Inungilak

Epilogue

June 4th, 2010

The invitation had arrived six months ago and I had accepted. I had agreed to go back to the dig at Kiniktok on Inungilak Island in the Eastern Arctic. The Canadian Government was sponsoring a symposium commemorating our work that summer, and I was to be the keynote speaker – the authority. I had written my speech, but I still wasn't certain I would deliver it. Even with my husband and two of our children at my side, I didn't know if I was ready to go back to Kiniktok.

My work at the dig, as Phyllida Allyngham’s assistant, had begun as part of an elaborate subterfuge, and the world still knows very little of what actually happened on Inungilak Island thirty years ago. The dig at Kiniktok was located about three miles from the Hamlet of Inungilak which had been built adjacent to Foxe Five, the DEW Line station. In 1980 Foxe Five had still functioned as a Distant Early Warning Station, and I was sent to the Arctic that summer in order to help protect a National Security operation at Foxe Five. What I hadn’t known was that the work at Foxe Five was part of our defense against the Soviet arsenal of biological weapons.

The world was a very different place in 1980. We were in the midst of the Cold War. I had been born into the Cold War, and it seemed a permanent part of my existence. My family knew war well. My parents had both been survivors of the Holocaust. My mother was from Russia where she had seen her family massacred by the Germans with Ukrainians cheering them on. My father had survived, somehow, at a forced labor camp. My parents had come to America and raised three children, but they still seemed to live their lives in almost daily expectation of Hitler’s return. They knew the face of their enemy and it was totalitarianism. They believed that it was only by the grace of God and the vigilance of the Free World that we, as Jews, continued to survive. And so I had grown up believing that I owed somebody something for the fact that I was not a very little bit of ash in a furnace at Auschwitz.

I was twenty-four that summer. I was very young and very innocent. I had completed my dissertation at Columbia, and I had volunteered for a stint in the State Department. The State Department sent me to the CIA. I had no intention of volunteering for the CIA, nor could I imagine why the CIA would want me. I had a BA in anthropology and my Ph. D. was in the philosophy of the social sciences – not a particularly relevant field of expertise for the CIA. According to the CIA plan, however, I was to be little more than a listening post in the local community, while the real CIA work continued at the DEW Line. At least that was the plan.

It didn't happen that way. Nothing happened the way it was supposed to that summer. Both the successes and the failures were not the ones any of us could have anticipated.

CHAPTER ONE

Monday Morning, July 7th, 1980

Like Abraham I stood at the door of my tent and looked out at the world. But where he saw the angels of the Lord walking across the fields, I saw only the stark outlines of the pack ice rising out of the cold sea. It was an inhospitable world. In scale, in dimension, in sheer barrenness, it dwarfed to insignificance anything merely human.

We had pitched our tent in the midst of what must have once been a fairly large community. Scattered around our camp were the remains of over twenty Thule houses – the bases built of stone with sod and whalebone superstructures. The whalebone and the sod, seemingly flimsy, had remained fundamentally unchanged for three hundred years.

In its own way, the Arctic is a world almost without decay and without change. In hundreds of years the houses themselves hadn't changed: the sea hadn't changed; and the mountains of the Precambrian shield rising to the east like weary sentinels above the beach hadn't changed. Rocks which had been dropped randomly across the face of the hillside ten thousand years ago by a retreating glacier remained where they were – like a handful of children's marbles casually come to rest. There was no moss, no overgrowth, no sign that those rocks had not fallen from the firmament the day before. The archaeological ruins, the ice, the sea, and the sky had achieved an equilibrium with each other, and change, if it came at all, came with a stately disregard for the years and a total lack of urgency.

The only thing vulnerable in the Arctic is life itself. Life in the Arctic – where you can find it – is adaptable, changing, fragile, heroic. Each blade of grass, each flower, each human child is an exercise in courage set down in a world sublimely indifferent to its struggles. Every speck of life is vulnerable and near helpless in a universe of ice and sea and wind. And the men and women who had built those houses were gone – they had died and disappeared almost without a trace.

One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh;

And the earth abideth forever. . . .

