The Quality of Silence (32 page)

‘What about Pamiuqilavuq?’ Ruby signed, making the sign of a fast wagging tail.

‘I couldn’t find him. I think that he must have fallen into the water too. It would have been very quick, Puggle.’

‘Yes.’

‘We went another four miles.’

His feet and his outer trousers were wet from going through the ice in the river. He was wearing three layers, as Inupiaq hunters did, but the cold penetrated through. He felt frostbite as electric shocks in his feet and shins. His legs became weaker and his feet numb and he found it hard to balance in the sled. He kept on calling the dogs’ names over the sound of the wind, but gradually he could no longer remember what they were called. He knew that he was suffering from exposure, that he would die if he didn’t get warm soon.

He stopped the huskies. His wet clothes were leeching remaining warmth away from his body and he had no way of drying them. There was nothing with which to build a fire, not a tree or a twig. The wind was slicing like machetes with nothing to stand in its way. In this wind he wouldn’t get the qulliq lit let alone keep it alight. He had no source of warmth.

Dad says he knew a storm was coming because it was getting so windy and cold. He tried to put up his tent but the ground was too hard to get the stakes in properly. And then this gust of wind came along and Dad says it just blew the tent away like it was a lacy handkerchief held down by drawing pins. He tried to chase after it but it disappeared.

He says he tried to tether the huskies, so they wouldn’t escape and get poisoned, but it was hard to hammer the stakes in. And it’s awful to think of Dad all cold and alone with the hard hard ground.

‘Why didn’t you email us?’ I say. ‘And tell us it was you and ask us for help?’

‘I wanted to, Puggle, but Akiak’s laptop had frozen.’ He smiles. ‘Literally.’

I smile too, but our smiles are just carrier bags; inside we’re not feeling smiley.

‘It wouldn’t even switch on,’ Dad says. ‘My cover hadn’t protected it properly and I think it had got too cold to work. The screen had little cracks in it too.’

He looks at Mum with that new look he has for her and I can tell he’s about to say something to her, probably in sign because that’s more private, but then the state trooper interrupts and Mum translates his words into sign for me.

‘That must have been on Monday,’ the state trooper says. ‘When we were searching for you in the storm. But you built this.’

‘Not this. A first effort,’ Dad says and gives me a proper smile. ‘I was pretty hopeless, Puggle. I’d never done it before, just watched Kaiyuk and Corazon. They could build an aputiak in twenty minutes. It took me hours. Even then it was a scrappy kind of thing.’

He’d been thinking too much as a Londoner and not as an Inupiaq; if he was to survive he’d have to think what they would do. He took Corazon’s snow-knife and cut blocks of snow from a snow bank, his fingers struggling to co-ordinate. Some of the blocks crumbled and were useless and he had to start over. When he thought he had enough blocks he started to build the aputiak.

All the time he was building it, his body wild with shivering, his feet stabbed with frostbite, he thought of Yasmin and Ruby, saw their faces in the dark as if at the end of a tunnel and if he built the aputiak he’d reach them. He remembered Kaiyuk’s voice above the howling wind explaining to him patiently, ‘
Not row upon row, but a spiral; then we pack the joints with snow’;
but his voice was more vivid than a memory, as if he was with Matt on the snow, and he feared exposure was making him hallucinate, but the sound of Kaiyuk’s voice comforted him nonetheless.

When it was done, he crawled inside, unutterably cold. It took him ten attempts to light the qulliq. The warmth startled him. He closed the opening with snow then took off his damp clothes to dry. He took the battery out of Akiak’s laptop, then put the battery and the laptop near the qulliq, hoping the warmth would get it to work again. Then he fell asleep, slipping in and out of consciousness, light from the qulliq shining on the snow walls.

He woke choking, the smoke from the qulliq filling the aputiak, and he had to get the knife and gouge a hole to let the smoke out. But he was no longer violently shivering.

