First Light Page 5

  The pup remained motionless for a long moment and then took breath, shuddering. Thea exhaled, realizing that she had stopped breathing herself for a minute, and set the runt quickly to the warmth of his sleeping mother.

  Even the unflappable Dolan was awed. Eight live pups and a healthy mother! Thea gathered all the pups around Cassie and positioned the heater at their backs.

  “Take another look at the runt, Thea,” Dolan said.

  “Is something wrong?” She examined the tiny creature again as he sucked contentedly at his mother's milk. He was a pretty one, with a light-gray coat and—Thea checked all four to make sure—yes, white paws!

  She sucked in her breath. “Dolan …”

  Four white paws: The pup bore the legend's mark.

  When the Settlers arrived in the cold world, they met a pack of wild dogs, or wolf-dogs, that they named the Chikchu. The Chikchu became the Settlers' guides; the dogs showed them safe places to cross the ice and helped them hunt for skins to wear and food to eat. It was written that Sarah, Grace's granddaughter, was particularly close to her Chikchu, a dark-colored dog with four white paws.

  Every Chikchu in Gracehope was descended from those first dogs. Some were black, some all-white, somehad dark masks across their eyes, or four dark paws, or three white and one dark, or two of each. But never in anyone's memory was there a Chikchu born with four white paws. Until tonight.

  A legend had grown: People said that Sarah's white-footed Chikchu was a symbol of the Settlers' journey to Gracehope, and that another would not be born until it was safe to cross the cold world again. Thea had never believed it.

  Dolan gazed at the pup. “He's weak, and small. We'll keep an eye on him before saying anything.” He stroked Norma and broke into a smile. “You did wonderfully.”

  They grinned at each other. When Thea started yawning, Dolan said, “Don't worry about the timelog. You've done more than nine hours' work tonight. Go home.”

  Thea shook her head. “No favors,” she said firmly. “You know I have to be extra careful. Anyway, I'd like to stay until Cassie wakes.”

  Dolan shrugged. “Suit yourself, girl.”

  Thea stretched out on the sand, resting her head on the edge of the whelping box, where the pups now slept as soundly as Cassie did. Sometime later, she was dimly aware that Dolan was slipping a fur under her head; Norma's tail swept her arm as they walked away again. Grateful, she slept.

  NORTHWEST GREENLAND

  In America, you're always in a place with a name: You're in New York City, or in Orange County, or in the middle of Lake Huron. You are somewhere.

  In Greenland, Peter learned, things are different. If you aren't in one of the little towns that dot the coastline, you aren't necessarily in any named place at all. When Peter asked where exactly in Greenland they would be living, his father always said they would be “up on the ice sheet, near a town called Qaanaaq.”

  From the Air National Guard plane, Qaanaaq was alittle cluster of colored squares next to the ocean. His father shouted to Peter (you had to shout to be heard over the engine) that the squares were small wooden houses made with lumber brought in by boat. There were no trees in Greenland.

  Peter's whole body was vibrating with the rattling plane. There were no passenger seats. Instead, they sat back against some thick red netting that was slung from floor to ceiling, anchored by big metal clips. It was also cold. Hours before, Jonas had turned to him and shouted, “Is your butt numb yet?”

  “Like ice!” Peter had shouted back.

  The plane circled, giving Peter's stomach a lurch, and then started down. He stretched to see what the pilot was aiming for, but there was only flat, white ice below.

  “Why do they call it Greenland if it's covered in ice?” Miles had asked him. Peter had no idea.

  Now he leaned toward Jonas and yelled the same question.

  Jonas smiled and cupped his hands around his mouth to shout. “False advertising!”

  When the plane landed, Peter was stiff and cold. One of the pilots grabbed him by the hand and pulled him to his feet. He wished he could stagger into a coffee shop and order a hot chocolate and French fries. He got to the door of the plane and saw nothing but white groundand gray sky. He jumped down next to his mother, who was squinting against the wind and scanning the horizon.

  Peter's father hopped down beside him. “Got your gloves? Great. Let's start unloading.”

