It is a cold knife-blade of a night in the white land as you wait for the snowflake girl.
The snowstorm tears at your tent like an angrly giant child as you huddle inside, warming your frostbite-covered hands in the heat of the oilburner flame, cheeks blushed and burning from the long day of struggling against the icy wind. Outside, the dogs have dug themselves snowy nests, and you marvel at their constitution: the sight of them rising from the snowdrifts in the morning,after a long, long, night, shaking themselves vigorously and shedding the snow from their fur like a second skin is nothing short of a miracle. But then this is a country of miracles, strange and terrible.
Igaarjuk warned you from going again as you set out from the mission, dark broad face furrowed with concern. “She belongs to Naarssuk now”, he said angrily, eyes as black and sharp as his whalebone harpoon. “Naarssuk too was once a girl who did not want to marry.”
As the wind rose and you cracked the whip to send the dogs underway, towards the inland ice, he trodded back into his snow hut, squeezing the crucifix he had laboriously carved from a walrus tusk, muttering Inuit curses as he went.
You put out the oilburner, drink some water melted from snow and chew on a strip of dried meat in the dark, listening to the song Naarssuk, the lady of snowstorms, is singing outside. The salt bites the lacerations in your lips but that is not the only thing that brings tears to your eyes. There were many nights like this before, her naked unwashed body warm against yours, your own private sweaty universe impregnable to the cold outside. And you wonder again why you did not see the signs, did not hear the fear in the beating of her heart against your own. The white land makes you blind: in the snow, the eyes forget how to see.
“I want to take you beyond the sea with me”, you told her, caressing her oval face, her straight black hair. “To the land where there is no ice and no one hunts. There are big stone huts that touch the sky, and the kayaks are made of iron. I want to show it to you.”
You should have known when she did not answer, just kissed you quickly, uncertainly, eyes wide open and serious, and held you close.
In the morning she was gone, her bare footprints half-filled with freshly fallen snow.
Outside, the wind dies suddenly, and you know it is time. You light your lantern, grab your heavy rifle, pull on your furry mittens and stumble through the tent flap. Your limbs are heavy and weary from the long hours spent motionless, and the chill feels almost good on your hot face. The light from the lantern draws a small circle in the darkness as snowflakes drift down, tiny constellations so unlike the minuscule ice meteors that seemed to bore their way through your fur coat and into the flesh and bone beneath during your long journey. The lead dog pokes it nose from a snowdrift suddenly, sniffing the air and growling: after a few soothing words from you, it settles down again, curling up against one of its companions.
You start walking into the dark, leaving the tent to turn into a low round snow mound behind you, not sure you can find your way back but not really caring. You are wandering through a starry galaxy: the temperature has gone up slightly and the snowflakes are now big, six-spoked ice mandalas that give you wet kisses as they melt on your skin. Somehow, teasingly, they find their way under your fur hood and sent thin trickles of cold water running down your back. They build nests in your eyebrows and beard, first melting and then freezing into little clumps of ice. You stumble on, the light of the lantern playing in the tiny crystals that cling to your eyelashes. The snowdrifts become thicker until you’re actually wading through them, sweating.
Then the wind rises again and suddenly there are faces in the night, their eyes and mouths gaping black holes furiously orbited by snowflakes. They swirl around you like a flock of carrion birds but you ignore them, knowing that they will fade back into the white snow noise if you try to focus on them, leading you astray from your path. They are the least of the ersgisavut, the others, not to be feared. And so you make your way through the thickening snow, cold seeping through your clothes and into your heart.
You arrive to a ridge, a fracture where two vast sheets of ice have collided, exerting enormous pressure against one another and creating a small mountain range in the white flatland. It rises up like the spine of some long-dead, ice-entombed behemoth, and in its shadow she comes to you.
The wind assembles her from snowflakes like a three-dimensional puzzle, the ice crystals swirling, interlocking, extending, unfolding. At first, she is a transparent sketch drawn with broad white brushstrokes, then something more solid: a smiling sculpture that emerges from the falling snow when everything unnecessary is chipped away by the gale. She is something beyond the ephemeral ersgisavut: her skin seems solid, although she is white, so very white, no color at all, not in her hair or nipples or lips, and the air around her is so cold that breathing is difficult.
As you gasp for breath, trying to form the words that you came here to speak, she takes a step forward, touching your cheek. Her fingers are like needles, so cold that they feel like hot irons, but you do not flinch. Her eyes are pure, clear ice, perfect smooth lenses refracting light into whatever remains of her mind. She is smiling, tiny icicle teeth glinting in the beam of the lantern, which flutters and almost goes out.
Finally, you muster enough air and courage to speak, teeth chattering.
“I’m going away.”
She cocks her head slightly to one side and draws her hand back, leaving her touch burning on your cheek.
“This is the last time.”
Speaking is becoming harder as the cold numbs your lips and cheeks, and her ice eyes bore into yours, hard and angry.
“I thought… I wanted to follow you. But I am too warm. Too soft. I want to go home. It’s been too long.”
You are tired. There is frost in the marrow of your bones. The many, many scars left by her fingers and lips ache under your clothes and deeper. The memories of many nights like this swim in your mind: making love to the winter’s daughter, hurting her with your body heat, crying in pain inside her, punishing your flesh in her frozen perfection. How the white land let you live through it all, you do not know.
You only want to be warm again.
You swing the lantern in a wide arc and connect with her head. It breaks, shards of glass mingling with fragments of ice, and flaming oil spills over her, melting deep hollow pockmarks in her face and white body. She weeps burning tears and comes apart as the hot liquid cuts into her like a knife, dissolving her into half-molten fragments of ice and snow.
Naarssuk’s song rises around you and the flames die. The ersgisavut scream their fury. There is salt on your cheeks again. The barrel of the rifle feels like her mouth on your lips, the cold freezing your skin to it like a lover.
Its hot breath carries you away from the white land and the girl who did not want to marry.