A dog, sitting on his haunches in the aisle, let out a hungry cry.
He’d been dreaming of Eleanor—what else did he ever dream of?—but it was not a happy dream. It was hardly a dream at all. He was remembering a quarrel that they had had, just before he’d gone off hunting. From the belfry, he had done some reconnoitering and determined that the coast bellied out to the northwest, promising perhaps some escape route. “We may not be so marooned, after all.”
“Sinclair,” she’d replied, softly and with great deliberation, “we are marooned as no two people have ever been before.”
“None of that,” he replied, tearing another hymnal into pieces and tossing it into the fire. “We’ve as much right to the world as anyone else.”
“But we’re not like anyone else. I don’t know what we are, or what the Lord intended for us to be, but this…this cannot be His plan.”
“Well, then, it’s mine,” he barked, “and for the time being, that will have to serve.” He could feel the shortness of breath, the dimming of his vision, as he stared into the blazing grate. “I’ve seen God’s plan, and I’ll tell you this much—the Devil could have done no worse. The world’s a slaughterhouse, and I’ve played my own damned part in making it so. If I’ve learned anything at all, it’s that we must make up our own fate, from scratch, every day.” He ripped another hymnal in two and added it to the fire. “If we hope to survive at all, we must fight for every breath we take, every bite we eat, and every drop we drink.” Looking around for the nearest bottle, he’d concluded, “God helps no one.”
Raising his eyes to the dog now baying in the aisle, he saw no sign of God there, either…unless it was in the strange silence outside. The storm had passed. The wind had died to just a whisper. Perhaps it was the cessation of the constant battering that had awakened him…awakened him to the chance, at last, of going in search of Eleanor.
God helps no one, but if he could find the strength to harness the dogs and provision the sled, he could help himself. He could take matters into his own hands. He lifted the chalice and drained its last drops.
Michael, not surprisingly, was the first to arrive at the flagpole, the rendezvous spot for the search party. Standing by his snowmobile, he stomped his feet on the ground to keep the blood flowing. Someone had wrapped a long chain of red-and-green tinsel around and around the flagpole; it had become pretty much soldered to the metal, and Michael doubted anyone would ever be able to get it off. It would forever be Christmas at Point Adélie.
He glanced up at the sky; even through his sunglasses, it was a hard, blazing blue, the color of Easter eggs he’d painted as a kid. A bird shot across his field of vision—a dirty gray bird—and wheeled in the sky, then returned to swoop down at his head. He ducked fast, and heard it squawking as it came back for another pass. He held his gloved hand up above his head, remembering that the birds always dived for the highest point of their target, but it was only when it swooped by again that he realized there was no nest anywhere near here—at least none that he could see—and no carrion that the bird could have been claiming for itself. He quickly wiped the ice crystals from his glasses to get a better look at the whirring bird. Could it, by any chance, be Ollie?
It was flitting in a wide circle around the top of the flagpole, where Old Glory flapped listlessly in the cold breeze, then landed atop the administration module. Michael dug into his pocket, and found a rock-hard granola bar. Skuas, he knew, weren’t too particular. With his gloved fingers, he fumbled to remove the wrapper, as the bird watched him intently. He held it up for inspection, then tossed it onto the ground a few feet away. These birds were scavengers and they knew enough not to miss a chance; in a second, it was zooming off the roof and plopping down with its beak already open. With a couple of quick pecks, it had broken the bar into several pieces, and one or two had already gone down the hatch. Michael studied him, hoping to see anything that might tell him if it was Ollie or not. The bird gulped down the last of the granola bar, and Michael crouched to get a better look.
“Ollie?” he said. “Is that you?”