Ice Drift (9780547540610) Read Free

just as brave.
    Kussu soon went back outside and placed the dogs in their shelter. He fed them and then checked the kayaks, which had not been used since summer.
    Maja quickly prepared dried fish from the summer hunt and they ate. In some respects, they were twinlike in size and appearance, except Kussu had a thick black mustache and goatee.
    Kussu said, "If Alika went where I told him to go, the floe will pass here. But with luck the wind will drive it toward Greenland." There might be safety in Greenland. There were more villages over there.
    "Why did you send Alika to the ice?" Maja asked, suddenly angry. "Winter is almost here."
    "To hunt seals, of course. He's a man."
    "He's still a boy. And why didn't you check the sledge to see if Sulu was on it?" Maja continually worried about Sulu's health.
    "I was too busy talking to Niuinia about going out for caribou tomorrow to even think of Sulu."
    Maja let out a disgusted breath.
    They both knew that the size and depth of the floes controlled the speed of drift. The depth in the middle of the floe could be ten or fifteen feet or more, like a keel, but it would be thinner along the edges where it had been attached to land. The floe might run aground. They could hope for that. It had happened before.
    After the three darkest months, the white man's November, December, and January, hunters sometimes went out on the moving ice for seals to feed their families. They'd even set up camps on the floes, going back to the mainland by kayak. But there was no guarantee this would happen. Kussu knew there could not be a worse time for his sons to be on the ice, if that's where they were, due to extreme cold and often thick darkness.
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    In the early hours of the new day, the gale died out as suddenly as it had begun, and Kussu and Maja dressed in their sealskin jackets with drawstrings at the hoods and wrists. The jackets also cinched at the waists, where they attached to the kayaks. Inuit inventions, the light ocean kayaks were made of wooden frames and covered with sealskin. Hunters sometimes attacked walrus or whales in them, two kayaks tied together, and sometimes they disappeared in their frail boats, blown out to hostile seas. Kussu and Maja knew that it was into this heaving theater of ice that Alika and Sulu may have gone.
    Finally, Kussu and Maja lifted their kayaks and carried them several hundred yards to the shore. Chunks of pancake ice mingled with the dark waters in no pattern. The winter freeze, thick enough to carry the weight of man or animal but not enough to stop a moving floe, would soon set in.
    Without speaking, they launched the boats and slid into them, fastening themselves into the cockpits. Each kayak was twenty feet long, nineteen inches wide, and ten inches deep. If Kussu and Maja were lucky enough to locate the floe, they'd insert Sulu and Jamka into the covered bow of one boat and Alika into the other one, snug as fingers in gloves.
    As the storm clouds vanished to the east over Greenland's mountains and the gale wind became a cold breeze, the waxing moon lit up the slivers of the kayaks. The water was calm again but littered with glittering pieces of ice. There was only one human sound, the rhythmic slosh of their paddles. Inside the cockpits, Maja and Kussu were already beginning to sweat, despite the subzero temperature. They guided around the chunks of frozen pack ice.
    The sky was impaled with stars. Some Inuit believed that the stars were holes in the sky created by the passage of dead bears into the eternal light.
Kussu and Maja knew the Big Dipper as a herd of reindeer; the Pleiades as a dog team in pursuit of a bear; the belt of Orion was a cut by an Inuit into a steep snowbank to enable him to climb to the top. But they did not navigate by the stars this night. They paddled straight east. They could see Greenland's mountains in the distance.
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    Frost smoke set in during the first hour, coming up like fog. Kussu shouted across to Maja, "We must