Until the Night

From the Blue Notebook

There is a night within the night. Even in the temperate latitudes, even in nights of the duration we would consider “normal,” there can be a time, an hour or two, that might be called the night within the night. The hour when a wife discovers she can no longer pretend to love her husband. The hour when a young man judges that the world is not going to hand him the life he yearns for, and it seems preferable to end the one he has.

It was early April. Arcosaur was still jammed in the ice pack. Arctic dawn was yet to come. We were a skeleton crew, the first rotation of scientists having yet to arrive. Before Rebecca, in other words.

Wyndham, Vanderbyl, his grad student Ray Deville, and myself. Beyond this, we had Paul Bélanger the cook, Murray Washburn, our facilities manager, Hunter and, of course, Jens Dahlberg. It had been a long day. We were in the mess. If we hadn’t had Paul there to make meals at regular hours, we probably would have warped into a forty-eight-hour cycle, which ends up being less productive than it sounds.

The weather had been foul for days. Horrendously cold, with a wind that could not be borne. But now the wind had dropped and the stars came out in their millions. The cold was deep and vast. Finally we could work outside again.

We put on many layers and our thickest downs and thus broke a cardinal rule of Arctic labour: if you’re warm when you venture outside, you will soon be too hot. We overworked and sweated hard all day, eventually staggering into the mess one by one, stinking and exhausted and damp. We probably consumed three or four thousand calories each at dinner.

Paul gave us a long and obviously prepared speech about pitching in to do dishes because we were eating as if we were three times our actual number. Paul himself had been working with stove and oven all day, and now his pies and cakes were vanishing before his eyes. As he lectured us, he bundled himself into his parka and raised his hood, wrapping the lower part of his face in his scarf. He looked like an astronaut going EVA, even though he and Hunter shared a cabin between the mess and the radio shack, which meant he had to travel about ten metres.

Jens Dahlberg sensibly went off to bed soon after, but the rest of us sat on, not talking. We were in a group lassitude brought on by shared exhaustion and the heat of the stove. We had passed that point where exhaustion skirts the edge of weeping and goes beyond it. Even Vanderbyl, who had reserves of energy that made one occasionally suspect a secret supply of Dexedrine, sat angular and expressionistic, one elbow on the table, cheek to palm, and the dead stare in his eyes of the terminally numb. Wyndham was asleep, chin on chest, quietly snoring. Ray Deville was scribbling urgently in a notebook, the sound of his pencil like the scurrying of a mouse. I’ve no idea what he was writing, but I suspect it was not academic.

Had one of us fired a shotgun into the air, I don’t think the effect of what happened next could have been any more drastic. A pounding, satanically loud, shook all four walls of the mess. The four of us stared at the door, its sturdy construction suddenly enfeebled. Vanderbyl, not a man given to cursing, sat straight up and yelled, Jesus Christ. Ray looked like a cartoon image of alarm—goggle-eyed, mouth open.

It came again. We were immobilized, dumb as figures in a natural history tableau.

I nominate Ray to answer the door, Wyndham said quietly.

Ray shook his head. He seemed to be getting smaller in his chair, as if he would sink under the table.

I got up and approached the door. Jens?

The mad thing on the other side pounded again.

I opened the door and an enormous Inuit man, rounded, solid and monolithic as one of their sculptures, was bathed in our light. The depth of his hood made his face a black circle.

Welcome, I said in Inuktitut. Undoubtedly this represented a naked attempt to hide my fear, not good manners.

He crooked an arm much rimed with snow, beckoning. He was enveloped in the cold of hell.

Honour us, I said, and gestured toward the stove, the table. Quickly, if you would.

He stepped inside with the lumbering gait of Arctic dress. He was clad head to foot in sealskin and wolf hide. I closed the door.

My name is Karson Durie, I said. Will you have some tea?

In another country one might offer vodka or brandy, but there are communities where the offer of alcohol is received as an assault, and not for religious reasons.

He pulled back his hood. The ageless smooth face of an Inuk in his prime. He was the tallest I had ever seen. My head came to his shoulders.

Karson Durie, I said again. How do you call yourself?

He received my words like a plate of stones.

Come in, Vanderbyl shouted down the length of the mess. He was fluent in Inuktitut. Let your testicles hang low.

No change of expression, no sign of recognition. He pointed to the door, crooked his head toward it.

Vanderbyl turned to me. “Where the hell’s Hunter?”

I don’t think this fellow speaks Tuk, I said.

What do you think he is, Romanian? Come in, Vanderbyl yelled again, you are welcome to our food and our fire. Come and share a story.

I don’ see why we ’ave to invite ‘im in, Ray said, if he don’ even try to be frien’. Ray’s face was drained white’ he looked in danger of fainting. And ‘ow did he get here in da first place?

There must be quite a jam behind us, I said.

From the Inuk, no shadow of a response. I had an unnerving sense of figure and ground, as if the air in the mess had turned solid and the figure before me were empty space. It pointed at the door and again crooked its head. I retrieved my parka from a hook.

Jesus Cry, Ray said. Don’ go widdim.

This is great, Wyndham said. I love this. Good luck, Kit. Don’t forget to write.

I put up my hood and opened the door. The Inuk went out ahead of me. The generator suddenly seemed terribly loud, our camp lights as gaudy as Times Square.

How had we not heard his dogs? A full team lay crouched before a traditional Inuit sled. The whites of their eyes flashed as they looked up. Why had our own dogs not been roused?

The Inuk didn’t wait for me, didn’t speak—to the dogs or to me. He went to the sled and pulled away the side panel. A heap of sealskins. He reached down and pulled back the layers. The face of a young man stared up at the stars with milky eyes. His features were dark, and at first I thought he was of some exotic race, but of course I was looking at the effects of extreme frostbite.

