“How was the view?” he asked her. Instead of answering, she handed him a bouquet of mountain avens, a small white flower with a burst of yellow stamen in the center, frothy with pollen. A few of the blooms were spent, their seed heads sprouting long white tufts of fuzz, some still twisted in a glossy bud shape and others already blown out by the wind like the wiry white hairs of an old man’s beard. He laughed.
“Are these meant to look like me?” He gave one of the seed heads a poke and Iris nodded with her best serious-not-serious face.
“Things could be worse, I suppose,” he said, plucking one of the spent flowers and sliding it into his buttonhole. Iris smiled in approval and continued down. Augie struggled to his feet, scrabbling against the smooth surface of the boulder to haul himself up, crushing the flowers against the rock by accident. As he watched Iris make her way back toward the camp, he cradled the crumpled, half-dead bouquet in his hands and followed her. It was time.
WITH HIS COFFEE in hand, he ambled across the rock-strewn plateau and gave the doorknob of the little radio shed a try. It was stubborn, so he set his coffee mug on the ground and gave the door a hard shove with his shoulder. Inside the shed he found exactly what he’d been expecting: a well-equipped base station. With a few stacks of radio components, various transceivers for HF, VHF, and UHF frequencies, two pairs of headsets, speakers, a tabletop microphone, and a sleek generator in the corner, the station was complete—just ready and waiting for an operator. The trouble with the observatory had been its reliance on satellite communication—radio was used only as a backup or for local transmissions—but here the setup was built for radio frequency. He noticed a lone satphone on the desk, a few handy-talkie sets beside it.
Augie started the generator and let it run for a few minutes before he checked that the equipment was connected to the power source, then he started turning things on. Orange and green displays flickered. A low, even static emanated from the speakers, as if there were a hive of bees inside. Some survival gear was tucked under the desk—bottled water, emergency rations, two sleeping bags—and he realized that as the sturdiest building at the camp, this must be the emergency shelter as well. The three tents were durable enough to make it through Arctic winters, year after year, but they weren’t indestructible. The Arctic was anything but gentle to its inhabitants.
After a few moments of fiddling, Augustine plugged in the headphones, slipped them on, and began to scan. Here we go again, he thought. But it was different from the observatory—the aerial array outside was going to allow him to reach farther with his voice and his ears than he ever had at Barbeau. He ran an admiring hand over one of the transceivers and wiped the dust from the glowing green display with his thumb. He flicked the microphone on and pulled it close to his chin in anticipation, then chose a VHF amateur band and began to transmit, CQ, CQ, CQ, over and over as he scanned the frequencies. Nothing—but then, he hadn’t expected an answer. He kept transmitting, moving from VHF up to UHF, then down to HF, then back to the beginning. Eventually Iris appeared in the doorway, which he’d left open to let in the summer air. She shook a fishing rod at him. He looked from her to the equipment and back again.
“You’re absolutely right,” he said. “I’ll meet you at the boat.”
She disappeared from the doorway, leaving the slender rectangle of lake and mountain and sky unbroken. He began to switch everything off, the generator last, then unfastened the headset from where it hung around his neck and coiled the cord. He shut the door behind him, letting his eyes adjust to the blaze of the sun reflecting on the water.
Iris was sitting on the upside-down hull, tapping out a jazzy rhythm with the butt of the fishing rod.
“Ahoy,” he called, and she jumped up.
Together they flipped the boat over and shoved it into the shallows, a smooth and effortless movement by now, after all of their fishing trips. Augie went to get the oars and the net, and then they pushed off from the shore. He let them float for a few minutes, closing his eyes, listening to the lap of the water against the earth, against the hull, and feeling the heated gaze of the midnight sun on his face. When he opened his eyes, Iris was hanging her legs over the side of the dinghy, the tips of her toes dragging on the lake, leaving brief ruts in the water: there and gone, there and gone. He dipped the blades of the oars beneath the glassy surface and began to row.
SUMMER SEEMED TO fade faster than it had arrived. The warmth seeped out of the valley and a cold front crept in, chilling the delicate wildflowers and icing the muddy shores of the lake with frosty crystals. Augustine continued to sit in his Adirondack chair by the lake, watching the progression of time, the descent of the sun, but now he bundled himself again in woolly layers. The cold returned to his bones, his joints, his teeth. He didn’t leave the camp anymore. Iris wandered the tundra and the mountains alone. They still fished together, taking the dinghy out for as long as the lake would allow it, but rowing had grown difficult for him in the cold air and the frosts fell heavier with each passing week. It won’t be long now, he thought.
Augustine continued to scan the bands once a day in the radio shelter, but the silence was perpetual, the isolation complete. He listened only out of a need for work, for purpose. As the days passed and grew colder, getting from his chair to the shelter and back again escalated from a pleasant stroll to a challenge. Augie hoarded his energy for the short walk, unwilling to give it up. He became unable to row the dinghy even a short way. Eventually a thin rind of ice formed at the edges of the lake. It’s just as well, he thought. Not long after, the sun finally reached the horizon and dipped beneath it before climbing back up. The sunrise/sunset concert it created was magnificent and lasted several hours, bathing the mountains in a fiery orange glow and sending spurts of violet cloud into the sky before fading back into vivid blue. These moments of day’s end and day’s beginning, pressed together into a continuous event, became a regular marker of time’s passing.
The lake froze, then melted, then froze once more. One afternoon, as the sun dipped behind the mountains and hid there briefly, a cold drizzle began to fall. In the cool twilight, the rain hardened into sleet and then softened into thick, white flakes of snow, which drifted slowly down and covered the brown landscape. Augie had retreated from his chair when the drizzle began, but he returned to it when the sleet changed to snow. Iris joined him, sitting on his little footstool made from a packing crate, and together they watched the contours of the land disappear beneath a blanket of white. When the sun cleared the mountains a few hours later it bathed the freshly covered peaks in pale fire, and as it climbed higher the tundra burned brightly, a field of white flame. The familiar cloak of the Arctic had returned and would not be shrugged off for many months to come.
The stars also returned. One night, after the color-soaked mountains had dimmed and then darkened into black peaks set against a sleepy blue sky, Augie walked down to the edge of the frozen lake to test the ice. He tapped it with his boot, and when it held he took a few cautious steps, giving it another tap and finally a good hard stomp. It was firm. It would hold him. He walked back to the shore and headed toward the radio shed. He noticed a set of fresh tracks in the snow, illuminated in the starlight, leading down from one of the hills and then disappearing at the edge of the lake. The prints were enormous and widely spaced, with the pricks of long claws indented around the impressions: polar bear prints. Here? He was surprised—forgetting the radio for a moment he doubled back, following the tracks to the shore, where they disappeared onto the ice. He bent down to examine the shallow scratches on the surface where the bear had dug in as it crossed the frozen water. Perhaps it was on its way to the fjord, he thought. Perhaps it was lost. He shrugged and turned back toward the radio shed.