The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof

I looked out over the sea. The fog was drifting away to the west and the air was still – that was rare in itself. In the three weeks I had been on Inungilak Island in the Eastern Canadian Arctic the wind had never once died down – not on a fog clear day.

Phyll was striding up the shale beach toward me, her head down, her hands jammed into the pockets of her slacks. The clear unfiltered polar sunlight was reflected off her hair like a living halo. Phyll was the senior archaeologist in charge of the dig at Kiniktok. She was my boss; she was also my partner and my friend.

She came toward me and for a few minutes we stood side by side – both of us facing out to sea. She seemed, as always, to tower over me. It was not, I knew, simply a matter of the six inch difference in our heights. Phyll was a person of effortless stature. Her physical presence had – like the sea, the ice, and the mountains – become a part of my Arctic landscape.

It's very beautiful out there isn't it, Phyll?

She sighed and nodded, Only if you are bred to it. And neither of us was.

Phyll was right of course. She was generally right. The Arctic in its very beauty remained intransigently alien to my soul. And yet I knew, even then, that in the three weeks I had been working at Kiniktok, Inungilak Island had taken a grip on me. I had to remind myself almost daily that the dig at Kiniktok was not the real reason I was in the Arctic.

Phyll nodded to the camera cupped in my hand. While she continued with the more delicate excavation work, I would catalogue. Part of my responsibility, as Phyll's assistant, was to keep a photographic chronicle of our progress, and I had planned to devote that morning to photography.

There was a great deal to photograph at Kiniktok.

In the Arctic, records of previous cultures aren't buried under yards of soil. Since the surface of the land is very much like it was thousands of years ago, even a tent ring is likely to have survived hundreds of years unchanged. The Arctic was never heavily populated. When people lived exclusively off the land – before the era of government intervention – the population of the entire circumpolar Arctic probably never exceeded 20,000 people. But a migrant population of twenty thousand people, over a few hundred years, will have camped in a great many different places. In the summer they lived in tents – in the winter some of them were fortunate enough to live in permanent dwellings – part stone and part sod or whalebone.

Archaeological sites are found everywhere up and down the coastlines of the Canadian Arctic. Most of them remain unexamined. Ironically, it is the existence of DEW Line which was indirectly responsible for the work at Kiniktok.

The presence of the DEW Line helped to draw the Inuit off the land and into the settlement, and it was the settlement's Catholic priest, Father Peter Van der Hoven, who had begun the archaeological work at Kiniktok fifteen years earlier.

Our tent was adjacent to the Father's original excavation – several whalebone houses dating to the Thule period. The Thule houses were clustered on the raised beaches a few yards from the sea shore.

Like much of the eastern Arctic, the topography of the western coast of Inungilak Island is fairly predictable. There is a coastal plain or raised beach made up, not of sand, but of layers of limestone and dolomite which have been wave worked and frost shattered over the years into a sort of shale. The beaches are said to be raised because the limestone is in fact in the process of rising up out of the sea at the rate of a centimeter or so a year. In places, the shale has taken on the contours of a gently sloping sand beach, in other places the limestone rises almost cliff-like up out of the sea.

The beach at Kiniktok was bounded on the one side by the sea and on the other by the escarpment of the Precambrian shield – a smooth, worn, old horseshoe of mountains surrounding Hudson Bay and Foxe Basin. Except for the view and the occasional caribou, the Shield offered even less of sustenance than the nearly barren coastal plain. In fact, virtually all human activity was concentrated in the plain and near the sea, since the Inuit in the Inungilak area were, until very recently, largely dependent on the sea for their food. And so, almost all human settlements in the Arctic – both modern and archaic – are strung ribbon like along the water front.

Nevertheless, farther up the raised beach some distance away from the shore, we had discovered what we believed was an earlier Dorset site. Our Dorset camp was inland not because it had been built away from the shore, but because the sea had in effect retreated as the land rose. For the archaeologist in the Canadian Arctic, meters above sea level is a measurement of time as well as of distance. Dating a dig in the north is likely to be done in terms of distance above sea level or distance from the shore, rather than in terms of distance below ground level.

