Freya & Zoose

by Emily Butler

  “Well, it was good of you,” said Freya. “And if the bear comes back, why, I’ll just have to be on my toes.”

  Zoose laughed with some ferocity. “He’s not coming back, unless his spirit wants to know what we did with his bones.” Here Zoose knocked on the tall beam that was holding up the silk tent, as if for luck.

  Freya wasn’t sure if she took his meaning.

  “Nils got him with his gun,” elaborated Zoose. “Sent him to the big iceberg in the sky!”

  “You’re telling me that the bear is dead,” Freya concluded.

  “Dead as a dodo. Turned into bear burgers—which happen to be quite tasty, I’ve discovered.”

  “I do hope you’re joking,” said Freya with a shudder. “About the bear burgers.”

  “Not one bit,” said Zoose. “That bear was a gift from the gods, as far as the humans are concerned. They soaked his meat in salt water, and then cooked it up and ate it with some pumpernickel. They’ll eat every inch of him, except for his liver. Which is barmy, since everyone knows the best part of a polar bear is the liver. Tastes just like custard!”

  “Does it?” asked Freya weakly. “Just like custard, you say?”

  “It does!” affirmed Zoose. “There’s nothing better. Brought you back from the brink, didn’t it?”

  “I suppose it did,” said Freya. She wasn’t going to act the delicate flower now. These were desperate times, and they called for desperate measures, even if those measures included eating the liver of a bear that had almost knocked her to kingdom come.

  Of course, none of this answered the question of whether Zoose was staying with her or forging ahead on his own. Freya felt an urgent need to know. “You’ll probably want to eat all the bear burgers you can before you push off, right?” She tried to keep her tone light. It was just a question, not an appeal.

  “I’m not pushing off any time soon,” said Zoose. “I’m done in. Tired as a mouse can be. I can’t even feel my whiskers.” He wrapped himself in a shaggy white rug that very much resembled a polar bear, or at least a small part of its hide. Soon he was fast asleep.

  Freya’s own weariness washed over her like a riptide, and she slept too. On and on she slumbered. Someone fed her (Zoose) and scratched her between her shoulder blades (again, Zoose), and there was some one-sided banter about the “corking good holiday” they were having (who else but Zoose?), but she was mostly oblivious to these things. What the men were doing she hadn’t the strength to even speculate. Freya heeded nothing. She didn’t care. Her mind wandered far and wide, sifting through memories it hadn’t visited for many years. Like the balloon that had delivered them to this place, Freya felt herself rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall. But then she rose and kept rising, until at length she was properly herself again. The first thing she noticed was the steadfast rhythm of Zoose’s breathing, less than a foot away from her. It was the most companionable thing she had ever heard.

  Later, when they were both awake, Zoose opened the flap of their tent. They listened to the sounds the ice made under the bleak light from a waning moon. It was noisy. The ice crackled and creaked and sometimes even moaned. The wind blew over and around the humps in the floe, sending packed snow crystals skittering over its surface like sand.

  “I don’t want to be out there by myself,” Zoose said in the darkness of their silk cocoon. “I’ve had enough of that to last a lifetime. It’s bad when you’re with your own people and nobody wants you. When you’re nothing but another mouth to feed. When the priest curses you every time you show your face. But it’s worse to be alone.”

  “I thought the priest cursed you because you dropped your ancestors’ bones into the river,” remembered Freya vaguely. “Or did that come after?”

  “That priest!” Zoose rolled over and spit through the opening of the tent. “That old mumbler!”

  “Mumbler?” asked Freya.

  “Never moved his mouth when he talked—like he was wearing a mask because no one was good enough to look at him. Oh, he was very high and mighty. His High Lordship the Mumbler.”

  “Priests expect a little reverence, to be sure,” Freya said.

  “A little reverence!” Zoose erupted with contempt and spit again. “There was this explosion of air before he said anything. ‘LUH-liar!’ and ‘SUH-sneak thief!’ and so on.”

  “Those aren’t very nice words,” said Freya.

