The Quality of Silence

  The state trooper has pulled off his mask and I can see from his face that he thinks this is a nasty place too. He might have taken off his mask because he knows I find it a bit scary; or because his face got too warm right next to the bonfire.

  ‘And you built the really good aputiak?’ I say to Dad, making our special sign for it.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘With a hole for the smoke and a door made of a hide,’ I say.

  ‘Exactly. I’d learned a few lessons the hard way, Puggle.’

  When he’d finished building the aputiak, he lit the qulliq and put Akiak’s laptop near to it, wrapped in the camping towel. After four hours, the screen glowed and he felt he was no longer alone. He hadn’t been there when the villagers were killed, when they had needed him, but now he was at least able to bear witness to what had happened. He attached his camera cable to Akiak’s MacBook Air, which automatically went to iPhoto. He pressed ‘Import All’ and his photos downloaded onto the laptop.

  He opened the first photo and started typing the co-ordinates of where it was taken in the description box, but the screen flickered off and on and he was afraid he didn’t have long before it packed up. He typed as fast as he could for each photo, just copying the numbers he’d written in pencil, no time for anything else.

  He already knew the co-ordinates of Anaktue and he put those with the photo of the raven.

  He’d taken photos of the fracking wells and pits, shadowy in the light of the bonfire, and taken co-ordinates, but there was no proof in the photos of any poison; the proof was in his photos of animals and birds.

  He needed to get the photos onto the internet as a safe place for his record, away from the vagaries of ice and damp and extreme cold, but first he would email Yasmin; somehow translate his love for her into articulated thought and words.

  He typed in her address then the screen flickered again and failed. He wrapped the laptop up and put it by the qulliq. An hour later, the screen came on faintly. Only the trackpad worked. The keyboard didn’t work at all. He pressed letter after letter, but none of them responded. He felt as if he’d been made mute. He thought about Ruby when people didn’t understand that her signs were words and how brave she was.

  Maybe he could still send the photos and co-ordinates. He had Yasmin’s address and the trackpad worked. He left the aputiak.

  ‘I emailed the photos from over there,’ Dad says. He points at a hill, like a huge black cut-out against the orange light of the bonfire. ‘I had to get a clear line of sight to a satellite.’

  ‘It must have really hurt your feet,’ I say. Because inside the aputiak I saw his poor black toes.

  ‘It hurt a bit, but not too much,’ he says. ‘Frostbite’s not such a big deal in feet. Worst-case scenario is that I lose a toe or two, and you can get by missing the odd toe.’

  He says that just to me with his hand-voice.

  I take his hands and look at all of his fingers, really carefully. He smiles and he signs that his fingers are all absolutely fine.

  The climb had been hard, his feet numbed with frostbite, the ground uneven and treacherous with ice. He reached the top and tried to wedge his torch so he could see to plug in the connecting cable between the laptop and his terminal, but the torch kept falling over and getting covered in snow. If the laptop screen had been bright it would have been easier, but it was dim and cracked and gave no light for him to see by.

  He took off his mittens and, wearing thin liners, felt along the connection holes with his fingertips to try to plug in the cable..

  He got the terminal and laptop connected. The terminal searched for a satellite. Using the trackpad on the laptop, he opened iPhoto and then clicked on the photo of the musk ox. He clicked the ‘Share’ option and then email. Using the trackpad, he checked the description box so the co-ordinates would be sent automatically with the photo. He’d typed in Yasmin’s address before the keyboard had frozen so he used the trackpad to copy and paste her address into the recipient box. The subject box automatically filled in with the number of the photo from his digital camera. Before he pressed the send icon he tried the keyboard, desperate for it to work, so he could write to Yasmin. The keyboard was still frozen.

  The terminal got a satellite connection and he sent the musk ox photo, but when he tried to send the next photo, he lost the connection and had to start over. He knew he could only send a small sample of the photos he had taken. Every five minutes, he’d put his hands into his mittens until they were warm again. After half an hour the laptop screen went out. He had to return to the aputiak and wait till it flickered into life then climb the icy slope again. His mind sluggish and his body clumsy, he lost all track of time,. He kept on hoping that his keyboard would work, just enough, just for his initial even, to tell Yasmin it was him.

