Devour

KURT ANDERSON

PINNACLE BOOKS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

S
omething was wrong.

Jaarva “Joe” Inuviat stood at the edge of the sun-rotted ice sheet, two miles north of his home village of Naujaat. In front of him a long lead of open water sparkled in the weak April sun, the small black-capped Arctic terns darting over the surface. The days were growing longer, and the ringed seals had begun to surface in the open leads, their small heads rising above water just long enough for a man quick with a gun to make a killing shot. But there were no seals. There hadn’t been any seals, or walrus, for weeks.

Something was wrong under the ice.

There was a visiting group of scientists in the village, climate researchers from a place called Stanford. They had theories, these researchers. They said the rapid melting of the landward glaciers had created a dense stream of diluted seawater, a massive river flowing south and east toward Nova Scotia. The Kaala Current, they called it. The krill and the mysids were victims to the Kaala, pulled south mindlessly. The smaller fishes and minnows followed, mindfully. The larger predators hounded the schools, followed in turn by the big marine mammals which for thousands of years had sustained Joe’s people. That’s what they said.

Joe was a carpenter, and he supported his wife, Akiak, and their two small daughters with a combination of what he earned from Inupiat Construction and what he harvested from the sea. It was the same path his father had followed, a good and honest life, enough to raise a family well. Joe thought of his daughters, a smile spreading across his face, and studied the lead.

He did not know much of science, nor of climate change. He did not know if the researchers were wrong, or right, or somewhere in between. He knew the world changed, sometimes over the course of days, sometimes over many generations. It was foolish to look at today’s events and attempt to unravel the world’s mysteries.

Besides, he knew the seas were not barren. There was still life here. It was just very, very skittish.

* * *

Joe squinted into the brisk northwest wind, staring at the great white expanse of packed snow, and his thoughts turned from his daughters to poor, doomed Daniel Pakak. Danny had been an ultra-traditional hunter, only twenty-three but radical in his adherence to the old ways. Two weeks earlier, Danny had set out on a hunting expedition onto the big ice with three other men looking for walrus. Danny had returned alone two days later, severely hypothermic, his clothes frozen stiff on his body. The other men were dead, he managed to tell them through lips that had gone an unhealthy shade of dull purple. Not from cold or drowning, though.

“Quallupilluit
,” he croaked, then slipped into his last sleep.

Joe looked out over the ice fields, marked by steaming lines where other leads had opened, and pulled his hood tighter against the frigid wind. The ocean was a mystery, one of the few that were still left in his world. He had always liked mysteries, especially the ones that his grandmother told him at bedtime when he was a boy, the scratchy feel of store-bought wool blankets pulled tight over his face. Sometimes those stories revolved around a monster that lived in cracks of the sea ice.

Quallupilluit
, the monster of legend.
Quallupilluit
, who had survived for eons by hibernating in the cold sea mud, buried in the soft floor of the ocean while its brethren flamed out and froze out across the rest of the world.
Quallupilluit
, eater of worlds, emerging every fourth or fifth generation to gorge and reproduce. What a strange last word. Danny must have had some awful visions before he died.

Joe turned to the east, waved at his brother-in-law, Darmuska, and put a hand to his mouth. Darm nodded. They would eat now, a leisurely lunch of caribou jerky dipped in fermented seal oil. As they ate, the sun would warm the surface layer of the water, and the krill would become active. The baitfish would rise up to eat the krill, and the cod would follow. Soon the seals would begin to hunt, and then the Arctic air would crackle with gunfire.

Joe started toward the rest of the hunters. The hunger he’d felt for the last hour was gnawing at him, and he didn’t want to be distracted when the seas came alive. It was time to eat.

* * *

* * *

Darm was telling a story around a mouthful of food, gesturing with the jerky strip he held in his hand, spraying the snow with flecks of venison. Joe, who was an only son, loved his sister’s diminutive husband like a brother. But it was difficult to be around the man when those ancient twin urges—eating and talking—overcame him at the same time.

There were four of them standing with their backs to the wind. Joe and Darm had hunted together for twelve years. Nuqtak and Paarvu were cousins of Darm, younger men who worked on Joe’s construction crew. They had been hunting for only a few years, and they were worried about the ice, worried they would end up like Danny Pakak. Dying from the cold, of all things. It was a disgraceful way for an Inuit hunter to liberate his
anirniq
from his body.

