Ice Island (4 page)

Tatum set her math notebook on the dresser. Her mom had given her new problems.
Sixty-two teams started the Iditarod. Each had sixteen dogs in their team. Three teams scratched when canine flu struck their dogs. Two mushers had to scratch—one dislocated a shoulder and one just gave up. Of the teams left
,
each had the required eight booties per dog, either on their dogs or in the sled. Calculate the total number of booties on the trail
.

Tatum knew booties could last up to ninety miles, depending on snow conditions. One book said dogs could run twelve miles an hour on a fast trail. Her dad made up questions about weather. Tatum didn’t find wind speed very interesting, so she did those problems last.

“Mom?” Tatum called down the hall. She found her mother standing barefoot in the shower, scrubbing the tiles. “Is it okay if I take Bandit out?”

Her mom looked unsure. “I don’t know, Tatum, it’s—”

“Just to check out the store,” she said, looking at her watch. “It’s only three-thirty, and it won’t be dark for another few hours.”

“If you promise to come right back.” Her mom’s voice sounded like it was coming from an echo chamber. “And see if they have any fresh fruit, honey. Wallet’s on my dresser.”

“Will do.”

Bandit plunged down the steps, trying to get a grip on the slippery wooden treads. She wound up flying through the air like she’d planned it.

“You could be in a circus,” Tatum said, and hooked the leash onto the ring of her dog’s collar.

Bandit followed close beside her, sniffing her way down the street as if everything belonged to her. She stopped regularly to mark the snowy ground.

Tatum smiled, thinking about her dad. He always joked, “Never eat yellow snow!”

Down the street, a group of boys were using bone mallets to hit rock balls. Alaskan croquet. Tatum passed other kids playing in the snow, stacking small blocks of ice like Legos. Two other kids had set a dented surfboard over a barrel like a teeter-totter. Each straddled an end, bouncing higher and higher. Where had they gotten a surfboard out here?

“Hey,” she called to them.

They waved back. “Hey!”

She cut behind a house with a large plywood box in its yard, probably winter storage for meat. Several houses had walrus-skin boats in front, upside down on sawhorses. The boats’ frames were similar to those she’d seen in a museum, built without nails.

Snowmobiles were parked by the store, like cars in a lot. Rifles were strapped behind seats. Icicles hung from the roof. Tatum wound Bandit’s leash around a post and knelt down to hug her. “I’ll be right back.”

Bandit tilted her head and put two paws on Tatum’s lap.

Inside, a kid in shorts and a T-shirt worked the cash register. Behind him a faded map of the Iditarod was tacked to the wall. The sweep of slopes was so massive it was hard to believe it was earth.

Someday I’ll be out there mushing with Dad. We’ll need two sturdy sleds and about thirty-two dogs
, Tatum thought. It might take five years to gather and train two teams. By then Tatum would be eighteen, the legal age to enter the race.

An old woman in a traditional
kuspuk
pullover was talking about a renegade polar bear. “Jonah saw it on pack ice near the dump last night.” She was bent over a cane, her forehead streaked with soot. “A thousand pounds of
mean.
”

The kid bagged her groceries. “Better keep your dogs in tonight.”

Tatum didn’t want to think about what
that
meant. Her dad had taught her the Latin name for “polar bear,”
Ursus maritimus
. It means “maritime bear,” because polar bears hunt from sea ice. “They are the world’s largest land carnivore,” he’d said.

She walked past TV dinners in a freezer. Food and supplies were flown in by plane. That doubled the price. A half gallon of ice cream: nine dollars. A dusty box of laundry soap: three times as much. Who could afford these prices?

She picked up a wilted head of lettuce.
Forget it
. Bananas, apples, and oranges looked even worse. She grabbed a bag of kombu candy, her mom’s favorite. She said it tasted like taffy. Tatum thought it tasted like what it was: boiled seaweed, dried and then rolled in sugar.

“Do polar bears really come into the village?” Tatum
asked the kid at the register. She’d only seen one polar bear in her life. It was a tower of stuffed fur standing upright inside a glass case in the lobby of a hotel.

The kid struck a “don’t be stupid” stance. “Only when they’re hungry and crabby—and they’re always both. Dog is their favorite snack food,” he added, making his point. “Life here isn’t as romantic as it looks in movies.”

Tatum paid for the candy and left.