  “Well, those were the ones he was usually shouting at me,” Zoose said. “I called him Uncle PUH-Peter, and he didn’t appreciate it.”

  “The priest was your uncle?”

  “He was my mother’s oldest brother. He was in charge of blessing the sacred fish cakes, which I used to steal off the altar when nobody was looking. I couldn’t see how the gods needed them more than I did—they had all the fish in the sea, while I was practically starving. Anyway, he caught on and made my mother BUH-banish me.”

  “Why didn’t she tell him to go soak his head?” asked Freya.

  “Oh, she’d never do that. Nobody would. I had dozens of aunts and uncles, and every one of them turned their backs on me. When you were CUH-cursed by the priest, that was the end of you. He said that Death would follow me wherever I went, and people believed him. Word got around for miles. They chased me out of town,” said Zoose.

  Freya envisioned a solitary figure, living from paw to mouth, always on the move, always alone. She imagined a young mouse who spoke only to himself, ate his meals like a fugitive and slept in vacant crooks and corners. Not even her year on the island had been as bad as that. She’d been alone, it was true, but not shunned like a plague.

  “You were so awfully deserted, Zoose,” said Freya. “But then you decided to visit the loneliest place on the planet. What made you do it?”

  “Now, now, the North Pole could be stacked three deep with friendly people just waiting to meet us. We don’t really know what it’s like there, do we? Nobody does,” said Zoose, looking out into the emptiness of the ice pack.

  “I think we have a good idea that it’s not especially crowded,” said Freya softly.

  It was a few minutes before Zoose spoke again. “Everyone was so happy to forget me. No, it was more than that. They tried to erase me, see? They ousted me and turned my name into a dirty word. My name! Zoose! It never crossed their lips again. I didn’t exist anymore. And to be honest, I got used to not existing. But when I heard about this balloon thing…I don’t know. It just grabbed hold of me. At least I will have made my mark on the world, I said to myself, no matter how hard they tried to blot me out.”

  “And you’re sure you wouldn’t rather be by yourself?” Freya asked.

  “I’d rather travel with present company, if present company will have me,” said Zoose.

  “Present company would be most grateful,” said Freya.

  And thus it was decided that (north, south, east or west) it was better to drift together than drift apart.

  From the calamity of the capsized boat came the gift of a long recess, for both humans and animals. Zoose had suffered greatly from his drubbing, but things were worse for Knut. By the time the captain and Nils had dragged him out of the water, he was soaked to the skin and had come very close to losing a few of his toes to frostbite. They rubbed him all over with handfuls of coarse snow until he bellowed at them to stop, and then made him drink cup after cup of hot tea, while attempting to dry his trousers over the camp stove. But still he caught a chill, and they decided to rest until he recovered his strength.

  Meanwhile, Freya and Zoose recuperated steadily. Zoose had chosen an impeccable location for their tent, set back into a natural cavity in a jagged hump of ice. Here they were well hidden from the humans and any predators.

  They had food in abundance, supplementing their provisions with bear liver. As Freya convalesced, she regained a bloom that had evaporated long ago with her youth. She felt practically vivacio
us. For Zoose’s part, he was unable to rest until he had used up the last few yards of thread sewing silk cushions for the inside of the tent.

  “We’re on some sort of Arctic safari!” said Freya, flustered by the profusion of pillows. But if there was a certain extravagance about this development, Freya felt Mrs. Davidson would approve. Hadn’t she devoted an entire chapter to the subject of cushions and declared them a boon for an invalid with shattered nerves? If being ambushed by a bear isn’t enough to shatter one’s nerves, then nothing is, Freya thought. Cushions are well-nigh a necessity.

  After garnishing their tent with the pillows, Zoose curled up against a pile of them and (by the looks of it) had no intention of moving any time soon. “What about your family, Freya? What were they like?” he asked.

  “My family? What is there to say? In a word, we were respectable. We dressed respectably, read respectable books and had dinner every night at five o’clock. If I had been a boy, I would have followed in Father’s footsteps and dabbled in deposits.”

