Inuit Word Meaning
gussak: term for white people/foreigners
quvyubabniqsuq: whiteout
It was winter. The dawn was cold, and Alyssa’s breath became a silk scarf on the air. Hair bleached white by long summers in the sun drifted on the chilly breath of the wind; the unruly locks framed eyes as clear and blue as the winter sky. These eyes looked out on the ocean now, watching the waves crashing against the beach in a rhythm as steady as a heartbeat.
Several months before, when the days were long and happy, before David had left, Alyssa had stood in this same spot, but not alone then.
“Do you have to go?” Alyssa had asked, leaning into David’s embrace after hours spent playing in the surf.
“I’ll be back before you know it. I promise,” David had asked, smiling. "Wait for me." He had looked at her with eyes full of love, of laughter; his eyes were the color of sunlight shining through the crest of a wave just beginning to break, like green glass. Alyssa wished to see those eyes again with each fresh wave rolling across the sand.
David was a student of animal behavior, and had left to study wolves in Alaska, just for a couple months, he’d said. That had been six months ago. Alyssa couldn’t wait any longer. She didn’t know if she could afford to. So with this last vision of the ocean she and David both loved, Alyssa left her small coastal town. She went north.
The Alaskan sky was opaque, brooding. Not snowing, but heavy with the promise of it. In the past few days, this sky had become a familiar sight to Alyssa. The land itself was a pale mirror of the sky; the tundra was an endless expanse of white. From the plane, the appearance of patches of forest or towns on the tundra had seemed misshapen; splotchy adolescent feathers disfiguring the otherwise unblemished white plumage of a young swan. Nonetheless, the sweeping landscape seemed to hold a swan’s proud and quiet grace.
Two weeks later, Alyssa viewed the sky through the triangle-shaped frame of a tent opening, although the view seemed much less captivating now; now, the heavy clouds seemed only malicious as they sent their biting winds to steal the heat from her body. It was with stiff fingers that Alyssa pulled off her gloves and made herself eat a few strips of jerky; this was the most Alyssa felt she could stomach.
Outside the tent, eight huskies tore into their own meal, suffering none of the girl’s inhibitions. These eight were her only companions.
When Alyssa had arrived in Alaska, it had been in Anchorage. She had hoped that someone might have remembered the young zoology student; around here, he might’ve stuck out. Fair skin, cropped dark hair, a lean physique far from unfit, but slight compared to those who frequented the tundra, particularly in winter. And those eyes… the green of sunlight through the crest of a breaking wave. But when Alyssa described him, she reduced this to simply, “green.”
Those that recalled the young scholar had seen him months ago; it had been assumed that he’d left the North before the arrival of the real cold, as did so many summer visitors. At her firm denials of the possibility, some merely looked uncomfortable, wondering if she could be sure of this. Others, well, the arctic was a dangerous place in any season. Everyone had known one or two that had simply failed to return from its wild expanses; they’d made a simple mistake, perhaps, and the mistake had been fatal.
Alyssa vehemently rejected this idea every time. David couldn’t be dead; she would have felt it if he was, wouldn’t she? A stutter in her heartbeat, a feeling of dread… something. No, David must still be alive, if not in any of the small Alaskan towns, then on the tundra somewhere. David was smart, he would have survived.
