'Kay-rist!' I reacted, jumping halfway to the ceiling.
This seemed to agitate her. She rubbed her hands together and blew on them and shivered and blew on them again, and then reached behind her to insert one of her hands in the cleft of her own rosy buttocks. 'Oggledywoggledyglup!' she told me again in the tone one uses to a child in explaining something that should really be crystal clear. 'Oggledywoggledyglup!'
I got it then. Poli was trying to show me the Eskimo ritual by which lovers warm each other's hands so that they will not be a jarringly cold note when the actual love-making begins. She was obviously disappointed that I'd been too tense to allow it. Now she tried again more gently, and I followed her example.
'Whoops!' I found myself giggling like a schoolboy. Although she was restraining herself, Poli's probings were making me more nervous than passionate. I was very glad I hadn't eaten too much of that polar bear steak.
When our hands were warmed to her satisfaction, she started the nose-rubbing bit again. I was getting the hang of keeping my grip on her slippery skin now, and my caresses grew more intimate. With each new thrill they provided, she laughed louder. At first this nettled me, but after awhile I realized it was her Eskimo way of paying me a compliment. Civilized women may sob, groan, or cry out during sex, but to the Eskirno girl it is sheer pleasure and to be appreciated with laughter. Why, after all, should one sob, groan or cry when the emotion one is feeling is joy?
The peaks of her breasts had grown long and fiery under my touch, and now I bent to kiss them. When I raised my head, I saw that she was looking at me with astonishment. I remembered then that Eskimos rarely use their mouths in love- making. I was about to try to apologize with sign language, but Poli's astonishment turned out to be by no means censure. On the contrary, she pushed my head back down and laughed excitedly as my lips fastened once again.
Her excitement excited me in turn. I forgot myself for the moment and my lips traveled down her belly in a series of small, passionate kisses. When they reached the mouth of her lust, she instinctively clasped her hands over the back of my neck and pressed me to her, prolonging the kiss. The laugh she unloosed then was a veritable roar of appreciation.
I tried to raise my head, but she wouldn't let me. She didn't want to relinquish this new thrill to which I'd introduced her. Which would have been all right with me except for one thing: Poli had gone a bit overboard with her seal-oil perfume in this particular area. I was damn near asphyxiated before her body was finally seized by a long, drawn-out tremor which ended with the heartiest laugh yet.
Then she let go and held her arms open. Her eyes were shining with wonder as I came into them. We made love more conventionally, and she enjoyed that, too. But when it was over, she kept sliding my head down her belly again until I obliged her and repeated the first act.
And so the long arctic night passed, alternating between one form of love- making and the other. In the morning, Ungilak came to wake us. When he had done so, he conveyed to me by gestures his concern as to whether his poor excuse for a wife had given me any satisfaction. I gestured back with great enthusiasm, and he nodded, pleased that this humble offering had met with my approval. He patted Poli on the head to show his praise for her having done well.
Poli had something she wanted to show him, too. She pulled him down beside her excitedly, and drew his head to her breast. He pulled away, puzzled. She raised the pelts covering his chest, and then chattered some words to explain the kiss she bestowed there. Ungilak shrugged and pressed his lips to her breast. He looked at her out of the corner of his eye, and she giggled approval. Then she pulled the skins from her legs and pushed his head farther down. She pointed at me and chattered some other words. Ungilak raised his eyebrows and pressed his lips where she indicated. She held him there and soon her laugh sounded out once again. Only then did she release him.
Poli turned to me as Ungilak got to his feet, and I gathered she was thanking me for enlarging her erotic horizons. She tugged at Ungilak and said something to him. Then he too thanked me politely. But I could see his heart wasn't in it. He tried to hide it, but he obviously thought I was some kind of nut or something. Why else would I humor a woman with an orifice meant to consume polar bear steak and other arctic goodies? Surely, the look he was trying to hide seemed to say, it was foolish to make her laugh in this way when a man could laugh along with her while making love more conventionally. But I guessed that Poli would find a way of overcoming his skepticism.
