he said. “I’ll find something that no one else has ever found. That is what I’m going to do. You can laugh all you like. I’ll find a way.”

“John,” Catherine said, “no one will ever find them. They are gone, all those Franklin crews, and the ships.” Her gaze went briefly to the picture of the
Erebus
and back to him. “You know what King William Island is?” she asked in a lower voice. “A piece of land in the middle of nowhere. It takes days to trek from Gjoa Haven to the west shore. And then what? You’re going to walk, dive, what? Through ice, by yourself? It’s ridiculous.”

“Well, maybe I am ridiculous,” he said, wounded, turning away.

He went back to the bed, and looked at the picture. In the silence Catherine could hear someone passing along the street. Footsteps came and receded.

“Ever since I was a little boy,” he said, still without looking at her, “I just wanted to get there ahead of him.”

“Who?” she asked.

He didn’t reply.

“Ahead of who?” she prompted, again.

He shook his head, but still didn’t answer her.

She went over to him, touched his shoulder. He looked around at her.

“John,” she asked, “who is it that you are really looking for?”

By way of reply he took her hand. Then, very gently, he pulled her toward him, and kissed her.

“Oh,” he said. And his eyes were full of tears. “You really are so lovely.”

She smiled, moved by the sight of the tears, and yet not quite understanding them. “No,” she said.

“Of course you are.”

She looked down at their still-linked hands. “I think maybe exotic. That’s the way you see it. Different.”

“Who do you look like?” he asked. “Your father, or your mother?”

She had already told him a little of her background that evening. Her father was pure-blood Inuit, her mother an American working with an oil exploration company. They had been married for four years, separated when Catherine was six, when Catherine and her mother had moved to London. Since Catherine had won a place at Cambridge, however, Catherine’s mother had gotten a promotion and had moved back to Washington.

“My father is not very tall,” she murmured, answering John’s question. “And my mother is very tall.” She smiled. “They are an odd couple.”

“Do they ever see each other?”

“Not now,” she told him. “They e-mail a lot, I guess. To argue.”

He smiled back at her. “Like mine,” he said.

She considered him. “You are like your father.” To her surprise the expression on his face closed, became guarded. “You have the same eyes, I think. The smile. Very handsome.”

But the compliment had no obvious effect. He looked away a second, then asked, “What’s it like in Arctic Bay now? Is it light?”

“Yes,” she said, momentarily thrown by the change of subject.

“Isn’t it colder after the sun comes back?” he asked. “That’s what I read.”

“Sometimes.”

“And sometimes it looks as if the sun’s come back early, the Novaya Zemlya images, like illusions of light.…”

She slipped from his embrace. He couldn’t read her face.

“Is that right?” he asked.

“How would I know?”

“But of course you know. You were brought up there.”

“I was brought up, since I was six years old, in this country,” she said.

“But you go back every year. You told me.”

“Yes …”

“Then you know,” he said. “You know more than I do. Didn’t the children go around the igloos, when the sun came back after winter, blowing out the flames of the lamps, and taking out the old wicks, to put in new ones? Didn’t they have to relight them from a single flame?”

She was now looking narrowly at him. “If you say so.”

He was taken aback. “Didn’t you?” he asked.

There was another silence, for a moment. “I think I will go,” she said. She moved swiftly to the door.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Wait.” He tried to catch hold of her elbow. “What have I done?”

He could plainly see that she was angry; a muscle flickered at the corner of her mouth. “I shouldn’t have come in the door,” she finally said. “Or stayed when I saw your girlfriend. That was embarrassing.”

“I’m sorry …” he began, “but she’s not a regular girlfriend. I mean, I didn’t know she’d be here.…” And he at once colored, at how that sounded.

“And what she said to me,” Catherine went on, more thoughtfully. “
You’ll never really find him, because he’s out there.
” She nodded slowly. “She is right,” she said. “I am just your way through to where you want to go.”

“No,” he said. “No.”

Opening the door, she suddenly rounded on her heel. “You want a nice Eskimo girl?” she said. “Maybe like the ones that Crozier used to know, to dance with?” John started protesting. “The crews all liked Eskimos, right?” she said. “They had no morals like Christian women.”

She had opened the door fully and was now at the head of the stairs. John had to get around her, and stand on the first stair down, to bar her way.

“You’re wrong,” he said, yet deeply thrown by her accusation.

