Bacon, sausages, reconstituted eggs, baked beans.
“Simon wanted porridge,” she said, “but we couldn’t find it. That tent’s a shambles.”
“Yes. It’s about time we tidied it up, sorted it out. We should have done it ages ago, but . . .”
The little silence contained much that words might have rendered imprecise – the fact that the final sorting of the supplies would be an acceptance of the fact that they no longer hoped for early rescue. And rescue had been on all their minds. Hope was necessary to their continued existence, and it was necessary to keep it alive: they were all adults, they all knew it, they all worked at keeping it alive.
“Well,” said Colin, as he finished his breakfast and his third cup of coffee, “I’ll see about sorting out the tent then. Heavens knows how long this’ll last for.” He looked at Job in half-enquiry.
“Not for long,” said Job. “There will be a breeze soon.”
Ross nodded. “Well, I might as well do it in the meantime. Anyone looking for us in this’ll be hard-put to see their noses, let alone the floe.”
“How do you know things like that, Job?” asked Kate, fascinated. “About the weather – some sort of collective Eskimo knowledge passed from father to son down the years?”
“Not really. I just know the High Arctic, that’s all.”
“Even after a lapse of five years?”
“What?”
“Well,” she gestured at the shrinking shape of Ross’s back, “I thought you two . . .”
“Oh, I see. You think I have been in Washington with Colin. No. Colin and I haven’t worked together since . . . well, since Jeremiah died.”
“Oh.”
“No. I live up here. I’ve a wife and family in Togiak. Couple of hundred miles south-west of Anchorage.”
“Oh I see. How old are the children? How many? What are their names?”
“Four boys: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Matthew’s the eldest, he’s ten; Mark and Luke are eight; John’s two.”
“What happens if you have another? I mean there aren’t any Gospels left.”
Job smiled. “We’ll start on the disciples – Peter, James, Thomas, the rest.”
“Well, what do you do if you don’t work with Colin?”
“Oh, I work in the field, like Simon, a bit.”
There was a silence, then Job continued. “It’s funny, really. Mary didn’t want me to come out on this one. Well, it’s my summer holiday: I thought that’s why she was so upset. And,” his eyes slid away from her and his voice dropped, “she’s a little jealous of Colin. But perhaps she knew more than she said. She can smell trouble the way I can smell a wind . . .” He lapsed into silence again.
“What do you usually do for your summer holidays, then?” she asked him next.
Job smiled broadly. “Took them to Florida last year.” He laughed. “My God, they hated it! All except Disney World – the boys loved that, so did Mary and I, I must admit; but the rest! It was so hot! And the people! Mind you, it’s hardly surprising; no one could believe it. I mean, a family of honest-to-God Eskimos in Florida!” He chuckled. “No, we usually just stay where we are. I paint the house, do odd jobs, you know? Mary’s a school-teacher, so she’s got good long holidays. We could go away more often, I suppose. Maybe Europe. We could visit Colin, he asks us often enough, but . . . Maybe next year . . .”
Kate remembered something Colin had said at breakfast. “Who is Nootaikok?”
“Lord of the Icebergs. He is one of the gods.”
“What gods?”
“The gods of this, of the frozen north, of the High Arctic, of Innuit.” His hand and arm took in the ice, the snow, the pack, the permafrost and midnight sun . . .
Kate caught enough in his gesture to feel the interest stir in her. She asked him to explain, and he smiled and told her of the Inua, the Spirits. The Inua were everywhere, he said, and fell into the three main types, the Evil, the Indifferent, and the Good. The Evil were headed by the great spirit Aipalookvik the Destroyer who had great jaws which rend and tear. And with him were such spirits as Paija, the huge woman with one leg who prowled the winter nights and killed with a look; and Wendigo who haunted the dark pine forests, feeding on the unwary. And there were those like Aulanerk who struggled beneath the sea thus causing the waves and Nootaikok the spirit of the Icebergs, who were neither good nor evil. And there were the Good Spirits, like Anglooklik the Great Seal, Aumanit the Great Whale. And the greatest of all these was Torgasoak the Great Spirit, the Good Being.
“Don’t tell me,” said Kate, “Torgasoak is a big bear or something.”
“No,” said Job. “He’s a big man and he’s only got one arm.”
Kate opened her mouth to reply, and then the screams began.
ii
Doctor Warren had convinced himself that he was genuinely interested in the rust-red stain he had spotted on the ice ahead. He was only interested, however, because he had nothing else to do. Certainly there was no premium in doing any work here, not that there was actually the equipment to do any real work with – but he was bored.
“I say,” he called to Simon, “there’s some plankton frozen into that hill; I’m sure of it.”
“Oh. Right.”
The fog eddied and swirled around them, constantly changing the quality of the light by its varying thicknesses. One moment the hill would be vaguely visible, the next a hand held at arm’s length invisible.
After they had been walking for two minutes or so, the ice beneath their feet began to hunch up, and the restless sound of the ocean moved more forcefully through the heavy fog as the warm waves lapped at the little cliff of ice.
“Here we are then,” said the doctor cheerfully. “I think it’s somewhere up towards the top here.”
Close-to, it was a hill of some substance rising twenty feet above them to a little plateau then falling nearly thirty feet sheer to the sea with only a little ledge some six feet down from the top to break the sheer cliff.
Simon was at the top several minutes before the doctor, and he spent the time in exploring the little platform he found there. It was only about six feet by six, and, with the fog at that moment close around him he did not venture too near to the seaward side, but sure enough, on the crest of the upslope there was the tip of a rust-red stain stretching down one side. He knelt to examine it and chipped a bit free with his axe. The stain went down into the ice far beneath the sliver he had broken free. He held it up awkwardly in his mitten and looked through it at the sky. As he did so, the first intimation of a wind disturbed the fog and the sky brightened.
The doctor puffed up beside him. “Let’s have a look.”
He knelt beside the younger man and quickly uncovered his hands. Simon handed him the piece he had cut, and he studied it for a moment.
“By Jove, you know this is interesting . . .” He became quite animated. “You can see how it might have happened, can’t you? I dare say it’s not an uncommon occurrence. A cloud of krill very near the surface, snap icing, and there you are. But this is something else again! Unless my eyesight’s even worse than I thought, this stuff isn’t surface krill at all, it’s from the Deep Scatter Layer.”
“What’s that?”
“The Deep Scatter Layer? Oh, it’s found in most oceans. It’s a layer several hundred feet down unusually rich in marine life which rises and falls depending on the height of the sun during the day. At midday, it’s at its deepest; but it rises during the night. I suppose the Deep Scatter Layer in the Arctic Ocean would be a pretty shallow one; the ocean itself is only a little more than six hundred feet deep in most places.”
He began to follow the stain along the edge of the little platform towards the seaward-facing cliff. “Yes. It goes right across. Now I wonder if this ice has just been stood on its end, or has been forced up as a whole? I mean, if this cliff is a section straight down through the cloud of krill it could be a fascinating study.”