The raised beach system of dating is fairly reliable, but it's not fool proof. Although the people of Inungilak Island always preferred to camp near the water, it was often necessary in the summer to camp near permanent snow drifts – the snow was used for drinking water. So, although our method of dating worked fairly well for winter camps, it was not nearly so effective at dating summer camps.

There happened to be a snow drift near our possible Dorset site, but not so near that either Phyll or I felt it had been used as a source for water, so we had decided between us that the new site should be dated, at least in a preliminary fashion, by its distance from the sea.

History on Inungilak Island is divided into three periods. The first period, which lasted almost 3000 years, was a Sarqaq or a Denbigh type culture characterized by small chipped tools. They had left us a few tools, some signs of camp fires and tent rings. At Kiniktok, the Sarqaq camps were farthest above sea level – about 22 meters above the present sea level, and therefore about 200 meters inland.

By 800 BC the Sarqaq culture had been replaced by the Dorset in our part of the Arctic. The Dorset culture was first identified from artifacts shipped from Cape Dorset on Baffin Island in 1925. And, in the intervening years, relatively little had been added to our knowledge of the Dorset. Dorset sites are relatively rare, and much of what constituted the Dorset culture remains a mystery to us. That summer Phyll had discovered what seemed to be evidence of several Dorset rectangular houses, together with Dorset artifacts on Inungilak Island at seven meters above the present sea level. Phyll and I knew that, if confirmed, our work at Kiniktok would represent a major find.

The Dorset culture survived until about 1300 AD, when it was replaced by the more advanced Thule culture which had moved across the top of the globe from the west. The Thule were the better adapters – they had a superior method for hunting whales and theirs was a whale based economy. The Thule had the technological edge, and the Dorset culture disappeared. Whether the Dorset people died or were assimilated into the dominant Thule culture, no one knows.

Eventually – by about 1600 – the climate turned colder, the north experienced a little ice age, and the supply of whales began to ebb. The Thule were forced to abandon their relatively comfortable whale based life-style in settled winter camps, and to become completely nomadic like the Sarqaq before them – dependent on seal, caribou, and fish.

Our tent was set near the beach in the midst of a group of whalebone Thule houses dating back at least three hundred years. It was fifty yards, farther up the beach to the East, where Phyll had first uncovered the Dorset artifacts. In a preliminary way, we had dated the Dorset camp site to 900 AD.

Working together, we had already uncovered a multiplicity of small Dorset artifacts including one exquisitely carved ivory bear, and a small iron burin like tool.

Eventually, our Dorset artifacts and the skeletons could be moved to a museum. But the Dorset puzzle was more than the sum of its parts. Our goal was to understand the Dorset life style. And we would learn almost as much from puzzling out the campsite itself, as from any number of carvings lifted out of their original settings. That is why my work as a photographer was so essential to the project. The camera was one of our tools for identifying and analyzing pieces of the puzzle and part of my job was to photograph everything of significance, and a great deal that was not significant.

I worked slowly and meticulously with the camera in one hand, and my work book and maps in the other. Carrying my camera and my workbook, I walked up away from the sea to the northeastern quadrant of our surveyed site plan – the Dorset camp. I took some time to sketch and photograph the long rectangular stone foundations of the Dorset houses. What kind of people had they been – the people who had built this long house? How had they lived? What had they felt? How had they died?

About the only thing we knew about them was that the fear of starvation must have dominated their lives – as it dominated the lives of all native Arctic people. They had probably assimilated that terror of starvation into every aspect of their existence. Their lives had been precarious even by Arctic standards, and they had probably, like the Inuit after them, learned to accept death and starvation with the appearance at least of serenity and calm.

And, in the end, of course, the Dorset had not in fact survived.

I walked from the long house over to a cache of bones. The skeletons of at least twenty or thirty people were buried in one place. That, in itself, was astonishing in the north. Dry bones – waiting for the coming of the Messiah. I didn't like to touch the bones. Not even to arrange them for the camera. Without thinking, I turned aside, and pursed my lips three times. Phyll had asked me once what I was doing when I pursed my lips like that. Until she asked, I hadn't even been aware I was doing it. Strange how little we know of ourselves."

