The Quality of Silence

by Rosamund Lupton

  ‘I photographed it.’

  It hadn’t been about evidence or a trail then, but because the dead raven felt like an epitaph for the Inupiat villagers, expressing something that he would never be able to.

  ‘And then I left the village for the second time.’

  His plan had been to go to the airstrip; he thought a plane was bound to fly over in the next few days. He’d still got his tent and provisions for himself and the huskies in the sled from his first trip. Kaiyuk had made him take double what he needed in case a storm had blown in. He could wait as long as it took for the plane.

  The dogs hadn’t wanted to leave. He’d had to use all his authority and strength to get them to budge. Only the lead dog, Puqik, had seemed to understand that they needed to get away and the others had eventually followed her.

  As he left Anaktue, the snow became heavier. Behind him the village was lost in snow and darkness and he felt that he was abandoning them. The dogs pulled on, the snow getting denser, until he could no longer differentiate what was in front of him or beneath or above him; a one-dimensional whiteness in which he could have been travelling across the sky as much as across the land.

  Eight miles from Anaktue the snow thinned and the different planes of a three-dimensional world established themselves again. His head torch showed black shapes lying on the snow.

  As he got closer, the smell hit him; the same as in the village cabins, putrid even in the icy air. There was a herd of dead musk oxen, the smaller ones almost buried in the recent white-out. A large bull had been partially eaten, after it was dead because there was no blood on the snow.

  Something glinted in his torch beam. A short distance away, there was a hole in the snow and he saw moving water beneath reflecting his torchlight. The river was frozen over here then covered with snow. Musk oxen must have made the hole with their hooves in the thinnest part of the ice to get to water.

  He looked into the hole. The river flowed fast under the ice. A lingcod, eighteen inches long, was trapped by a shard of ice just underneath; its gills were half dissolved.

  He hadn’t wanted to believe the evidence in front of him; hadn’t wanted to think that this fragile and pure land, the white poem he’d lived in yesterday, was rank with poison.

  Nor did he want to acknowledge that the smell of the musk oxen linked them to the villagers. It was too grotesque a detail, demeaning, had no relationship to the beauty of the people or the animals.

  Half a mile away he found a pack of dead wolves, most of them buried by drifting snow. He thought that they must have fed on the musk oxen, or perhaps drunk from the river too.

  The villagers would take water from the river to last two days at a stretch,

  keeping it in storage tanks; the task of hauling it falling to the fittest men and women. Akiak and Kaiyuk had been going to get water from the river when Matt left for his first trip. Akiak wouldn’t have been on any roster, not when he’d unexpectedly returned, so it had been generous of him to help his friend.

  But the villagers always boiled the water before drinking it.

  It was still snowing, softly smothering the animals.

  In the aputiak Matt told them how he’d taken photos of the musk ox and the wolves, using his satellite terminal to get a precise location. The terminal hadn’t connected for long enough to attempt linking it to his laptop, but did give him latitude and longitude. He’d written the numbers on a notepad with a pencil. His biro had frozen.

  ‘You used decimal co-ordinates,’ Yasmin said.

  ‘It was faster to write. I thought it would be easy to fill in the decimal points later.’

  Yasmin imagined the physical and mental stamina of standing in minus thirty, using a camera then a terminal, then a pencil. And she understood why he wrote the minimum. He’d have had to write wearing just glove liners; he wouldn’t risk frostbite in his fingers in case he couldn’t talk to Ruby.

  ‘This was last Friday?’ Captain Grayling asked.

  ‘Yes. Instead of heading east towards the airstrip, I went south-west, following the river and the dead animals and birds on its banks. I was going against the current, towards the source.’

  Yasmin understood that Matt had felt he owed it to the villagers to record what had happened and to find out the truth, but surely he could have gone to the airstrip and waited for a taxi-plane and then someone else, the police, could have done it. He must have sensed her question without her asking it.

  ‘The snow was covering everything, the blizzard had almost buried the musk oxen and wolves. Another heavy snowfall and the animals would have been hidden and there’d have been nothing left to see; nothing left to follow.’

