twenty
Wyatt ordered all of us to gather in the living room that evening at seven sharp. No word why. I took a seat on one end of the sofa, while Nora perched stiffly next to Raj on the other. Jeanne hummed as she cleared the dishes, her CD player churning out “Luck Be a Lady.” Sigrid had gone to bed early, refusing dinner, refusing to talk. She’d been pouty—I theorized—because I’d left her alone with Nora and Raj all day. But in truth I didn’t know whether to be touched that she’d missed me or worried that she wasn’t feeling well. I held my revelation about Sigrid counting down days close to my chest, filled with dread as to what it might mean.
Wyatt blew in at the stroke of seven, a yard-long ice core encased in a wooden tube under one arm. Reverently he set it down on the coffee table, turned toward us, and unzipped his parka.
“Jeanne, would you turn that shit off and get in here, please?”
Wordlessly she snapped off the player, strolled into the main room, and took a seat between us.
“I’ve had a chance to look at the cores we drilled today.” He glanced at Jeanne, then at each of us, as if to say, Pay attention. He lifted the wooden lid from the core. Twisted the business end of a gooseneck lamp directly on it. Frost smoke sizzled up, floating along the length of ancient ice. Hundreds of slim bands of alternating pale blue, gray-white, and murky storm-cloud colors glistened, even sparkled here and there. At about the midway point, a thin, coal-black ring encircled the tube. “Here,” he said, pointing with the blade of a hunting knife. “Around the seven-hundred-year mark. See it?”
We all leaned forward to get a better look.
“Human remains.”
“Christ,” Nora breathed.
Raj knelt on the rug, peering at the black ring. “How do you know they’re human?”
“I looked at the cells. Human bone cells are shaped differently from those of other mammals. They’re like concentric rings. Animal bone cells look more like bricks. Want to have a look?” He gestured at the microscope behind him.
Raj didn’t take his eyes off the black ring. “No.”
Wyatt continued. “I don’t believe Sigrid was encased in ice a few months ago, with her family chasing caribou. I think something happened to her between 1300 and 1400 or so, around the Little Ice Age. I think she’s ancient.”
We were all silenced, but the rightness of Wyatt’s words slammed me in my gut, illuminating Sigrid’s every mystery. This was why everything—from markers to beds to snowmobiles to heat flowing from a box—fascinated her. This was why modern Greenlandic was mostly noise to her. If she was alive in 1300, she could have been Dorset or from the culture that conquered them, the Thule.
“What’s the Little Ice Age?” I asked Wyatt, breaking the spell of quietude.
“This was a cataclysmic, compressed, natural climate change event, where extreme changes—severe and dramatic cooling and warming events—happened in a matter of years or even months. From around AD 1300 to 1800.”
Raj rocked back on his heels. “Okay. All right. This is getting—”
“Here’s my theory. Could Sigrid have been caught in some naturally occurring piteraq in 1300, similar to what we’re calling ‘ice winds’ today? Think about it. Around 1250, there’s evidence that pack ice in Greenland had grown beyond what anyone had ever seen. Summers disappeared. Temperature fluctuations were crazy fast.”
“This has nothing to do with—” Raj said.
“Just listen!” he snapped. I kept my eyes on the slim black band, lost in my own amazement. “These katabatic winds—these piteraqs shooting down off the glaciers—they can easily kick past a hundred miles an hour, hit seventy, eighty degrees below zero—the question is, are these being roiled up by insane temperature swings happening around the world right now?”
Raj folded his arms over his chest. “Sounds like a reach, sorry to say.”
“What’s your explanation?”
“Katabatic winds only happen on glaciers. They’ve never been recorded anywhere else on earth. Wyatt, these deaths, they’ve occurred everywhere but on glaciers—”
“Santa Ana winds are katabatic. Oroshi winds happen in Japan. Bora winds? Adriatic piteraqs, you could say. Williwaws, derechos, shall I go on?”
Raj sat back on the couch, smoothed a hand through wavy black hair. “All just semantics. You’ve gone from human remains in a core to some wacko theory about ice winds then and now? Tying it in with the whole Sigrid fantasy? This is not science—I don’t know what it is, but it’s not—”