Ilatsiak - 35

David woke. It was a new sound, a strange one, something hitting the roof of the skin tent. It was raining heavily. David rose and turned, coming to a sitting position under the caribou blankets. The inside of the tent was a quiet gloom, the only light was coming from the patches in the skin which had been scraped too thin and become translucent. The rain sounds seemed to increase, a regular pitter-patter which now and them turned into a rage of sound against the outside surface. It wanted to come inside and get everything wet. David sat there and listened, wondering whether it was worth getting his clothes on and going out to have a look. This was the first time he had seen real rain at all and here it was in early fall. In fact, it was highly unusual. Snow would be more like it, especially after the beautiful, cold, clear, sunny days of the past week or two.
Agayuk began waking up as well, stirred awake by the sounds outside. He turned and began his usual morning cough, pulling his long, black, stringy hair from his sleep-worn face, another standard morning routine. He then pulled himself from under the caribou skin he shared with his wife and, bare-naked, crawled along the ground to the hanging flap of leather which covered the entrance. Drawing it aside, he peered outside. As far as he could see, there was an overpowering whiteness, the snow beneath blending seamlessly into the clouds above. The illusion was made even more perfect by the fog which had come with the rain, which had begun to freeze as it hit the ground. The fog hung over the snow like a sullen dog, dripping wet and mean, something everyone would come to regret as the ice began to build up on everything.
David heard him mutter something, probably a curse of some sort. Rain and worse, the icy fog, meant the hunting would be useless today, not to mention making attempts at travelling awful as well. No, today it would be best to stay inside where one could at least be dry. He could hunt tomorrow. If not then, well, there was always the fish cached last month only a day’s walk southward from the camp. He turned from the doorway, got up, pretended to cover himself with false modesty, smiled at David with his friendly, toothy grin, mumbled something through his second coughing fit , during which David recognised the word “sila”, the weather, and then he slipped gracefully back under the caribou skins. Within minutes, he was snoring again, dead to the weather.
David pulled on his clothes then his tattered woolen coat and crawled though the tent opening. He stood up and looked around. The two other tents were drooping in the icy wetness, the side facing the weather glistening with its freezing coat. It had become much warmer than the past few days. That would account for the rain and fog. Below the crust, the snow was soft and wet and not the dry, hard granular stuff he had become so used to during the long winter months.
He walked around for a while, then realised he was getting soaked. His woollen coat had completely lost its ability to shed water like it had done when new. Instead, it just soaked in the moisture that fell on it, no longer beading on the surface where it was easy to brush off. His boots leaked as well. He could feel the remains of his socks getting wet around the toes, especially the left one. David needed to get some replacement clothes and vaguely wondered if he would be able to return to the ship in this weather, but came to the conclusion they would give him clothes anyway unless he stayed on the Erebus.
In this fog and rain, the whole world had turned white, every direction looked exactly like every other one, without any up or down or sideways. Once out of sight of the tents, he would be totally lost in this dimensionless world where there was nothing to guide him. Turning back to the skin tents, David wondered how the men he had left were fairing in the ships. At least, they would be under cover, he thought. The deck tenting was probably still up, so they would have lots of room to wander about out of the rain. They were probably thinking about getting the ships ready for yet another winter. The gossip was that the ships had not moved very much since they’d got stuck almost a year ago. Then he laughed, “I don’t care about those ships anymore! They don’t even know they’re frozen in for good...”