rustling. But he knows that if he walks closer to the hole now, he’ll sound, in his white-man clumsiness, like a collapsing tower of tin cans to the seal below – if there
Crozier knows that before he arrived, after Silence found the breathing hole, she carefully and slowly removed the snow over that hole with her knife and widened the hole itself with a bone pick set into the butt of her harpoon shaft. She then inspected the hole to confirm that it was directly above a deep channel in the ice – if not, the chances of a good harpoon thrust were low, he understood now – and then she built the tiny mound up again. Since the snow was blowing, she put a narrow gauze of skin over the hole to prevent it from being filled in. Then she took a very thin point of bone fastened by a long piece of gut string to the tip of another bone and slid this indicator down into the hole, setting the other end on one of her antler twigs.
Now she waits. Crozier watches.
Hours pass.
The wind comes up. Clouds begin to obscure the stars, and snow blows across the ice from the land behind them. Silence stands there, hunched over the breathing hole, her parka and hood slowly being covered with a film of snow, her harpoon with its ivory tip in her right hand, its weight being supported at the rear by the forked antler in the snow.
Crozier has seen her catch seals in other ways. In one, she hews two holes in the ice and – with Crozier’s help using one of two harpoons – literally beguiles the seal to her. She has taught him that while the seal may be the animal kingdom’s soul of caution, its Achilles’ heel is its curiosity. If Crozier gets the head of his specially prepared harpoon near Silence’s hole under the ice, he moves the harpoon up and down ever so slightly, causing two small bones rigged with split-feather shafts near the head of the harpoon to vibrate. Eventually, the seal cannot resist its curiosity and pops up to investigate.
In the full moonlight, Crozier has gaped as Silence has moved across the ice on her belly, pretending to be a seal herself, moving her arms like flippers. On those times he can’t even see the seal’s head protruding from a hole in the ice until there is a sudden, impossibly fast motion of her arm, and then she is pulling back the harpoon attached to her wrist by a long cord. More often than not, there is a dead seal on the other end.
But this dark night-day there is only the seal’s breathing hole to watch and Crozier stays on his skin pad for hours, watching Silence standing bent over the almost indiscernible dome. Every half hour or so, she reaches back slowly to her antler-twigs and removes a strange little instrument – a curved bit of driftwood about ten inches long with three bird claws attached – and scratches so lightly at the ice over the breathing hole that he can’t hear the noise even from a few feet away. But the seal must hear it clearly enough. Even if the animal is at another breathing hole, perhaps hundreds of yards away, it seems – eventually – to be overcome by the curiosity that will doom it.
On the other hand, Crozier has no idea how Silence can see the seal to harpoon it. Perhaps in the sunlight of summer, late spring, or autumn its shadow might be visible under the ice, its nose visible beneath the tiny breathing-hole opening… but in starlight? By the time her warning device vibrates, the seal could have turned and dived deep again. Can she smell its presence as it rises? Can she sense it in some other way?
He is half frozen – a symptom of lying on the caribou pad rather than sitting upright – and dozing when Silence’s little bone-and-feather indicator must have vibrated.
He comes awake in an instant as she blurs into action. She lifts the harpoon from its butt rest and flings it straight down through the breathing hole in less time than it takes for Crozier to blink awake. Then she is leaning back, pulling hard on the thick cord disappearing through the ice.
Crozier struggles to his feet – his left leg aches abominably and does not want to support any weight – and hobbles to her side as quickly as he can. He knows that this is one of the trickiest parts of the seal hunt – pulling the thing up before it can writhe off the barbed ivory harpoon head if it is only injured, or just tangle in ice or slip away to the depths if it is dead. Speed, as the Royal Navy had never tired of telling him, is of the essence.
Together they wrestle the heavy animal up through the hole, Silence pulling at the cord with one surprisingly strong arm and hacking away at the ice with her knife in the other hand, enlarging the hole.
The seal is dead but more slippery than anything Crozier has ever encountered. He gets his mittened hand under the base of a flipper, taking care to avoid the razor- sharp claws at the end, and heaves to leverage the dead animal up onto the ice. All the while, he is gasping and cursing and laughing – relieved from his duty to remain silent – and Silence is, of course, silent except for the occasional soft hiss of breath.
When the seal is safe on the ice, he stands back, knowing what will come next.
The seal, barely visible in the little starlight that’s made its way between the low-scudding clouds, lies with its black eyes unblinking and looking vaguely censorious, its open mouth leaking only a trace of black-looking blood onto the blue-white snow.
Panting a bit from the exertion, Silence goes to her knees on the ice, then to all fours, and then she lies on her belly with her face next to the dead seal’s.
Crozier takes another silent step back. Strangely, he feels now much the same way he did when he was a boy in Memo Moira’s church.
