Overwinter Read online

  He was not exactly human.

  He had to be nine feet tall, and five feet across the shoulders. A giant. He was dressed in a loose fur cloak that was as white as snow in some places, in others stained a greasy yellow. On top of his head was a carved wooden mask studded with ivory spikes. It was tilted up to reveal his face, which was broad and moon-shaped. His eyes were very small, almost beady, and it had been a long time since he’d last shaved. His nose was running.

  As Chey studied him he reached under his furs and scratched himself so violently that the chair creaked under his weight and nearly collapsed. He grunted in annoyance and then reached down into a bucket next to his chair that held chunks of blubber—thick white slabs of fat backed with sleek black whale skin.

  “What?” he demanded, in a voice like sandpaper on a rough piece of wood.

  Chey sat up slowly on the bed. Suddenly she realized she was alone in the dome with this giant. And that he was talking to her.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to stare.”

  He sneezed three times in a row and then started chewing on his piece of blubber. “Then fucking don’t.”

  Chey looked away. She found her clothes folded neatly under the bed. She didn’t want to put them on—the idea of cloth against her skin just felt wrong—but she fought back that urge and dressed herself. The shoes weren’t there. Lucie was probably wearing them, wherever she’d gone. So that was a small relief.

  “You feeling better?” the giant asked, with a nasty guffaw. “You had one hell of a night.” He scratched himself again, roaring a little as if it hurt him to do so but he couldn’t help it.

  “I’m … okay,” Chey said. “How are you?”

  “Nearly fucking extinct, thank you very much.” He reached for another piece of blubber.

  That seemed to be all he wanted to say. His attention was fixed on the TV, and Chey remembered how her mom hadn’t wanted to talk much when her show was on, either. She watched the human faces on the screen go through various melodramatic changes that she could barely sympathize with. She tried to follow the action, but it just didn’t seem very important.

  “This one’s focused on the Mortons. The fucking Mortons—who cares? The Barlows are the ones who have the best stories,” the giant grumbled.

  Chey tried to remember what she knew of the show, just to make conversation. “Did Deirdre ever get out of prison?” she asked.

  For the first time he turned to really look at her. Just moving his head was enough to make his chair creak. “Where … the fuck … have you been?” He growled and his lips pulled back. His teeth were not human teeth. “That was like ten fucking years ago.” He struggled up out of his chair and staggered over to the TV. With one massive hand he slapped the power button to turn it off. “You some kind of fucking moron?”

  Chey tried to laugh.

  He wasn’t joking, though. “I asked you a question,” he said. His minuscule eyes bored into her like drill bits. “Are you ‘special’?”

  “No,” Chey said, quietly. “I’m not special, I just—”

  Maybe he hadn’t heard her. “Is that it? I went to all that trouble for some kind of retard?” He stomped toward her, leaving huge footprints on the woven mats. “They brought you in here—into my home—” He loomed over her, huge and implacable, and she scooted backward on the bed to try to get away from him. “Into my—my home, and—”

  Then he started to cough. Big, chest-wracking, gagging, choking coughs. He gasped for breath and pounded on his chest with one fist and dropped to the floor, on his back. His tiny eyes stared up at the ceiling as if he couldn’t see anything. Chey scrambled down off the bed and knelt next to him, wondering what she should do. She tried to loosen the fur cloak from around his throat, but it seemed to be sewn shut.

  “Gah,” he moaned, and then leaned over and spat nearly a gallon of mucus out onto the mats. “Fucking global warming. Can you get me something to drink?”

  Chey nodded and ran over to a refrigerator standing against the wall of the dome. It wasn’t plugged in, she noticed, but it didn’t matter—the air in the dome was as cold as a refrigerator ever got, anyway. Inside she found nothing but a six-pack of Diet Pepsi. It would have to do, she supposed. She cracked one open and brought it over to the giant, who sucked it all down in one gulp.

  “Thanks. That was—that was really nice of you,” he said, his face softening. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “Anybody would have,” Chey insisted.

  “No. No, they wouldn’t,” he said. He was crying. “What’s your name?”