Outside, she heard the familiar whooshing sound. A kid who looked fourteen or fifteen was being pulled by two muscled dogs. He was taller than the boy in the store, but he had the same dark eyes and straight black hair.

Riding the brake, he stopped by the door. His sled had a newer type of flip-up drag brake.

Tatum checked out his dogs. The bigger one was twice the size of the other guy. He was charcoal-gray with a black line running down his spine. His coat was long, and thick as smoke. She’d never seen a sled dog that big before. Most were in the fifty-five-pound range.

Bandit barked and pulled against her leash. The dog worked his way over, sniffing her tail. Tatum reached out to pet him. He growled, showing huge, sharp teeth. She jerked back, shaking.

The kid took off his glove and slapped the dog across his nose. “Knock it off!” he shouted.

The dog dropped his head and tucked his tail between his hind legs. Tatum felt bad, as if she was the reason he’d been punished. “Some dogs don’t like to be petted,” she said, keeping her voice even. “Unless they’re being put in a harness.”

“He’s my uncle’s dog,” the boy said. “Too much wolf bred into him. He’s never learned there’s only one alpha male on a team—and that’s the musher.”

“You race?” she asked, taking Bandit’s leash.

“I’m gearing up for a two-hundred-mile sprint in Kotzebue. Should have a decent snowpack for another month.”

“You fly your dogs to the mainland?” she asked, surprised.

“It’s easy to hitch a ride on a cargo flight,” he said. “Pilots don’t charge me for my dogs or equipment.”

“Cool.”

“Yeah.”

“Is the race like the Jr. Iditarod?” Tatum asked.

“This one’s fourteen and up,” he said. “The winner gets a college scholarship—that’s worth gold around here.”

“Have you run in it before?”

“I came in second last year and got this new sled,” he said easily. “Local businesses donate cold-weather gear.”

“Nice.”

Tatum thought about Beryl and the other Iditarod mushers, equipment packed up, switching from snow boots to rubber ones for the muddy season. Then she told him about her mom filling in at the lodge.

He nodded, like he already knew.

“I’m Tatum. And that’s Bandit.”

“Cole,” he said. “And don’t pay any attention to Wolf. He was raised in Anvil, a village on the other side of the island. Wrangell, he’s my lead dog. Had him from a pup.”

“Ever hear of Beryl Webb?” Tatum asked.

“Heck, yeah. She came in twelfth last year.”

“Twenty-third this time,” she said. “Bandit led her team through Dalzell Gorge.”

Cole whistled, impressed. “That’s one steep canyon—and the creek always has running water. I hear those ice bridges are pretty narrow. If your dogs slow down or cut across at the wrong place, it’s Popsicle time.”

“Scary stuff,” Tatum said.

“Yeah, but that’s not why we do it.”

Tatum knew what he meant.

Cole lifted a crate from his sled, balancing it on his hip. “Too bad you can’t stay until spring thaw. My grandfather and uncle spend all day walking back and forth from the village to the beach checking ice. You have to be able to read snow and ice to be a musher—only they’re checking to see if it’s safe to go hunting.

“They don’t close school for a fifty-below blizzard,” he said, setting the crate beside a snowmobile. “But when a whaling captain catches a bowhead? Everyone’s a butcher, even our school librarian.”

Tatum’s stomach clenched. She remembered the article about whale hunting in
National Geographic
magazine. The frozen shore ran red with blood.

“Maybe I can help with the dogs?” she said. “A training run or something?”

Cole looked at her like he was trying to decide if she was serious. “How much experience do you have?”

“Some.”

“
Some
won’t cut it out here,” he said, and took off.

Tatum let Bandit run loose, taking a different route back. They passed houses with drying racks that held long strips of fish frozen solid. She felt like kicking herself for not sounding more confident.
I should have told Cole all the things I did for Beryl
, she thought miserably.

Bandit barked and made a beeline for a walrus skin, sniffing the dried, curled edges. The hide was stretched flat over a section of chain-link fence and propped on fifty-gallon oil drums to keep it off the ground.

“Come on, girl.”

Bandit darted behind another house where four concrete walls circled a pit the size of a minivan. Two-by-fours were nailed above them like scaffolding. An enormous, dingy yellow hide hung on the rack.