  He’d felt the storm building all around him; the wind sharpening against him, the snow falling faster and thicker until it was blinding him. On his last trip down from the hill, he had to crawl, the glacial wind whipping around him, stripping him of warmth; the vicious cold felt vastly impersonal and intimately cruel.

  He didn’t know what day it was any more and he thought out here there were no days, no turning of the Earth to reach the face of the sun, but a dark night of the soul in which only violent storms broke time into different pieces.

  He reached the aputiak and, miraculous to him, the qulliq was still burning. As he sheltered, he thought of Kaiyuk and Corazon, sharing their skills with him.

  Daddy hasn’t said anything about Qaukliq and Siku but those are the only two huskies he had left.

  ‘Were Qaukliq and Siku in the aputiak with you, in the megatron storm?’ I ask him.

  He looks sad and I know something horrible happened. He tells me they weren’t there when he got back to the aputiak from sending his emails. He says they’d lost their proper musher and the lead dog, and they were really hungry so they’d turned wild and half mad. They had gone out into the storm and he couldn’t go and find them.

  I want him not be sad, not to think about the dogs.

  ‘After the storm,’ I ask him, ‘did you see the stars?’

  ‘Weren’t they amazing?’ he says.

  We’re signing to each other, so it’s private.

  ‘You sent Mum a photo,’ I say.

  ‘I didn’t know she was seeing them herself for real,’ he says and he smiles at me. ‘Since when did you get so grown up?’ he asks. I think he knows I was trying to cheer him up.

  ‘You kept your hands warm,’ I say.

  ‘I had my toasty mittens and a qulliq.’

  ‘Did you think anyone was coming to rescue you?’ I ask.

  ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Honestly.’

  ‘To start with, I thought maybe, but as time went on I wasn’t very hopeful.’I think that means he was sure nobody would rescue him.

  ‘Even with your co-ordinates?‘ I say. Because even though the co-ordinates were to show where the animals and birds were, they also showed where Dad was too.

  ‘I thought they were a bit cryptic,’ he says and I know that ‘cryptic’ means like a really hard crossword. ‘And no one knew it was me,’ he says.

  ‘I did,’ I say. ‘For most of the time.’

  Dad takes my hand so for a little bit I can’t talk.

  ‘You didn’t have any food left,’ I say.

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘You said the qulliq only has a bit of time left and the bonfire’s going to go out too.’

  ‘It was going to get very dark,’ he says.

  It would be so frightening to be here on your own in the dark and cold.

  ‘But Mum worked out the co-ordinates,’ I say.

  ‘While driving all the way across Alaska,’ Dad says with a !! expression on his face.

  ‘And you saw our flare,’ I say.

  ‘And heard your mum making a big racket.’

  ‘And then you made a big racket back?’

  ‘I did. And I saw you and Mum runnin
g towards me. You are both the most amazing people I have ever met in my entire life—’

  My bracelet vibrates and Dad’s hands aren’t making words any more.

  A siren screeched across the darkness. Yasmin traced the sound to the helicopter, two hundred metres behind them.

  ‘Isn’t he handcuffed?’ Matt said.

  ‘No. Because he’s not going anywhere,’ Captain Grayling said. ‘He isn’t a threat now. You have my word. I’ll go and stop that infernal racket.’

  While Yasmin had listened to Matt’s story she’d been too preoccupied by the dangers of his journey to think about hers and so had been able to push the tanker driver aside.

  When she’d looked out at the darkness, she’d looked towards the gently glowing aputiak in front of them, not to the helicopter. Now she felt him behind her again, oppressively close. She couldn’t imagine him as a man with a face, but as blue lights stalking her; a siren as a voice.

  The state trooper’s gone to turn off the noise in the helicopter, so it’s just Mum and Dad and me by the bonfire. They always sign everything in front of me or let me read their lips and I think they’d like to be private.

  ‘I’ll go to the aputiak,’ I say. ‘I’m a bit cold. And sleepy.’

  it’s partly true. The aputiak is glowing all yellowy warm through its snow walls, a snug cave.