  “Chey,” she told him. She rubbed one of his massive shoulders. It was like rubbing a side of beef covered in greasy fur. “What’s yours?”

  “Nanuq,” he told her.

  Her eyes went wide. “Nanook? Like … Nanook of the North?”

  His face hardened again. “You gonna start something, now?”

  “No … no no no,” Chey said, trying to soothe him. “I just—when I was a kid, in school, we watched—”

  “That fucking documentary. You know the whole thing was staged? Fucking humans. Can’t even tell a story right. Factual fucking inaccuracies all over the place. I hate that movie.” He shook his massive head. “It’s N-A-N-U-Q, thank you very fucking much. It happens to be the Inuit word for ‘polar bear.’ ”

  “Oh! So you’re the—”

  “Guy whose favorite show is on in three minutes, that’s who I am.” He climbed back in his chair. “So don’t fucking try my patience.”

  50.

  The others returned a little later, Dzo holding up a flap of seal skin that was the dome’s door while Powell and Lucie squeezed inside. Powell proudly brandished a string of lemmings, the great hunter returning. “Hungry?” he asked Chey.

  “I’m actually kind of full,” she told him. Truth be told, she didn’t feel that great. Her mouth still hurt. It felt like she had gargled lye or something. Her teeth felt loose and fragile. “I had some … blubber.” Saying the word aloud made her stomach turn. She still couldn’t quite believe it. She’d told Nanuq how much her mouth hurt and he recommended she try some of the whale fat. It didn’t require much chewing, he told her, which had turned out to be incorrect. Maybe if your teeth were the size of Chey’s thumbs. Then there had been the taste. It had tasted a little like clams, but the consistency had made her want to gag. Somehow she’d managed to swallow several mouthfuls of it.

  “She’s been keeping me company,” the giant said, struggling to rise from his chair.

  Chey shot Powell a quizzical glance. She still had no idea how she’d ended up in Nanuq’s dome house, or exactly what kind of creature the giant was.

  “You’re … probably wondering what’s been going on,” Powell suggested, and she nodded in agreement.

  “Well,” Powell said, sitting down on one of the oversized beds, “it wasn’t good. Apparently there was a huge storm—the world out there is about ten feet deep in snow. Then we got in some trouble. When I woke up, when I woke up human, I found Dzo waiting for us and he brought us here. We were all hurt. Lucie and I weren’t in great shape. Nanuq was kind enough to take us in. I’m still not entirely clear on what happened. It all occurred while the moon was up, so my memories are pretty fragmentary. But I know the hunter tried to kill us again.”

  “Lots of explosions. Like American TV,” Nanuq said, nodding his big head. “Guns and snowmobiles everywhere.”

  “People …?” Chey asked. “Like, multiple people? Not just the blue guy?” Her blood turned cold.

  “Yep,” Dzo said. “I was watching you three when it happened, just like I promised. And I told you I would do something to help. I went and found my old buddy here, because I thought he might be useful. At first he didn’t want to help.”

  Nanuq shrugged. “I said what the hell did I care, but eventually Dzo convinced me you could use some help, so I pitched in.”

  “He saved your butts,” Dzo said.

  Nanuq shrugge
d again. “Mostly I think I just scared them. I didn’t kill anybody.”

  “Oh, you didn’t?” Chey asked, with growing hopes.

  “Nah. That was all you three. You tore their guts out pretty good.”

  No. Oh, no, Chey thought. No no no, not again. After what had happened at Port Radium, she thought that kind of violence was behind her. She couldn’t bear the thought of killing another human being. And yet she knew, with real certainty, that her wolf felt differently. That her wolf wouldn’t miss the chance to kill a human being and probably eat them afterwards.

  Just like Powell had killed and … and eaten her father. Or rather, just like his wolf had done.

  “How many of them were there?” Chey asked.

  “Three or four.”

  “Did we kill them all?” she asked.

  Nanuq scratched his head. “Yeah, I think so. I mean they were all bloody or blown up or in pieces. Yeah, all of them. Except the blue guy.”