The next morning, his frostbitten feet had turned red and blistered. Two of the huskies, Umialik and Quannik, had broken their lines and gone. He’d given them the last of the meagre rations the night before and they must have gone off in search of food. He only had Koko, Qaukliq and Siku left. It sickened him that before feeling the loss of the dogs he’d felt relief he could remember their names. The next aputiak he built would be big enough for the dogs too.

He replaced Akiak’s laptop battery and the laptop turned on for five seconds or so, but then the keyboard jammed and he saw that warming it had caused condensation inside the screen. He wrapped the laptop in a lightweight camping towel, hoping to draw the condensation away, then packed it in his knapsack.

He left his poorly built aputiak and walked for three miles along the river; his feet bloody and blackened with frostbite; the three remaining dogs pulling the sled without his weight. He only had a torch beam to see by, tiny in the immense black landscape, and he felt as if he was the only person alive on a planet of darkness and ice.

His torch beam shone on a delineator. It was the first evidence of humans he’d had for almost four days and he knew he was reaching the source of the poison. He saw more delineators, marking the river as a road.

He’d walked, stumbling, a mile and a half along the river-road, when he heard a faint crackling as the huskies pulled the sled over the ice.

He shone his torch, looking for the cause, and found a hole in the ice, cracks emanating around it from where the sled had gone over it. He widened the hole with his knife. Underneath, boulders sectioned off a part of the fast-flowing river. His torch beam shone on layers of dead fish and frogs, partially dissolved, a foot thick under the ice.

He walked a few paces and felt something soft and giving at his feet. He shone the torch and saw dead river otters on the ice.

He took a photo, but the camera was getting harder to operate and he feared that snow had got into the mechanism. He was desperate to get the photos onto the net, where they wouldn’t be subject to the freezing weather, but doubted he’d get Akiak’s laptop to work. He remembered how in a strange way it had been easier to think about the problems he had with his camera and laptop than to focus on the family of river otters. Quannik had been next to them.

Dad says he saw the river otters too and he photographed them. He thought he was getting near the source of the poison.

I tell him that when I saw the family of otters I cried and he nods, because he understands. It’s like our stories are joining up now, Dad’s with Mum’s and mine, and we are all one story again.

When I saw the husky next to the otters, I thought the bad man had let him die, but now I know that Dad was trying to look after him. Quannik means Snowflake and although he looked soft and gentle he was very strong and quite fierce.

Dad walked along the river-road, like we did, and when he got to here he knew

he’d found the poison. He says he checked further up the river and there were no dead fish and no dead animals. He says the poison started here.

Everyone is putting on their outdoor things and going out of the aputiak. Dad

tells me to stay in the warm but there’s no way I’m letting him out of my sight again, not for a minute.

* * *

The bonfire is super-bright so I can see Mum and Dad’s hands. The flames look like genies trying to escape into the dark.

‘It was burning when I got here,’ Dad says to the state trooper. ‘I’m not sure what they were trying to destroy. I kept it going hoping a plane would spot it.’

The state trooper is saying something and Mum translates, ‘Regular planes don’t fly over this way. We don’t either unless we have a reason.’

I know he means that he was looking for Mum and me, which is why he saw our flare; and a flare goes a lot higher than a bonfire. Our flare looked like a red star.

No one was even looking for Dad except Mum and me.

Dad puts a plank of something on the bonfire and it makes lots more flames and the darkness turns orange as the genies escape.

I can see a gigantic metal monster, rising up into the marmalade sky.

‘It’s a fracking rig,’ Dad says.

He’d walked towards the glow of the bonfire and in its light had seen the towering rig, a hundred and thirty feet tall, like a medieval trebuchet made of metal attacking the land; and then he’d searched with his torch, its small beam shining on a huge compressor and storage tanks and well heads and frack pumps. There was a partially dismantled generator shed, floodlights lying on the ground. He’d found twenty-two wells within a mile of the rig. There were pits like moon craters, the size of lakes, which he thought must be the waste storage ponds. Even in the cold he smelled the chemical poisons, abrasive in his nose and throat. Despite the sub-zero temperature, the fluid in the pits wasn’t covered in ice and instead of reflecting, his torch beam was absorbed by the murky viscous fluid.

