“Sigrid,” I whispered. I lifted her slightly, turned her to face me. Her eyes at half-mast under the slouchy hat, arms wet-noodle limp. “The cairns, Sigrid. Inuksuit. The first one. The map, please. Drawing. Help. Stahndala.” Fear. In her language, I said, “Rocks, many, ice eels, dead alive, paper, drawing, Bahl, want.” No idea where I’d put the map. Felt like I had brain damage. How could I lose such an important thing?
Her mittened hand crept up the side of my sweater under my coat. Tried with no luck to grab the cunning zipper hidden in the seam. Of course, that’s where I put it, so I wouldn’t lose it! I took off my gloves and rescued the crumpled piece of notebook paper. The flesh of my fingers waxy in the moonlight. My heart sank at the sight of her crude crayon drawing of the Shack, the glacier that led through the pass, the frozen lake… Good lord, where are we, where are we going? Sigrid pointed to a craggy set of low mountains in the distance and the slender river of glacial ice between them.
“That way? Are you sure?”
She turned the paper over, where the drawing continued. Jabbed her finger at the three cairns.
I tucked her back into the folds of my coat and started the engine, which seemed to make all the available noise in the world. We threaded between waist-high and taller ice formations like waves frozen in place. Infinite shades of blue and gray continually tricked my eye: Is that a depression, a shadow, an abyss? The light too flat to judge. Always listening for another motor, the only other motor in hundreds of miles. The snowcat.
But we were alone.
We banged and growled up through the narrow pass, only slowing to ease past natural rock formations that rose like soldiers guarding the stygian night. Descending over ridges of rough, uneven ice, we rocked so hard I was sure the machine would break apart beneath us.
Spread out before us, a snow-swept plain met the black bowl of night an untold distance away. I jammed the machine into neutral. Listened. Just the wind fluting past.
“Where now, Sigrid?”
She gestured weakly at the icescape. Peered up at me as if to say, Can’t you see? Her cheeks burnished red, smile like a Cheshire cat. She said, “Verohnsaht.” Joy.
I scanned the desolate landscape. My pelvis felt frozen in place on the machine, legs stiff, shoulders locked, hands petrified on the controls. “Sigrid, I don’t…”
But—there! There was something. Between snow-filled blasts gusting across the plain, a pea-sized black form took shape in the distance.
I shifted into gear and tore off. Quickly the mass grew taller, fatter, and vaguely man shaped, the absolute weirdest thing to find in a sea of nothingness. In minutes, I kicked off the motor. We glided the last several yards in white silence. The rock creature loomed over us, one stone “arm” raised as if in judgment, its jagged form blocking out the stars. Wide-set pillars served as stumpy legs, a thick slab capping them like a pelvis, a mammoth block as a torso. Two long flat stones rested on top—its shoulder girdle—a roundish boulder set squarely in the middle. A stone man who towered close to twelve feet tall. How long had this craggy monster existed, condemning everything that passed? A hundred years? Thousands? Wind and flying snow sheered across its unforgiving angles.
If only he could speak to us.
I climbed out of the machine, lifting the child to her feet. She swayed, unsteady.
“Sigrid, help me understand…” What are we doing here?
She reached her arms up to me; I carried her to the beast. Sapphire scarves of ice draped the length of its shoulder and pelvis stones, while a comical rounded cap of ice rested on its head. The cairn blocked the wind, and I was thankful for that; it had been a while since I could feel my toes or fingers.
Sigrid leaned out of my arms. Grabbing on to the ledge that was the shoulder stone, she pulled us closer to it, speaking a few words lost to the wind. I stumbled along where she led me, up close to the thing, my face almost touching its icy skin. It felt sentient in a quiet, slow way, like a tree.
Sigrid pointed to my eye, then toward a triangle-shaped hole created by the two shoulder rocks.
She said, “Eye. See.”
I huffed her up higher in my arms, squinting through the fist-sized hole. Perfectly framed, perhaps miles away, there it was. Another blocky, vaguely man-shaped form.
The second cairn.
thirty-six
Increasingly reckless, I gunned the machine across ridges of snow and ice to the next rock man. This one stood even taller, but cockeyed, one massive leg a bit shorter than the other, pelvis and shoulder slabs tilted, one rock arm jauntily pointing skyward, the other down, like it was disco dancing. Four stacked oblong blocks made up its torso; the one placed where the belly might be looked like it’d been rescued from the sea. Waves had worn away a long shallow groove and a hole, like a belly button. It curled inward like the fossil of a snail shell or an ammonite, breaking through to the other side in a perfect quarter-sized peephole. Someone had had fun building these stone beings. I peered through the hole and sighted the third cairn, again perfectly framed by the contours of the opening. We were off.