  She nodded and thought he must have hoped that the police would discover the villagers and then come searching for him. He didn’t know about the fire and that because of the fire they’d thought him dead. He wouldn’t have imagined being so totally alone for so long.

  * * *

  Kaiyuk’s huskies were the only living connection he had to Anaktue. He’d called to each one above the sound of the wind, using their names, which Kaiyuk had taught him. At the front was Puqik, which meant Smart; next Umialik meaning King; then Qaukliq meaning Chief; then Nuturuk, Firm Snow; Siku, Ice; Koko, Chocolate; Qannik, Snowflake; and at the back was Pamiiuqilavuk, which Kaiyuk had said meant Wags-his-Tail, but Matt hadn’t known if Kaiyuk had been teasing him about that.

  ‘Puqik, the lead dog, found some carrion by the river and ate it before I could stop her.’

  He’d stayed with Puqik until she died, for the first time in his career wishing that he had a gun. It had hurt his friends to die.

  Without Puqik as the lead dog, the other dogs were difficult to manage and he struggled to keep authority over them. The only light he had was a wind-up torch, and he’d let it get almost out before winding it again because he had to do that in just glove liners.

  Sometimes he thought he’d lost the river, and then he’d spot a dark shape near its edge and know he’d found a poisoned animal or bird. He’d photograph it and get the co-ordinates and write them down; then he’d continue through the dark scarred land monitoring the poison.

  ‘Is that what happened to your friends too, Dad?’ Ruby asked. ‘Were they poisoned too? Was it poison not a fire?’

  Matt nodded, wishing that Ruby didn’t need to know this story, but he was signing it to her because she’d asked to know what happened. He and Yasmin had agreed that they’d never use her deafness for some kind of advantage; even when it was to protect her.

  ‘The second night my primus ran out of fuel,’ he said. ‘It was too windy to light the qulliq. I had food for the huskies, but no way of melting snow to get water for them.’

  Over the next two days whenever the wind dropped enough he’d light the qulliq and melt snow for the dogs and himself.

  ‘By Sunday night, I had travelled twenty-five miles. I pegged the huskies on their lines outside the tent. They were hungry. I’d been giving them half rations, trying to make the supplies last. The next morning two of the dogs were missing.’

  ‘Which dogs?’ Ruby asked.

  He’d told her all their names, after his first sledding trip with Kaiyuk.

  ‘Pumiiruq and Nuturuk. I found Nuturuk with a poisoned arctic hare and he was ill too.’

  It had looked as if the dog was on solid ground, but as Matt went to get him the ground had given way.

  ‘Dad? What happened?’

  ‘He was on thin ice over the river and he went through. He died because the water was so cold.’

  ‘But he’s got special thick fur, Daddy. You told me that. You said huskies got too hot even when it was freezing cold.’

  ‘He was ill, so he got too cold very fast.’

  The part of the river where he and the dog went through was relatively shallow, but it was fast-flowing. Matt hadn’t tried to rescue the dog, but had let him be borne away swiftly; drowning or hypothermia was a less brutal way to die.

  ‘What about
Pamiuqilavuq?’ Ruby signed, making the sign of a fast wagging tail.

  ‘I couldn’t find him. I think that he must have fallen into the water too. It would have been very quick, Puggle.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We went another four miles.’

  His feet and his outer trousers were wet from going through the ice in the river. He was wearing three layers, as Inupiaq hunters did, but the cold penetrated through. He felt frostbite as electric shocks in his feet and shins. His legs became weaker and his feet numb and he found it hard to balance in the sled. He kept on calling the dogs’ names over the sound of the wind, but gradually he could no longer remember what they were called. He knew that he was suffering from exposure, that he would die if he didn’t get warm soon.

  He stopped the huskies. His wet clothes were leeching remaining warmth away from his body and he had no way of drying them. There was nothing with which to build a fire, not a tree or a twig. The wind was slicing like machetes with nothing to stand in its way. In this wind he wouldn’t get the qulliq lit let alone keep it alight. He had no source of warmth.

