We unchained the dogs. The harnesses went on smoothly. The last animal to be fitted was the lead, a five-year-old female named Justina.
“Climb on. I’ll start it out,” Karen said.
I sat legs out on the sled’s pile of woolen blankets. I smelled dog and mildew and the sharp tang of ammonia. She stood behind me on the runners, the woman I’d fallen for, my personal explorer, my one in a million. She shouted, fiercely and happily, “Hut-hut-hut!”
The sled rammed forward at twelve miles an hour, out of the backyard, up over the packed-down snow on the road. We skittered hard across someone’s backyard, past hanging caribou skins, and across a frozen lagoon and out onto the tundra. We passed the airport runway lights, with the streetlights of town receding. The dogs headed at a happy gallop toward the raised-up natural gas pipeline in the distance, source of Barrow homes’ heat.
“Beats the horse carriage in Central Park,” she called.
I forgot any investigation. I saw furred dog tails wagging. The sense of space pressing in; the lab, the base, the hut, disappeared. Karen’s voice floated in from behind.
“I apologize, Joe.”
“Why?”
“Because you were just doing your job at that dance. You know why I’ve been spending so much time with Mikael? To show you I’m independent. Truth is, I used him to make myself feel like I wasn’t getting tied up. I mean, he needs to be here, but I went a little overboard.”
“Thanks.”
“And then I saw you with Tilda Swann and I was furious. Like you were flaunting someone else in my face. But you weren’t doing that. I was.”
I thought, recalling last night’s torrid sex dream about Tilda, Accept this gift and shut up.
“I want us to work, Joe. I want it so badly that I get scared.”
“Me, too.”
“I thought Marines never get scared.”
“We hide it better.”
“Want to drive?” she said.
“Now I’m scared. Explain how to steer this thing.”
“Pick a direction.”
“Right.”
She shouted out a sharp command, “Dee! Dee!”
Justina suddenly veered off to the right, looping the whole team, the sled, and me that way. Amazing.
Now we were running away from the pipeline, and straight away from Barrow, and toward the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay, two hundred miles ahead.
Karen shouted, “Haw!” and Justina smoothly and instantly veered back the way we’d come.
“Stop! Okay, Marine, let’s see you try.”
We reversed position, Karen sitting on the sled, me standing in the back.
“See that flat iron bar above by the back runner, Joe?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a brake. If you stand on it, it slows the sled. But you still need the command for them to pull up.”
“What’s that command, Karen. Moo?”
“Just yell ‘stop,’ silly. Like I did.”
I yelled, “Hut, hut!” and off we went again. Joe Rush, Arctic dog team commander. I gathered up my Marine colonel’s voice and shouted a resounding “DEE”—turn right — except the dogs ignored me. I tried, “Haw! Haw!” and a dozen heads whipped around, regarded me with doggy distain, and kept going straight.
Karen was laughing. Then she said, “Oh! Look up, Joe. Look at the stars!”
They seemed closer and brighter. Then there was a sudden disturbance up there, like a razor blade drawn across darkness. A slit opened and I watched in awe as molten color — green lava — began spilling out, dripping down in luminous sheets.
“Aurora borealis,” I breathed.
The lava faded to a luminous gas, swirling in the southwest quadrant. It sharpened back to the lava-like mass that colored even stars and flared brightly and disappeared so suddenly that they left an ache in space.
We stopped the sled, the dogs lay down, she got on beside me and pulled up a free blanket. “Now this really beats Central Park,” I said.
She giggled. “Ready to hear a super-classified submarine crew war game secret? Death penalty if you talk?”
“They’ll never get it out of me.” From the teasing tone, all I knew was that something amusing would come.
“I was on the Virginia a couple years back, war game, north of the Bering Strait. Scary scenario, actually. The deal was, Russia’s in the Ukraine again. We’re threatening reprisals. They up the ante in the Arctic, face-off, and we suddenly lose all sat coverage, we’re stuck on the surface, fire’s destroyed guidance. We have to get to Nome.”
“You navigated by stars,” I said.
“Right, except the game was, The Russians can hear everything we say… so one of our chiefs, a guy from Louisiana, shrimper family, told us about this game his people played in the Gulf. They made up constellations.”
“What do you mean?”
“Think about it, Joe. Look up. See Polaris? The North Star? See how it’s part of Ursa Minor, the bear?”
“Yes, I know it.”
“The Greeks named it. They knew that if they drew lines connecting those particular stars, you’d see the outline of a small bear, and they named the whole image, see?”
“So what was the game? Rename the image?”
“No! Better! Because the images are arbitrary. Take those same stars, connect them to other stars, thirty degrees south, and turn your pen northwest and hit that red-looking star, see it? Good! Connect those dots instead of the Greek ones, you get a squatting monkey.”
I started laughing.
“It was the simplest damn code,” she said admiringly, and lowered her voice, became a ship commander directing a helmsman to change course. “Head for the monkey’s chin.”
I loved that laugh. Karen taught me new constellations. The fat zebra. Flipper. She was right. It was easy, and had us howling. “Head southwest from the giant toad.”
Funny, yes, but as we stood under the stars, holding hands, the sad truth about the deaths of new friends came back to me.
“Occam’s razor. The simplest explanation is the truth, Merlin will announce a suicide/murder.”
We started back. At length I saw, in the distance, hemmed in by vast night, the small glow of human-made light in Barrow. I knew that probably a thousand new diseases come into existence every year. You never hear about them. A goatherd in Turkey develops rashes from a new skin virus. His fever spikes. He recovers. The rash disappears.
A Boston two-year-old comes down with a cough that lingers, and the child does not respond to antibiotics. Three days later the girl is cooing at her mother, cured not by medicine, but by natural body defense.
In less than twenty-four hours we’d board the evening Alaska Airlines 737 and head south, me to D.C. for a talk with my new boss, she to Nome for upcoming war games.
In ninety days I would retire. In ten months so would Eddie, and then Karen and I and my partner and his family would take up residence on the East Coast. We’d never have to deal with General Wayne Homza again.
It struck me, as we glided along, that for the past twenty thousand years — from the time before the Romans to Wayne Homza — the land around us had simply sucked up lives with mystery. That Kelley and her parents, and Clay Qaqulik, were going to go down as the latest additions to a list stretching back to the days when mammoths and saber-toothed tigers walked these rolling plains.
If Clay Qaqulik hadn’t fired his shotgun, all four of them might have recovered and told the story one day of the scary time out on the tundra, when they’d become ill with something no one ever ID’d.