I'm spitting. I had answered.

No you're not spitting, Naomi.

Like most very good archaeologists, Phyll had a literal and precise understanding of things.

"Symbolically, I am spitting. I shrugged and kicked at the shale, I spit three times to ward off the evil eye."

Phyll smiled, The evil eye exists only as a superstition in the cultures we study, Naomi.

Don't count on it, Phyll. I said turning aside again to spit three more times. "It exists, k’n eyen hora as a superstition in some cultures in Brooklyn as well – including mine."

K’n eyen hora – a phrase my mother used almost reflexively – literally means without an evil eye. After three years at Barnard, and as many years in graduate school, I realized I still could never touch a human skull without taking the precaution of first warding off the evil eye.

In my gut I know there is something inherently obscene about a detached scientific attitude toward human bones – but studying bones was part of my job that summer. And the study of those bones at the Dorset site had become something of an obsession almost entirely obscuring, in my own mind, the reason I had been sent to the Arctic. There were too many things wrong with those bones. There was something wrong with the way they were assembled – the almost haphazard distribution of the human skeletons. That in itself was profoundly disturbing. There was no ritual to the distribution of the bones. These people hadn't been buried. Some of the skulls had been mutilated. Perhaps they had been murdered. Perhaps they had been cannibalized.

It was all possible. But I was convinced that there was something else – something else very wrong with those bones. Slowly, methodically, I continued to photograph and make notations. Then, because I was in no hurry, I returned to the Thule area closer to our tent and photographed a few grid squares of that as well. Compared to the Dorset site, the small rounded Thule stone and whalebone houses had come to represent relative security and comfort.

When I looked up, I saw Phyll standing, head down, examining one of the pits on the upland side of our tent. From an archaeological point of view, that pit was not very significant, but for some reasons it had become a target for vandals. For Phyll the willful destruction of an archaeological site was unforgivable. I walked over to where Phyll stood.

We have a problem, Naomi.

I shrugged. Yes, Phyll, but I don't know what we can do about it. Let's be thankful that, so far at least, the vandals haven't touched any pit of critical importance. What did Yellowknife have to say when you telephoned?

She jammed her hands into her pockets, "Yellowknife, Naomi, is about as effectual as a clergyman at a bacchanalia. They say we should post signs, appear on the local radio station, attend the council meetings, and, in general, attempt to educate the populace. As a plan of action it doesn't strike me as particularly efficacious. Meanwhile, the axe murderer is allowed to roam about at will. And Lord knows why I care. It's their heritage not mine.

Not an axe murderer, Phyll. Probably only a handful of teenage boys who want to make a little extra change. And they don't understand anything about heritage – theirs or anyone else's. To them sites like Kiniktok are a dime a dozen. Broken down rocks, some whalebone, a lot of ashes, and two dumb Kabloona women desecrating old bones and making a big deal about it.

Well they'll discover that this particular Kabloona woman intends doing something more than 'make a big deal'. This work is my life, Naomi.

What are you planning, Phyll?

"How should I know – but I'll think of something. Machine guns? Laser rays? Tranquilizers in their seal meat? There ought to be something, Naomi. Perhaps I'll build a fence."

"A fence, Phyll? A fence in the Arctic? What are you going to build it with? And why? The only thing a fence will stop is drifting snow, and maybe a bear or two during the summer. But go ahead build a fence. It can't do much harm this time of year."

She relaxed and smiled at me – the smile held both a hint of embarrassment and a hint of apology. Don't be critical unless you have something better to suggest. Where is your professional pride, Naomi? Didn't they teach you anything at Columbia?

No more than they taught you at Cambridge. I know how to write a research paper and how to apply for grants. Remember, I'm not an archaeologist. I'm not even an anthropologist anymore. I'm getting a degree in philosophy, and this is just a summer job for me. It's not my life's work.

And you don't care.

Of course I care. I poked my glasses back onto the bridge of my nose. We might as well try the Yellowknife suggestions. I don't think we'll lose anything by going to the settlement council.

