Ice Drift (9780547540610) by Taylor Theodore

Author:Taylor, Theodore [Taylor, Theodore]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

The next two days, a light wind blew from the northwest, good for hunting, chasing the clouds. The moon was again shining down, and a most beautiful halo encircled it, as bright as Tatkret himself. Horizontal and vertical rays extended from it to form a perfect cross.

Alika had instructed Sulu to stay in the iglu and conserve his energy. Meanwhile, Alika spent hours at two different seal holes that Jamka had chosen. At last, on the third night—when Alika had to crawl, because of weakness, to the hole selected by Jamka—a seal rose to the surface for a quick breath, and Alika used the last of his strength to drive the harpoon into its thin skull. Then he found new energy to widen the hole and pull the animal out onto the snow, where it died.

Alika and Jamka teamed to drag the carcass to the snowhouse, Alika shouting, "Sulu, come out here and look at what we have!"

Sulu soon appeared, grinning widely. "I knew you'd do it, big brother."

This time Alika had no freshwater with which to anoint the lips of the seal, and he prayed to the animal's fleeing spirit to allow him this error. He promised he'd never do it again.

Inside the iglu, away from any bear's snooping nostrils, he began to use the woman's knife to butcher the seal, saving every drop of warm blood that he could for Sulu, Jamka, and himself. They needed it badly and drank it greedily. In the faint shaft of the moon's light through the ice pane, provided at a lucky angle, Alika skillfully cut the seal, first saving every ounce of the blubber so that he could light the qulliq. Later he would boil the meat as needed. But now they ate it raw, slicing the delicious liver into three pieces.

After filling their stomachs, which soon ached from being so stuffed, they went to sleep, Alika and Sulu thanked the seal and the moon for saving them. There was enough food to last four weeks if they ate very little of it at a time.

In the morning, Alika chopped some ice out of the berg, melted it, and filled the pair of walrus intestines with the freshwater. It could still be obtained on the surface of the floe, but the frozen snow-coated pools of it were difficult to locate.

A week later, a strong gale from the northwest ripped the grounded berg loose from the bottom, and Alika heard the ice cracking and felt the floe move, too. With the wind driving it, the berg would sail on south at a much faster rate than the floe.

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