Ilaanni Nanoq Pivat

“What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning with infinite artfulness the red wine of Shiraz into urine?”

Isak Dinesen

Isak reluctantly tugged his Heckler & Koch USP free of its holster. The leather creaked in protest, as if a vital appendage had been abruptly ripped away, at least in Isak’s fertile imagination. Such was how seldom Qaanaaq’s chief law enforcement officer had given the semi-automatic pistol even a thought.

Liquor was a most amenable and accommodating companion here in the northernmost region of the planet, and as a result, relationships that existed on compromise, contention, and concession tended to suffer. Isak took pride that he’d been able to rely on wit, resourcefulness, and, when essential, his considerable brawn to deal with the occasional difference in opinion or culture at the village’s lone tavern or the inevitable ale- or whiskey-fueled domestic spats, depending on household wealth. In a community increasingly popular with dogsled hunters and eco-tourists, Isak had managed to avert more than one international incident with only his affable demeanor and daunting physical presence.

But polar bears and serial murderers paid little heed to affability or athleticism, and both were on Isak’s mind this night. Roughly five years ago, polar bears were seen rummaging through science camps at the top of Greenland’s ice sheet, well inland, where they had never before ventured. The creatures had drifted further and further outside their normal range, with more frequent sightings even in the Southeast region, where freshwater glacial ice flowing into the ocean had enabled them to hunt without sea ice. Two years earlier, a polar bear bit the hand of a documentarian near the Daneborg military base to the east, sparking animated debate between climate scientists and Canadian zoologists who maintained the reported repeat offender was merely a bad apple.

Isak tended toward the former camp – like the yuletide legend of the young Virginia, he believed. In part, that bias might have been the product of being raised by a policeman and the Danish scientist from Nord for whom Unaaq Lyberth had fallen hard and abruptly. Asta Lyberth herself was a contradiction – a geophysicist who nonetheless had insisted on naming her only child for the pseudonymous author Dinesen and dispatched him to slumber with lyric prose about fate and God and feminism where most mothers might have cooed Hans Christian Andersen.

He now chuckled into the darkness (in mid-January, a perpetual darkness) as he recalled one of his favorite Dineson quotes: “The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.” Man had betrayed the northern seas, and as payment, he would share the land with the displaced. More tears for mankind, more sweat for the likes of me, Isak ruminated.

All of this over a still-warm mound of scat that had caught Isak’s eyes even in the three-month darkness, even from the road past the IS-18 CTBTO infrasound listening station. Qaanaaq had no restaurants save the hotel Iherit’s guest service and the scattered homeowner willing to supplement their income with a bed and possibly a meal for the foreign hiker, hunter, kayaker, or film crew exploring for streaming content. The local bar, Tavfi, offered only a liquid menu. But if you dispensed too quickly with the Qaanaaq museum in the former home of famed Arctic explorer Knud Rasmussen and poking about the indigenous Inuit culture, the village did boast the barometric array that sniffed out international nuclear mischief and doubled as a wheel-like abstract art installation on the outskirts of a village in the middle of the world’s greatest nowhere.

Isak deduced the origin of the shit-pile in the most elementary manner – tracing the ursine trail that extended from the fjord across the village/airport road and onto the Danish Meteorological Institute/ Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization site. He’d left the Outlander just off the road, and crunched warily toward the polar bear’s leavings, armed with a high-powered lamp and his largely ornamental H&K. Even if security had been a real issue at the station, Isak’s omnipresent bright red woolen watch cap was a beacon for the scientists, the military types, and the town’s 640-some citizens. 

There was no need of evidence-gathering paraphernalia as the errant polar bear was beyond prosecution, but as Isak poked about the shit, he felt a dual jolt of adrenalin. Something metallic had glinted in the lantern’s harsh light, and, using a screwdriver from the Mitsubishi’s glove compartment, he pried it out and cleaned it in the surrounding snow.

