Rangi holds a finger to his lips. His breathing comes quick and adenoidal when he reaches over and turns off my transponder. Before I can even process what’s happening, Rangi rips it off my neck and lobs it, with a casual madness, into the blue maw of the crevasse.
Then Rangi flicks off his own transponder. He slips it over his neck.
“No!”
He sails it into a narrow opening in the ice.
“Oh no—oh no—oh God—oh no why did you do that? Now you’ve done it, Ritardando, now you’ve really done it….”
I belly-squirm out of the cave and peer over the lip of the crevasse. The chasm glows with the loveliest, least hospitable colors: cold white stars, the green of interstellar vapors. It reminds me of the old stories, kids’ stuff, about sirens who swam in the deep pools and thrashed up snowstorms with their merscales. Pirate lore. X-marks-the-spot stuff. I’m in no position to appreciate the fantasy shades of white and green inside the chasm. The only color that I want to see is the plastic yellow of my transponder.
This is when I plunge my hand into the ice hole, up to my elbow, fishing around a ledge for the transponder, and come up with a fistful of treasure.
It’s really true, then, the part about the treasure. I can’t wait to tell Mr. Oamaru that I was wrong, that “The Pirates’ Conquest” isn’t all lies and stupid rhymes; there are at least a few bars of truth in our song. Verse 4.
It’s the stolen Moa patrimony: greenstone, river pearls, whale-tooth combs. The crevasse has swallowed our transponders, but the ice ledges inside are heaped with old plunder. Soon I’ve amassed a tall stack of greenstone. I wonder if I’m looking at the Moa’s holy relics, melted down by our great-great-grandfathers into these anonymous nephrite bricks. I pull out coins, too, orange and red metal. They must have been here for a century or more. The coins are frozen. Each is chiseled with a historic profile, a numismatic portrait of the old Moa leaders. Nobody we sing about in “The Pirates’ Conquest.” You can’t even make out their gender anymore, just high collars, proud noses, stout asparagus braids in the green copper. Men and women from some past that never made it into our music. I would have preferred a miracle that benefited us more directly.
“Here you go, Rangi!” And suddenly I’m laughing, I’m shaking all over now, in total hysterics. My body feels like a great chattering tooth. “We’ll split it! Fifty/fifty…”
Rangi refuses to touch the treasure. I grab him by the elbows and twist open his palms. I place a brick of the luminious nephrite in each of his hands. It’s enough that, if Rangi ever gets back to town, he could become the cemetery’s sole proprietor. He could employ Digger Gibson.
“Take it!” I scream. “It’s yours, it’s yours, take it!”
What a small, cold fortune. Rangi lets it sink into the snow. He just wants a fistful of bear fur. I want my father.
I try to remember the chorus of “The Pirates’ Conquest,” and I’m frightened to discover that I’ve forgotten how it goes. No words, no melody, just a white, blank space. Sun sparkles above us. The walls of the ice caves are melting together—too softly, this time, for me to hear. I touch a drop of the wall to my tongue. A clear braid of liquid trickles across the caves, snow that fell in 1947, 1812, earlier still, released all at once like tears from a body. Rangi crawls over and crouches in front of me. The solar glare is sculpting the ice into glass fangs and tall blue scythes.
“Well, I hope you’re happy,” I hiss. “No one’s going to save us now.”
Rangi doesn’t look happy; his face is still a mask of old fury. I wonder what it feels like to be angry at everyone except for a dead bear. It scares me to think about it. I picture the dead bear loping and slathering forever inside of Rangi, a long-toothed loyal animal, his one memory of love. Digger Gibson should never have adopted him. Who wants salvation when it just orphans you further?
I lean my cheek against the translucent outer wall of one of the caves. Water whispers inside: You are going to die up here—nobody knows where you are…. Any place, then, can become a cemetery. All it takes is your body. It’s not fair, I think, and I get this petulant wish for ugly flowers and mourners, my mother’s old familiar grief. Somebody I love to tend my future grave. Probably this is the wrong thing to be wishing for.
