Along the Shattered Edge

I was supposed to take some visitors down the edge. When they canceled, I went alone. That was a mistake.

I was supposed to take some visitors down to the edge--to the ice--to show them the animals that come around during spring breakup. Walruses and seals. Maybe even a polar bear.

It would’ve been my first time guiding anyone alone, so I was stoked. Nervous but excited. Thrilled that anyone would want to pay for my services. At just fourteen, it made me feel so grown up and, for once, something other than a mouth to feed. I had a purpose. More importantly, it’d give me a foot in the door to becoming a search and rescue worker. That was what I really wanted to. I didn’t want to just show people the Arctic, I wanted to rush out and snatch them from its claws.

I prepped and rehearsed for weeks. Then, at the last minute, the people canceled.

And it pissed me off that these strangers from down south--these white people--could just take that away from me. So, I went down to the edge anyway. Alone. And on foot, not with a skidoo.

I found out later the tour got called off because of weather. You might think it snows all the time up there, but it doesn’t.

It did start snowing, though. Only a bit at first. No big deal. And the wind picked up. Gusts you can lean into. I kept walking along the shore but moved a ways inland, away from the jumble of ice flows, just in case. It snowed harder. Blowing sideways and taking away visibility. It’s early spring, so it’s basically twilight all day, but I know sundown is approaching. Already, it’s hard to see. It gets worse fast. Total white out plus falling darkness. What bit of light is left looks like it’s coming from the way I just came, which doesn’t make sense because the direction of the snow drifts indicates the opposite.

I get to a small bluff I sort of recognize, so instead of crouching down behind the rock to ride out the blizzard, I turn and keep moving farther. But after a while I can’t find any of the other bluffs I should have run into. The snow and wind are only getting stronger. My coat’s not the big warm one--that’s at home--so the wind is really biting into me.

Then I almost break my ankle falling in a hole. A pit in the snow. And I’m down inside it on my a*s, the walls are up to my shoulders and just wide enough to hold me. Right away, I know where I am, because of all the fresh blood spilled everywhere and trailing off across the snowpack. 

I’m in a hole where a bear just killed a seal. That’s okay with me at first. At fourteen an Inuk girl isn’t scared of anything. She’s invincible. So, I think I’m going to stay there in the pit and wait out the storm, probably until morning unless I get a good aurora or moonlight. Except, then I get thinking about the polar bear that killed the seal in this hole, and about all the things it might do to me if it comes back. And my head is sticking up right at surface-level like a seal popping out of the ice.

It’s getting dark fast, but I find the bear’s tracks. They’re big. Fresh. I follow the trail of blood and paw prints away from the hole, thinking the bear probably kept going down to the ice.

The edge can’t be far. If I can find it, I’ll know which way to go, and I can stay along it until I see the lights of town.

With the blowing snow and fading sun, it’s hard to follow the tracks, but they’re leading me uphill and not toward the ice. I must be heading off in the direction of the old dump. At least now I know which way town is, but since I’ve probably come more than halfway to the dump already, logic says keep going instead of going back. I need shelter before dark, and there’s some old shipping containers there I can hide in.

Gravel crunches underfoot now, and I lose the tracks. My foot hits something and sends it skittering. At first, I get excited, thinking it’s driftwood--not that I’d be able to make a fire in this wind anyway. I go down on my knees to find it and for a second think it might be best to lie down and curl up. Maybe if I wasn’t shivering so hard. I won’t make it until morning in the open.

I get hold of the driftwood, only it’s not driftwood. It’s bone. Then I find another piece and another, and I know where I am. A minute later I almost trip over a mound of stones. I see a blue plastic sheet sticking out, and a caribou hide. Another mound has artificial flowers and a bent-over cross. Another one’s been pulled open, and the cross is in splinters alongside some bone fragments.

You can’t bury anything in permafrost, so we wrap up the dead and build a cairn out of stones to keep animals from eating the body. It doesn’t always work, though.

That’s when I see a bear. It’s moving in and out of the blowing snow as it walks back and forth, pacing among the cairns. A male. About an eight-footer. Twelve hundred pounds. Medium size. He has a nice, healthy coat. Blood around his mouth and down the fur on his neck and chest.

I don’t see any others with him, but that might just be the poor visibility.

The bear stops pacing. He swings his head, lifts his nose, and sniffs. And then he starts moving toward me. Only one grave is between him and me, and we’re playing a kind of slow-motion cat-and-mouse around the opened cairn. Inside it, through the darkness and blowing snow I, glimpse the torn mummy of someone from the community, but I can’t see more than the beads in her hair and the whites of her teeth behind the drawn-back lips of her leathered face.