  ‘I’ll take you,’ Dad says.

  ‘It’s just over there, Dad. I’m grown up enough to walk a little way on my own.’

  ‘You are,’ he says and gives me his torch.

  Yasmin pulled her mask over her face, the bonfire’s warmth was ebbing.

  ‘That photo of stars . . .’ she said.

  ‘It was a kind of goodbye,’ Matt said.

  After the terrible storm, the sky turning bright with stars had been wondrous and he’d thought of Yasmin and taken the photo. He remembered how he’d concentrated on the practicality of it: taking the photo and plugging the lead from his camera into the laptop and using the trackpad to put the co-ordinates from the fracking well photos. The chance of her realising the stars photo was from him, and of understanding the co-ordinates, was remote and he’d known that wasn’t the reason he was sending it.

  ‘A kind of goodbye?’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A touch pessimistic,’ she said and even with a face mask on he could tell she was smiling.

  ‘A touch,’ he admitted. ‘That wasn’t the first time I thought I’d peg it.’

  ‘Peg it?’

  ‘I’m trying to do understatement.’

  ‘You’re doing it very well. That was in the first storm?’

  ‘Yup. When my tent cartwheeled off across the tundra and my laptop was frozen and I hadn’t thought about the aputiak. Couldn’t think straight at all.’

  ‘You had exposure and frostbite and were exhausted. It’s not surprising you couldn’t think straight.’

  The sound of the siren snapped off. Captain Grayling must have reached the helicopter.

  ‘But I did think of you,’ he said.

  She kissed him.

  ‘I need to see who’s in the helicopter, don’t I?’ she said.

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘That’s why you let Ruby go off to the aputiak?’

  ‘No. But I did know we’d need to talk about it.’

  She knew he felt violently protective and loved him for not making this about him; for not marching over to the helicopter saying he’d kill him; for not dominating her anxiety with his aggression.

  ‘I’ll have to see him at some point,’ she said.

  ‘In a courtroom. When he’s got big burly guards next to him.’

  ‘Yes.’

  But for so long he’d been at her back, stalking her. She had to turn round and face him.

  I got near to Dad’s aputiak when my torch shone on a little bit of brown fur on the snow. I knew it was Siku. He’s the only husky with a stripe of brown down his back. I think he must have tried to get back to Dad to die.

  I tried to pick him up but he’s really heavy, so I’m dragging him over the snow. I’m not going to leave him. I know he can’t really feel anything, but I still don’t want him to be on his own in the snow.

  I get him inside the aputiak. And then I cry a bit about everything Daddy’s told me.

  Fifty metres from the helicopter, Yasmin and Matt met Captain Grayling.

  ‘Do you know who he is?’ Yasmin said. ‘Have you found out?’

  ‘His name is Jack Deering. He’s owner and CEO of Am-Fuels. It’s a hydraulic fracturing company.’

  ‘So these are his wells?’ Matt asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  Yasmin tried to remember where she had seen Am-Fuels’ name. It was at the trucker stop when Adeeb was taken ill; in the parking area there’d been three Am-Fuels trucks with prefab houses. All of them had headed back to Fairbanks, clearing out. And at Fairbanks, before they’d even left, they’d had to wait to turn out of the trucker yard; Am-Fuels trucks had been coming in.

  ‘I want to see him,’ Yasmin said.

  She was pretty sure she knew who he was. She carried on walking towards the helicopter.

  The light was on inside the passenger cabin. She went closer and through the window saw the side of his face; he hadn’t yet seen her.

  She remembered the airport and her desperation to get to Matt; the two merging so that her desperation had also felt frenetic and loud .

  He had called himself Jack Williams not Jack Deering. He’d told her the last flight for the day had left and offered to help. He’d seemed kind; he’d had his daughter with him. But Jack Deering and the girl in the queue hadn’t interacted in any way; he’d needed an excuse to be there. He’d probably followed them from when they arrived off the flight from England.

