house.
‘Oh! Yes,’ she said, starting from her thoughts. ‘I know where the key is.’ She went with him to the drilling rig and opened a little hatch on its side, which emitted a low screech that echoed for a long time in the desolation around them. She stuck in her hand and pulled out a clunky-looking key. ‘There you are.’ She walked back to Alvar and Thora and contented herself with watching from a distance as Matthew tried to put the key in the lock. First he had to move a covering that prevented fine snow from filling the lock when the wind blew outside. ‘I don’t know whether I should hope they’re in there or not.’
It wasn’t clear to Thora whether Fri?rikka was talking to herself, or to her and Alvar. ‘You knew them, I assume?’
Fri?rikka simply nodded. A silence followed, which was interrupted when Matthew dramatically opened the door to the shed. He stuck his head in and then looked out again immediately. ‘No one here,’ he called out unnecessarily loudly.
The others relaxed visibly and walked over to the shed. It was larger inside than it appeared from the exterior and they all fitted in there easily. There was a little kitchen with two chairs and shelves fixed up along all the walls. On these were wooden boxes that Fri?rikka said were designed specially to store core samples, to prevent them from being broken, damaged or mixed up.
Although Thora thought she’d gone over the data in the case quite well, it wasn’t entirely clear to her why these samples were so important.
‘They show what the ground beneath us contains,’ explained Fri?rikka patiently, when Thora voiced her puzzlement. ‘The purpose of this project is to determine whether there is molybdenum here in any usable quantity. The more we exploit accessible areas of the earth, the more expensive the metals and other precious material in the ground become. So it starts to pay off to get it from remote places like this.’ She pointed at the boxes. ‘There is much less known about the bedrock here on the east coast than on the west coast, so we basically have to start from scratch. We drill boreholes in the ground and extract core samples that show a full breakdown of what’s to be found here. It’s all documented and if a sufficient quantity of precious material is found in the samples, then it’s possible that it would pay to establish a mine somewhere in the vicinity. We prepare maps that show the strata and estimate how they are situated between the boreholes, and after that’s done we can pinpoint the most suitable place for the mine. Mining sites aren’t just chosen by sticking a pin in a map or throwing dice.’
‘But isn’t it hopeless trying to drill through all this snow?’ asked Thora. She would have thought such work would have been much easier during the summer, when the ground was bare.
‘No, absolutely not. The drill goes through the snow like a knife through butter, and the snow protects the ground and covers over disturbances caused by the machinery or the transport of people, worksheds, and other things like that. We need to cover a lot of ground in the search and it wouldn’t be a pretty sight if the snow weren’t so thick. We try to keep our impact here to a minimum. It’s an expensive process, and in some instances we also need to restore the area after a project, which can also be costly.’ She shrugged. ‘Since the snow cover melts so quickly every year, we actually have to work fast in our studies. In a few years things will be much more difficult, and we’ll make tracks all over the place.’
Thora frowned. ‘Is the snow thinning and the ice melting?’ The hand in the photograph had appeared to be enclosed in ice, and if the ice were retreating rather than advancing it seemed doubtful that it was Oddny Hildur’s hand. ‘Do you mean, then, that more ice melts in the summer than is formed in the winter?’
Fri?rikka gave her a puzzled look. ‘Yes, I suppose so. I’m not always so good at the small details of these things, but I would think so. And of course the geological conditions from place to place, as well as the wind, probably play a part. Even though it appears white everywhere you look, the layers are thinning and more melts away each summer.’ She looked out of the shed’s tiny window and raised her hand to shield her eyes from the glare of the snow cover outside. But shouldn’t we get going to Borehole L-3 and investigate whether the photo was taken there?’
‘And what if we do find a hand in the ice?’ exclaimed Alvar. None of them knew the answer to that.