It was a bell – a sleigh bell, or jingle bell. Gold, it would appear, from both its yellowed cast and relative weight. No cheap souvenir shop trinket or remnant of the bells that pealed during the village’s holiday pageant. And at roughly an inch in diameter, it was not the remains of some unfortunate cat or canine. The bell had passed intact through the beast’s digestive track, and shaking it, Isak detected no ball bearing or marble that customarily served as a ringer. Miraculously, dark threads tied into the ring at the top of the bell also had survived digestion and passage, though even in the high-wattage lamplight, the now-shit-dyed color was impossible to read.

No such bell ordinarily would be found on a functional Inuit or recreational sled, and even so, it would be wired, rather than merely sewn or tied into place. It was now well past the holidays, and even had the bear suffered a bout of constipation, the idea of one of the village’s amateur thespians capering about out either down by the fjord or up here was as surreal as, well, a pair of nuke-detecting tinker toys seemingly discarded by some leviathan at the edge of town.

Two other factors played against a local being the bear’s supper. On closer examination, Isak spotted the symbol engraved on one of the four folded tabs that formed the cross-like aperture at the bell’s base. Isak was fluent in Danish, Inuktun, and Kalillisut, as well as English – the product of policing a tourist destination, and this was no standard Scandinavian rune or indigenous glyph. In point of fact, Isak recognized it with a chill that superseded the Arctic night.

And the finger. At least the two carpal segments that remained. It belonged to no villager or tourist, Isak was certain, even without the DNA or serological tools his “department” did not possess. A second pair of tracks receded into the darkness past the CTBTO array alongside – or likely preceding – the bear’s trail. The directional blood splatter beyond told the story, and Isak knew it was incumbent to follow it to its conclusion, out there in the darkness. Reflecting on his mother’s favorite admonition, he tightened his grip on the H&K.

**

And as Isak created a third trail into the hills above Qaanaaq, his mind turned once more toward the human killer who had put locks on village doors where none previously had existed.

By definition, a serial killer is one who claims three or more lives over more than a month’s period, with some significant interval between homicides. Isak had encountered the subspecies solely through U.S., Canadian, and British reruns and true crime programs on GTV and the Internet, but the criteria had been met a week earlier with the bloody decapitation of a nurse from the village hospital. That a post-mortem search of Bibe Reimer’s rooms had revealed a stash of opioids no doubt gleaned from the tiny hospital’s stocks raised gossip of the drug trade invading Qaanaaq with the polar bears and Americans.

Neither Isak nor the Kalaallit Nunaanni Politiit investigator brought into the case had confided in the populace what they knew to be the truth: That Reimer’s death was tied to the New Year’s Eve stabbing of Aanarsi Ignatiussen, a young and popular sled guide unfortunately more popular with his clients’ wives and daughters, and the evisceration of Stene Bidstrup, a middle-aged laborer known as much for the severity of his anger as for his sterling craftsmanship with mortar and lumber.

When the killer leaves a signature on his work, one does not have to be a Sherlock Holmes or Louise Ricks. However, Isak did not share with his national police comrade that he already knew that signature – there were too many implications and risks. It was a bitter irony for Isak that his most significant investigation was one he likely could solve only at the expense of his career and possibly his life in this community. Prosecution was inconceivable.

Isak’s heart pounded as he heard the distant wail to the east, he guessed from inside the ridges bounding the inland valley. The sheer cliffs to the Northwest, toward the airport, would be daunting for someone who’d experienced a major trauma and potentially catastrophic blood loss, while the terrain on the other side might provide a small niche or cover for the bear’s victim. Or prey.

Isak moved cautiously, following the sounds of pain and terror, in and out of the rocks and low faces. As the victim had slowed in search of refuge, he reasoned, the blood droplets would become lager and more concentrated. The policeman relied on the snow and the lunar reflection for illumination and contrast, fearing the lantern might attract the creature that may or may not be foraging the clearing for an unfinished meal and possibly a second course.