Reaching under her parka, Silence pulls out the tiniest stopped flask made of ivory and fills her mouth with water from it. She has kept the flask next to her bare breasts under the fur so as to keep the water liquid.
She leans forward and sets her lips to the seal’s in a strange parody of a kiss, even opening her mouth the way Crozier has seen whores do with men on at least four continents.
She passes the liquid water from her mouth to the seal’s mouth.
Crozier knows that if the seal’s living soul, not quite departed from this body, is pleased with the beauty and workmanship of the harpoon and barbed ivory spearhead that killed it, is pleased with Silence’s stealth and patience and her other hunting methods, and especially if it enjoys the water from her mouth, it will go tell the other seal-souls that they should come to this hunter for the chance to drink such fresh, clear water.
Crozier does not know how he knows this – Silence has never signed it to him with strings or suggested as much through any other gestures – but he knows it is true. It’s as if the knowledge comes from the headaches that plague him every morning.
The ritual over, Silence gets to her feet, brushes the snow from her pants and parka, gathers up her precious instruments and harpoon, and together they drag the dead seal the two hundred yards or so to their snow-house.
They eat all evening. It seems that Crozier can never get his fill of fat and blubber. Their faces are both as greasy as a greased pig’s arse by the end of the evening, and he points to his face, points to Silence’s equally greasy face, and bursts into laughter.
Silence never laughs, of course, but Crozier thinks he sees the slightest hint of a smile before she scrambles down the entrance passage and returns – naked except for her caribou shorts – with fresh handfuls of snow for them to wipe their faces with before wiping them again with soft caribou skins.
They drink icy water, heat and eat more seal, drink again, go outside to separate places to relieve themselves, drape their damp clothing over the drying rack above the low-burning blubber flame, wash their hands and faces again, brush their teeth with fingers and string-wrapped twigs, and crawl naked under the sleeping robes.
Crozier has just dozed off when he awakens to the feel of Silence’s small hand on his thigh and private parts.
He reacts immediately, stiffening and rising. He has not forgotten his previous physical pain and scruples about having relations with the Esquimaux girl: these details simply are not in his mind as her small but urgent fingers close around his penis.
They are both breathing hard. She flings her leg over his thigh and rubs up and down. He cups her breasts – so warm – and reaches down behind her to fiercely grab her round behind and pulls her crotch tighter against his leg. His cock is almost absurdly hard and pulsating, its swollen tip vibrating like the seal-indicator feathers at every fleeting contact with her warm skin. His body is like the curious seal, rising quickly toward the surface of sensations in spite of its wiser instincts.
Silence throws aside the top sleeping robe and straddles him, reaching down in a motion as quick as her harpoon-throwing movement to seize him, position him, and slide him inside her.
“Ah, Jesus…,” he gasps as they begin to become one person. He feels the resistance against his straining cock, feels it surrender to their motion, and knows – with deep shock – that he is bedding a virgin. Or that a virgin is bedding him. “Oh, God,” he manages as they start moving more wildly.
He pulls her shoulders down and tries to kiss her, but she turns her face away, setting it against his cheek, against his neck. Crozier has forgotten that Esquimaux women do not know how to kiss… the first thing any English arctic explorer is told by the old veterans.
It does not matter.
He explodes within her in a minute or less. It has been so long.
Silence lies still on him for a while, her small breasts flattened and sweaty against his equally sweaty chest. He can feel her rapid heartbeat and knows she can feel his.
When he can think, he wonders if there is blood. He does not want to soil the beautiful white sleeping robes.
But Silence is moving her hips again. She sits straight up now, still straddling him, her dark gaze holding his. Her dark nipples seem to be another pair of unblinking eyes watching him. He is still hard inside her, and her motions, impossibly – this has never happened in Francis Crozier’s encounters with doxies in England, Australia, New Zealand, South America, and elsewhere – are making him come alive again, grow harder, begin to move his own hips in response to her slow grinding against him.
She throws her head back and sets her strong hand against his chest.
They make love like this for hours. Once, she leaves the sleeping shelf, but only long enough to return with water for them to drink – snowmelt from the small Goldner’s tin they leave suspended over the clothes-drying flame – and she matter-of-factly cleans the small smears of blood from her thighs when they’ve finished drinking.
Then she lies on her back, opens her legs, and pulls him over her with her hand strong on his shoulder.
There is no sunrise, so Crozier will never know if they have made love all that long arctic night – perhaps it has been entire days and nights without sleeping or stopping (it feels this way to him by the time they sleep) – but sleep they eventually do. Moisture from their sweat and breathing drips from the exposed parts of the snow-house walls and it is so warm in their home that for the first half hour or so after they fall off into sleep, they leave the top sleeping robe off.
64 CROZIER
