We flew across rough, tumbled ice. The next cairn seemed to reach a rocky, beseeching hand to us. Up and over a shining blue hillock we sailed—I wasn’t looking down—and landed hard, my brain banging against my skull. I comforted Sigrid as we thudded along, but I knew it was bad. Belching out an ugly blast of diesel, the motor breathed its last. We coasted across the slick surface in silence, until we stopped.
Were we one, five, ten miles away?
Impossible to tell.
Sigrid barely stirred.
I jerked the key from the ignition, cursed, jammed it back in, and turned. It made a clicking sound; clearly some crucial connection had been severed. I propped my forehead on the wheel, tried to calm my breathing. Lifted it up. The wind cuffed me. I smacked the side of the machine, kicked at the pedals, screamed into the void. Tried the key again: tick, tick, tick…
Silence.
Or was it?
A motor. Faint, but real. The snowcat. I would know it anywhere. How long has it been tailing us? Our own motor had deafened us to any other sound—they could have been following us since the second cairn.
“Sigrid.” I shook her. “Do you hear? They’re coming.”
Her eyes glimmered open, and she nodded, exhausted, sad.
“We have to move, okay? We have to walk.”
She closed her eyes and melted into me.
I got out of the machine. Set her down on the windswept ice. She listed, staggering a few paces, but remained upright. I ransacked the snowmobile in vain for anything we might use. By the time I raised my head from the guts of the machine, she had already commenced a stumbling walk in the direction of the cairn. Blowing snow revealed a blip of red, then obliterated her with a pure white canvas.
“Sigrid, wait!” I ran toward her, sick at heart to leave the machine even though it was useless.
We were really in it now. Alone in an astonishing country of snow and ice that was simply not of human scale. We pitched forward on the flat expanse. My heart beat weakly in the chilled rigid box of my body; I walked on feet I no longer felt. Looming in the incalculable distance, the last cairn cut a jagged black hole into a velvet sky matted with stars. I no longer felt the wind.
Sigrid tripped, fell forward, and didn’t get up. I dropped down over her, lifted her, held my ear to her mouth—Are you breathing?
Her eyes were closed, her breath a weak heat against my cheek. Snow crystals gathered between her fine straight lashes, in her half-open mouth. A flash of the baby thawing; I pushed the thought away.
She didn’t have enough life in her to hold on to my back, so I carried her in my arms. I don’t know how far I walked. The whine of the motor grew neither louder nor fainter, but stayed a steady buzz in my head… Have I lost my mind? Is it just the wind?
But if it is them, can they see us?
I turned, scouring the circle of mile-high peaks, the pewter-gray glacial pass that led to the frozen lake. Nothing moved. I whipped back around, terrified to lose sight of the cairn. My breath raked across my throat. I thrust my limbs forward, robotic. We were freezing to death.
I spoke to Sigrid using all the words I knew in her language, about a hundred by then, to try to keep her awake and with me, but there was no answer. How useless was all this—was I—if I lost her. I can’t lose her. But the Enormity didn’t care what I wanted; it just stretched out and out, beyond all human understanding, its brutal blue jaws stretching ever wider. It would take her dear breath, her faint heartbeat, then mine, and we would become human statues, rock-hard in the snow, not even as useful as a cairn.
I careened toward what looked like a snow-dusted boulder. The massive body of a musk ox lay on its side, one curled horn anchoring it to the ice field. A meaty tongue lolled out stiffly from its regal head as a golf-ball-sized eye held me in its gaze. Its back like a wall covered with rough brown and black fur; half-shed tufts clung in ropy tangles, fluttering in the wind. Boxy hooves jutted skyward; legs gnawed to the bone.
I circled it, expecting to see the rest, but it was gutted. Just a shell articulated by a huge set of ribs, for the most part empty of viscera and flesh, yet a thin film of vapor rose off it, and its nose still glistened. Crouching, I stepped inside its oil-drum-sized body cavity, startling a couple of ravens snatching a few remaining strings of tissue from white fascia. They squawked their annoyance as they battled their way past us and out into the night. As I bent nearly double inside the chamber—teeth clacking, shuddering uncontrollably—it finally occurred to me to wonder Where is the animal that did this? Footprints next to mine said polar bear. Shaped like a man’s footprint but wider, dinner-plate-sized, and deep; five toe prints, five claw marks. The bloody tracks led outside, erased by swirling snow.