The victim was a good 165 meters northeast of the array, his back against the rock face in a crevice roughly the size of Isak’s Outlander. The bleeding male looked up in shock and inevitability, and his terror receded only slightly as he glanced up at a would-be rescuer rather than a 500-kilogram predator. As Isak activated the lamp and held it between them, fear returned, with something else.

“What brings you here?” Isak asked neutrally, in a tongue unknown to the villages or the Kalaallit Nunaanni Politiit detective. The man’s right hand was bound in bloodstained sealskin, and the right sleeve of his superficially quaint cloak was gone – a sacrifice that likely had saved his life. As Isak examined the stump of the “stranger”s amputated digit, he checked the garment’s left arm. The bell was intact, and although he couldn’t read the rune on its underside, he knew this was the companion to the shit-speckled object in his parka pocket. “Why have you come to Qaanaaq?”

The victim’s unnaturally pale face hardened into a sullen mask that would have frightened – probably had frightened – the brutal Stene Bidstrup. And utterly paralyzed the petite nurse Reimer and the foolish, libidinous Ignatiussen. His fur-lined cap had slipped off, and Isak unconsciously adjusted his own crimson watch cap.

“And why did you?” the small man rasped, wincing with the fury he poured into his retort.

Isak smiled despite himself. “I was a freak, an outcast. You know that. They – you – drove us out.” The smile disappeared into his thick beard, and he leaned close. “I asked you a question. Why did you come here?”

The man stared into the Arctic darkness, and gestured in the general direction of the village. "They – you – have left us nowhere else to go.”

Isak fell back on his rump. “You’re not the only one?”

“There are few left,” the injured man spat in the odd tongue no university linguist would be able to crack. “Just as the ice bear has been forced to find a new home as they – you – have destroyed theirs, we now have been driven out. Or eliminated. The thawing – it’s released abominations, a plague.”

It took a second for Isak to grasp. Then he recalled an item he’d seen on the web – one of those doomsday articles on the unexpected consequences of climate change. The melting and erosion of the Arctic permafrost had revealed not only paleontological treasures such as perfectly preserved woolly rhinos and cats and other mammals vanished for eons, but also extinct, or as had been surmised, merely dormant microorganisms and viruses. Instruments of plague unleashed on an unwitting – and perhaps deserving – mankind.

Isak paused. “And…Julemanden?”

The plain grew silent. Grief and fear stabbed at Isak’s chest, the latter rapidly overtaking the former. The “father,” as his people had called him, had set a standard founded in compassion and generosity, but his people now would lack either compassion or rudder. And their Eden gone, they were adrift in a new, dark world.

Isak reached into his coat and brandished the rescued sleigh bell. He held the inscription before the bleeding man’s silver eyes. “Vice,” he growled in a rough translation. The man winced as the policeman yanked his good arm to his face. “Virtue — that was Julemanden’s oath. To reward the virtuous. You have perverted his memory!”

“The virtuous!” the immigrant snarled. Pain contorted his features as he ripped the remaining ornament from his cuff and, despite his mutilated right hand and blood loss, flinging it over the outcropping and into the darkness.

The frigid, barren expanse between the cliffs was Nature’s ideal acoustic chamber. The pair froze as the bell pinged against a projection. A second sound – wary, curious, inhuman – caused Isak to extinguish the lamp.

“The virtuous,” the bloody, odd man muttered as Isak crouched. “The weak, the ineffectual, with their kind sentiments and nice words and empty actions. He believed they would multiply, that they would spread goodness across this world. How could they as long as evil existed in such number? ‘Father’ is no more, and we survivors now must honor his memory by repaying vice. Your village, your Qaanaaq, has been honored as the gateway to a new age.”

