Sulu jumped up and down and hugged his brother.
Alika said, "You may have to work."
"I don't care. Just so we can go home."
Katann and Uming beamed.
The morning of the day the Resolute steamed away, Alika and Sulu went about thanking the villagers, especially Katann and Uming, for all they'd done. Then they boarded the exploration ship with Jamka. It was headed to Greenland to top off its coal bunkers and then would proceed north up the strait.
Alika had never been aboard a ship, aside from the wrecked Reliance. He'd never been around talking and laughing kabloona sailors, men who seemed to enjoy their work. He'd never felt the amazing power of a steam engine that made a whole ship shake. He'd never gone belowdecks to see burning coal beneath something Kangio called a boiler. He'd never stood at the bow of a ship as the water rushed by, or at the stern, where the water became a churning white trail.
Alika was working with the deck gang, polishing brass and scrubbing the wooden decks until they gleamed. He said to Sulu, "Can you believe all this?"
Sulu replied, "I can't."
Sulu was working in the ship's kitchen, peeling potatoes and washing dishes, pots, and pans. Sulu had never gone aboard the Reliance. It had already been dismantled by the time he was born.
On the fifth day of their voyage, feeling the sea wind on his face, Alika decided he would become a sailor, not a hunter.
Sulu said, "I don't blame you."
Alika knew his papa and mama would be disappointed, but it was his life to live. Sailors went around the world, and what a world there was to see, Kangio had said. Alika wanted to go where there was sunlight every day.
He'd go home for a while, hunt for a while, but sooner or later, he'd find a way to become a sailor, perhaps even on the Resolute when it returned from trying to reach the North Pole.
Alika warned Sulu that their papa and mama might not be in Nunatak when they arrived. It was almost August, and all the families would be out on the tundra, hunting, fishing, gathering eggs and plants and all the other food necessities needed for winter. The summer departure from the villages and camps had been happening for centuries, and there was no reason that it would not have occurred this year.
Nor did anyone still in the village know that a ship was approaching, and among its passengers would be Alika, Sulu, and Jamka. They were presumed lost in the strait. Even Maja had given up hope. Miak was the first to see the Resolute as it slowly came up to anchor off Nunatak.
Alika, Sulu, and Jamka stood by the gangway, waiting for a boat to be launched to carry them ashore. Sulu said, "I do wish Mama and Papa were here."
"So do I," Alika said. "But we're home, Sulu. That's all that counts. Home again, and we're alive. The sun is up day and night. We'll find Papa and Mama wherever they are."
Standing onshore waving were Inu, Miak, and Sulu's carving mentor, Etukak, just the three of them standing there.
Sulu was holding his carving of Punna to give to Inu. He said, looking over at the dwellings, "Nothing has changed."
"We don't know. We've been gone a long time," Alika said.
Miak had gone back from the shore to the center of the village and was ringing the bell again, again, and again. The chords were as sharp as the points of a hunting lance.
Alika broke into tears and grasped his brother, holding him until they went aboard the ship's boat to take them to the rocky beach. They'd already said good-bye to the Resolute's captain and officers and deck crew, as well as Kangio, who all watched the departure. Even the cook stood near the gangway.
Jamka was at the bow of the boat, front paws resting on the gunwale. He leaped out as the prow ground on the sand. Alika and Sulu, having no possessions, followed him, Sulu kneeling down to put his cheek on the grit.
They both hugged Inu and Etukak. Then they went on to the meeting hall, where Miak was still ringing the brass bell, and hugged him.
They spent little time inside their empty house. Sulu said, "You see, nothing has changed."
Alika agreed, "Nothing has changed."
They loaded a sealskin bag with dried char and took a walrus intestine filled with freshwater for the early hours of their search. Farther inland, they'd cross many streams and could drink from them. They shed their winter parkas, dressing in their sealskins, and hurriedly left the house with Jamka.
Sulu said, "You said you think you know where they might be."
"You've been there before. It's the usual village campground this time of year. We'll go northwest and find them," Alika said.
They hadn't walked a mile on the tundra before Sulu said, "It's just like we left it."
Alika laughed. "It never changes on the tundra until the snows come."
The sun was strong, and the fresh air carried the sweet smells of summer. The heather was thick, and the cranberries and blueberries and crowberries were waiting to be picked on the way home.
They walked steadily northwest for two days, stopping only to rest, eat, and sleep a little in the new grass.
In the early afternoon of the third day, they could smell food being cooked far away. Trudging over the top of a low hill, they saw the Nunatak encampment, and it was alert Jamka that first howled and broke into a run for it.