I jerk away from the trickly whisper of the snowmelt. This is the wrong thing to be wishing for. I don’t want to die on this glacier. This accident is nothing I volunteered for. Below us, the ground rolls with sluiced water. In the Valley, it’s easy to forget that the ground is moving, that we’re traveling on a frozen river. But up here I can hear it happening. Centuries of water are melting in the heart of the glacier, a constant interior roar that calves icebergs into the black sea. Even now, we’re moving away from Waitiki Valley. And suddenly I’d give anything to be back in my kitchen with Mr. Oamaru, swapping lies about my father. I’d pay any price to open my eyes and find myself in the Ice Amphitheater with the boys choir, all of us holding that single note.
And then I get a hero idea. This is my solo. If I can sing down an Avalanche on my own, the families at the base of the glacier will see it and send help. Mr. Oamaru’s weathered face floats in front of my vision, and I make it a target for my anger. I pitch my voice so high that my forehead starts throbbing. Higher, and higher still. Breath floods out of my lungs. The note beckons and retreats above me, a round luminous note, like the sun viewed from the bottom of the Waitiki River. My voice rises like a hand struggling to break the surface of that water. I wonder if it’s like this for Rangi, too; if Rangi’s mutism just means that he has sunk several fathoms farther down than the rest of us, and given up on swimming.
If this were a local interest story, some square of uplift in the Gazette, I’d send down a tremendous Avalanche, an S.O.S. I’d hit that high C, or, in a fluted miracle, the C above it. Somebody below us would see it and send help. But that’s not what’s happening. My voice is cracking. It suffers up and fails and surges again. It breaks eons before the ice ever will. Now I’m breathless and covered in freezing spittle. Rangi watches and never even opens his mouth.
I hear myself echoing Franz Josef: “Sing it with me, Rangi! Forget Franz. Forget Digger. It’s okay to sing now, Rangi. Or scream if you have to, anything….” Our voices are the only hatchet that we have up here. But Rangi, if you can believe this, has fallen backwards into the snow. He’s settled into his own snow angel. When I kneel and shake him, Rangi looks up at me with a mild surprise, as if he’s forgotten that I am still here. Then his gaze shifts inward. A new shape is running in Rangi’s eyes now. A brown-gold speck, at such a distance. Its black snout opens in a soundless, joyful roar.
Somewhere, an Avalanche is about to happen without us. Rangi must know this before I do, and the dead bear in his eyes comes racing towards us across old snow. At the base of Aokeora, Mr. Oamaru is fiddling with the flashbulb, the black drape of the box camera billowing around him. He is snapping picture after picture of white sludge rolling down an ice shelf. My mother is pointing to the ridge where I’m supposed to be and making good-natured jokes about my weight gain. Ruth, Rachel, Rebecca are sending up a prayer for my success. They’ll eat stale lemon moonpies and listen for a happy hallucination of my voice. In a few minutes, the town will stand up and applaud. I feel as if I’m looking down at my own funeral, only nobody knows that I’m dead. It’s a frightening, lonely feeling.
Even so, I can’t silence a small chirp of hope. Who knows? Maybe my transponder hit a ledge that jarred the switch back to ON. Maybe it’s still emitting a signal. A part of me feels certain that my family will hear my absence at the bottom of Aokeora, thousands of feet below us, and know that I am lost.
St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
Stage 1: The initial period is one in which everything is new, exciting, and interesting for your students. It is fun for your students to explore their new environment.
—from The Jesuit Handbook on
Lycanthropic Culture Shock
At first, our pack was all hair and snarl and floor-thumping joy. We forgot the barked cautions of our mothers and fathers, all the promises we’d made to be civilized and ladylike, couth and kempt. We tore through the austere rooms, overturning dresser drawers, pawing through the neat piles of the Stage 3 girls’ starched underwear, smashing lightbulbs with our bare fists. Things felt less foreign in the dark. The dim bedroom was windowless and odorless. We remedied this by spraying exuberant yellow streams all over the bunks. We jumped from bunk to bunk, spraying. We nosed each other midair, our bodies buckling in kinetic laughter. The nuns watched us from the corner of the bedroom, their tiny faces pinched with displeasure.
“Ay caramba,” Sister Maria de la Guardia sighed. “Que barbaridad!” She made the Sign of the Cross. Sister Maria came to St. Lucy’s from a halfway home in Copacabana. In Copacabana, the girls are fat and languid and eat pink slivers of guava right out of your hand. Even at Stage 1, their pelts are silky, sun-bleached to near invisibility. Our pack was hirsute and sinewy and mostly brunette. We had terrible posture. We went knuckling along the wooden floor on the calloused pads of our fists, baring row after row of tiny, wood-rotted teeth. Sister Josephine sucked in her breath. She removed a yellow wheel of floss from under her robes, looping it like a miniature lasso.
