Free Ice Drift (9780547540610) by Theodore Taylor

through his mind after Sulu had gone to sleep.
    He remembered riding, as a child, on the sledge as the dogs drew it across the new grass of May. He remembered gathering bird eggs toward the end of the summer, when he was not much higher than Jamka.
    He remembered picking heather to line the caribou-hide sleeping mattresses for the sealskin tents in which they slept. He remembered gathering cotton flowers for use with dried moss to make wicks for the seal-oil lamps. He remembered picking crowberries and blueberries and cranberries to be dried for Mama's winter cooking. Red bearberries ripened in the fall.
    Most of all, he remembered going hunting for the first time with his papa for musk oxen and caribou and wolves and hares. Hares were hunted by the thousands, as much for their skin, which would be made into socks, as for their meat. Eider ducks were snared.
    Fishing for Arctic char, food for man and dog, began in the spring through lake and river ice. In the fall, the ice was sometimes so transparent the fish could be seen swimming beneath Alika's boots.
    During the spring and summer hunting, fishing, and food gathering, Alika's family often met friends and neighbors from Nunatak, sharing food and talk and songs, sometimes throat singing. Standing face-to-face, they'd make a sound in their throats without opening their mouths. The sounds were inspired by those of the birds or other animals. Mama was very good at it.
    The shared food cooked by the women always tasted better than the food of winter. It could be smelled a mile away as the hunters returned to the campsites. The men occasionally did something special, like placing hot rocks in caribou stomachs filled with blood, to make an instant pudding. Alika loved that.
    Beginning in May, the musk oxen shed large parts of their underfur, and it was gathered to be woven by the women. Almost everything on the tundra—animals, birds, and plants—was gathered. The migratory birds would begin to arrive, pleasing Sulu. And seal pups would be born out on the strait.
    Alika clearly remembered summers when the wolves got to a herd of musk oxen before the hunters. The musk oxen formed a circle, with the cows inside, and the wolves attacked. The bulls on the outside of the circle rammed the wolves as best they could, and the hunters shot the wolves and then the musk oxen.
    Thinking about those days, from the time of childhood until the past spring and summer, Alika felt desolate and sad, lonelier than ever.
    He reached across Jamka's belly to put his hand on his brother's shoulder. Sulu stirred but did not awaken. Alika soon went to uneasy sleep.

    The floes, common in the Greenland Strait during
the long winters, were sometimes occupied by seal hunters,
going out in their kayaks, risking high winds
and blizzards.

13
    In the first week of the
kabloonas'
January, the moon was very near the horizon, so it was not much assistance to Alika's hunting. Two days later, Jamka found three possible seal holes, but it was too cold for Alika to sit at them. Sulu stayed home.
    Alika took the carbine with him, of course. But he shook with cold and could not hold the rifle steady. His fingers were numb despite his mitts. He would not have been able to pull the trigger should a bear have appeared.
    Every day they'd go outside for a few minutes to stand in the blackness and look at the
iglu,
seeing the warm light of the
qulliq
through the nearly transparent blocks of snow. It seemed to be the only light in a planet of ebony.
    On the tenth morning of January, a towering berg slammed into the stern of their ice ship, shaking it, pushing from behind, and then finally spinning away in the wind and the currents.
    Watching it go, Sulu asked, "What else can happen to us?"
    Alika forced a laugh. "Not much. A berg knocked us loose from shore. A bear stole our food. We almost got lost in a blizzard. We got frostbitten. What did I miss?"
    "We've been missing the feast every week!"
    "I hadn't thought about