“Oh, yes?” she replied. “Then maybe you just get off on the whole fantasy, John. Your world where you can solve some mystery. Whatever. Go hunting alone. Iceman.”

“That’s not it,” he said.

“No? Then what is it?” she asked. “You want me to tell you
irinaliutit
, make you an Inuit?”

“No—”

“Teach you the half smile, to welcome the sun?”

“No, I—”

“I have American citizenship, John,” she said. Her color was very high now, the flush touching her neck. “Yes, sure, once a year I go to see my father, who is like all Inuit now, not so much like the old ways, nothing at all like Franklin’s Esquimaux. He even forgets some of the things that his own father taught him. He belongs to this century, John. Not part of your dream you have here.” And she briefly inclined her head back to John’s room. “Okay, he had a sled, and he hunts, but he is vegetarian,” she said. “You know why that is? Because ten years ago he had an alcohol problem, and now he has a gut problem. So you take your fantasies, and …”

He stepped up and put his hands on her shoulders. She was breathing heavily from her outburst.

“Forgive me,” he said.

She looked away from him.

“My head is just full of this stuff,” he said. “It’s not you. I don’t want a part of you. I don’t mean to disrespect your father, take a piece of his world, ask him for anything.”

She closed her eyes for a second. “You don’t know how tired I am,” she whispered, “of guys here that …”

“I know,” he said.

“You don’t know.”

He lifted her hand and kissed it.

He had meant to step aside and let her go, but the sensation of her skin against his mouth made him stop. It had sent a charge through him. He took the hand from his lips, not daring to look into her face, rubbing his thumb gently, exploringly, over her long fingers, turning her palm over.

“You don’t want to go to that cold, John,” she murmured, very softly. “I think maybe there is a cold in you, and that is what you want to cure. The cold in your heart. A father and son …” she guessed.

But he stopped her words, by suddenly looking directly into her face.

“My father doesn’t have a heart,” he said.

Seven

The bear was out from Prince Leopold Island, close to Cape Clarence.

When the ships came past the Borden Peninsula in 1845, passing out of Lancaster Sound, Franklin would have seen the thousand-meter mountains that almost walled in Arctic Bay. It was an area full of narwhal, killer whale, bowhead, seal, and walrus, in season.

It was cold and clear today, minus thirty, but feeling more in the sunlight. The Swimmer had a male a kilometer behind her, a mature male of eleven hundred pounds, who had avoided her when he had not picked up a trace of estrus.

The team had come out to tag her.

Richard Sibley sat behind the lead biologist, with the biologist’s assistant and their researcher alongside him. The idea was to put radio telemetry collars on young females who had not yet had cubs. They would tranquilize her from the air, the biologist explained, once she had moved past open water. They didn’t want their infamous Swimmer returning to the sea while sedated.

As they passed above her, the bear suddenly began to move, front paws outstretched and the rear paws flexing outward and back. She was faster than a snowmobile, steady over the rucks of ice that would have forced a vehicle to maneuver.

They used a dart from a .22 caliber, leaning out of the side door.

The Swimmer barely looked up, propelling herself faster, weaving a little as if to avoid the gun. When the dart connected with her flank, her speed never altered. She kept up the same even rhythm, a moving cloud against cloud, hypnotic in her unchanging, shimmering pace, her blue shadow matching her.

And then she began to slow, her hind legs first showing the effects of the drug. She tried to keep running, the front paws pulling and the rear legs dragging, until she finally succumbed, suddenly lying prone on the ice, flattened to it, sunk into a deep sleep.

On the blinding white-blue of the snow they took blood samples from her, and ran an electrical current to test the reserves of fat. She was four on the Quetelet Index, an average covering of fat rising to five. She had hunted well, fed well.

They noted the extraordinary development of the hindquarters and shoulders. If she had been human, she would have been an athlete, honed to fighting weight, supple and flexed, the delineation of the muscle obvious even at rest.

They tattooed her lip for permanent identification and painted a number on her back.

As this was done, Richard Sibley stepped back.

He was experiencing the usual problems of taking photographs in subzero temperatures: his breath had coated the back of the camera with frost, and the lens itself was in danger of icing over. He put the camera under his armpit and backed away, staring down at the collar on the bear. They had rolled her onto her side temporarily, and her neck was extended along the ice, her front paw raised. Her strength and beauty moved him.