Two thousand years ago, Greenland had been an uninhabited island – free of the Inuits, the Aleuts, the Danish, the scientists and soldiers and refugees from the turmoil and terrors of the lower latitudes. While the isolated, inhospitable climes had kept the Horseman of War at bay, the ever-resourceful human species had paved the path for Pestilence and Death. Isak quickly reached his decision, holstered his H&K, and pulled the torn man to his feet.

“Come,” he whispered. “You must pay.”

Isak spied the creature across the clearing, yellow-white on white, fur bristling along its spine, muscles tensing as it read the air. The man half-carried by the local policeman had similar abilities, Isak knew, and he was grateful for the murderer’s incapacitation.

Isak spotted the bear suddenly pivoting, bracing, and, ultimately charging as the dark figures limped toward the CTBTO installation. The Outlander lie ahead, and recalling his Dinesen, he released the bloodied, weakened, shrieking man and ran for the Mitsubishi as if pursued by the spectral riders themselves. 

**

Isak’s fingers tensed on the wheel. The pistol bore into his hip as he pressed toward the frost-rimed passenger window. He bore the pain in measured contrition.

And watched the bear do a bear’s work, as splashes of red disrupted the blinding, numbing perpetually ghostly white.

“‘Be not afraid of absurdity; do not shrink from the fantastic,’” his mother had quoted over the howl of the Arctic winds beyond her adopted son’s window. “‘Within a dilemma, choose the most unheard-of, the most dangerous solution. Be brave, be brave.’”

Sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you, the actor Sam Elliott said. Sometimes, Isak recognized, the bear is the only option. When the work was done, Isak sought out that one accommodating, amenable companion in a frozen, implacable world.

**

The American had been hunting by dogsled most of the day, but by this late hour it was impossible to determine whether the ruddiness and ruptured capillaries were attributable to the Arctic winds or the man’s self-congratulatory Isfjord Single Malt.

Isak affably declined the sportsman’s offer of same, ignoring the barman’s amused glance as he requested a pint of Ice Beer. The American was mollified as the lawman detailed his brew’s origins in 2,000-year-old Arctic ice. His neighbors to the South seemed to relish history packaged as a beer ad written by Hemingway.

Isak felt a throbbing vein of perversity tonight — the opportunity to savor a good whiskey on a policeman’s wage was rare, but the man’s affluence, pseudo-intellectual pretense, temerity in lecturing the natives on their own heritage, and bloated pride in killing made forging any brotherhood of blood or spirits repellent.

In the same vein, Isak launched into a detailed account of “The Whisky War” — Canada and Denmark’s bloodless but protracted dispute over the tiny Arctic island of Tartupaluk. In 1984, Canadian soldiers planted a Canadian flag and left a bottle of Canadian whisky on the rock. The Danish Minister of Greenland Affairs “retaliated” by planting the Danish flag with a bottle of Schnapps and a letter stating, "Welcome to the Danish Island.”

No land too remote, too barren, too hostile or inimical for a world too small, too finite, too easily exhausted, Isak reflected.

The American leaned into his glass, initially absorbed — until he realized no blood or glory would be forthcoming. But he laughed heartily at the story’s culmination, and extended a trail-roughened but well-manicured hand. His “drinking buddy” was beginning to perspire amid the tavern’s body mass and the fever coursing through his brain.

“Ron,” the American announced.

“Isak.”

“Like the author? Dennison, Dean?” These gentlemen adventurers from the south had a limited library, but Dinesen’s father had been an avid, perhaps rabid huntsman, and to most Americans who’d deign to crack a binding, Karen Dinesen/Blixen’s Kenyan period was her sum total.

Isak plowed his dense black hair with his own rough fingers as the visiting squire lifted his whiskey and propounded.

“‘There is something about safari life that makes you forget all your sorrows and feel as if you had drunk half a bottle of champagne – bubbling over with heartfelt gratitude for being alive.’”

Isak barked harshly, silencing the American. Or so he had triumphantly assumed.

The silence — and stares — became pervasive. Isak snatched his knit hat from the bar. Far too late…