“My God, that’s what she’s been asking us for all this time,” I said. “A bird and an eel, not a snake. Not seaweed.”
Sigrid scrambled to her feet and grabbed my pants, resting her weight against me. “Sahndaluuk,” she moaned.
“Are there any more?”
Nora dumped the bucket over; the contents sluiced out. The little octopus rippled across the ice, sliding into the diving hole with a plop. Raj nudged the rest of the fish into the opening with the toe of his boot, but there were no more eels.
Stricken, Sigrid squatted at the edge of the hole, said, “Sigrid ice alive.” As if coming to terms with the fact of just the one eel, she wandered back to me and held out her arms. “Taimagiakaman.”
“What is she saying?” Raj asked.
I lifted her onto my lap; she collapsed into me, the black kohl from her eyes smudging into the orange of my parka. “It’s an Inuit word that means the necessity of staying alive through knowledge of the natural world. That means all traditional wisdom—the caribou migration patterns, where the good fishing holes are, and for her, surviving the ice winds by injecting blood from this eel.” Sigrid burrowed into me, moaning the word for eel over and over. “But look at her. This one eel—it can’t be enough. How can we get more?”
“They used to be everywhere. Very common species.” Nora knelt next to us, stroking Sigrid’s hair. “But the climate’s probably pushed them farther north. They need very cold water to survive. They used to hang out just under the ice, but now?” She turned to Raj. “What do you think? Could be they’re near the ocean floor.”
“We don’t have the equipment to dive that deep,” Raj said, taking a seat on the upturned bucket.
“But maybe… the traps,” Nora said. “We could drop them much deeper, to the seabed.”
“We’d have to dive down and anchor them.” He shook his head as if to say, Not a good idea.
Sigrid excavated from the pocket of her parka a balled-up piece of paper, took my hand and wrapped my fingers around it.
“What’s this, Sigrid?” I smoothed the picture out over my knee.
“She was drawing that last night,” Raj said. “While we were with the baby.”
I could make out a rough depiction of two sets of people, barely more than stick figures, facing each other and holding arrows. A child’s rendition of what we’d all seen in the flesh from the surface of the ice lake. Between the two groups she’d drawn a vertical line, dividing them.
“Sigrid, are you in this picture somewhere?” I pointed at the drawing. “Where is Sigrid?”
She put her finger on a diminutive figure in the crowd on the left side. “Sigrid,” she said softly.
I traced my finger across the figures near her, on the left side of the vertical line. “Is this your village? Your family? Mother, father?”
She nodded.
“And the baby? Where is the baby in the picture, Sigrid?”
She moved her finger to an oval shape near the feet of the people on the right side of the picture. A look like shame passed over her face, and she snatched the sketch from me.
“What, Sigrid?”
I stretched out my arm toward the drawing. “Sigrid? Please?”
With a good deal of reluctance, she handed it back, resting her finger on a squiggly shape just above the drawing of herself. The same snakelike image she’d been churning out for weeks. An ice eel.
“So your family, you, Sigrid, and your mother, father, here,” I said, touching the people to the left of the line, “had the ice eels, had sahndaluuk, but these people”—I ran my fingers over the stick-drawn figures on the right, “had no sahndaluuk?”
“Tahtaksah.” Sad. “No ice alive.”
“Good God,” Raj said. “People were killing each other for these eels.”
Nora sat down heavily next to us, head in her hands. “And the other village didn’t have the eels, which is why the baby died in the ice wind, and why we couldn’t revive him.”
Raj flipped through the magazine to the spread featuring eels of the Arctic. “Maybe there was some secret about where the ice eels were, or how to get them,” he said. “Maybe they were scarce and people were fighting over that knowledge.”
I turned Sigrid’s face to mine. Already her eye was drooping less severely. I said, “Ice alive. Tukisilitainnaqtuq.” The word meant “the sensation of seeing or understanding a thing for the very first time.”