Not ours, I said.

The Inuk flipped hides away. He bent and reached down and waited.

I took the feet and we lifted the stony weight of him from the sled. The Inuk backed toward the mess.

Wait.

He stopped and we lowered the boy to the ice pack. The clothes were odd. Buckskin jacket, trousers of some material I didn’t recognize. High boots of sealskin, hand-sewn with gut.

I was reaching for the door when it opened. Kurt Vanderbyl took one step outside and stopped. Wyndham and Deville bumped into him from behind. Four of us in hoods and parkas looking down at the dead youth.

Who is he? Kurt said.

I don’t think we’re going to know any time soon, I said.

Where can he be from? We’re the only group for twelve hundred miles or more.

Yes.

We can’t have him inside. He’ll thaw. Where did you find him? he said to the Inuk.

The Inuk, still as a sculpture, said nothing.

He had to be sheltered somewhere, I said. Perhaps a glacial cave.

The bears would have got him. Foxes. He looks totally undamaged except for the frostbite.

’Ell wid dis, Ray said, stepping around Kurt. Why you come and bodder us like dat? You imagine you’re de only people on de planet?

Stop, Kurt said, and put a hand out to hold him back.

’Ell wid dis, Ray said again. Dat guy ’as something not right widdim.

Squeal of boots on snowpack as Ray walked away from us, one hand touching the wall of the mess as if he were on board ship. He muttered curses in French as he went.

Look at his clothes, I said, pointing at the dead youth. He’s not contemporary. Not even this century.

Incredible, Wyndham said.

We’ll put him in one of the unoccupied huts. We’ve got an Otter due in five days. They’ll have to take him back.

Grab an end, Vanderbyl said. We’ll put him in Paris.

Some camps do this—they give whimsical names to various locations so that it’s easy to explain where things are. No one knows who started it, and not all camps do it, but ours did. My cabin was called Pluto because it was farthest from the mess.

And so Kurt and I lifted the boy and carried him to Paris, his body having no more give than stainless steel.

For some reason—and barring a high wind—an unheated interior space always feels colder to me than the outdoors. It was only on stepping into that darkness that I remembered it was near fifty below zero outside. My face, despite the hood, was on fire.

We decided against waking Jens Dahlberg, there being nothing in his medical bag that was going to be of use to this young man, and tramped back toward the mess. Ray had thankfully gone to his cabin. The dog team lay in quiet formation in front of the sledge.

I asked Vanderbyl how it was that our own dogs had not woken up.

It’s strange, he said, the smoke of his words issuing from his hood. The whole thing is strange. Christ, it’s cold.

He won’t sit, Wyndham said when we were back inside. I invited him to, but he won’t. Won’t even warm up by the fire.

The Inuk stood in the shadows by the door, his hands, encased in enormous sealskin mittens, folded before him.

Wyndham had pulled his own chair over to the stove. The kettle whistled and he got up and poured hot water into four mugs flagged with teabag labels.

Vanderbyl hung up his coat and went to stand beside the man, taking, as it were, his point of view. It’s a thing I’ve noticed with some of the more isolated peoples: they prefer to talk side by side rather than face to face, sharing a point of view even in disagreement.

Thank you for bringing this boy to us, Vanderbyl said. It cannot have been easy for you. His family will be very grateful. A plane will land here in a few days and take him to a place where he can receive a proper burial.

The Inuk bowed his head. Impossible to tell if he was nodding in agreement or merely ruminating or registering nothing at all. If this sounds like the cliché of the silent Indian, it is. In my time, I have met the stereotypes of the absent-minded professor, the hot-blooded Latin, the stiff-upper-lipped British officer, and it just can’t be helped. This was his behaviour.

The Inuit in general are not particularly quiet people. Hunter Oklaga could make a story last all night, if you let him, and his wife was the same. I had dinner at their home in Resolute one evening and was thoroughly exhausted by the experience. His two teenage daughters gave an impromptu throat-singing recital, an eerie Inuit custom. Two females—it’s always females—stand face to face, lightly gripping each other’s elbows. One begins a rhythmic bass line consisting of a phrase that may or may not be nonsense, while the other develops a sort of spinning, buzzing melody line above it. The sound is closer to that of two mating furry creatures, or even to a didgeridoo, than to anything recognizably human. They look intently into each other’s eyes or at each other’s lips, standing only inches apart, and combine the sounds with a shuffling dance. The effect is slightly erotic but the intent is amusement—the object being to see who can last the longest without giggling.

But this solid ghost who stood before us, threads of steam rising from his sealskins, was a different creature entirely. It was as if he lived in a different medium. It was like talking to a fish, a flash of silver below the surface, a hydrodynamic shadow in the depths. It seemed idiotic to speak at all, let alone expect a response.

Vanderbyl told him he was welcome to stay the night, or longer if need be. We would be happy to feed and shelter his dogs as well. He spoke in Tuk and repeated it in English.

Wyndham carried over two mugs of tea and offered one to the Inuk, who ignored it. He handed the other one to Vanderbyl and came back and sat beside me.

He doesn’t understand a word, Wyndham said.

He’s Polar Inuit, I said, from the tip of Greenland. They don’t get out much.

That’s four hundred miles away. What the hell would he be doing out here? Vanderbyl said, warming his hands over the stove.

Lika-Lodinn, I said.

What?

In the Norse sagas, Lika-Lodinn collected the frozen bodies of adventurers and returned them to the people they came from.

Well, he’s making it pretty clear he wants nothing to do with us, so what’s he doing hanging around in our mess?

He’s waiting to be paid.