The Quality of Silence (31 page)

He ran into cabin after cabin. The same smell. No one alive. Only Kaiyuk and Akiak unaccounted for. Both fit and young, he hoped they’d managed to escape whatever had happened here. He found them fifty or so metres away from the village. They must have been trying to go for help.

Corazon was in her elderly neighbour’s cabin, and he thought she had gone to look after him. Like the others, her hands were coloured blue, diarrhoea staining the floor.

Adrenaline had coursed through him, making him run not walk, his body taut, his mind racing with desperate urgency. Then his torch shone on a black bird dead on the white snow. A raven. He’d been abruptly stilled. The urgency to help them was before they’d died. There was nothing he could do for them; nothing he could ever do for them. His sense that time here expanded into an endless vast moment was horrifyingly true of death and remorse.

He returned to Hiti’s cabin and carefully replaced the blanket over his son’s face. He saw the boy’s prized caribou hide hung on the wall of the cabin, it was his
anjungaun
; a young hunter’s first game.

The boy had shot the caribou with Hiti in September and had confided in Matt that he’d cried when he’d killed it; that he’d felt like a monster. But then his father and he had cut the animal’s windpipe to release its spirit. They’d butchered it together and his mother had frozen the meat into different cuts and pieces for stewing that they’d be eating through this long winter until springtime, and the fat would be used to light their qulliq and the hide would be used for bedding or clothes. But as it was his anjungaun, they had displayed it on the wall; in the summer he would be allowed to go on an overnight hunting trip and he’d take it with him and use it in an aputiak. His father said one day he would surely be an
Isiqsuruk, a strong and enduring hunter. The boy said that because they’d released the animal’s spirit, and not wasted a single part of its body, he was proud of his first hunt.

Matt took the caribou hide off the wall and held it as he wept.

Chapter 22

In the quiet aputiak, Matt remembered the noise of the dogs, Kaiyuk’s dogs, howling at the black sky, the stars shrouded in clouds; the dogs’ sound a violent keening.

Yasmin was holding his hand tightly in hers, as if she’d been going into the cabins with him. He wasn’t signing these details to Ruby, he didn’t want her to have these images in her head, and didn’t want her to know how he’d failed his friends.

‘They had no way of getting help,’ he said. ‘I’d taken the satellite terminal with me. I didn’t even use it.’

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Yasmin said. ‘Matt, listen to me, please. It wasn’t your fault. You had no way of knowing.’

Captain Grayling’s face appeared slackened by the horror of what Matt was telling him.

‘Do you think they died painfully?’ he asked and Matt was taken aback by the humanity of the state trooper’s question.

‘Yes. But I didn’t know it then.’

‘You found them five days ago?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘The police thought everyone died in a fire,’ Yasmin said to him.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘There was a terrible fire,’ Captain Grayling said. ‘Burned everything to the ground. There was no way of knowing that they died before.’

‘Someone set fire to the village?’ Matt asked, appalled.

‘It could have been an accident,’ Grayling said, as if he wanted to believe it. ‘Maybe a heater was left on when they died, or a cooker, that could have caused the initial fire that spread.’

Yasmin remembered Captain Grayling had led the search party at Anaktue; it must have been a brutal scene. She understood why he didn’t want the fire to be deliberate; because it would be as if someone had killed them twice over.

‘I thought the police would find them,’ Matt said. ‘Not for a few days, maybe, but I was sure they’d be found.’

The villagers had friends and relatives outside of Anaktue. It was remote but not totally cut off. People visited by taxi plane and the villagers left the same way. He’d assumed that someone was bound to find them and tell the police.

Yasmin turned to Captain Grayling. ‘If you’d found them before the fire you’d have known Matt was alive. You would have seen there wasn’t a Westerner’s body among the dead.’

Captain Grayling nodded. He took a few moments as if to collect himself.

‘We will find out about the fire,’ he said to Matt. ‘But I’d like to know what really happened at Anaktue, before the fire. And I think you can help me?’

Dad’s taken off his special boots, and his feet are bleeding and some of his toes are black, like someone has put shoe polish on.

I tell Dad that I want to know what happened too, so I’ll lip-read what he says. I don’t want him to sign too because he looks so tired. I say that I’ll look away if something’s too horrible. I put my sleeping bag over his poor feet to try and warm them up, and when I do that, he smiles at me, just like old Dad again.

‘Outside one of the houses, I saw the dead raven again,’ Dad says with his mouth-voice and in sign as well even though I said he didn’t need to.

Had he told them about the raven? Or just remembered it so vividly himself that he thought he must have done.

It had started snowing, the white flakes landing on the black bird.

‘I photographed it.’

It hadn’t been about evidence or a trail then, but because the dead raven felt like an epitaph for the Inupiat villagers, expressing something that he would never be able to.

‘And then I left the village for the second time.’

His plan had been to go to the airstrip; he thought a plane was bound to fly over in the next few days. He’d still got his tent and provisions for himself and the huskies in the sled from his first trip. Kaiyuk had made him take double what he needed in case a storm had blown in. He could wait as long as it took for the plane.

The dogs hadn’t wanted to leave. He’d had to use all his authority and strength to get them to budge. Only the lead dog, Puqik, had seemed to understand that they needed to get away and the others had eventually followed her.

As he left Anaktue, the snow became heavier. Behind him the village was lost in snow and darkness and he felt that he was abandoning them. The dogs pulled on, the snow getting denser, until he could no longer differentiate what was in front of him or beneath or above him; a one-dimensional whiteness in which he could have been travelling across the sky as much as across the land.

Eight miles from Anaktue the snow thinned and the different planes of a three-dimensional world established themselves again. His head torch showed black shapes lying on the snow.