  The pilots helped. They worked in silence because the noise of the engine was practically deafening. Peter's father had explained that no one turned an engine off on the ice cap—it was so cold that you might not get it started again.

  There were boxes and boxes of stuff, and it felt good to move around again. Dr. Solemn and Jonas showed Peter and his mom how to make a cargo line, which was just a bunch of boxes lined up straight so that you could find them after a snowstorm. The pilots unloaded a few huge flat bundles that Peter's father said would eventually be their tent. There were smaller flat bundles that would be the dogs' shelter. The dogs were coming from Qaanaaq in a few days. It was against the law to bring dogs into Greenland—the Inuit wanted to keep their breeds pure, Jonas said.

  The pilots stayed long enough to help set up the two little nylon tents they would live in for the first few days, Peter and Jonas sharing one while his parents took the other. Each tent had to be pinned down by twelve long rods so it wouldn't blow away. When the last bamboo stick had been driven into the snow and the propanestove was declared functional, the pilots shook hands all around, got into their plane, and were gone.

  It was blissfully quiet. Peter stood outside his tent looking at the snow that stretched out forever in every direction. His father was rummaging in one of the cargo boxes, looking nothing like Superman. The wind had died.

  What in the world would he do here for the next six weeks?

  His dad turned around and called, “I've found dinner! Beef stew or chicken pot pie?”

  “Stew!”

  “Gotcha. And a bag of brownies!”

  Things were looking up.

  The days that followed were wet and tiring: Peter helped build the new tent, which came with a set of instructions as big as a phone book and a video they had no way of watching. He hauled buckets of snow to melt for water, nailed boards for the dogs' shelter, washed dishes in freezing cold water. The glare of the sun was everywhere.

  He didn't sleep well. He was used to honking trucks and car alarms, but the screaming wind was new. And the tent he and Jonas shared was covered in puddles from the snow they tracked in on their boots. Anything that touched the floor got soaking wet.

  And then, finally, the new tent was finished. Moving-in day was a celebration complete with steak, cake, and snow peas. Peter's father said a celebration wasn't a celebration without steak and cake. And his mother loved snow peas.

  When Peter woke up the next morning, life seemed wonderful. He was in a bed. The floor was dry. The bread-maker had worked and the tent smelled like a bakery. Then, at breakfast, Peter's dad announced that he was taking a dogsled and going to Qaanaaq. But he was bringing Jonas with him, not Peter.

  An hour later, Peter frowned into the glare of bright sun on snow as he watched Jonas check the dogs' harnesses while Dr. Solemn gave the sled straps a final tug. “This stinks,” he said. He had practically begged to go.

  “Don't give me a hard time about this, Pete.” Dr. Solemn adjusted his goggles. “I haven't made this trip in years, and I want to make sure it's safe.” He yelled over Peter's head toward the tent. “We're off, Rory!”

  Jonas knew his way around a dogsled. He'd already given Peter two driving lessons. Peter was great with the harnesses and lines, and he was getting much better at not falling off the sled. But the dogs never listened to him. When Peter said “Cha!” the dogs just stood around nosing in the snow or smelling one another.

  “Am I saying it wrong?” Peter had asked. “You said a five-year-old can do this!”

  “You've got the sound right,�
�� Jonas had said, “but you have to say it like you mean it. Like you expect to actually go somewhere.”

  Peter's father drove a dogsled as subtly as he parallel-parked their car in the city, and he refused to travel any other way. “Dogs know what's up,” he'd told Peter. “When your survival is at stake, they don't give up, and that's more than I can say for any snowmobile.”

  Now Peter looked bitterly at the eight dogs gathered in front of him. There was a shotgun strapped to the sled in case they met any polar bears as they got closer to the coast, where bears did their hunting. Peter had made his father promise not to shoot one unless absolutely necessary. “Don't worry,” his father had said, “nine times out of ten I can scare them off with a few flares.” This dad was very different from the city dad who wore corduroys to work and came home with corny jokes and Chinese take-out. This one was serious a lot of the time. And busy.

