I didn’t care. It had to be twenty degrees warmer inside the tent of ribs and skin. I smelled meat, hide, blood, and offal. Under a shoulder blade the size of a snow shovel, a wedge of flesh still steamed. I lay Sigrid on the bloody snow, wrenched off my gloves, and clawed my hands between bone and skin, yelping as my blood turned from sludge back to liquid, from death back to life and all its agonies. With shaking, blood-slicked fingers I yanked Sigrid’s mittens off her terrifyingly stiff hands and worked them into the hot tendon. Her eyes banged open, then fluttered closed; she moaned but didn’t resist me.
“Sigrid. You have to tell me about the eels. You have to tell me what to do at the third cairn.”
Pearly coat striped by the slatted rib fence, an Arctic fox wandered by. He caught a glimpse of us and froze, one paw raised. For several heartbeats, he appraised us—our huddled, wretched forms—before skittering off, the pads of his paws flashing charcoal in the great white waste before he was gone.
Hands still planted in the steaming flesh, Sigrid mumbled what sounded like an incantation. I let her spool out as long as I could bear it. “The cairn, Sigrid. Stones. Help, eels, dead alive, alive, please, now.”
She pulled her hands free, eyes slipping into the back of her head. “Love, happy, Bahl. Walrus, bone, ice eels, dead alive, dead alive.”
She lost consciousness. I rubbed and blew at her hands. Stuffed them back in her mittens. Gathered her up and abandoned our shelter in a run.
thirty-seven
I grew weaker. I could feel my energy waning as if a hole had been drilled into me, and my life was steadily leaking out. I was pure intention, pure will. I threw myself toward that petrified monolith like it was everything I’d ever wanted in this brief and miserable life.
I fell to my knees at the base of the rock beast, a penitent. Lifted my head. This one—taller than the others—looked the most human, one rock foot slightly forward of the other as if it were in the midst of taking a step. Its block-for-a-head had a mouth, an ear-to-chin gash in the stone; it looked as if it were trying to speak, or snarl, or curse. It had only one stone arm, a promontory of shale about five feet long that narrowed off like an attenuated hand, pointing to something it had been pointing to for millennia.
Holding the child close, I circled the creature, wind battering us as I searched for a hole, a pattern, anything. Ran my hands over what I could reach—pelvis, torso, monumental shoulders—but all the rocks fit together with no opening I could find.
Nothing to look through. My heart broke. We were lost.
The sound of the motor ramped up, a dull, constant roar, not my imagination. A loaded gun aimed at us.
“Sigrid,” I yelled through the wind, though her face was inches from mine. “There’s no peephole…”
I pushed her hair off her face. Spoke her name over and over, but she was still.
From somewhere beneath us: grunts, barks, snorts; an appalling fishy smell. Ammoniac.
What is this?
Only then did I look down, along the sight line of the stone arm. The ice field descended sharply, plunging into a slender fjord that glistened like black oil in the moonlight. Low tide revealed a magnificent natural arch of ice over a pebbled beach. From the dark water, the lusty blow of a fin whale. On the far flank of the inlet, an immense herd of walrus, perhaps thousands.
The stone arm commanding me, I half fell down the steep slope toward the beach, glancing back at the immobile face of the cairn. Its leering mouth seemed to say, Just look, what you’re searching for is right there, I cannot be more clear.
Something snapped under my boot, turning my ankle; I fell sideways onto my hip. A white wedge cut me through my pants, deep into the flesh of my calf. Sigrid spilled from my arms. I marveled at the shell-sized piece of bone stuck into me and pulled it out without thinking. Blood darkened my pants at the cut; it warmed my leg, but froze in seconds, the fabric of my pants crackling as I moved. I tossed the chunk of bone aside and looked around. I could see it now. A thousand walrus jaws—interlocking chevrons—had been arranged in a semicircle, a demarcation of something precious.
I gathered up Sigrid. Picked my way down the slope, past the ring of walrus jaws, toward the dark beach. Which seemed to be moving.
Love, happy, Bahl. Walrus, bone, ice eels, dead alive, dead alive.
Filling the shallow bay, countless gleaming ice eels twined around each other as if sleeping or in some sort of love embrace. The mat of twisting ropes shone under the moonlight, eminently peaceful, as if this was their homecoming, their great nature under the ice arch, like salmon that have battled untold miles upstream to spawn and die where they were born. In places, the eels moved gently with a slick sound, as if they were one creature with one brain.