Tatum tried to look away but couldn’t. The polar bear had massive paws and thick curved claws. Dark eyes stared
from a powerful head.
Hunting is a way of life up here
, she kept telling herself.
But that doesn’t mean I have to like it
.

•  •  •

Tatum tried calling her dad after an early dinner of Dinty Moore stew. She stood in the kitchen, annoyed by the constant busy signal. There was always something wrong with the darn lines! She finally gave up.
I’ll try again later
.

The North Slope was one of the few places in the country with a population of less than ten people. The census didn’t count workers like her dad who spent winters living out of a modular lodge.

Four months was too long for him to be gone, even with his visits. But the job paid too much to turn down. Most of what her dad earned went into the fund for the lodge he and her mom were going to build. In the meantime, they got by on their salary from working at Skilak Lodge and her mom’s odd jobs.

Tatum followed her mom outside to watch the sunset. They stood on the porch, drawstrings on their hoods pulled tight. Their breath huffed out like clouds. Bandit’s tail swept the porch, better than a broom.

It was impossible to tell the difference between frozen land and frozen sea. How did mushers know if they’d accidentally driven onto sea ice? Especially where the Iditarod trail hugged the shore between Unalakleet to Koyuk.

One year, a woman got separated from the other mushers in a whiteout. She’d accidentally mushed onto sea ice,
stopping her team a few hundred feet from open water. The winds blew the snow so hard that searchers didn’t find her until the next day. By then her hands and feet were badly frostbitten.

Farther out, icebergs shimmered like giant blue rocks. “Those icebergs look like lopsided buildings,” Tatum said.

Her mom nodded. “Or ghostly cruise ships.”

After a short burst of light the Arctic sun vanished.

The living room felt like a furnace after being outside. Tatum hung her mittens and parka on a nail. Bandit lay sprawled by the door, where it was cooler. “Let’s put on a video,” Tatum said.

Her mom sat down and untied her boots. “Which Iditarod will it be this time?”

“We haven’t watched 1990 lately. That was the last time Susan Butcher won. Eleven days, one hour, fifty-three minutes.” Tatum slid the video in and fast-forwarded to the interview.

“If you deduct the mandatory twenty-four-hour layover—and both eight-hour layovers,” her mom said knowingly. “That means Butcher covered more than a thousand miles in a little more than a week.” She sat back, propping her feet on the coffee table. She laughed when Bandit sniffed her socks.

“When I was growing up we played with dolls,” she said wistfully. “What ever happened to your princess pony?”

“She was pink, remember? Besides, a leg fell off in the washing machine.”

“I suppose a good mother would’ve sewed it back on.”

Tatum shrugged and punched Play. “The Iditarod is a
sport, as popular as football or basketball in the Lower Forty-eight, but the playing field is one million square miles,” the moderator was saying.

The mushers all had haggard faces, hair poking up in greasy snarls. One guy had a black eye, swollen shut. He clutched a whole cheesecake. “Sugar and fat,” he said, holding it like a hamburger. “That’s what we live on out here.”

“Disgusting,” her mom said.

“It’s not as gross as the guy who ate a cube of butter,” Tatum reminded her. “Mushers feed their dogs better than they feed themselves.”

One of Beryl’s manuals said dogs should eat beaver or seal when it was below zero, because those animals have thick layers of fat. Fish was better when it was hot—meaning twenty degrees or warmer—because fish have lots of water in their bodies.

Tatum had asked Beryl about it. “Hot or cold, Bandit will jump hurdles for carrots,” Beryl had replied.

“Thank goodness Dad gave up on this,” her mom said absently.

“What do you mean?” Tatum turned sharply from the TV. “He always talks about the Last Great Race on Earth. How the two of us will be on the trail, out there together. Dad with his team, me with mine, and—”

“Oh, Tatum.” Mom cut her off. “You know he can’t race with that messed-up ankle of his. And it’s so much worse when it’s cold. Can you imagine him trying to stand on the back of a sled? For a thousand miles? In subzero temperatures?”

Tatum knew about the metal plate and screws holding
her dad’s ankle together, the result of a snowmobile accident. But any time he talked about the Iditarod, he’d just laugh and say, “Heck, I’m not going to
walk
to Nome.”

“All he needs is a brace,” Tatum said stubbornly. “A special one with room for heat packs.”

Her mom got up wearily. “Sometimes dreams change, honey.”