  Peter's mother emerged from the bright blue dome that was their tent. Her hair was clipped up in a bun on top of her head, which meant that she had been writing.

  The dogs crowded each other, eager to move.

  “You can't take Sasha,” Peter said darkly, knowing that they weren't planning to. Sasha was a black-and-white husky, Peter's favorite. She was smarter than the rest of them, and a lot more affectionate.

  “Does it look like we're taking her?” His father was getting annoyed.

  “Bon voyage,” Peter's mother said brightly. “We'll see you in a couple of days.” She put an arm around Peter's shoulders as Jonas and Dr. Solemn set off, trotting due west alongside the loaded sled. Then she called after them: “Remember to bring back everything they have that's green!”

  The trip to Qaanaaq had two purposes. Peter's father had discovered that the tubing on his steam drill was cracked, and a replacement waited for him at the post office. And they were also going to the town's sole grocery store. Peter's mother said her brain couldn't function without fresh fruit or vegetables.

  Their camp was on a small rise on the ice cap, and Peter watched as his father and Jonas quickly descended the side of it and were gone. He held his gaze steady for a few moments, until the fluttering began, just at the edges of his vision. He blinked quickly, banishing it. It had become a game.

  Peter shielded his eyes from the sun with a gloved hand. “I'm going to take Sasha for a walk,” he told his mother. He knew it was silly to walk a dog in Greenland— they were outside most of the time. But he had always wanted a dog to walk, and this trip seemed like his only chance. Their apartment building didn't allow pets.

  “Be careful. Daddy really worries about you, youknow,” his mother said. “It's a lot of responsibility, having you here. I think it's a bit scary for him.”

  “Well, maybe he shouldn't have invited me, then. We could have stayed home, like we always do. Or I could have stayed with Miles.” He pictured himself eating oranges and popcorn with Miles on his dad's TV couch. Not so bad.

  “Don't be silly.”

  “Right, no silliness,” Peter said as he ducked into the low shed that was the dogs' shelter. Momentarily blinded by the dimness, he called, “Here, girl.” Sasha was waiting just inside the door for him. She followed him into the sunlight and flipped onto her back so he could rub her belly.

  Peter had been warned over and over that sled dogs weren't pets in Greenland. Here, dogs were fed and tied to stakes outside until needed for travel or to hunt. They were important, and cared for, but they were not part of the family. In town, dogs that managed to get loose from their stakes by slipping their harnesses or gnawing through their leads were seen as a danger to the community, and shot dead on sight.

  But Sasha was different. “Someone has been showing this animal a lot of love,” Peter's mother said, watching Sasha submit happily to Peter's crazy tickles. “She's somebody's darling, all right.”

  And she would be somebody's darling again, shemeant. His mother always managed to remind him that this arrangement was temporary. She didn't want him to get too attached. He pushed the thought away. For now, Sasha was his.

  Peter squatted next to the dog and scanned the camp. He never got tired of looking at their tent. It was a bright blue dome, pocked all over, so that it looked like a golf ball half-submerged in the ice. He and Jonas called it the “geebee geebee,” which stood for “giant blue golf ball.”

  The inside of the tent was as wonderful as the outside. There were three separate bunk areas, each with drawers under the bed and a small bookshelf built into the headboard. Each bed had a reading light that cast a perfect cone of yellow light at just the right angle. Peter's parents had a double-size bed and two reading lights. There were round windows like portholes all around, curtains to be drawn across the foot of each bed for privacy, and the tiniest bathroom Peter had ever seen.

  The kitchen area had two propane burners, a microwave, and the breadmaker (it was Peter's job to measure the ingredients and set the timer every night). There was also a bucket to take outside and fill with snow to boil for water. There was no need for a refrigerator.

  In the middle of the tent was a round table and four chairs. Jonas acted all excited about having his very own chair, and taped a joke sign to the back of one. “Jonas's chair.”

  Outside, three brightly colored ropes, about knee-high, fanned out from the geebee geebee. One led to the research tent, one to the dogs' long, low shelter, and one to the cargo line. Peter's father said they might need something to hold on to in a storm, and he'd made Peter memorize which colored rope led to which place. For now, they were just something to trip over.