  “No?”

  “Nah. Not a scratch on him.”

  Chey sat down hard on the mats that covered the floor. The leader, the one who wanted nothing but their destruction, was the only one that survived. “Great.”

  “Yeah, it was pretty cool,” Nanuq agreed.

  51.

  Powell announced he had things to discuss with Nanuq, but first he wanted to eat. He and Lucie made a fire under the smoke hole and cooked their lemmings, while the giant watched, occasionally licking his lips. Chey took Dzo over to the far side of the dome, intending to ask him some questions.

  “So he’s like you, right?” she said.

  “Who, Nanuq? No way. Nothing like me,” the spirit told her.

  Chey frowned. “I guess I assumed, with the furs and the mask, that he was an animal spirit.”

  “Right. Spirit of the polar bear.”

  Chey frowned in incomprehension. “But you just said he wasn’t anything like you.”

  “Exactly. Totally different. He eats meat, for one thing. It’s kind of gross. Look at his mask, too, and mine. Completely different styles. Mine has a sort of Dene feel, because the Dene people south of here were the last ones who really took me seriously. Up here, it’s various kinds of Inuit, some of whom still pay tribute to Nanuq, so he wears their kind of mask.” He seemed to think of something else. “Oh, and he’s dying.”

  “That’s not the word he uses. He says he’s going extinct.”

  Dzo rolled his eyes as if she was completely missing the point. “Same thing, isn’t it? We’re animal spirits. We’re connected to our animals. Not the individual ones, of course. There’s musquashes dying and being born all the time. But they aren’t dying out. Polar bears, on the other hand, there’s less of them every year. Which makes him weaker. Soon enough there won’t be any left.”

  “And he’ll die, then?” Chey asked.

  “Sort of. I mean technically, no, because he lives outside of time in some really important ways. Which, believe me, you do not want me to explain to you what that means. Because it would give you a really bad headache.”

  “I can believe that,” Chey said. She had tried in the past to understand how Dzo could travel from one body of water to any other even if they weren’t connected, or how he could dive into a single drop of water without actually shrinking himself. She assumed the spirits operated on some kind of magical level that didn’t compute with human logic.

  “So it’s not like he’ll cease to exist. Because he’ll still be there in the past, like he always was. And people will still tell stories about polar bears, long after the last one’s gone. So he’ll need to be around to embody those stories. But—well, let me give you an example. There used to be this one kind of elephant. Except it was all covered in hair and it lived up north here with us.”

  “You mean the wooly mammoth?”

  Dzo nodded. “So you’ve heard of it. Anyway, all of them are gone, but there was this spirit of the mammoth, really nice girl, really … sweet. Hair down to her butt and even taller than Nanuq. But man, the teeth on her.”

  Chey smiled, for the first time in a while. As confusing as it might be, she always felt better after talking to Dzo.

  “She used to live on an island off Alaska,” Dzo went on. “You know, a while back.”

  “A couple thousand years ago?” Chey suggested. “During the last ice age?”

  “Yeah, well, I stopped keeping track of individual years. Now I just think of that time as ‘a while ago.’ The thing is, people still talk about her, or at least, about her mammoths. She’s gone as far as you’re concerned, because you live in time. You could go to her island and you wouldn’t find her there. If I wanted to go visit her, though, I could. I couldn’t walk there directly, but if I dove really deep through the water I could end up where she is, in the past.”

  “I read a while back that there are some scientists who want to clone a mammoth, like in Jurassic Park, but without all the people getting eaten. They would take DNA from one that’s frozen in a glacier and make an embryo, then put it in an African elephant so she would give birth to a baby mammoth. What would happen to your friend then? Would she come back to life?” Chey asked.

  Dzo shook his head emphatically. “That’s just it. No. Because she never really died. She just went extinct. So I guess that’s the difference you were asking about.” He grinned at her. “Does your head hurt yet?”

  “Always,” she told him.

