Hello from arctic Norway, 70 degrees 26 minutes North x 28 degrees, 28 minutes East
Departing from Kirkenes by ship tomorrow, just west of the Russia-Norway border, for a turn past the north tip of Europe at Nordkapp, then west to Tromsø. And on Thursday Oslo, Keflavik, and Toronto, on Friday Yellowknife and home sweet home.
Playing hooky for ten days from my working life, to celebrate a wedding. Our family just got a little bigger, and for the first time in my life I have a son (-in-law.) Congratulations, Liv and Håkon.
Here for the monthly post is another excerpt from my story surrounding the Bode / Olson / Lanner / Telhiruk mystery, a story set mostly in 1930-1932. Best I can do here tonight, as the month ends.
We join the Inuit boy Telhiruk, moments after a nearly fatal plunge through thin ice, on his long walk back toward his people. See April’s post for more lead-up here.
Fire. He had to make a fire. Teeth chattering, hands curled, nailbeds going blue, his mind lurching and fumbling, Telhiruk stood by the brink of the flowing water where the shelf of ice had collapsed. Then he saw the box. It was downstream, caught by the current at a place where ice jutted out from a boulder. It was tipped and its wooden lid was tilted and wobbling at the ice-lip, but it was floating upright.
He lurched over to the spot and knelt on the snow-covered rock, leaning forward. He clamped the heft of the slick wet box between his numb palms and squeezed hard and heaved the box up and over his shoulder. It landed on the snow, up away from the streambank. Telhiruk rolled to one side, off the boulder, and hunched down alongside the box.
His breath was coming in gasps and his fingers would not move. The wind was slicing in and gusting again from the west. He rolled onto his side and drew up his knees, shoving his bare hands down the front of his trousers into the fold of his crotch. He lay there some minutes. A glimmer of feeling came first to the backs of his hands where they touched his thighs. A few minutes later he could feel his fingers wrapped around his balls. A minute more and he could move a few fingers on each hand.
He thought of Nelson on the way up the Arkilinik the summer before. Kicking him and Knox in their blankets at sunrise, where they were sleeping under the mosquito bar in the lee of one of the canoes. “Drop your cocks and grab your socks, boys. Daylight in de swamp!” Every morning he would say that. One day Knox told him what Nelson was saying, with gestures, and they had laughed. He thought of that again, and of Knox laughing. It helped.
At last he pulled out his hands and loosened the lampwick straps around the box. Lifted the lid. It was dry inside. There was the small glass bottle of lamp oil, and the bronze tubes of matches, each with its rubber cap.
Fifty feet upstream a patch of gnarled spruce grew thick right to the water’s edge, below a knoll. A tiny bit of shelter from the wind. Telhiruk put the lid on the box and carried it up to the little trees and knelt down again. He was shaking with cold, limping and stumbling. Something was wrong with his left leg, up high. He kicked a little snow away from the base of the trees and pain shot up his leg again. Some of the lowest branches of the little trees were dead. He cracked off what he could and smashed a clump of dry twigs together, but he could see they were rimed with frost. He paused.
He limped back to the ice edge looking for the packsack. No sign of it. Back at the clump of spruce he knelt down again. With his belt knife he cut a thick swatch of hair from the back side of his head and stuffed this in under the twigs. He broke some bigger branches off the spruces. He got the bottle of lamp oil open and dribbled some onto the hair clump and the twigs. Pried the rubber cap from the match safe and tapped out a match. The matches were big, with big blue and white tips, and there was a small strip of striker paper there in the safe. He could see Knox stuffing that into the safe and saying, “Blue end down, in case your fingers are wet.”
He was doubled over, trying to block the breeze. The first match spun off into the snow. The second one struck and in its first bright burst he touched it to the clump of kerosene and hair. It caught and the oil on the twigs flared. He laid on more wood. He piled and carried. He felt the heat on his cheeks and let his eyes close to feel it some more.
By dusk he was back down where the ice had given way, searching for the packsack. All he found was his walking stick, wedged in the boulders. He would have to look some more down the current, in daylight. He went back to his fire and sat through the long night, wet and steaming and scrabbling for more wood every hour. Dozing a couple of times. Then morning, after the longest night of his life. He went downstream and there, in a turn of the little drainage, was the packsack, soaked through and impossibly heavy, but found. He began to allow himself to imagine living through this.
"bushedpilotblog" Dave Olesen 