Silence is squatting near one now. When Crozier is a dozen yards away, she gestures for him to be quiet.
To hear Silence tell of it with the string patterns making pictures between her hands, the seal is one of the most cautious and wary creatures alive, so silence and stealth are the essence of hunting seal. Here Lady Silence earns her name.
Before approaching a breathing hole — how does she know they’re there? — Silence sets down small squares of caribou skin that she retrieves after each step, setting her thickbooted feet carefully onto them so as not to make the slightest crunch on the snow and ice. Once next to the breathing-hole dome in the dark, moving in slow motion, she softly pushes several forked antlers into the snow and sets her knife, harpoon, lines, and other hunting bricabrac on them so that she can retrieve them without making a noise.
Before leaving the snow-house, Crozier has tied sinew thongs around his arms and legs the way Silence has shown him, in an attempt to keep his clothes from rustling. But he knows that if he walks closer to the hole now, he’ll sound, in his white-man clumsiness, like a collapsing tower of tin cans to the seal below — if there is a seal below — so he strains to see the ice surface beneath him, makes out the inevitable two-foot-by-two-foot-thick caribou skin that Silence leaves for him, and slowly, carefully, goes to his knees on it.
Crozier knows that before he arrived, after Silence found the breathing hole, she carefully and slowly removed the snow over that hole with her knife and widened the hole itself with a bone pick set into the butt of her harpoon shaft. She then inspected the hole to confirm that it was directly above a deep channel in the ice — if not, the chances of a good harpoon thrust were low, he understood now — and then she built the tiny mound up again. Since the snow was blowing, she put a narrow gauze of skin over the hole to prevent it from being filled in. Then she took a very thin point of bone fastened by a long piece of gut string to the tip of another bone and slid this indicator down into the hole, setting the other end on one of her antler twigs.
Now she waits. Crozier watches.
Hours pass.
The wind comes up. Clouds begin to obscure the stars, and snow blows across the ice from the land behind them. Silence stands there, hunched over the breathing hole, her parka and hood slowly being covered with a film of snow, her harpoon with its ivory tip in her right hand, its weight being supported at the rear by the forked antler in the snow.
Crozier has seen her catch seals in other ways. In one, she hews two holes in the ice and — with Crozier’s help using one of two harpoons — literally beguiles the seal to her. She has taught him that while the seal may be the animal kingdom’s soul of caution, its Achilles’ heel is its curiosity. If Crozier gets the head of his specially prepared harpoon near Silence’s hole under the ice, he moves the harpoon up and down ever so slightly, causing two small bones rigged with splitfeather shafts near the head of the harpoon to vibrate. Eventually, the seal cannot resist its curiosity and pops up to investigate.
In the full moonlight, Crozier has gaped as Silence has moved across the ice on her belly, pretending to be a seal herself, moving her arms like flippers. On those times he can’t even see the seal’s head protruding from a hole in the ice until there is a sudden, impossibly fast motion of her arm, and then she is pulling back the harpoon attached to her wrist by a long cord. More often than not, there is a dead seal on the other end.
But this dark night-day there is only the seal’s breathing hole to watch and Crozier stays on his skin pad for hours, watching Silence standing bent over the almost in-discernible dome. Every half hour or so, she reaches back slowly to her antler-twigs and removes a strange little instrument — a curved bit of driftwood about ten inches long with three bird claws attached — and scratches so lightly at the ice over the breathing hole that he can’t hear the noise even from a few feet away. But the seal must hear it clearly enough. Even if the animal is at another breathing hole, perhaps hundreds of yards away, it seems — eventually — to be overcome by the curiosity that will doom it.
On the other hand, Crozier has no idea how Silence can see the seal to harpoon it. Perhaps in the sunlight of summer, late spring, or autumn its shadow might be visible under the ice, its nose visible beneath the tiny breathing-hole opening… but in starlight? By the time her warning device vibrates, the seal could have turned and dived deep again. Can she smell its presence as it rises? Can she sense it in some other way?
He is half frozen — a symptom of lying on the caribou pad rather than sitting upright — and dozing when Silence’s little bone-and-feather indicator must have vibrated.
He comes awake in an instant as she blurs into action. She lifts the harpoon from its butt rest and flings it straight down through the breathing hole in less time than it takes for Crozier to blink awake. Then she is leaning back, pulling hard on the thick cord disappearing through the ice.
Crozier struggles to his feet — his left leg aches abominably and does not want to support any weight — and hobbles to her side as quickly as he can. He knows that this is one of the trickiest parts of the seal hunt — pulling the thing up before it can writhe off the barbed ivory harpoon head if it is only injured, or just tangle in ice or slip away to the depths if it is dead. Speed, as the Royal Navy had never tired of telling him, is of the essence.
Together they wrestle the heavy animal up through the hole, Silence pulling at the cord with one surprisingly strong arm and hacking away at the ice with her knife in the other hand, enlarging the hole.
The seal is dead but more slippery than anything Crozier has ever encountered. He gets his mittened hand under the base of a flipper, taking care to avoid the razor-sharp claws at the end, and heaves to leverage the dead animal up onto the ice. All the while, he is gasping and cursing and laughing — relieved from his duty to remain silent — and Silence is, of course, silent except for the occasional soft hiss of breath.
When the seal is safe on the ice, he stands back, knowing what will come next.
The seal, barely visible in the little starlight that’s made its way between the low-scudding clouds, lies with its black eyes unblinking and looking vaguely censorious, its open mouth leaking only a trace of black-looking blood onto the blue-white snow.
Panting a bit from the exertion, Silence goes to her knees on the ice, then to all fours, and then she lies on her belly with her face next to the dead seal’s.
Crozier takes another silent step back. Strangely, he feels now much the same way he did when he was a boy in Memo Moira’s church.
Reaching under her parka, Silence pulls out the tiniest stopped flask made of ivory and fills her mouth with water from it. She has kept the flask next to her bare breasts under the fur so as to keep the water liquid.
She leans forward and sets her lips to the seal’s in a strange parody of a kiss, even opening her mouth the way Crozier has seen whores do with men on at least four continents.
But she has no tongue, he reminds himself.
She passes the liquid water from her mouth to the seal’s mouth.
Crozier knows that if the seal’s living soul, not quite departed from this body, is pleased with the beauty and workmanship of the harpoon and barbed ivory spearhead that killed it, is pleased with Silence’s stealth and patience and her other hunting methods, and especially if it enjoys the water from her mouth, it will go tell the other seal-souls that they should come to this hunter for the chance to drink such fresh, clear water.
Crozier does not know how he knows this — Silence has never signed it to him with strings or suggested as much through any other gestures — but he knows it is true. It’s as if the knowledge comes from the headaches that plague him every morning.