Between Two Worlds by Katherine Kirkpatrick

Author:Katherine Kirkpatrick [Kirkpatrick, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-375-89924-9
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2014-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

For an entire week, the moon shone bright and silvery in a clear sky, as if to welcome Angulluk. Our lives fell into a comfortable rhythm, though we lived in deep winter’s shadow, when death often comes, when people as well as animals can freeze. I liked seeing the village and the frozen sound by moonlight, and smelling the burning seal fat in our lamps, the soft lights they cast; the white man’s lanterns had been too bright. At night, Angulluk and I enjoyed each other’s company in the warm, fur-lined darkness and I pushed away thoughts of Duncan.

I’d told Angulluk that I suspected something terrible had been done to my parents in America. “Maybe they’d had to take off their clothes, pose for photographs. The sailors said that Minik saw something. What could have upset him?”

“I don’t know.” Angulluk agreed with Duncan that the sailors were stupid men who told lies. “After everything that has happened, how can you not hate Peary?”

I didn’t completely understand it myself. “He wasn’t responsible for my parents’ deaths. He wasn’t there.” I could never truly hate Peary, who was so friendly, or Mitti Peary. Though she’d sent Angulluk on a mission in which he could have died, she’d acted out of desperation. Neither she nor her husband seemed to do bad things on purpose. Or did they?

“You’re far too forgiving of the qallunaat,” Angulluk said.

“You may be right.”

After that conversation, I noticed he insulted me less. He didn’t talk of trades. We spent all our time alone together or with his friends, sledding the snow-beaten trail to the valley to check our fox traps and searching for the elusive herd of musk oxen. Then one day, Duncan and two other crewmen, rifles on their shoulders and sacks on their backs, appeared in the village. The sailors wanted to hunt, and they chose Angulluk, of all people, to be their guide!

I didn’t volunteer to go. It was too awkward to see Duncan and my husband together. Before the men set off, Duncan and I talked in low voices.

“The captain is sending us for musk oxen,” he said.

“I didn’t know you knew how to hunt.”

“I’m a poor shot.” He shrugged. “But food is running low and our skills as sailors are worthless now. And the captain will give me what I need to—”

He looked at me hard. The silence revolved between us like swirling snow. “Billy Bah, would you be willing to—” he started, then broke off. “We have to go now.”

Did he want me to divorce Angulluk?

I watched as the men set out. If only the Fat One’s brothers could see him, at the reins of the dogsled, proudly leading the qallunaat across the snow fields in search of a great prize. The group came back empty-handed that night. The Fat One, puffed up, tried for musk oxen for the next eight days. Most times Duncan went with him.

I used any excuse to stay behind. Navarana’s family needed me, I said, which was true.

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