For thousands of miles around this place the ancient tundra was white with snow, the delicate ecosystem beneath fragile and unspoiled. But here it was scarred with metal and craters and underneath him the fracking pipes went two miles down into the earth spreading out as veins and fracturing the land.

The villagers had feared that fracking would poison their land and water and destroy their way of life. They’d feared it could make them sick. He’d researched with Corazon the many ways that fracking was potentially dangerous. Horribly ironic, that it wasn’t fracking wells right next to their village that had killed them, but wells owned by a different company over forty miles away.

‘Do you know how the river was poisoned?’ Captain Grayling asked.

‘A casing in one of the fracking pipes could have cracked and leaked chemicals from the fracking fluid,’ Matt said. ‘Or when they fracked the rocks, they released poison naturally present. Or someone just dumped all the toxic waste. There’s a whole load of ways.’

The state trooper has pulled off his mask and I can see from his face that he thinks this is a nasty place too. He might have taken off his mask because he knows I find it a bit scary; or because his face got too warm right next to the bonfire.

‘And you built the really good aputiak?’ I say to Dad, making our special sign for it.

‘Yes.’

‘With a hole for the smoke and a door made of a hide,’ I say.

‘Exactly. I’d learned a few lessons the hard way, Puggle.’

When he’d finished building the aputiak, he lit the qulliq and put Akiak’s laptop near to it, wrapped in the camping towel. After four hours, the screen glowed and he felt he was no longer alone. He hadn’t been there when the villagers were killed, when they had needed him, but now he was at least able to bear witness to what had happened. He attached his camera cable to Akiak’s MacBook Air, which automatically went to iPhoto. He pressed ‘Import All’ and his photos downloaded onto the laptop.

He opened the first photo and started typing the co-ordinates of where it was taken in the description box, but the screen flickered off and on and he was afraid he didn’t have long before it packed up. He typed as fast as he could for each photo, just copying the numbers he’d written in pencil, no time for anything else.

He already knew the co-ordinates of Anaktue and he put those with the photo of the raven.

He’d taken photos of the fracking wells and pits, shadowy in the light of the bonfire, and taken co-ordinates, but there was no proof in the photos of any poison; the proof was in his photos of animals and birds.

He needed to get the photos onto the internet as a safe place for his record, away from the vagaries of ice and damp and extreme cold, but first he would email Yasmin; somehow translate his love for her into articulated thought and words.

He typed in her address then the screen flickered again and failed. He wrapped the laptop up and put it by the qulliq. An hour later, the screen came on faintly. Only the trackpad worked. The keyboard didn’t work at all. He pressed letter after letter, but none of them responded. He felt as if he’d been made mute. He thought about Ruby when people didn’t understand that her signs were words and how brave she was.

Maybe he could still send the photos and co-ordinates. He had Yasmin’s address and the trackpad worked. He left the aputiak.

‘I emailed the photos from over there,’ Dad says. He points at a hill, like a huge black cut-out against the orange light of the bonfire. ‘I had to get a clear line of sight to a satellite.’

‘It must have really hurt your feet,’ I say. Because inside the aputiak I saw his poor black toes.

‘It hurt a bit, but not too much,’ he says. ‘Frostbite’s not such a big deal in feet. Worst-case scenario is that I lose a toe or two, and you can get by missing the odd toe.’

He says that just to me with his hand-voice.

I take his hands and look at all of his fingers, really carefully. He smiles and he signs that his fingers are all absolutely fine.

The climb had been hard, his feet numbed with frostbite, the ground uneven and treacherous with ice. He reached the top and tried to wedge his torch so he could see to plug in the connecting cable between the laptop and his terminal, but the torch kept falling over and getting covered in snow. If the laptop screen had been bright it would have been easier, but it was dim and cracked and gave no light for him to see by.