Without a word, Sigrid trudged toward the baby walrus, which had stopped moving. We rushed to join her there. It had rolled onto its side, closed eyes black slits, mud-colored flesh motionless under a dusting of fresh snow.
Sigrid dropped to her knees, excavated her crescent knife from deep inside her parka, and without hesitation sliced open the walrus’s belly. I think we were all too stunned to come near; we only watched as she plunged her bare hands into the steaming cavity and removed the purple slab of liver, tossing it onto the snow. Shrieking, an Arctic tern shot down out of the sky and snatched it up, flying away with his prize. While a dozen more circled above, screaming and cawing with excitement, she cut into the stomach, withdrawing several blood-slicked pieces of plastic: a toothpaste cap, a tampon inserter, cellophane sandwich wrapping, a length of tangled dental floss, and last of all, a tiny troll, the size of a toy in a kid’s fast-food lunch. This she took and wiped clean in the snow, peering with fascination at its buggy eyes and bubble-gum-pink hair before pocketing it.
While we adults stood silently, she cut deeper into the walrus’s abdomen, carving out chunks of meat and blubber and throwing them onto the snow. The big birds folded their wings like fans and plummeted from the sky, diving at the entrails, screeching as they carried long strings up and away. Sigrid took off her parka. In no time, most of the meat was gone, until—in a battle for the last shred—three birds dive-bombed at once. An explosion of feathers, beaks, claws. They fought one another so viciously they paid no attention to Sigrid as she pounced over them using her coat as a net. Two escaped easily, but the third struggled under the parka, its beak caught up somehow in her sleeve. She lay on top of it and reached down under the hood; the snap of its neck a dull reality.
We all exhaled, none of us with a clue as to what she might do next. Very sweetly, with imploring, blackened eyes and blood-slippery hands, she held out the dead bird to me, said, “Sigrid want bird.”
I knelt, eye to eye with her and the limp creature in her arms. There was no mistaking her pride and satisfaction. “You finally got your bird, Sigrid. Verohnsaht.” Joy.
She said, “Sigrid want sahndaluuk.” She looked from Nora to Raj and back to me. “Sahndaluuk.”
“The drawings,” Nora said. “Of the snakes and birds. I just thought of something. Let’s go to the Dome, and I’ll show you.”
thirty
Sigrid crouched on the floor of the Dome with the dead tern. Charcoal-saddened eyes intent, she studiously severed one of its wings. Picking two of the hollow, straw-like feathers clean, she sliced one of them on the diagonal, creating a sharp point, inserting the thinner feather into the larger one, like a plunger.
Nora pulled down several glossy magazines from a high shelf wired to the struts of the Dome. On the cover of Marine Invertebrates, an octopus wrapped its many arms around a barnacle-encrusted anchor. She flipped the magazine open to a spread featuring different kinds of eels. Brought it to Sigrid.
“Here, sweetheart. Have a look at this.”
Crying out excitedly, Sigrid dropped the feathers and wrested the magazine from Nora’s grip. She pointed to one of the eels.
“That’s an ice eel,” Raj said.
Sigrid ran to me with the magazine, jabbing at the eel and talking fast.
I said, “Sahndaluuk?”
Yes, she nodded. Yesyesyes.
Of course, the word meant “eel”！
“They’re not as common as they used to be,” Nora said. “But—Raj, we haven’t sorted through yesterday’s specimen bucket.”
Raj hauled a sloshing plastic bucket from the far end of the Dome and the diving hole to where we were gathered on the fur-covered chairs under the heater. “We drag for specimens every day,” he said. “This was at ten meters down.”
Sigrid peered into the bucket. In the frigid seawater wriggled a baby octopus, a bright orange-and-black jellyfish, several small slender fish, and a nearly transparent eel about a foot long. “Bahl,” she said, pointing at it.
“Get it out of the bucket, Raj, can you?” I said.
He reached in with a sieve-like tool. The eel squirmed in the contraption, seeking an exit. “Looks like a juvenile, nearly dead, I’m afraid.” He lay the sieve on the floor; the eel zigzagged out onto the ice, looking much more alive than it had appeared in the bucket.
Sigrid brought her knife down, slicing its head off neatly. As black blood spurted from the headless creature, Sigrid held the tip of her hollow, sharpened feather at the artery, where lines of blood mapped the eel’s translucent length. She shoved the sleeve of her parka up her arm and inserted the sharp tip into the crook of her elbow, working the tapered feather into the larger one, injecting herself until what little eel blood the feather held was gone. Uttering something unintelligible, she stumbled a few paces, then scrambled along the ice as she tried to catch the eel. Even headless, it wriggled with eerie vitality, its blood quickly draining out. Practically transparent except for its black veins, it nearly disappeared where it lay on the ice, lifeless.