And you really think that in one or two meetings we can instill in the locals a sense of history and heritage?

Probably not. But a council meeting is worth a try, Phyll. I was planning to go into town anyway this afternoon, do some shopping for groceries, and work on my paper. While I'm there I'll ask to appear at the meeting, and find out if Enoki Amarok will translate for us.

She nodded, Fine, go into town, Naomi. Lord knows you deserve a break, and enjoy yourself.

I always enjoy myself, Phyll.

No you don't. You work too hard. Hell, we both work too hard. She ran a hand through her hair. And we both take all of this too damn seriously.

CHAPTER TWO

I wondered if Phyll would even have believed me if I had told her who I was really working for that summer. For my first three weeks in the Arctic I had had trouble believing it myself. I reminded myself, yet again, that I hadn't actually volunteered to join the CIA. It had not been my idea. It had all started innocently enough.

I wondered if Phyll would even have believed me if I had told her who I was really working for that summer. For my first three weeks in the Arctic I had had trouble believing it myself. I reminded myself, yet again, that I hadn't actually volunteered to join the CIA. It had not been my idea.

It had all started innocently enough.

As acutely embarrassing as it is to many of my colleagues, I have an almost absolute devotion to the ideals of a free society. I believe in things like democracy and human rights, and I think the United States of America is a great place. And so I decided to devote two or three years of my life to serving my country.

At twenty four, with a Ph.D. in the liberal arts near completion I wasn't really prime material for the military, so I had applied to the State Department. I thought they might offer me a three year posting doing drudge work in some obscure and preferably dangerous embassy. As it happened, he State Department wanted me only as a long term career bureaucrat, and I had no intention of becoming a career bureaucrat. So they sent me off to "this other place.

Naive as I was, it took me several days to figure out that this other place was the CIA. I had never even imagined myself in the CIA. Not surprisingly I was not quite what the CIA had expected. The CIA, in turn, was not at all what I had expected. The earnest young men interviewing me at Langley seemed curiously innocent. They seemed like nothing so much as adolescent boys playing computer games. Did I really want to work for these people? And what sort of work could they want me for? I certainly wasn't comfortable with them, and they weren't comfortable with me. We were from different worlds– different universes of the mind. There was nothing that I could relate to in those cubicle-like offices at the CIA – no reality.

I would have taken the next train back to Brooklyn except that David Greenberg was getting married the second Sunday in June – in Baltimore. My parents were in Israel with my pregnant sister and at least one of the Solomons had to be there for David's wedding. The Greenbergs were the closest thing to an extended family that a child of survivors is likely to have. And, as long as I could remember, I had been going to marry David's older brother Sam.

But then Sam Greenberg had been killed, and it was David who was getting married.

Sam's death. David's marriage. That was reality.

A time to weep, and a time to laugh.

Sunday morning, I took the bus from Washington into Baltimore and found my way to the big modern reform temple the bride's family belonged to. Temple Beth Israel of Baltimore was to our run down back street synagogue like a condominium on Park Avenue is to a walk up in the Bronx. I had a great deal of faith in God's ability to find the true believer in unlikely places, but for me, at least, God didn't seem much in evidence in Temple Beth Israel. The temple and its congregation were almost as sanitized and as sterile as the people I had left behind in Langley. The difference was that while the people at Langley had probably been WASPS, the congregants of Temple Beth Israel only acted like WASPS. They were Jews who seemed to have successfully shucked off the burdens of their Jewishness. And I, who have always been weighed down by those same burdens resented them their freedom, and envied them their weightlessness.