“The girls at our facility are backwoods,” Sister Josephine whispered to Sister Maria de la Guardia with a beatific smile. “You must be patient with them.” I clamped down on her ankle, straining to close my jaws around the woolly XXL sock. Sister Josephine tasted like sweat and freckles. She smelled easy to kill.
We’d arrived at St. Lucy’s that morning, part of a pack fifteen-strong. We were accompanied by a mousy, nervous-smelling social worker; the baby-faced deacon; Bartholomew, the blue wolfhound; and four burly woodsmen. The deacon handed out some stale cupcakes and said a quick prayer. Then he led us through the woods. We ran past the wild apiary, past the felled oaks, until we could see the white steeple of St. Lucy’s rising out of the forest. We stopped short at the edge of a muddy lake. Then the deacon took our brothers. Bartholomew helped him to herd the boys up the ramp of a small ferry. We girls ran along the shore, tearing at our new jumpers in a plaid agitation. Our brothers stood on the deck, looking small and confused.
Our mothers and fathers were werewolves. They lived an outsider’s existence in caves at the edge of the forest, threatened by frost and pitchforks. They had been ostracized by the local farmers for eating their silled fruit pies and terrorizing the heifers. They had ostracized the local wolves by having sometimes-thumbs, and regrets, and human children. (Their condition skips a generation.) Our pack grew up in a green purgatory. We couldn’t keep up with the purebred wolves, but we never stopped crawling. We spoke a slab-tongued pidgin in the cave, inflected with frequent howls. Our parents wanted something better for us; they wanted us to get braces, use towels, be fully bilingual. When the nuns showed up, our parents couldn’t refuse their offer. The nuns, they said, would make us naturalized citizens of human society. We would go to St. Lucy’s to study a better culture. We didn’t know at the time that our parents were sending us away for good. Neither did they.
That first afternoon, the nuns gave us free rein of the grounds. Everything was new, exciting, and interesting. A low granite wall surrounded St. Lucy’s, the blue woods humming for miles behind it. There was a stone fountain full of delectable birds. There was a statue of St. Lucy. Her marble skin was colder than our mother’s nose, her pupil-less eyes rolled heavenward. Doomed squirrels gamboled around her stony toes. Our diminished pack threw back our heads in a celebratory howl—an exultant and terrible noise, even without a chorus of wolf brothers in the background. There were holes everywhere!
We supplemented these holes by digging some of our own. We interred sticks, and our itchy new jumpers, and the bones of the friendly, unfortunate squirrels. Our noses ached beneath an invisible assault. Everything was smudged with a human odor: baking bread, petrol, the nuns’ faint woman-smell sweating out beneath a dark perfume of tallow and incense. We smelled one another, too, with the same astounded fascination. Our own scent had become foreign in this strange place.
We had just sprawled out in the sun for an afternoon nap, yawning into the warm dirt, when the nuns reappeared. They conferred in the shadow of the juniper tree, whispering and pointing. Then they started towards us. The oldest sister had spent the past hour twitching in her sleep, dreaming of fatty and infirm elk. (The pack used to dream the same dreams back then, as naturally as we drank the same water and slept on the same red scree.) When our oldest sister saw the nuns approaching, she instinctively bristled. It was an improvised bristle, given her new, human limitations. She took clumps of her scraggly, nut-brown hair and held it straight out from her head.
Sister Maria gave her a brave smile.
“And what is your name?” she asked.
The oldest sister howled something awful and inarticulable, a distillate of hurt and panic, half-forgotten hunts and eclipsed moons. Sister Maria nodded and scribbled on a yellow legal pad. She slapped on a name tag: HELLO, MY NAME IS! “Jeanette it is.”
The rest of the pack ran in a loose, uncertain circle, torn between our instinct to help her and our new fear. We sensed some subtler danger afoot, written in a language we didn’t understand.