  She remembered that most of the men in the departure lounge had been wearing F.B.F. caps, but a few, including Jack, had been wearing Am-Fuels caps; Silesian Stennet had said F.B.F. had been taken over by Am-Fuels. No one had known who Jack was, because how often would the boss mingle with the workers? It was probably only their departure lounge that had the announcement about debris on the Deadhorse runway.

  Jack’s loathing of Silesian, the green activist, had been genuine, but not protective of them. And he’d come after them to make sure Silesian didn’t say anything more. Because Silesian was on the right track. Only it wasn’t poisonous fumes from Am-Fuels’ wells travelling forty miles north to Anaktue that killed the villagers, but poison in the river.

  It would have been easy for Jack to take a tanker; he probably owned a fleet of them.

  Inside the helicopter, Jack turned. She met his look and held it. Just a man after all. He was the first to turn away.

  ‘He’ll be sent to prison,’ Matt said. ‘In America. So thousands of miles away from you and Ruby.’

  ‘Yes.’

  They walked back to the bonfire, from where they could see the warm glow of the aputiak, with Ruby safe inside. Grayling was in the cockpit, finding out how long the replacement chopper would be.

  A few individual flakes of snow were falling to the ground, taking their time in the stillness.

  I’m stroking Siku and I HATE the man who hurt him. I know it’s the man in the helicopter. I want him to know what he’s done to Siku and all the other animals. I want to tell him that I AM NOT AFRAID of him and he didn’t stop us finding Dad. I want to be brave like Mum and Dad. I say goodbye to Siku and leave the aputiak. It’s snowing a bit and the flakes sting like sparks and I have to pull up my face mask. I go around the edge of the bonfire so Mum and Dad don’t see me. They’re standing close, like two hands held together. Mum’s face is inside his big parka hood and I’m sure they’re kissing so it’s good I left them on their own.

  I’m getting closer to the helicopter, Mum and Dad and the bonfire are a long way behind me. Mum told me she used to be really really afraid of the dark, but one night she made herself pull up her bedroom blind and look at the dark and inste
ad of just black she saw gazillions of stars.

  I can see through the window of the helicopter. It’s light inside. A man turns towards me and I quickly turn off my torch.

  I thought it would be the man with the smelly hands, but it’s the smiley smarmy one with the super-expensive watch that he just wears on any old day.

  There’s another man in there. It’s the state trooper. I go a bit closer and I can see both their faces in the light and I don’t think they can see me in the dark.outside. The state trooper doesn’t have his face mask on. The smiley smarmy man looks cross and he says, ‘Oh for God’s sake, David . . .’ Then something I can’t see, then the smiley smarmy man says: ‘We found him . . .’ and there’s lots of other things, but I can’t lip-read them clearly enough to be sure.

  The state trooper is getting out of the helicopter. He looks angry, then he puts on his face mask.

  I’m running to Mum and Dad by the bonfire. But I haven’t put my torch on and I fall over. The state trooper walks right past me, not even seeing me.

  He’s with Mum and Dad by the bonfire. The flames show up his black rubber mask over his face.

  I stand a little way behind him and sort of to the side, so that he can’t see me but I’m hoping Mum or Dad will. And them Mum sees me, and I put my fingers to my mouth – shoosh. Mum looks surprised, but she doesn’t say anything to the state trooper. I sign to her, ‘The bad man called the state trooper David’ I say, finger-spelling ‘state trooper’ and ‘David’. ‘And then he said, “We found him.”’

  Mum looks at the state trooper, like she’s super-interested in what he’s saying, so he won’t see her hands by her waist finger-spelling to me: ‘Go to the aputiak as fast as you can.’ I don’t want to leave Mum and Dad, but I will do what she says. She made Dad’s and my sign for aputiak, so now it’s her sign too.

  Matt saw Yasmin signing to him. He thought she was going to say something intimate and wanted privacy in front of Captain Grayling and Captain Grayling must have thought so too, because he smiled, a little paternally.

  ‘Did you try to phone me?’ she asked in sign. And then hurriedly, ‘Tell me in sign.’

  ‘Yes. In the first storm. When my tent blew away and I couldn’t think straight. I needed to hear your voice.’