  At this, Zoose’s ears pricked up. “Deposits?” he asked. “Did your people have money?”

  Freya was unfazed by his bluntness. “I believe we did. We were what you might call prosperous. We had a cook and a scullery maid. A seamstress came to the house twice a year. Our carpets were shabby—Mother was always on about the carpets to Father. But he liked them the way they were. Father liked to be comfortable. As I was saying, he was in minerals….”

  “You said he was in finance,” interrupted Zoose.

  “No, I did not. Father made his money in mineral deposits, not bank deposits! He would come home at night and say that the firm had invested in a brilliant deposit of clay or salt.”

  “Clay or salt,” repeated Zoose, sounding underwhelmed. “Was he nice, your da? Buy you candy and that sort of thing?”

  “Mother didn’t approve of sweets,” said Freya. “But there were lots and lots of presents, especially on Christmas Eve. I never got what I really wanted, but that wasn’t their fault.”

  “What was it you wanted?” asked Zoose, of course.

  “An egg. A perfect egg that would have hatched a baby brother or sister. How I dreamed of that egg.” Freya sighed. “I’m sure I wore their ears out, begging for it. But it wasn’t meant to be.”

  “Brothers and sisters are overrated, if you ask me. They eat your food when you’re not looking and blame you when the furniture catches on fire.”

  “I think it would have been great fun to have a little brother,” countered Freya. “Or a sister. Or one of each. However, I was an only chick, and I suppose that became the story of my life.”

  Zoose, who had been gnawing on some exceptionally stale bread during this chat, picked the crumbs off his homespun snowsuit and ate them one by one. “Tell me the story of your life, Freya,” he said when he was done. “I could use a good yarn. Make things up, if you need to. Let’s have a real potboiler!”

  “Why do you think I need to embellish my history with invention to make it interesting?” asked Freya. “I might be an old maid, but that doesn’t mean I’ve been ordinary!”

  Zoose raised his eyebrows skeptically.

  “There are some lurid details that might really shock you,” she warned.

  Zoose discovered an errant crumb and ate it without saying a word. And so, like Scheherazade of old (“Who?” asked Zoose. “Oh, never mind,” said Freya), she leaned against a silk cushion and began to speak. This was the story that unfolded over several days:

  There was once a family of penguins who lived in a house far enough from the city that Mother could have apple trees and elderflower bushes. It was a brick house, whitewashed on the outside, with a vibrant red-tiled roof. It was not a small house; in fact, it was optimistically large for a family of three. Yet each room was filled with the love that the penguins had for each other. Even the formal dining room felt cozy and warm, because the meals were seasoned with joy and served with affection.

  Mother was a round little bird who was famous in three counties for her wine, which she made from the fruits and flowers of her own garden. When guests sampled her rhubarb and rose petal concoction, it gave them a euphoria that lasted well into the next week. Even children were permitted to sip it by the thimble-sized cupful! Mother spent her days telling the cook what to make for dinner and reminding the maid not to polish the silverware with boot-blacking. She also took care of Baby Frey, who was her pride and joy.

  Father was a taller-than-average penguin who wore a taller-than-average hat. His hat was so tall that he could stand Baby Frey on his head and cover her with it. He often snuck her out of the house this way, until Mother noticed she was missing and would march out the front door to demand Baby’s return. It was remarkable how many times Mother fell for this trick—nearly every morning! Years and years later, Freya could conjure the smell of that hat: the clovey essence of Father’s feather pomade.

  While Freya did long for a playmate in the form of a brother or sister, her early years were full of amusements. There was nothing her parents loved more than company, and they did not lack it. Scarcely an evening went by when there wasn’t a guest or two (or three or six) for dinner. Weekends were devoted to excursions with friends, often to the coast, where everyone was encouraged to shed their clothes and bathe in the wonderful, chilly waves. Mother and Father were passionate swimmers. Mother’s precise, delicate strokes were much praised by observers, whereas Father went in for diving. He could stay beneath the sea for what seemed like ages, only surfacing when Mother’s patience with his underwater antics was exhausted. Freya herself bobbed like a black-and-white cork, until Father taught her to zip between the waves like a two-masted clipper. To see his daughter swim boldly was Father’s fondest desire, surpassed only by Mother’s aspiration that she do it in style. These were their twin ambitions for Freya, who never for a second doubted that one day she would be both fearless and fashionable!