  Dad says he knew a storm was coming because it was getting so windy and cold. He tried to put up his tent but the ground was too hard to get the stakes in properly. And then this gust of wind came along and Dad says it just blew the tent away like it was a lacy handkerchief held down by drawing pins. He tried to chase after it but it disappeared.

  He says he tried to tether the huskies, so they wouldn’t escape and get poisoned, but it was hard to hammer the stakes in. And it’s awful to think of Dad all cold and alone with the hard hard ground.

  ‘Why didn’t you email us?’ I say. ‘And tell us it was you and ask us for help?’

  ‘I wanted to, Puggle, but Akiak’s laptop had frozen.’ He smiles. ‘Literally.’

  I smile too, but our smiles are just carrier bags; inside we’re not feeling smiley.

  ‘It wouldn’t even switch on,’ Dad says. ‘My cover hadn’t protected it properly and I think it had got too cold to work. The screen had little cracks in it too.’

  He looks at Mum with that new look he has for her and I can tell he’s about to say something to her, probably in sign because that’s more private, but then the state trooper interrupts and Mum translates his words into sign for me.

  ‘That must have been on Monday,’ the state trooper says. ‘When we were searching for you in the storm. But you built this.’

  ‘Not this. A first effort,’ Dad says and gives me a proper smile. ‘I was pretty hopeless, Puggle. I’d never done it before, just watched Kaiyuk and Corazon. They could build an aputiak in twenty minutes. It took me hours. Even then it was a scrappy kind of thing.’

  He’d been thinking too much as a Londoner and not as an Inupiaq; if he was to survive he’d have to think what they would do. He took Corazon’s snow-knife and cut blocks of snow from a snow bank, his fingers struggling to co-ordinate. Some of the blocks crumbled and were useless and he had to start over. When he thought he had enough blocks he started to build the aputiak.

  All the time he was building it, his body wild with shivering, his feet stabbed with frostbite, he thought of Yasmin and Ruby, saw their faces in the dark as if at the end of a tunnel and if he built the aputiak he’d reach them. He remembered Kaiyuk’s voice above the howling wind explaining to him patiently, ‘Not row upon row, but a spiral; then we pack the joints with snow’; but his voice was more vivid than a memory, as if he was with Matt on the snow, and he feared exposure was making him hallucinate, but the sound of Kaiyuk’s voice comforted him nonetheless.

  When it was done, he crawled inside, unutterably cold. It took him ten attempts to light the qulliq. The warmth startled him. He closed the opening with snow then took off his damp clothes to dry. He took the battery out of Akiak’s laptop, then put the battery and the laptop near the qulliq, hoping the warmth would get it to work again. Then he fell asleep, slipping in and out of consciousness, light from the qulliq shining on the snow walls.

  He woke choking, the smoke from the qulliq filling the aputiak, and he had to get the knife and gouge a hole to let the smoke out. But he was no longer violently shivering.

  The next morning, his frostbitten feet had turned red and blistered. Two of the huskies, Umialik and Quannik, had broken their lines and gone. He’d given them the last of the meagre rations the night before and they must have gone off in search of food. He only had Koko, Qaukliq and Siku left. It sickened him that before feeling the loss of the dogs he’d felt relief he could remember their names. The next aputiak he built would be big enough for the dogs too.

  He replaced Akiak’s laptop battery and the laptop turned on for five seconds or so, but then the keyboard jammed and he saw that warming it had caused condensation inside the screen. He wrapped the laptop in a lightweight camping towel, hoping to draw the condensation away, then packed it in his knapsack.

  He left his poorly built aputiak and walked for three miles along the river; his feet bloody and blackened with frostbite; the three remaining dogs pulling the sled without his weight. He only had a torch beam to see by, tiny in the immense black landscape, and he felt as if he was the only person alive on a planet of darkness and ice.

  His torch beam shone on a delineator. It was the first evidence of humans he’d had for almost four days and he knew he was reaching the source of the poison. He saw more delineators, marking the river as a road.

