The Sun at Midnight
Sandra Field
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
IT WAS heaven.
Sheer heaven.
Kathrin Selby smiled to herself. Very few people would feel that her present location bore any relation to paradise. In fact, a great many of them might equate the landscape that stretched in front of her with hell rather than heaven. But to her it was astonishingly beautiful.
She settled herself a little more comfortably on the boulder and cupped her chin in her gloved hands. She was sitting on a granite ridge that overlooked the meadows of a wide valley, its far side flanked by plateaux of loose grey shale and by drifting, sunlit clouds. There was not another human being in sight. Behind her lay another valley where a glacial river tumbled and churned beneath snow-covered mountains. From her perch she could not see that river. Nor could she see the sea or the pack ice, nor the camp where she and the other scientists were staying. The only other creatures sharing the landscape with her were a herd of muskoxen, grazing on the slope below her.
Kathrin had spent the last five days out on the tundra watching the herd, taking copious notes and a great many photographs. She had nicknamed the herd bull Bossy, because of his huge horn bosses and because of his habit of displacing the cows from the best clumps of grasses and sedges. Now she picked up her binoculars and focused on him once again. As a species, muskoxen had changed very little in the last ninety thousand years, and it was all too easy in the deep Arctic silence to imagine herself in another time, a time long ago, when hunting these great beasts might have meant the difference between life and death.
The wind stirred the long guard hairs of the bull’s outer coat. He looked not unlike a boulder himself, his dark brown hair almost hiding his thick, light-coloured legs, his huge hump and pale saddle a solid mass against the evening sun. He was browsing on the tiny, ground-hugging willow, the only tree that grew this far north.
Kathrin shifted, pushing back the sleeve of her jacket to check her watch. It was nearly seven o’clock, and she had a three-hour hike to get back to the base camp. She was almost out of food; she had to go back. But she was reluctant to leave the peaceful valley, which was bathed in soft gold light as the sun moved in its slow circle around the horizon. Reluctant, too, to leave the herd that from long hours of observation she was beginning to know so well. The three cows, two yearlings and two new calves dotted the tundra, the cows moving with stately grace, the calves leaping among the rocks as if there were springs in their heels.
She felt another upwelling of happiness. At the age of twenty-four she had finally found her niche. She was doing work that she loved in an environment whose vastness and solitude spoke to her soul. Not many people were that lucky, she thought humbly, and stood up, taking a long breath of the chill, pure air. Bossy raised his head, his dark eyes gleaming. He pawed at the ground, rubbed the side of his face along his foreleg, then lowered his head to graze again. Slowly Kathrin turned away and began walking towards her small yellow tent.
She would be back here tomorrow. Deciding to leave her tent up, she ducked into it, shoving her dirty clothes and her camera gear into her backpack, then pulling the pack outside. Carefully she zipped up the tent flap and anchored the pegs with rocks. Then she heaved the pack on to her back and clipped the straps around her hips. As she did so, the plaintive call of a plover drifted to her ears, and to her surprise she felt tears prick her eyes. She was so incredibly lucky to be here.
She stood still. The luminous clouds that were piled high over the plateau, the big, slow-moving animals with their long shadows on the grass, the cry of the bird: all coalesced in her heart so that for a moment out of time she and the tundra were one.
Then the plover called again and the spell was broken. Her lips curving in an unconscious smile, Kathrin began trudging up the hill towards the ridge. The quickest way to the base camp was across the ridge and along the river valley. She hoped there’d be some supper left. Even more urgently, she hoped tonight was the night that Garry Morrison, the camp leader, was firing up the sauna. After five days of living in a tent, she badly needed to renew acquaintance with hot water, soap, and shampoo.
She walked easily, her long legs moving at a steady pace. After climbing the rock ridge, she descended into the valley, her knee-high rubber boots squelching in the bog; the permafrost was only a foot down, so the water had nowhere to drain. As she automatically scanned the valley for wildlife, the constant broil of the river assaulted her ears. The ice-cap high in the mountains was its source, and Kathrin had never tasted water as cold or as clean. She took a drink from her water bottle, stooping to admire the magenta flowers of an early patch of willowherb before she struck out north-west towards the camp.
Its official name was Camp Carstairs, after the scientist who had founded it thirty years ago on the western shore of Hearne Island in the Canadian High Arctic. Before she arrived, Kathrin had pictured something more imposing than the reality: a small cluster of plywood-faced buildings and insulated tents, all brightly coloured so as to be visible from the air. Now, as she scrambled over a scree slope and rounded a cliff, she saw in the distance the orange of the radio shack and the bright blue of her own little hut and smiled again. It would be good to see the others. While she loved being alone, it was a little difficult to carry on a meaningful conversation with a muskox.
Even though she could distinguish the individual buildings, Kathrin knew she still had at least an hour’s hard hiking ahead of her. Distances, she had learned early, were deceptive in the clear northern air, where there were no trees of any height to give a sense of scale.
She began the slow descent to the lowlands, which were pockmarked with lakes and ponds. It would not only be good to see the others, Pam and Garry and Karl and Calvin, it would be good to be home, she thought. Then her brow puckered. How, in only four weeks, had the motley collection of outbuildings come to be called home?
It had been a long time since she had felt like calling anywhere home. Not since she had left Thorndean.
Thorndean...Kathrin could never think of the formal stone mansion, where her mother had been the housekeeper and where she herself had grown up, without remembering the two young men who had shaped her life so definitively and so destructively. Ivor and Jud. Half-brothers, sons of the owner of Thorndean. Ivor, whom she had loved, and Jud, whom she had trusted...
She had seen neither of them for seven