  Over by the smoke hole, Powell and Lucie had finished their meal. Powell went over to where Nanuq sat in his arm chair, watching a rerun of North of 60. Powell cleared his throat and started to reach for Nanuq’s arm, clearly intending to get his attention.

  “Oh, shit,” Chey said, running toward him. She had a bad feeling about what would happen if Powell interrupted Nanuq while he was watching his soaps.

  Rightly so, it turned out.

  52.

  When Nanuq had finally calmed down again—it was like a light switch had been turned off and he settled easily back into his chair to reach for his remote control—Chey helped Powell stand back up and dust himself off. “You alright?” she asked him.

  He looked up at the curving wall of the dome. There was a significant dent in the sod wall where Nanuq had thrown Powell hard enough to break human bones. “I’ll be okay,” Powell said. “A little bruised. I didn’t know he took that box so seriously.”

  Chey stared into his eyes until she got it. “That box. You mean his TV.” She forgot, most of the time, that Powell had been born in 1895 and that he had been living alone in the north country for most of a century. “You’ve seen a television before, haven’t you?” she asked.

  “Sure,” he said, but it sounded like he was trying to remember. “Of course I have. I just didn’t realize how seductive it could be, for some people.”

  “Nanuq told me he used to hate TV. It was full of stories but none of them were about animals,” she said. They’d talked about TV a lot when it had just been the two of them in the dome. “But there’s not much else for him to do around here.”

  “Hmm. Maybe I should wait until his program is done,” Powell suggested.

  “Good idea.”

  When the rerun had finished, Nanuq muted the set with his remote and then looked down at the werewolves arrayed before him. It was hard not to think of him as a king sitting on a throne—even if that throne was covered in avocado green upholstery.

  “We want to thank you, first,” Powell told the spirit. “If you hadn’t come along when you did, all three of us would be dead now.”

  “It looked like it was going that way, yeah,” Nanuq told him. “Thank Dzo for that, though. I would have let you get pasted if he hadn’t begged me like a little girl.”

  “I’ll … do that,” Powell went on. “Still. There’s a very old friendship between lycanthropes and tuurngaq.”

  Chey glanced over at Dzo. “That’s the Inuit word for an animal spirit,” he whispered to her, and she nodded her thanks.

  “I guess,” Nanu
q said. “You live a lot longer than humans, so we have an easier time relating to you. They come and go so fast they don’t make any sense.” The polar bear spirit shrugged and Chey heard springs snapping inside his armchair. “It’s not the kind of thing you should push, really.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of that,” Powell said. “But I do want to ask you for a favor.”

  Nanuq growled. Then he reached under his furs to scratch violently at his thigh. “I’m not known for generosity. And anyway, it looks more like you owe me.”

  Powell nodded in agreement. “Absolutely. But I’m not asking for much. Just a little information on something that happened a long time ago. I need to know about what happened to Amuruq.”

  Dzo and Nanuq both straightened up a little when they heard that name. Neither of them spoke, though.

  “She was one of you,” Powell said. “A tuurngaq. The tuurngaq of the wolf. I looked for her for a long time. I thought maybe she could help me learn to control my wolf. I even spoke to other tuurngaq who knew her. But they refused to tell me what had happened to her. All I know is that she disappeared at the same time the first lycanthropes existed.”

  “That’s not something we ever talk about with humans,” Nanuq said. “It’s forbidden.” He didn’t growl, though. He didn’t look angry at all. He looked sad. Chey remembered his earlier mood swings and her heart went out to him. Nanuq wasn’t well. He was nearly extinct.

  “As I’ve already established, I’m not human.”

  “But you want to be,” Nanuq said. His beady eyes blinked rapidly. “That’s what you’re after. You want to know what they did to Amuruq so you can undo it. So you can shed your curse.”

  The cure, Chey thought. Nanuq knows something about the cure.

  Except, apparently, he didn’t. “I wasn’t there,” he told Powell. “I only heard about it afterward. Yeah, it happened up here. Exactly where I don’t know—and you’re going to need to know exactly.”

  He settled himself deeper in his chair. “What I know is a story. It’s not likely true in every particular, but I’ll tell it to you.