Then the splash came again, some distance into the tundra. I glanced behind me. Water? But we’d left the coast behind yesterday. Were we headed in the wrong direction?
I crawled out of my furs. I listened a moment longer, then started to head toward the splashing sound. Behind me, Ataneq woke and watched me go with a curious tilt of his head. He whined, but I held a hand up, reassuring him that I was all right. I cut the strings from last night’s maktak package into short pieces. I tied these to tiny patches of dry grass and lichen as I went, so that I would remember my path back. The splashing grew louder. Finally, something appeared ahead, a black patch that stood out solidly against the snow. I furrowed my brows. It was a hole in the ground, and the darkness was water.
I swallowed hard, then backtracked a few steps. It was hard to tell, but I had made my way onto the edge of an enormous frozen lake, hidden under the snow. The ice trembled slightly under my weight. A death trap. We would have headed this way come morning. We could have ended up in the water.
Another splash came from the hole in the ice. When I looked closer, I saw a faint white cloud of mist floating in the air. I squinted at the source of the spray.
The largest seal I had ever seen poked its head out of the water.
I gasped. The beast turned its head toward me, its huge eyes gleaming gold in the night. The water around it glowed a faint sapphire, as if lit by something from the depths, and the surface of the water glittered with a thousand tiny lights, as if the stars had shattered into the sea. They lit the seal, outlining its dark silhouette beneath the waves and adding a blue hue to its stormy-gray hide.
“The Seal King rose from the depths,” I whispered, “to claim the hearts of drowning hunters.” And now it seemed as if it had woken me to tell me about the lake.
The seal did not swim away. Instead, it stared back at me with unblinking eyes. I felt, for a moment, as if I looked into the face of my father. There was something wise there, something human. My lips trembled.
“Thank you,” I whispered. “For the warning.”
The seal only blinked once at me. Then it submerged, and when it did not come up again, I shook my head and followed my trail of strings back to camp.
I dreamed of fish. I dreamed that the Seal King came to bless us, that he turned into my father, and that when I woke and headed to the lake, the waters were teeming with fish. I grabbed at them as they leaped out of the water, their scales glittering in the sun. They piled along the shore in rows.
I woke with a start. The sun was very low today. A new chill in the wind reminded me of the approaching blizzard, and I looked to the horizon. The clouds were close enough this morning for me to see their bumps and bruises, their angry curves. Overhead, a lone tern glided, separated from its flock.
We had to move faster.
I rode my dogs hard, even as the sky turned darker and the clouds grew thicker behind us. Only when Ataneq slowed in protest, his panting heavy, did I finally snap out of my stupor and let the team rest. I inspected their bright eyes, their frosty noses, and their ice-crusted coats; I watched them chew snow off of their paws. There are no boundaries between the animals’ spirits and ours, my father had told me. I had no right to treat them so.
Still, we had no choice. I pushed them on.
The second day ended, and the third day began. I set snares in the snow. They caught a few fat lemmings, and I divided the fresh meat among the dogs, saving only a little for myself. Our maktak had to last, and the dogs were ravenous. The third day bled into the fourth. The days turned darker, and the nearing storm promised snow. The dogs ran more slowly.
That night, I watched the dogs shift uneasily in their sleep. Ataneq looked exhausted, but we could rest only a few hours before I had to force the team onward again. I stared up at the night sky, followed the line of the constellations, and tried to believe that I could find our way if the stars disappeared behind the storm.
I didn’t sleep that night.
An hour before dawn, I looked up into a gray sky. The sun was gone, hidden behind the clouds. A few fat flurries drifted onto my face. The storm had arrived, shrouding the guiding sky, and the snow was already starting to come fast. I jumped up and started folding my furs away.
My eyes paused on giant paw prints circling our camp.
They were enormous, a dozen times larger than Ataneq’s prints, larger than any wolf’s, pushed deeply into the snow and frozen in sculpture. I stared, startled, into the darkness of the open tundra.