  “C'mon, girl.” Peter stood up and Sasha happily rolled to her feet next to him. He put one hand on her head and gestured to the horizon with the other. “Time to look for the Second Volkswagen Road.”

  His mother laughed. “Don't believe everything you hear.”

  The Second Volkswagen Road was something Jonas talked about, a road on the ice cap built in secret by Volkswagen as a private test site for new cars. Jonas said the failures—all never-before-seen prototypes—were abandoned on the ice, and Peter intended to find one.

  “It's on the Internet, Mom.”

  “No, that's the first Volkswagen Road. The only Volkswagen Road. And it's a hundred miles south of here.”

  “That's the test site they talk about, Mom. But Jonas read about a second road, where the super-secret models are driven, the stuff that really breaks new ground. No one is supposed to know where it is, because the car companies spy on each other with flyovers and satellites.”

  “Ah.” Mrs. Solemn released her hair and it dropped indark waves around the shoulders of her jacket. “So this road could be anywhere, I suppose.”

  “It could be anywhere. But I can't look anywhere, can I? It could be dangerous. My boots might get dirty. So I guess I'll just look around here.”

  His mother rolled her eyes. “Poor thing. Your parents never take you anywhere exciting like the arctic circle. Well, good luck. Be back before lunch. Check your watch.”

  Peter decided to head east. The ground sloped gradually away from camp, and he slid along happily next to Sasha in his boots. She never strained at her leash, but trotted next to him, apparently as interested in finding the road as he was.

  Twenty minutes later, Peter's nose and cheeks were half-numb with cold and he was ready to turn around. So much for his big walk, he thought, starting back to camp. He looked steadily up at the geebee geebee as he walked, knowing that he was waiting for the fluttering to start. He knew that he shouldn't let it, that it would bring on one of his headaches and he would have to spend the rest of the morning in bed. But something compelled him.

  After a minute, there was a faint pulsing. The tent was animated as if by a tiny heart, beating fast. He knew he should look away now. Blink, he told himself.

  And then the geebee geebee loomed in front of him asif he had put a pair of binoculars to his eyes. He could see the weave of the blue fabric. He noticed that the door flaps hadn't been closed all the way
—the zipper pull hung a few inches from the top. He was seeing it more clearly than he had when he stood three feet in front of it with his mother.

  Sasha barked once, and his gaze jerked at the sound, causing an uncomfortable moment of darkness before his sight returned to normal and he saw her a few paces away. He had dropped her leash. “I'm coming,” he said. Five steps later, he felt the headache break over him like a wave.

  When he walked into the tent, carefully zipping the first set of door flaps closed before opening the inner flaps, his mother was at the table with her hair in its bun. She was doodling on a pad, lots of words and arrows pointing from one to another.

  “Find any Lamborghinis?” she asked. A bowl of tuna salad sat on the table.

  “There's always tomorrow,” Peter said, heading straight to his bunk.

  “Aren't you hungry?”

  “More tired,” he said. His head held a tiny raging storm. “I'll eat later, okay?”

  After an hour or so, he could sit up. His mother was still in her chair. Her pad, full of circles and arrows andscientific nonsense syllables, was pushed to one side, and she was writing in a notebook with a red cover he hadn't seen before. Her hand moved across the page so quickly he wondered that she had time to think of the words. He watched her for a few minutes before she glanced up and saw him.

  She flipped the book closed and gave him a strained smile. “Hungry yet?”

  He was.

  “All this fu ss for seven people.” The a lifted a large se rvin g platter and frowned at the cr o wded table. “I don't think we can fit in one more thing. It's impossible.”

  “Hush, Thea.” Lana crossed the greatroom, the hem of her heavy robe sweeping the floor as she moved across it. It was one of Thea's favorites, the embroidery all in yellow, with a squared neckline and a blue sash that tied in back. Though worn, the robe was still quite elegant. And only Lana could fashion a rose from the loose ends of a thick sash with her hands behind her back.