Andrea Barrett - Voyage of the Narwhal

He said something to Annie and stepped away. Annie’s hands darted like birds and paused, holding up a shapely web. “This represents a caribou,” Zeke said.

Alexandra tried to see a creature in the loops and whorls, not knowing that, for Annie, it was as if the stage had suddenly filled with beautiful animals. Not knowing that for Annie this evening moved as if the angef(of( who’d brought Zeke to them had bewitched her, putting her into a trance in which she both was and was not on this stage. The angekok had shared with her the secret fire that let him see in the dark, to the heart of things. For her Zeke’s bird net wasn’t a broomstick and knotted cotton but a narwhal’s tusk and plaited sinews; on her fingers she felt the fat she’d scraped from the seal. She was home, and she was also here, doing what she’d been told in a dream to do.

She was to watch these people, ranged in tiers above her, and commit them to memory, so that she could bring a vision of them to her people back home. Their pointed faces and bird colored garments; the way they gathered in great crowds but didn’t touch each other or share their food. Their tools, their cooking implements, their huts that couldn’t be moved when the weather changed. In a dream she’d heard her mother’s voice, singing the song that had risen from her tribe’s first sight of the white men.

Her mother had been a small girl on the summer day when floating islands with white wings had appeared by the narrow edge of ice off Cape York. From the islands hung little boats, which were lowered to the water; these spat out sickly men in blue garments, who couldn’t make themselves understood but who offered bits of something that looked like ice, which held the image of human faces; round dry tasteless things to eat; parts of their garments, which weren’t made of skins.

“At first,” her mother had said, “we thought the spirits of the air had come to us.” On the floating island her mother had seen a fat, pink, hairless animal, a man with eyes concealed behind ovals of unmelting ice, bulky objects on which to sit, something like a frozen arm, with which to hit something like a needle. The two men who’d stepped first on the ice had worn hats shaped like cooking pots. Through them, her people had learned they weren’t alone in the world.

Much later, when Annie was grown, she’d had her mother’s experience to guide her when the other strangers arrived. Kane and his men had taught Annie to understand their ungainly speech, and Annie had learned that the world was larger than she’d understood, though much of it was unfortunate, even cursed. Elsewhere, these visitors said, were lands with no seals, no walrus, no bears; no sheets of colored light singing across the sky. She couldn’t understand how these people survived. They’d been like children, dependent on her tribe for clothes, food, sledges, dogs; surrounded by things which were of no use to them and bereft of women. Like children they gave their names to the landscape, pretending to discover places her people had known for generations.

From them she’d gained words for the visions of her mother’s childhood: a country called England and another called America; men called officers; ships, sails, mirrors, biscuits, cloth, pig, eyeglasses, chair. Wood, which came from a giant version of the tiny shrubs they knew. Hammer and nails. Later she’d added the words Zeke had taught her while he lived with them; then the names for the vast array of unfamiliar things she’d encountered here. In the dream her mother had given her this task: to look closely at all around her, and to remember everything. To do this while guarding her son.

Her hands darted and formed another shape, which Zeke claimed represented ponds amid hills but in which she saw her home. She felt the warm liver of the freshly killed seal, she tasted sweet blood in her mouth. In the gaslights she saw the moon and the sun, brother and sister who’d quarreled and now chased each other across the sky. At first her mother had thought the strangers must come from these sources of light. Her hands flew in the air.

“Can you see what she’s doing?” Alexandra whispered to Erasmus. “I can’t see what she’s making.”

“I have to go,” Erasmus said. “We have to go. Can we go?”

HE HADN’T EXPECTED the exhibition to pain him so much. Back at Linnaeus’s house, Lucy said, “Well, of course I wish he’d mentioned you. But still it was interesting, wasn’t it? You should have stayed until the end, he had Annie and Tom sing some Esquimaux songs. The way she ate the raw fish…” Lucy shuddered, yet she was smiling.

“She’s sick,” Erasmus said. “She’s miserable. Zeke has no right to show her off like that, like a trained bear…”

“It was the stage lights that were making her perspire,” Linnaeus said. “And I think he does Annie’s people a service, as well as himself. The more people see what Esquimaux life is like, the more they’ll respect their ways. How can that be anything but good for her and her tribe?”

Erasmus retreated to his stuffy room, where he tossed and turned and dreamed about the copper kettle packed with relics, which had slipped beneath the ice. In his dream the prayer book and the treatise on steam engines, the silver cutlery and the mahogany barometer case had all sprouted eyes and were staring at him; the kettle was staring; the walrus skin sealing the top was staring. Annie, across that crowded space, was staring directly into his eyes, as Lavinia had stared when she was a girl often and he’d left, bereft and barely aware of her, to join his first expedition.

Only Annie had met his eyes in that theater, he thought as he woke. Only Annie — as only Annie knew if Zeke’s stories were true. He’d gone to the exhibition hoping her behavior might give him a clue; hoping, perhaps, that she’d interrupt the flow of Zeke’s words and say, “But it wasn’t like that.” Instead she’d performed in silence, gazing across the hall at him.

For a week he tried to resist what he knew he should do. He visited Copernicus, who had settled into his new place and begun another painting, this one of Lancaster Sound in mid-July. Into the vista he was crowding everything Erasmus had described to him, the whales and belugas and seals and walrus churning through the water, the fulmars and guillemots whirring and diving, the murres and kittiwakes guarding their eggs from the foxes. Everywhere life, vibrant and massed, and the streaming, improbable light.

“I should go to Baltimore,” Erasmus said.

“What can you do for them?” Copernicus said. “No matter how much you disapprove, you can’t stop Zeke — everyone loved his talk, he’s having a huge success. And he needs the money now.

He added a blue shadow to the flank of a beluga. Erasmus found the painting beautiful, but he kept seeing Annie in that landscape and soon he left.

He tried to work. He tried not to think, over the weekend, about Zeke and Annie and Tom in Baltimore; when the newspaper reported another huge crowd he tried not to see Annie’s face. He went to the engraving firm on Monday and met Alexandra at the pair of desks placed back to back, which Linnaeus and Humboldt had grudgingly granted them. Six square feet for her and six for him, in the dead space in the center of the storage room. The light was terrible. From the pages of Dr. Boerhaave’s journal, and the sketchier notes of his own, he was trying to build a description of some peculiar fossils they’d found before winter had confined them to the ship. A jawbone that seemed almost crocodilian; leaf casts resembling gingkos. Alexandra was drawing one of these.

“How could such a fossil be in that place?” she asked. “Where now there are no trees?”