I didn't want them to be a part of David's wedding, and so I, quite literally, blanked them out. Near sighted people have an advantage that way. We can take off our glasses and the rest of the world dissolves into a pleasant blur. With my glasses tucked away, it wasn't difficult to ignore them. To counter balance all those straight limbed, well-groomed, cocktail drinking acquaintances of the bride, the Greenbergs had brought a small army of friends down from New York to celebrate with them the marriage of their only remaining son. And our strength was as the strength of ten. In spirit at least, we had them outnumbered – we knew what it was to be joyful. We knew what it was to celebrate a marriage. To those cool outsiders studying us and nursing their cocktails, we must have seemed almost frenzied. And we were in truth, in a sort of frenzy. Unlike the congregants of Temple Beth Israel, the Greenbergs and the Solomons knew that at any minute the SS was going to come through the door with their machine guns blasting, or, if not the SS, then at least a horde of murdering Cossacks. Each of us knew, in the very pith and marrow of our bones, that the Angel of Death was waiting in the wings to play one of his colossal jokes on the Jewish people. And we knew our names were on his list. And still we were commanded to be joyful – even when there was no occasion for joy. And how much more wonderful to be joyful when there is an occasion for joy. A wedding is an occasion for great joy.

A time to mourn and a time to dance.

Despite the bittersweet memories of Sam, I did enjoy myself. I was away from both the State Department and the CIA. It was the first time in weeks that I could just relax and be myself – Naomi Solomon.

I returned to Langley on Monday rejuvenated. Even the CIA seemed rejuvenated – they had finally reached a decision.

Overnight – or so it seemed to me – I had become one of their chosen.

I, on the other hand, was not at all certain I wanted to be chosen. I asked the CIA what they had chosen me to do, and, by way of an answer I was referred to a more senior member of the Agency. Paul Lockley was about fifty, his hair grizzled, his eyes a tired world weary grey. He was a slight man of less than medium height and he seemed almost anonymous. I had finally been passed through the ranks of the CIA to someone of substance.

He said they needed a pair of ears on Inungilak Island, and they knew I had some acquaintance with the local language. I had done a bachelor's thesis on Inuit Kinship patterns. I was known to have an unusual facility with languages.

"I don't speak Inuktitut, Mr. Lockely. I might, with a great deal of help, be able to understand a conversation here and there, but I am not fluent in the language."

You are fluent enough for our purposes. We have arranged to have you working as an assistant at an established dig. Will that give you a plausible reason to spend time in the settlement itself?

I thought about it for a moment. More curious than interested I replied, No. Archaeologists don't as a rule spend a great deal of time in native communities. They don't have good press with indigenous peoples.

He smiled, Well then, how do we get you into the settlement itself?

It was not an entirely pleasant smile.

I still don't think I'm the person for you, Mr. Lockely, but it's not unusual for anthropologists to work at digs and also to research papers on the local culture. For example, I could do a paper on the philosophy of anthropology using theories about Inuit child-rearing as models.

"Do anthropologists working in the north have better press than archaeologists?" Lockely asked.

No. But people have accepted anthropologists as a necessary evil. Anthropologists have never had the option of hiding away in ruins.

It makes sense. We'll set you up with a grant – a generous grant that will cover the cost of hiring native interpreters.

From a professional point of view, of course, it's a wonderful opportunity. I would spend my summer working at a dig in the Arctic and writing a paper in my field. But I still have to know what this is all about. I can't help wondering just what the CIA expects to get out of my being in Inungilak. Why Inungilak?

He sat back and thought about that for a moment or two. Foxe Five, one of the main DEW Line stations, is located adjacent to the community of Inungilak.

I waited.

There are tests in progress at the DEW Line. Tests on a critical component of the Strategic Defense Initiative. We've code named the component ARTHUR. ARTHUR will enable us to pinpoint the location of incoming missiles well before they reenter the atmosphere. It's being tested by the Research Facility at Foxe Five.

He was, I noticed, in professor mode. I wondered how many times he had given this particular lecture before.

What use would I be in the town itself?

Hopefully, no use at all, Miss Solomon. We aren't certain that the Russians know about ARTHUR, and we have no reason to believe that they suspect ARTHUR is being tested at Foxe Five. But if they have located ARTHUR, they will make every attempt to steal or sabotage the device.

And you expect them to work from the outside?

They may. They probably won't. We like to have someone on the outside just in case.

It seems a sort of out of the way precaution, Mr. Lockely.