  Freya’s birthdays were an opportunity to fill the house and garden with every penguin from miles around. First there was the matter of the Danish flag, which Father raised on the pole as soon as the sun came up. Then came an avalanche of well-wishers, many bearing small gifts wrapped in tissue paper, for which they were rewarded with as many slices of cake as they might conveniently stuff into their beaks, washed down with glasses of Mother’s wine. Naturally this sort of indulgence resulted in much singing and dancing. And Freya enjoyed it all, perched atop an extraordinary throne that Mother wove every year out of the branches of her elderflower bushes. At the setting of the sun, fire was applied to the throne, and the remaining guests stood around it in a circle, roasting marshmallows. There was nothing better in the world than a slightly charred birthday marshmallow.

  One afternoon, Father came home from work early. He stood in the sunlit foyer, shifting his weight from one foot to the other in excitement. “Great news, my dear!” he called up to Mother, who hurried down the stairs to meet him. “We’ve bought up a pit of the finest white clay you’ve ever seen!” White clay was terribly important in Denmark, for without it there could be no porcelain dishes, and Denmark was known all over the world for the beauty of its porcelain.

  “Oh, hurrah!” exclaimed Mother. “It’s a good one, then?”

  “My word, it’s the richest deposit we’ve ever seen. Positively magnificent!” said Father. “And just on the other side of town, by the cliffs.”

  “Then I insist on seeing it with my own eyes,” Mother said, catching the spirit of the thing. She was keenly interested in Father’s ventures and had invested no small amount of her own money in his firm. “Let’s take the trolley and then walk the rest of the way. I could use a good ramble.”

  To this Father readily agreed, and because it was some distance to the pit, they resolved to leave Baby Frey (she was not really such a baby anymore, but quite little in any case) at home with the cook, who would give her dinner and see to her ba
th. Thus Freya’s life was spared when the side of the pit collapsed, taking Mother and Father with it.

  (Here, Freya paused to gauge her listener’s reaction to this news. Zoose had shown a singular aversion to almost any mention of death. But, absorbed in the story, he did not even flinch at her parents’ demise, so Freya carried on.)

  Now, there is such a thing as a reversal of fortune. Imagine that a beggar who hasn’t a penny to his name is suddenly unveiled as the long-lost crown prince of Siam! That would be a reversal of fortune. Or perhaps a family on the brink of starvation discovers that the spider living in their rafters has been spinning golden floss out of her backside for years and their attic is full of the stuff. What a reversal of fortune that would be!

  Sadly, a reversal of fortune can also work in the other direction, and a small penguin who has known only love and gladness her entire life can lose everything in a single tragic instant. Freya was to experience a reversal like this.

  The cook did her best to look after Freya in the days following Mother and Father’s dreadful accident. But as is the custom in such cases, custody of the orphan (and her tidy inheritance) was granted to the nearest relative. It mattered not at all that the nearest relative had never met Freya and didn’t particularly like children. It was pointless to suggest that this relative should have been forbidden from actually being in the same room as a child. The law was the law. Freya was sent to live with her father’s only sister, Aunt Agatha, in Sweden.

  So distraught was Freya at leaving the white house with the red roof and the apple trees and the elderflower bushes that she stopped eating. It may have seemed like a protest against the unwelcome removal from her home, but it was no such thing, for it was not in Freya’s nature to demand that she be given her own way. It was simply grief. Her spirit was being dismantled, and she was unable to receive nourishment in any form. During the voyage to Sweden, Freya did something very rare for such a young penguin: she molted. Day after day her feathers fell out, until, by the time she arrived at her aunt’s house, she was as bald and skinny as the day she was hatched.