“Actually, that’s completely false.” I tossed my books on Greelandic history on the table. “Just look at these, will you, please? Keep an open mind?”
“Sure,” Nora said with a polite smile, but I wasn’t convinced. “You want company going back?”
“No,” I said, suiting up. “I’ll be fine.”
* * *
HEAD DOWN AGAINST the bracing wind, I practically ran back to the Shack, furious and sad I hadn’t been able to convince them of what I knew in my heart: Time was running out for Sigrid. And if I was alone in helping her, so be it. Alone was a place I knew well.
twenty-three
Two seventeen in the morning and I still felt three cups of coffee awake.
It was the circa-1906 photo of an eight-or nine-year-old Inuit girl that hooked me. I stared at it so long I felt I’d actually entered the sepia-toned shot. Smelled the blood of the freshly killed ringed seal that hung from a hook behind her, felt the sting of the glacial wind that tousled her hair and ruddied her cheeks. Dressed in a caribou anorak, polar bear pants, and sealskin boots, she wore a worried look, the same expression that seemed permanently imprinted on Sigrid’s face. The girl stood next to her mother, who wore her hair in the topknot style of the time, a baby in a pouch on her back. They looked through the camera from this other century as if to say, What is it you want from us?
According to the book on ancient Nordic cultures balanced on my lap, the Dorset people dominated the north coast of Greenland from around 600 BC to AD 1300, but were decimated when the Thule arrived around AD 1200. Only a hundred years to wipe out a people. I had to wonder: Did the arrival of the Little Ice Age play a role in the friction between the Thule and the Dorset?
The human remains Wyatt found in the core dated to around AD 1300…
Was Sigrid Thule or Dorset?
I flipped on my recorder, my voice rough with exhaustion. “Few artifacts remain to illuminate either culture. Author poses the theory that little changed technologically before the arrival of Europeans in the eighteenth century. This was a subsistence culture… hunting and fishing, following caribou, hunting sea mammals.”
I paused at a 1901 photo of an Inuit hunter wearing a cavernous sealskin parka, so big he could squat in it—the idea being he could light a fire inside it to keep warm while waiting on the ice for a seal to emerge from a breathing hole. It reminded me of Sigrid and her obsession with the Christmas sweater.
I clicked on my recorder. “Eighty-five-year-old native hunter, 1955 interview. Reveals secrets of hunting whales in a sealskin boat. Said that since the whales weren’t afraid of these meager boats, the trick was to get as close as possible… scout out a subtle pulsing movement under the skin below her spine—the door to her kidney. A spear was inserted quickly and quietly. Apparently no fight from the whale. Perhaps no awareness that she was bleeding to death. Hunters followed until she was dead.”
Sigrid had done nothing like this as far as I knew, but she had called the narwhals up from the depths with her own voice. According to the text, narwhals were the filet mignon of sea mammals.
I read about all the brilliant ways Arctic people innovated with what few materials they had.
“Arctic rabbit skins were used for periods. Small bird skins turned inside out made baby booties. People lived on the knife edge of survival. Starvation was… not uncommon.”
I thought of how Sigrid ate—so fast I thought she would choke, as if there would never be any more food.
I skipped to the pages on the role of women.
“Girls at a very early age were expected to prepare skins for clothing. To scrape, stretch, and soften the skin by chewing it. Then to cut and sew—with caribou sinew—the skin and make clothes.”
I pictured Sigrid’s ground-down molars.
“Women were tasked with preparing the dead for burial. They closed the mouth and eyes of the deceased, washed them, dressed them in a clean, new skin. Encircled their own eyes with soot to indicate a state of mourning. A day was reserved for grieving. Just one. After that, people were expected to get back to the business of survival.”
I stopped cold at the photo of an ulu, known as a “women’s knife.”
My stomach flipped.
This ancient, crescent-shaped knife was the same size and shape—out of all the knives Jeanne possessed, and she had plenty—that Sigrid had chosen to steal.
Brain on overdrive, I forced myself to close the book, click off my recorder. Jittery, I went to the kitchen in search of wine. Midpour, I heard something. A dull thud.