He leaned back in his chair. Yes, I suppose it does. But ninety percent of our work involves taking routine precautions. The CIA is populated by thousands of people whose sole function is to provide some slight added increment of safety or knowledge. But if the Soviets do try to get ARTHUR, they will have to use more than the DEW Line personnel. In the Arctic, the problem will not be stealing ARTHUR so much as finding some way of escaping with him. ARTHUR is not large. It is a cylinder only about two feet high and a foot in diameter. But it is too large to put in your pocket. You couldn't mail it out inconspicuously; air access is limited; roads don't exist; and sea travel over any distance is monitored by Canada Ice Control.

And there is no getting it out under cover of darkness.

Not for a few months there isn't, Miss Solomon.

He looked down at his hands for a moment and then fixed me with eyes suddenly gone hard. One thing I want to stress, Miss Solomon, all the rhetoric aside, ARTHUR is important. Desperately important.

I looked into his eyes and I believed him. I hadn’t believed much of what he had said. But I believed – or at least I chose to believe – that ARTHUR was important. And so I found myself agreeing.

Then he smiled, instantly lightening the atmosphere. Your job is to be a listening post. The man in charge on the inside likes to work on his own. In fact, since ARTHUR's existence is not generally known, the CIA protection will be underplayed. The CIA has no firm knowledge that the Russians even know about ARTHUR, let alone that they know where he is located. Hopefully, all any of us will get out of your summer's work on Inungilak Island is some progress at the dig, and a paper.

This man on the inside – how do I contact him?

You don't. He'll contact you.

And if I do come up with information, how do I pass it on?

I'm hoping he'll make contact with you within a few days of your arrival. The agent in charge is one of our best men, but his methods are not entirely orthodox. He may not contact you at all. He is not a team player; but – in his way – he's a genius, and we let him manage things the way he wants to.

How am I going to recognize this genius?

You won't. Not unless he identifies himself with the passwords. He'll probably introduce the passwords into an otherwise normal conversation.

Like in the movies?

Right, Miss Solomon. Your new boss has a peculiar sense of humor.

OK, so what are the magic words that my superior is going to identify himself with?

Paul Lockely grinned, You won't have any trouble remembering them. He'll say '...flitter about on gossamer wings. Would you care for a cigarette?'

I beg your pardon.

You heard me right the first time. As I said, our man has a very peculiar sense of humor.

It sounded like that wasn't the only peculiar thing about 'our man.'

Humor aside, ARTHUR is deadly serious business, Miss Solomon. The agent in place may be eccentric, but he's damn good. He was very reluctant to have you stationed on Inungilak, but he did check you out quite thoroughly, and he's agreed that, if he needs you, he'll contact you. In the meanwhile, all you have to do is keep your ear to the ground, work at the dig, and produce a plausible anthropology paper.

In the three weeks I had been on Inungilak Island I had helped Phyll at the dig, and I had listened to all the gossip in the town, I had discovered that a fellow anthropologist, Martin Welche, was a drug dealer with a clientele at the DEW Line base – and I had waited in vain for some homosexual with a nicotine habit to identify himself as my superior. My superior hadn't chosen to make himself manifest to me.

CHAPTER THREE

Monday Afternoon: July 7th

During the summer, the fastest way to cover the four or so miles between the dig and the settlement is by ocean going canoe. Wisely, neither the CIA nor our various grants had provided us with an ocean going canoe. Neither one of us would have been able to operate it. The visiting archaeologists at Kiniktok had never been entrusted with anything more dangerous than a three-wheel drive all-terrain Honda.

Phyll could handle the Honda – I couldn't. Not very well. At home in Cambridge she drove something called a Jaguar Vanden Plas. At home in Brooklyn I used public transportation. Like many New Yorkers I had never bothered to get a driver's license. The world of gears, fan belts, and punctured tires was foreign to me. So, as a rule, I just walked to the settlement unless I was planning on bringing back groceries. That Monday afternoon the Honda trike started easily and chose to cooperate.

I came across Enoki Amarok about a mile north of the settlement where fifteen or twenty Inuit were working to extract an antique half ton pick up from the muck.

Summer is not the time to travel in the Arctic.

