Weeping into her gloved hands, Jeanne rolled onto her side on the unforgiving ice.
Wyatt ventured a couple of steps toward us. “You. Both of you. Get up here and stay up here. Wait for me.”
Making the slowest possible progress, I clambered a few yards up the hill, dragging Sigrid behind me.
But Wyatt didn’t wait. He sprinted past us like a mad bat, a jagged shadow hurtling down the bluff toward the ice arch and pool of eels beneath.
thirty-nine
Jeanne was so still on the snow I thought she was dead, that he had killed her with one blow, until I saw her parka rise and fall. I dropped down to where she lay in the moon-shadow of the cairn. Tried to lift her to her feet. She let me roll her to her hands and knees bit by bit, as if we were testing for broken parts. Tipsily, she rose up, coughed some blood, and turned toward me, her face a calamity. A couple of front teeth gone, nose pointed the wrong way, bottom lip split. She reeled away from us, staggering a few paces, only to crumple back down to her knees. I ran to her, grabbed her around the middle in an attempt to steady her. She lurched to her feet, knees wobbling. I wasn’t strong enough to hold her long.
“Are you all right, Jeanne?”
She pushed me away with a grunt. With a couple of spastic steps, she listed toward the ridge as if following Wyatt down to the eels, but stopped. As his form threaded through the gap between the two bands of walrus, the mood seemed to shift among them. Mammoth flippers slapped ponderous backsides. Rumblings rippled through the two broods, snorts exchanged. First, just one massive bull forded the narrow pass between the two throngs; then the smaller females dragged themselves toward one another, as if recognizing family; finally the infants—two, three hundred pounds—wriggled toward each other, until the mob had merged once again. Only Wyatt’s head was visible beyond the herd as he crossed under the arch.
Still hunched over, Jeanne watched the roiling mass of flesh and blubber. In her face, I read longing, fear, then—something else. Her eyes hardened. Head down, chin set, decision made. Blood from her wounds staining the snow, she stomped past us to the cat, animated by whatever possessed her. Wrenched open the door, climbed in, and started the engine. Slammed it into gear.
She didn’t have to go far.
Because what she’d wanted was already happening. The confusion, fright, and alarm clear in rounds of panicked barks and squeals. Halfway down the hill, she banged the machine into neutral. Revved it hard, the engine noise echoing between the steep banks of the fjord.
But she didn’t need to do more, because the walruses had been on the move the moment the snowcat blasted to life. It wasn’t like they steamrolled over Wyatt; their crushing charge didn’t seem intentional. There was just no place for him to go as they climbed over one another in their stampede to reach the sea and safety, flippers smacking, whiskered faces shuddering with terror, yard-long tusks cracking together. Shoulders colliding like blubbery waves, they crushed their own infants in their exodus as they filled the bay en masse, Wyatt’s cries barely audible over their grunts.
Sigrid stared at the scene in silence; I pulled her toward me. I didn’t dare take my eyes off Jeanne.
For close to a minute, she sat unmoving in the snowcat, then reached down and switched off the motor. Just walruses bellowing; no more sounds from Wyatt. She fumbled at the door and climbed out of the machine. Took a few wobbly steps down the slope.
She dropped to her knees crying Wyatt’s name. The grief in her voice stunned me, this raw pain loosed from some cavernous place inside her, like she was turning herself inside out. I thought to comfort her but couldn’t seem to move my limbs. After a minute, her manner changed; she dropped her chin to her chest. Seemed cried out, drained of energy and purpose.
I assumed she would stay there, wedged in the snow like that, but no. Gravity helping, she found her footing. Bolted with stunning agility down the bank toward the undulating mass of walrus flesh. Two big noisy females turned to her, shocked quiet at the sight of this woman jumping into their midst. Jeanne climbed onto one of their backs, teetered crazily as she tried to leap from there, but lost her balance and slipped down between them. She screamed once and was silenced.
* * *
THERE WAS NOTHING Sigrid and I could do for anyone except ourselves. We gathered the dregs of the eels that remained in the bay—no trace of Wyatt or Jeanne—and drove the snowcat from cairn to cairn, back to the empty Shack. My first call was to Pitak, who told me the winds would be calm enough the next day for him to safely fly out to the station and bring us to Thule.