“Come on,” Garner pressed. “You know I’m right.”
“No,” Carol said finally. “The Nolan Group VPS can smooth things over with True North and with the next of kin. Two of my crew are dead. The only way I can make amends for that is to find out what’s responsible for it.”
The commitment in her eyes was daunting; she had declared war on the invisible, unknown killer.
“We don’t even know if there is a possible source around here, let alone one we can stem,” Garner said. “Why don’t you let us take an uncolored look for it and then decide whose heads should roll because of it?”
Despite Garner’s attempts to comfort Carol and partially relieve her of her duties, his rationale did little to placate her. She felt threatened by even a temporary loss of command and Garner’s objectivity only turned her resistance against him, a give-and-take scenario they had played out often enough in the years that they were married.
“I’m staying here,” she said. “And you’re staying here. Sergei’s staying. Junko’s staying and the Phoenix is staying, even if I have to end up selling Girl Scout cookies to pay for it all. We’re going to find out what killed my crew and poisoned those whales. The rest of the world can just go to hell until we find out exactly what’s going on up here.”
6
Victor Tablinivik awoke to the sound of rain, a series of wet dripping noises on the snow outside, interspersed with dull taps that vibrated the canvas roof of his lean-to.
Janey didn’t like the weather, and had crawled into the other end of the shelter while Victor slept. Now she lay staring mournfully outside, her muzzle on her paws, mismatched eyes glowering at the apparent inconvenience.
Another thump on the roof, this one far too large to be a raindrop.
Victor sat up. Now he could hear something outside that sounded like running water. His first thought was that the sea ice on which he had camped had broken free from the shore — it wouldn’t be the first time the floe had made him a castaway.
But no, not that… Victor brought his aching body to its knees and peered out of the lean-to. On the ice before him was a small bird, an arctic sandpiper.
As it lay on its back, struggling to move, its wings fluttered wildly against the ice, making the noises Victor had thought were raindrops.
Sandpipers were usually summer shorebirds — the warm weather must have tricked this one into coming back. Then Victor saw another sandpiper lying nearby, this one clearly dead and making no sound at all. Then another. And another. Yet another sandpiper glanced off Victor’s hood and fell, lifeless, to the ice between his hands. Peering around the edge of the canvas, Victor saw another bird bounce off the canvas of his lean-to and struggle momentarily before lying still. Janey wanted no part of this apparently easy meal.
Standing, Victor now looked beyond his komatik. Hundreds of birds dotted the unending whiteness, dozens of them falling from the sky with those dripping sounds, the rest flailing weakly on the crusted ice, making the thin rasping Victor had thought was running water.
As Victor listened a moment longer, the sound quieted, then stopped.
Silence returned. The sky had emptied and Victor stood amid a thousand or more dead shorebirds, each no larger than his clenched fist. Victor broke camp and moved on. There was nothing for a hunter to do in the face of such a bad omen but relocate and hope Kannakapfaluk only wanted him to move to a more bountiful place.
Two hours later he found the carcass of the bear.
The polar bear is a wise hunter and is as much a role model as an adversary to the Inuit hunter, which made its discovery even more disturbing than that of the hapless birds. It was supposed to be a good omen to encounter this majestic sovereign while hunting at least it meant another preeminent predator was on the same track but Victor didn’t know what to make of finding a dead one. The bear was a large male, as long as Victor’s sledge and perhaps half a ton in weight.
On closer inspection, Victor knew that the bear had not starved, nor did it appear to be injured. In the cold, the carcass had not begun to decompose, although it had evidently lain here for some time. The bear’s muzzle was frozen to the ice, twisted into a pained snarl, its gums caked with dried blood Victor had recently taken especial note of such things though not from a recent meal or any apparent struggle.
Even when inexplicably fallen, all animals were treated with respect in the Inuit culture. By tradition, it was offensive to consume the flesh of land animals while on sea ice, or sea animals while on the land. The animal’s spirit must be kept with its natural order. The carcass is fully consumed or otherwise used; no portion is ever wasted. The qablunaq name for this land was Arktos, from the Greek for bear; the Inuktitut word for the animal, nanuk, meant “sea bear,” because the great hunter appeared most at home in the water. Polar bears are excellent swimmers, sometimes seen in the ocean tens of miles from the nearest landfall, confidently bear-paddling with their massive, webbed front paws. For this reason, the Inuit consider the polar bear a sea mammal in the same way that river fish are considered part of the land.
Victor took this rare opportunity to look at the animal up close, to touch its fur and stoop to examine the carcass. The bear’s hide had worn ragged in several places; the fur had tufted and shed in large divots, exposing the skin below.
Beneath its fur a polar bear’s skin is black — all the better to absorb the Arctic’s limited solar heat. The fur itself, though appearing white, is translucent hair, thickly layered, and hollow — all the better to channel heat toward the animal’s skin. Guard hairs on the outermost layer of the hide stick together whenever they become wet, providing a water-resistant coating and preventing heat loss as the bear swims or dives — one reason the hide made excellent boots and mittens.
Victor searched around for any sign of disturbance in the snow. Had the bear been taken by another hunter, the Inuk surely would have claimed his prize, or prepared the carcass before returning with a larger sled. Scientists or government rangers would have marked the carcass with their radio collars or plastic tags. But there were no marks on the animal and no tracks surrounding it. Not even the arctic foxes had come to dine on the once-mighty hunter. Janey herself, though always respectful of Victor’s kills, seemed to keep an extra distance from the bear. The mound of once-proud animal lay unwanted and utterly alone in the middle of the late-spring melt. Victor did not usually allow himself to dwell upon his own mortality, for no good could possibly come of it. But he knew he was sick, perhaps very sick.
Possibly even on his way to dying alone on the ice, frozen solid in a twisted and snarling pose. Most of Victor’s symptoms — like his persistent headache or the traces of dark blood in his urine — were unknown to anyone else, even his wife, Anika. Other signs were more obvious, like the gaps in his smile where once-healthy, unbroken teeth continued to fall out. To be toothless in one’s dreams was a bad omen because it represented famine and death — something the Inuit, with their paltry selection of natural prey, knew far too well. To be toothless when awake was simply bad.
On his head, a little more hair pulled loose each time Victor drew back the hood on his parka. Hairs also shed onto the woolly blanket he used as a pillow. His black hair still grew thick and unruly, but like the bear, sizable bald patches were developing underneath. His scalp, normally pale and almost translucent, was now nearly as brown as his flat, roundish face, though the newly uncovered skin was less weathered and tended to burn. Less noticeably, his skin was gradually getting thinner, and with that came a loss in his natural insulation. The rest of him just ached, bone deep. Victor told his wife he was simply getting old, but Anika never looked as though she believed him.