Maja was cooking outside their tent when Jamka practically bowled her over, tugging at her sleeve. She looked up, saw her two sons running toward her, and screamed with joy.
They were home.
Inuit Glossary
aalu a dipping sauce for meat
aglus a seal hole (for breathing through ice)
alupajaq a feast
aqsarniit people who have died from loss of blood
atertok a newborn
iglu a snow house (igloo)
illupiruq great-grandparents
inua a heavenly spirit or soul
inuksuk rock piles (as markers)
Inuktitut the native language spoken by the Inuit
iynivik a shelter in which humans give birth
kabloona a white person
Kokotah the evil icecap spirit
nanuk a polar bear
nattiq a ringed seal
nukilik to be strong (said of a person)
Nuliajuk the goddess of the sea
Oqaloraq the evil snowdrift spirit
piblikoto craziness
piosuriyok a brave man
Qilak a name for the Arctic sky
qulliq a lamp, stove
Sikrinaktok a name for the sun
Tatkret a name for the moon
tonrar sea ghosts
tornaq a polar bear spirit
tupilait the worst evil spirits
tuungait powerful good spirits
tuvaq sea ice
ulu a woman's carved knife
umiak a large animal-skin hunting boat
unaaq a harpoon
Author's Note
It was 1942, during World War II, when I came across an account of the most amazing "voyage" in international maritime history: a trip of eighteen hundred miles on a huge ice floe in the Greenland Strait (now known as the Davis Strait).
At the time, I was training to be a third mate aboard the gasoline tanker Annibal, sailing both the Atlantic and the Pacific in convoys. Among the books I'd brought aboard was The American Practical Navigator (first published in 1802 by the U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office) by Nathaniel Bowditch, a remarkable, complex work including tables for latitudes and longitudes—endless, staggering information that goes far beyond the use of the sextant.
On page 304 was the following: "The best example of a continued drift from the Arctic is that of Captain Tyson (George E.). On October 14, 1871, he and a party of eighteen others were separated from the polar exploration ship Polaris, in latitude 77 or 78 North, just south of Littleton Island, and being unable to regain the ship, remained on the floe."
The nineteen "passengers" on that huge ship of ice survived blizzards, gales, iceberg collisions, encounters with polar bears, starvation, an
d near mutiny. They included two Inuit men, two Inuit women, and five Inuit children. More than six months after an iceberg tore the floe from its frozen shore anchorage, they were rescued off Labrador. In these times of instant communication, search aircraft, and satellites, it is mind-boggling to consider that they survived six months in temperatures that reached forty degrees below zero. Captain Tyson did not even have a parka.
Fifty-eight years after I'd first read about Captain Tyson, I began extensive research of the astonishing incident. First, I contacted Jane Glazer, widow of David "Pete" Glazer, sports editor of the Portsmouth, Virginia, Star. (Pete began teaching me how to write when I was thirteen.) Jane had joined the staff of the Library of Congress, and she arranged for me to copy Captain Tyson's original handwritten manuscript as well as the writings of Polaris steward John Herron and crewman Joseph Mauch.
In the end, rather than attempt to boil down the mass of information about Tyson's ordeal—the many characters, the murder of the Polaris master, the near mutiny, the shameful treatment of the Inuit—I decided to write a novel about two young boys who were forced to go on a similar journey.
I wish to thank Michelle Konklenberg and Ida Kapakatoak, of the Hunters and Trappers Organization of Kugluktuk, Nunavut, for guiding me to sealing information; John Hickes and Page Burt, of Ranklin Inlet, Nunavut, for information about dog sledges in the 1870s; and author John MacDonald, of Igloolik, Baffin Island, for the lore and legends in his The Arctic Sky: Inuit Astronomy, Star Lore, and Legend. MacDonald also suggested Nunatak for the central village of Ice Drift. In addition, I consulted The Inuit Way, a booklet published by the Inuit Women's Association of Canada; E. C. Pielou's A Naturalist's Guide to the Arctic, and Douglas Wilkinson's Arctic Coast. Most of the information about ice came from Nathaniel Bowditch's work, but I also relied on I. E. Papanin's Life on an Ice Floe (1939) and Polar Animals (1962).
While writing Alika and Sulu's adventure, I became so fascinated with the Arctic that I wanted to go to the North Pole. I learned that there are air charters from Nunavut, and pilot Kenn Borek offered to fly me in an Otter, the Arctic workhorse plane. Because of uncertain weather in April or May, I'd be allowed only twenty minutes to stand where Robert Edwin Peary, the man credited with leading the first expedition to reach the North Pole, had stood in 1909. The price for the trip: $87,267.56.
My wallet (and my cardiologist) both nixed the adventure.
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