“Think about how Danny hunted,” Darm said, showing a mouth full of masticated caribou jerky. “Always on the edge, always pushing things.” He tapped the side of his hood. “He didn’t listen. There was a big current the day he went out. You could hear the ice pop from a mile inland.”

“Hard for you to hear the ice pop when you are nestled between Marjuk’s
narnugs
,” one of the other men said. Darm joined their laughter, more flecks of dried venison spraying on the ice. Marjuk was Darm’s wife, Joe’s sister. She was a plump woman, well-insulated from the cold.

It’s a different way to hunt, Joe thought, listening to the men joking, arguing, giving each other shit. A different way to
be
, actually. He could not remember his father hunting with a partner. Trapping, yes, it was too hard and dangerous to be a solitary trapper in these frozen expanses, where a lame dog or fouled spark plug for the snowmobile could mean death. But the day-trip hunting expeditions had been solemn, just father and son and few words. No lewd jokes, no bantering, no camaraderie. He liked the new way better in many regards, he liked the men and liked the little lunch breaks. And yet he missed those days on the ice when it was just he and the sky and the wind, the small opening in the ice front of him where a seal might emerge to breathe. Everything drawn into a tight focus. Feel the ice under you contracting like thick, cold skin. Think about the sea, so barren on top, teeming with rich and unknown life below.

Now Nuqtuk and Darm were wrestling, playfully, the steel Yaktrax on the bottoms of their boots scraping across the ice. Joe watched, smiling, but inwardly disappointed. The seals would hear the noise, and they knew the sharp scratches on the ice meant hunters, or polar bears. They would not surface in this lead now, instead seeking out other, safer—

He caught a blur of movement out of the corner of his eye and instinctively reached for his rifle. He brought the rifle to his shoulder and dropped the barrel down so that the sight nestled just above the eye of the smallest of the four seals, just fifty yards away. Younger seals were the best eating, with the least amount of toxins in their meat.

He clicked the safety off and squeezed the trigger, and three of the seals dipped back below the water. The fourth flopped several times and then went still, bobbing in the open lead, its blubber keeping it afloat. Joe turned to the men, who were staring at him, and grinned. He was about to say something about their youth, something about his skills, when he heard the water splash behind him. Their jaws dropped, and he realized their mouths weren’t open because of his shooting prowess. Joe spun back to look at the lead.

He saw nothing. The water was empty, the seal gone.

* * *

The predator had many attributes, but above all was its ability to adapt. If it could not get food below water, it would try its luck above
.

* * *

The men were all talking at once. They could not agree on what they had seen rise out of the water. They were traditional Inuit hunters, and knew almost every animal and fish that lived below the sea or ran up the rivers, possessing knowledge that had been passed down through generations and sharpened on the grit of decades of firsthand experience and observation.

Now the only thing they could agree on was that they did not know what had surfaced to take the seal. It was enormous, larger even than
arviq
, the bowheaded whale. And
arviq
did not eat seals, one of the men said.

“What else could it be?” Darm asked.

“
Arviq
cannot even break through the ice now!” another man shouted above the others. They were upset, their voices tinged with panic. “There is four feet outside the leads, and
arviq
can only break through half of that!”

It was true, Joe thought. The whales would not rely on leads for their air supply, and even though it was weakened by the spring sunshine, four feet of ice was a formidable barrier even for the reinforced skulls of
arviq.
No,
arviq
were still far to the south and east, where the ice was thinner.

He glanced back at the jumble of land-fast ice, several hundred yards to the west. He had one advantage over the other men: He had not seen the beast rise out of the water, and so his own panic was secondhand. He was able to think, and he was thinking about Danny Pakak’s last words. Thinking about the safety of the shoreline.

“Let’s go in,” Joe said. “Whatever it was, we can talk about it on land as easily as we can out here.”

“He’s right,” Darm said. “The hunting is ruined anyway.” Joe watched as his brother-in-law walked over to pick up his rifle. He had never heard Darm sound quite so agreeable, so ready to quit hunting at midday. He began to feel his own panic rising, the staccato thump of his pulse in his throat.

The ice exploded around his brother-in-law.

The shattered ice flew in all directions, some of the pieces larger than a man. Joe ducked instinctively as a slab the size of a snowmobile whirred through the air next to his head. He fell to the ice, losing his grip on his grandfather’s rifle. The carbine slid along the ice and disappeared into a newly formed fissure. He shouted for Darm and then fell silent, his words caught somewhere deep in his chest.