As he got closer, the smell hit him; the same as in the village cabins, putrid even in the icy air. There was a herd of dead musk oxen, the smaller ones almost buried in the recent white-out. A large bull had been partially eaten, after it was dead because there was no blood on the snow.

Something glinted in his torch beam. A short distance away, there was a hole in the snow and he saw moving water beneath reflecting his torchlight. The river was frozen over here then covered with snow. Musk oxen must have made the hole with their hooves in the thinnest part of the ice to get to water.

He looked into the hole. The river flowed fast under the ice. A lingcod, eighteen inches long, was trapped by a shard of ice just underneath; its gills were half dissolved.

He hadn’t wanted to believe the evidence in front of him; hadn’t wanted to think that this fragile and pure land, the white poem he’d lived in yesterday, was rank with poison.

Nor did he want to acknowledge that the smell of the musk oxen linked them to the villagers. It was too grotesque a detail, demeaning, had no relationship to the beauty of the people or the animals.

Half a mile away he found a pack of dead wolves, most of them buried by drifting snow. He thought that they must have fed on the musk oxen, or perhaps drunk from the river too.

The villagers would take water from the river to last two days at a stretch,

keeping it in storage tanks; the task of hauling it falling to the fittest men and women. Akiak and Kaiyuk had been going to get water from the river when Matt left for his first trip. Akiak wouldn’t have been on any roster, not when he’d unexpectedly returned, so it had been generous of him to help his friend.

But the villagers always boiled the water before drinking it.

It was still snowing, softly smothering the animals.

In the aputiak Matt told them how he’d taken photos of the musk ox and the wolves, using his satellite terminal to get a precise location. The terminal hadn’t connected for long enough to attempt linking it to his laptop, but did give him latitude and longitude. He’d written the numbers on a notepad with a pencil. His biro had frozen.

‘You used decimal co-ordinates,’ Yasmin said.

‘It was faster to write. I thought it would be easy to fill in the decimal points later.’

Yasmin imagined the physical and mental stamina of standing in minus thirty, using a camera then a terminal, then a pencil. And she understood why he wrote the minimum. He’d have had to write wearing just glove liners; he wouldn’t risk frostbite in his fingers in case he couldn’t talk to Ruby.

‘This was last Friday?’ Captain Grayling asked.

‘Yes. Instead of heading east towards the airstrip, I went south-west, following the river and the dead animals and birds on its banks. I was going against the current, towards the source.’

Yasmin understood that Matt had felt he owed it to the villagers to record what had happened and to find out the truth, but surely he could have gone to the airstrip and waited for a taxi-plane and then someone else, the police, could have done it. He must have sensed her question without her asking it.

‘The snow was covering everything, the blizzard had almost buried the musk oxen and wolves. Another heavy snowfall and the animals would have been hidden and there’d have been nothing left to see; nothing left to follow.’

She nodded and thought he must have hoped that the police would discover the villagers and then come searching for him. He didn’t know about the fire and that because of the fire they’d thought him dead. He wouldn’t have imagined being so totally alone for so long.

* * *

Kaiyuk’s huskies were the only living connection he had to Anaktue. He’d called to each one above the sound of the wind, using their names, which Kaiyuk had taught him. At the front was Puqik, which meant Smart; next Umialik meaning King; then Qaukliq meaning Chief; then Nuturuk, Firm Snow; Siku, Ice; Koko, Chocolate; Qannik, Snowflake; and at the back was Pamiiuqilavuk, which Kaiyuk had said meant Wags-his-Tail, but Matt hadn’t known if Kaiyuk had been teasing him about that.

‘Puqik, the lead dog, found some carrion by the river and ate it before I could stop her.’

He’d stayed with Puqik until she died, for the first time in his career wishing that he had a gun. It had hurt his friends to die.

Without Puqik as the lead dog, the other dogs were difficult to manage and he struggled to keep authority over them. The only light he had was a wind-up torch, and he’d let it get almost out before winding it again because he had to do that in just glove liners.

Sometimes he thought he’d lost the river, and then he’d spot a dark shape near its edge and know he’d found a poisoned animal or bird. He’d photograph it and get the co-ordinates and write them down; then he’d continue through the dark scarred land monitoring the poison.

‘Is that what happened to your friends too, Dad?’ Ruby asked. ‘Were they poisoned too? Was it poison not a fire?’

Matt nodded, wishing that Ruby didn’t need to know this story, but he was signing it to her because she’d asked to know what happened. He and Yasmin had agreed that they’d never use her deafness for some kind of advantage; even when it was to protect her.

‘The second night my primus ran out of fuel,’ he said. ‘It was too windy to light the qulliq. I had food for the huskies, but no way of melting snow to get water for them.’

Over the next two days whenever the wind dropped enough he’d light the qulliq and melt snow for the dogs and himself.

‘By Sunday night, I had travelled twenty-five miles. I pegged the huskies on their lines outside the tent. They were hungry. I’d been giving them half rations, trying to make the supplies last. The next morning two of the dogs were missing.’

‘Which dogs?’ Ruby asked.

He’d told her all their names, after his first sledding trip with Kaiyuk.

‘Pumiiruq and Nuturuk. I found Nuturuk with a poisoned arctic hare and he was ill too.’

It had looked as if the dog was on solid ground, but as Matt went to get him the ground had given way.

‘Dad? What happened?’

‘He was on thin ice over the river and he went through. He died because the water was so cold.’

‘But he’s got special thick fur, Daddy. You told me that. You said huskies got too hot even when it was freezing cold.’

‘He was ill, so he got too cold very fast.’

The part of the river where he and the dog went through was relatively shallow, but it was fast-flowing. Matt hadn’t tried to rescue the dog, but had let him be borne away swiftly; drowning or hypothermia was a less brutal way to die.