I duck down behind the broken cairn and my mitt lands in a bloody paw print. The tracks go off behind me. Big tracks. He’s not alone. I know I have to find a better place to hide. I can hear bears crunching in the gravel around me.

Tossing a splinter of wood distracts them a second, and I run to the next cairn, then the next. But they’re close behind. It’s really dark now. I know there’s a shed a few hundred yards away, somewhere out across the gravel flat, lost in the blizzard and darkness.

What’s in the shed is-- It’s not a place you’d ever want to enter unless you had to. But I’m shivering like crazy, and I don’t want to freeze or get eaten.

I pull the cross from the cairn and make a run for it. I hear a bear huffing behind me. I zigzag to throw him off, and it makes me get lost. I can’t see a thing. My eyes are iced over. My face hurts. The breaths burn my lungs, and it feels like I’m already turning into mummified remains. But I just keep running, back and forth, hoping I hit the shed before I hit a bear. I trip, and I don’t know if it’s the wind, a bear, or an evil spirit nudging my legs. It spooks me to jump back up, though.

I run into the shed--hard enough to rattle the padlock and hinges, so I know where the door is. Why the shed needs to be locked is anyone’s guess, but I have to stick the cross in the hinge and pry off the padlock, and I have to do it fast because I hear the bears already coming around the other side. The door busts open--swings outward--and I go in, pulling it shut behind me.

I know the bodies are all frozen--stored there until spring thaws them enough that they can be prepared for proper funerals--but I swear I can smell the rot. The shed’s only the size of a bus shelter, so I can feel their presence. I feel the deaths. Without reaching out to touch, I know how many bodies. I know their names. One was a skidoo accident. He fell through the ice. Two others were students. Suicides. I remember each of the days they didn’t show up for school. And a child and her mother. It’s a small community, so I knew them all. 

A bear slams against the door. I fly backward into the stack of bodies. My bloody mitt touches a frozen face. The door bangs and crashes. The bear is standing, hammering and hammering against the door with his paws. With the lock broken, all he has to do is give the door the right push to make it bounce off the frame and swing open. I lunge for the handle, grab on tight, and brace my feet on each side of the frame then lean back while the bear digs his claws into the top of the door and heaves down. I feel the top of the door bend inward.

 Then he pauses before throwing his shoulder and all his weight into the middle of the door. Twelve hundred pounds versus one-ten. Each time he strikes, the jolt runs up my arms, and for a second I lose my grip.

Bam … Bam … Bam …

He’s not going to give up until he gets in.

Bam …

The frame cracks. Wood splinters. He explodes through the door. I’m showered with debris and a gash tears into my arm. I pull back, but he’s got me. His claws are hooked into my sleeve. Into my flesh. I yank my arm away and feel the burn of my own skin shredding. His head smashes through the remains of the door, growling, roaring, chomping at air as he tries to find me. I let go of the door handle and hit his face with all I’ve got. I feel my fists strike hard, sharp teeth, but maybe I hit his nose because he backs off.

Not for long, I’m sure. He knows I’m trapped. He’s just sitting in front of the door and waiting. He can afford to take a break because I’ve got nowhere to go.

The shed jolts from the rear, tossing me into the fragmented door. I hear him huff and snarl right in front of me, then there’s another jolt from behind. The other bear--the bigger one--is there, too. I scramble backward, falling over the bodies. I feel the contours of a face beneath my mitts and dive over frozen limbs for shelter.

The bears are on the move.  Hear them breathing and crunching over gravel. First, they pace, then they circle the shed once, twice, and one approaches. He sweeps aside debris and crashes through the doorway. My chest aches, my heart and lungs are working so hard. He can smell me. I know it. He moves closer, and I feel his body heat and steamy breath. A body jerks out from under me, careening off the wall. I dig in my heals and clamber to get back but get no grip, and I’m already against the wall. Claws swipe through the air. He snarls and roars. My foot jerks left, then right. I’m yanked from the wall by the leg. He’s got my pants. He’s got me. 

I hear something over the growls. A different roar. Engines. Then gunshots. The bears runs off, and I see the lights of the search and rescue team.

 

Cover photo by Thomas Berg. Used and modified under Creative Commons license 2.0

 

This story is a modified excerpt from my novel “Tribulation: A Science Fiction Thriller” (Amazon--Kindle and paperback). Follow or contact me on social media: 550AU

Reviews

[roarke]

Great suspense thriller, had me hooked the whole ride. I hope your book does well. Thanks for sharing.