There wasn't time for her to try that morning, though. Ungilak was kept too busy preparing for the journey ahead. At first I tried to help him load up the dogsled, but I could soon see I was more in the way than being helpful. So I strolled down to the shoreline, where I found Olga.
She was staring out toward the sea. I followed her glance and saw a ship which seemed to be lying at anchor quite far out. 'I thought they left yesterday,' I remarked.
'That's not our ship,' Olga replied.
I took another look and saw that she was right. 'Who is it, then?' I asked.
'I wish I knew. All I know is that it's not ours, and that means it's probably dangerous to us.'
I was still mulling this over a while later when Ungilak came to tell us he was ready to shove off. Olga and I bundled up in the sled while he harnessed the dogs to it. Then he kissed Poli and we waved goodbye to her as Ungilak hopped on the back runners and cracked his whip over the sled dogs.
The thing about sled dogs is that the lead dog is the only one who ever gets a change of scenery. Not that there is much in the way of scenery in Franz Josef Land. Pack ice, an occasional glimpse of moss or lichen, the knowledge that there are fox and polar bear farther inland, and the sea stretching out to the horizon – that sums up the view. Which is one reason why the ship paralleling our dogsled course along the coastline was the most interesting thing in sight.
The other reason was our wonder at why it was following us. The question became academic when Ungilak made close to a right-angle turn and headed inland. The ship couldn't follow that course.
Still, Olga and I kept looking back over our shoulders at it. The coastline was almost out of sight when we saw two longboats from the ship reach the shore. Olga had Ungilak stop a moment and pointed out to him what we had seen. His keen eyes studied the activity of the dots back at the shore, and then he commented to Olga.
'He says,' she translated for me, 'that there are four men with a sled, dogs and supplies. It will take them about half an hour to get loaded, hitch up the dogs, and start out to follow our trail. That will put them about two hours behind us. Ungilak thinks we'll be able to lose them when we go through the glaciers.' Olga pointed to a low ridge of ice mountains.
We started moving toward them now, with Ungilak riding the runners behind us and lightly flicking his whip over our heads at the dogs pulling the sled. It was cramped, bundled up in the sled that way, but we didn't feel the cold too much with those heavy bear pelts covering us. It was dull, too, and it was as much from boredom as anything else that I decided this might be a good time to try to pump some information out of Olga. I figured if I could keep her talking, she might drop some clue to prove that she was really Dr. Nyet.
'How did you happen to join S.M.U.T. in the first place?' I asked for openers.
'My mother was a whore,' Olga told me simply.
'Oh. I'm sorry.'
'That's all right. I don't mind talking about it. I was born in a brothel in Paris. I was named by a white Russian, a steady customer of Mama's who may or may not have been my father. I grew up in the brothel. I ran away when I was thirteen. That was the day Mama tried to put me to work. But I'd made up my mind a long time before that never to be a whore like Mama. I'd seen what it did to her and to the other women there. Old before their time, too jaded to enjoy sex or anything else – I wasn't going to let that happen to me. So I ran away.'
'Where did you go?'
'Not very far. I stayed in Paris. I lied about my age and got a job. It was as a clerk in an office. I went to school nights and studied shorthand and typing. By the time I was sixteen – they thought I was twenty-one, of course – I was secretary to one of the senior executives in the firm. It was an import-export outfit, and there were promotions availabe to girls who could speak the Scandinavian languages and qualify as translators. So I went back to school again and took language courses. I found I had a real knack for languages; they came very easily to me. By the time I was really twenty-one, I was the top translator in the company and they were sending me on assignments all over the world. They imported furs, and one of these assignments took me into the interior of Greenland to deal with the Eskimo fur-trappers. That's where I picked up their language. The tongue Ungilak speaks is just an offshoot dialect of what I picked up there.'
'You still haven't told me how you came to join S.M.U.T.,' I reminded her.