  He’d walked, stumbling, a mile and a half along the river-road, when he heard a faint crackling as the huskies pulled the sled over the ice.

  He shone his torch, looking for the cause, and found a hole in the ice, cracks emanating around it from where the sled had gone over it. He widened the hole with his knife. Underneath, boulders sectioned off a part of the fast-flowing river. His torch beam shone on layers of dead fish and frogs, partially dissolved, a foot thick under the ice.

  He walked a few paces and felt something soft and giving at his feet. He shone the torch and saw dead river otters on the ice.

  He took a photo, but the camera was getting harder to operate and he feared that snow had got into the mechanism. He was desperate to get the photos onto the net, where they wouldn’t be subject to the freezing weather, but doubted he’d get Akiak’s laptop to work. He remembered how in a strange way it had been easier to think about the problems he had with his camera and laptop than to focus on the family of river otters. Quannik had been next to them.

  Dad says he saw the river otters too and he photographed them. He thought he was getting near the source of the poison.

  I tell him that when I saw the family of otters I cried and he nods, because he understands. It’s like our stories are joining up now, Dad’s with Mum’s and mine, and we are all one story again.

  When I saw the husky next to the otters, I thought the bad man had let him die, but now I know that Dad was trying to look after him. Quannik means Snowflake and although he looked soft and gentle he was very strong and quite fierce.

  Dad walked along the river-road, like we did, and when he got to here he knew

  he’d found the poison. He says he checked further up the river and there were no dead fish and no dead animals. He says the poison started here.

  Everyone is putting on their outdoor things and going out of the aputiak. Dad

  tells me to stay in the warm but there’s no way I’m letting him out of my sight again, not for a minute.

  * * *

  The bonfire is super-bright so I can see Mum and Dad’s hands. The flames look like genies trying to escape into the dark.

  ‘It was burning when I got here,’ Dad says to the state trooper. ‘I’m not sure what they were trying to destroy. I kept it going hoping a plane would spot it.’

  The state trooper is saying something and Mum translates, ‘Regular planes don’t fly over this way. We don’t either unless we have a reason.’

  I know he means that he was looking for Mum and me, which is why he saw our flare; and a flare goes a lot
higher than a bonfire. Our flare looked like a red star.

  No one was even looking for Dad except Mum and me.

  Dad puts a plank of something on the bonfire and it makes lots more flames and the darkness turns orange as the genies escape.

  I can see a gigantic metal monster, rising up into the marmalade sky.

  ‘It’s a fracking rig,’ Dad says.

  He’d walked towards the glow of the bonfire and in its light had seen the towering rig, a hundred and thirty feet tall, like a medieval trebuchet made of metal attacking the land; and then he’d searched with his torch, its small beam shining on a huge compressor and storage tanks and well heads and frack pumps. There was a partially dismantled generator shed, floodlights lying on the ground. He’d found twenty-two wells within a mile of the rig. There were pits like moon craters, the size of lakes, which he thought must be the waste storage ponds. Even in the cold he smelled the chemical poisons, abrasive in his nose and throat. Despite the sub-zero temperature, the fluid in the pits wasn’t covered in ice and instead of reflecting, his torch beam was absorbed by the murky viscous fluid.

  For thousands of miles around this place the ancient tundra was white with snow, the delicate ecosystem beneath fragile and unspoiled. But here it was scarred with metal and craters and underneath him the fracking pipes went two miles down into the earth spreading out as veins and fracturing the land.

  The villagers had feared that fracking would poison their land and water and destroy their way of life. They’d feared it could make them sick. He’d researched with Corazon the many ways that fracking was potentially dangerous. Horribly ironic, that it wasn’t fracking wells right next to their village that had killed them, but wells owned by a different company over forty miles away.

  ‘Do you know how the river was poisoned?’ Captain Grayling asked.

  ‘A casing in one of the fracking pipes could have cracked and leaked chemicals from the fracking fluid,’ Matt said. ‘Or when they fracked the rocks, they released poison naturally present. Or someone just dumped all the toxic waste. There’s a whole load of ways.’