The people in Kaanneq treated Igimaq coldly, as usual. The women gave him the evil eye and the men greeted him only by lifting their chins slightly. One of them actually called out to him and asked whether it wasn’t too late for him to move back in with his wife, now that all the men had used her. The hunter ground his teeth but did not turn around, acting as if nothing were out of the ordinary. Whoever said it was a coward; no one with a trace of self-respect would say such a thing to a man whose back was turned. A real man either spoke his mind to your face, or kept quiet and let the womenfolk gossip. Igimaq recognized the voice and knew perfectly well who the man was. It was one of those sheep, a man who had allowed himself to be debauched by alcohol and now let the system provide for him. Like Naruana, his son. Still, their fates were not comparable, nor was the man’s as tragic. He had had nothing to offer, had been a poor hunter with the stamina of a little boy. He’d been skinny his whole life and conditions here weren’t suited to that build, as you could see from the creatures that thrived in this place.
His son, however, had been blessed with all the qualities a good man needed. He was sturdily built, tenacious and unflappable. He had done the hunter’s ancestors proud, until he started to slip down the slope of misfortune. The boy had lost everything that drives a man: pride, enthusiasm and perseverance. From being self-sufficient and having enough to spare, he became like that wretch who shouted insults at people. Hopefully Naruana had not yet sunk so low – still, he had fallen far enough. Igimaq hoped he would not run into his son. He wouldn’t be able to bear it and he feared losing his self-control and hitting him so hard that the young man’s remaining teeth would be knocked out. But realistically there was no danger of seeing him. It was still too early in the day for his son to be on his feet. His time was the night; his behaviour that of the scavengers that hung around the heels of superior and more resourceful animals. Memories of the lessons when the hunter had held his son’s soft hand in his rough palms piled up. The stump where his index finger had been ached.
The hunter’s finger had been frostbitten. At the start of a seal-hunting expedition out on the ice he had clumsily cut a hole in one of his gloves with a small knife inherited from his father, and instead of turning back and waiting until the next morning he had allowed himself to be lured by the great catch the day promised. The ice had been thick and uncracked and the weather the best it could be for hunting. When he returned home that evening with a sledful of seals, his finger was useless. He cut it off before he went to sleep and asked his son to take his place on a sled trip he had promised to lead with a group of Westerners. He wanted to repair the glove before he went back out into the cold, and that’s how his son became acquainted with brennivin; he sat drinking with the group at the end of the trip and never looked back. The loss of his finger had cost the hunter much more than the effort it took to train his middle finger to pull the trigger of his rifle easily and securely. Naturally it took several months for the young man to plunge to the bottom, but all the signs of what was to come appeared immediately after he returned from the trip. He stared at the beer cans in the hands of people they met in a way that was embarrassing to see. Then he started disappearing night after night and always returned home late, until the day came when he did not return. The hunter’s wife went the same way soon afterwards, and that’s when he left. Now he lived in a tent, like his forefathers, far enough from the village to ensure that no one would disturb him. The only ones who visited him were the old men, who appreciated the ancient values and understood his decision and the pattern of his life.
No, the hunter had other things to attend to than meeting up with the disgrace that was his family. He had come to speak to the man considered to hold the most power in the village, a childhood friend of his who had been involved in casting his son and wife to ruin. The hunter did not look forward to it, but their conversation had to take place nonetheless. This former friend of his had to listen to him – he owed him that, having cost him his daughter. He took no pleasure in watching his friend grovel and count the minutes until their conversation ended. Far from it. However, the hunter had to warn people, and this was the way that he felt would be most effective. He wasn’t about to start going from house to house to tell people that hanging over them was the same fate met by the first residents of the town. No one would listen to him that way. Besides, it was only this former friend of his who knew the story and so would hopefully understand the gravity of the situation immediately. Unless he had lost his connection with his roots.
Two little girls with tightly plaited hair walked past and quickened their pace when they saw him. Their mothers had doubtless warned them about him, told them that the man in the tent would take them and eat them if they didn’t behave themselves. He never saw any boys here any more, which hurt him more than the loss of his own son. Perhaps this conversation wouldn’t matter. The town was marked for death anyway if there were no men left in it to hunt.