Our littlest sister had the quickest reflexes. She used her hands to flatten her ears to the side of her head. She backed towards the far corner of the garden, snarling in the most menacing register that an eight-year-old wolf-girl can muster. Then she ran. It took them two hours to pin her down and tag her: HELLO, MY NAME IS MIRABELLA!
“Stage 1,” Sister Maria sighed, taking careful aim with her tranquilizer dart. “It can be a little overstimulating.”
Stage 2: After a time, your students realize that they must work to adjust to the new culture. This work may be stressful and students may experience a strong sense of dislocation. They may miss certain foods. They may spend a lot of time daydreaming during this period. Many students feel isolated, irritated, bewildered, depressed, or generally uncomfortable.
Those were the days when we dreamed of rivers and meat. The full-moon nights were the worst! Worse than cold toilet seats and boiled tomatoes, worse than trying to will our tongues to curl around our false new names. We would snarl at one another for no reason. I remember how disorienting it was to look down and see two square-toed shoes instead of my own four feet. Keep your mouth shut, I repeated during our walking drills, staring straight ahead. Keep your shoes on your feet. Mouth shut, shoes on feet. Do not chew on your new penny loafers. Do not. I stumbled around in a daze, my mouth black with shoe polish. The whole pack was irritated, bewildered, depressed. We were all uncomfortable, and between languages. We had never wanted to run away so badly in our lives; but who did we have to run back to? Only the curled black grimace of the mother. Only the father, holding his tawny head between his paws. Could we betray our parents by going back to them? After they’d given us the choicest part of the woodchuck, loved us at our hairless worst, nosed us across the ice floes and abandoned us at St. Lucy’s for our own betterment?
Physically, we were all easily capable of clearing the low stone walls. Sister Josephine left the wooden gates wide open. They unslatted the windows at night so that long fingers of moonlight beckoned us from the woods. But we knew we couldn’t return to the woods; not till we were civilized, not if we didn’t want to break the mother’s heart. It all felt like a sly, human taunt.
It was impossible to make the blank, chilly bedroom feel like home. In the beginning, we drank gallons of bathwater as part of a collaborative effort to mark our territory. We puddled up the yellow carpet of old newspapers. But later, when we returned to the bedroom, we were dismayed to find all trace of the pack musk had vanished. Someone was coming in and erasing us. We sprayed and sprayed every morning; and every night, we returned to the same ammonia eradication. We couldn’t make our scent stick here; it made us feel invisible. Eventually w
e gave up. Still, the pack seemed to be adjusting on the same timetable. The advanced girls could already alternate between two speeds: “slouch” and “amble.” Almost everybody was fully bipedal.
Almost.
The pack was worried about Mirabella.
Mirabella would rip foamy chunks out of the church pews and replace them with ham bones and girl dander. She loved to roam the grounds wagging her invisible tail. (We all had a hard time giving that up. When we got excited, we would fall to the ground and start pumping our backsides. Back in those days we could pump at rabbity velocities. Que horror! Sister Maria frowned, looking more than a little jealous.) We’d give her scolding pinches. “Mirabella,” we hissed, imitating the nuns. “No.” Mirabella cocked her ears at us, hurt and confused.
Still, some things remained the same. The main commandment of wolf life is Know Your Place, and that translated perfectly. Being around other humans had awakened a slavish-dog affection in us. An abasing, belly-to-the-ground desire to please. As soon as we realized that someone higher up in the food chain was watching us, we wanted only to be pleasing in their sight. Mouth shut, I repeated, shoes on feet. But if Mirabella had this latent instinct, the nuns couldn’t figure out how to activate it. She’d go bounding around, gleefully spraying on their gilded statue of St. Lucy, mad-scratching at the virulent fleas that survived all of their powders and baths. At Sister Maria’s tearful insistence, she’d stand upright for roll call, her knobby, oddly muscled legs quivering from the effort. Then she’d collapse right back to the ground with an ecstatic oomph! She was still loping around on all fours (which the nuns had taught us to see looked unnatural and ridiculous—we could barely believe it now, the shame of it, that we used to locomote like that!), her fists blue-white from the strain. As if she were holding a secret tight to the ground. Sister Maria de la Guardia would sigh every time she saw her. “Caramba!” She’d sit down with Mirabella and pry her fingers apart. “You see?” she’d say softly, again and again. “What are you holding on to? Nothing, little one. Nothing.”
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