Growing up as I did in the Hudson River Valley, I had been well-schooled in Henry Hudson lore. The image of Captain Hudson trapped in the forming ice of the Bay named for him was fixed in mind. It was as if the cold and the ice in themselves were the enemy of all human activity. In the South, and by South Inuit mean anything below the tree line, we assume that travel during the Arctic winter is virtually impossible. In fact, the ice is not a threat, but a great facilitator of Arctic travel.

In the winter, everything is frozen – the land, the sea, and that curious in between of sedge meadow. In the winter an enterprising person could theoretically walk from Inungilak Island west across Foxe Basin, and from there west over the Northwest Passage to the Aleutians. People do regularly sled east over the northern part of Baffin Island and from there over the top of Lancaster Sound to Greenland.

In the summer, transport is very much more complicated. The limestone shale areas are fairly easy to walk across. But interspersed in the areas of shale, along river beds, and in low lying areas are soft, squishy, sedge meadows that are virtually impossible to traverse in any rational or straightforward fashion. Neither dog sleds nor snow mobiles were designed to handle raw rock, or shale, or sedge meadow.

The driver of the truck Enoki and his friends were trying to extricate had miscalculated the road conditions – which, even for an experienced man, is remarkably easy to do. He had thought the tundra was still firm enough to support his vehicle and, so thinking, he had started across one of the countless wadi like troughs in the Arctic that carry torrents of run off water for a few short days each spring.

The truck had sunk into the muck up to its axles. When that sort of thing happens, other Inuit start showing up almost instinctively, and Enoki Amarok was one of the men who had come to the aid of the truck's owner.

I noticed that I was not the only southerner there. Martin Welche had come to record their efforts for posterity.

Martin Welche was a tallish man, almost bald, with deep soulful eyes and a narrow slit of a mouth. He had the look of a weasel, not so much in his face which showed an almost total lack of cunning, but in his body. His body was bent out thin, curved, and weasel like. The curvature of the spine and the spavined shoulders were accentuated because he went everywhere encumbered by video equipment, still cameras, and photographic paraphernalia.

From the first, I had been a careful observer of Martin Welche. It wasn't simply that he was a fellow academic or even that Phyll had taken him in as a sort of pet – Martin Welche was also a functioning anthropologist with a full complement of hang ups, prejudices, and presuppositions. Since my paper was supposed to be about people like Martin, I took a genuine interest in the way he did his work.

It was this interest in Martin, as an anthropologist, if nothing else, that led me to discover his other source of livelihood. Ten days earlier I happened to notice that he was excessively protective of one of the brown leather bags he sometimes carried. I managed a quick look inside that bag to confirm that it was not filled with photographic supplies, but with a wide assortment of drugs. Even Martin couldn't be expected to consume that many chemicals in the course of a single summer. It had taken a week of very careful observation before I became reasonably certain that Welche was smuggling those drugs in to the military personnel at Foxe Five. I thought I now knew who his contact at the base was.

I could understand Welche's wanting a little income on the side. Perpetual dissertations are expensive. But I had real moral reservations about drugging the men and women who were monitoring the nation’s early warning system. And so that afternoon, Martin Welche was my primary target.

I watched as with seemingly endless patience Martin continued to photograph the Inuit, and, all the while, they ignored him. I knew that within a quarter of an hour he would come to talk to me. He always did. One of the psychological perils of the social sciences is the desire, by anthropologists in particular, to be loved and appreciated by their subjects. Both with respect to his professional life as an anthropologist, and his love life as a man, Martin Welche needed constant approval and reassurance, and since neither the Inuit nor Phyll offered these reassurances he came to me for comfort.

Ten minutes after I arrived, Welche walked over to where I was. He sat down on the ground beside me, and together we watched the men work on extricating the truck. Both Welche and I were familiar with Inuit work habits. We knew, or we thought we knew, what to expect. It was our interpretations that would differ. For Welche the Inuit represented some sort of ideal of classless society. For me, they represented just another method of social organization.

What I always noticed first was the silence. If there was to be any communication about the work in hand, it would be almost totally non verbal. People seemed to arrive as if summoned up telepathically, and then someone would stop to make tea. Inuit are never without the necessaries for making tea – a small