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Then my foot slipped on the tundra, and I fell to my knees. I twisted to try to catch Pop so he wouldn’t hit the ground headfirst, and then we both slid and fell into a dark hole in the earth.
VI
THE SOD ROOF OF THE ULAX WAS MOSTLY INTACT, BUT THERE WERE HOLES. So after my eyes adjusted, there was enough light to see. But Pop had landed on top of me, and at first all I could see was his mustache.
“Your breath ain’t so good, Pop,” I said. “Mind getting off me?”
At first I didn’t think he heard me over the shriek of the williwaw. But then he grunted and wheezed and pushed himself away until he was sitting against the earthen wall. I sat up and scooted over against the wall beside him.
Pop reached up and adjusted his glasses, which had gone askew. Then he looked up at the largest hole in the roof, which I guessed was how we’d gotten inside. It was about eight feet above the dirt floor.
“Thanks for breaking my fall,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the wind. “I hope I didn’t damage you. Although you might have avoided it if you’d told me what you were doing instead of dragging me.”
I didn’t answer. Instead, I looked around at the mostly underground room. It was maybe twenty feet long by ten feet wide. At the far end was a jumble of sod, timber, and whalebone that looked like a section of collapsed roof. But the roof above that area was actually in better shape than the rest. The rest was about evenly split between old sod and random holes. Some empty bottles and cans were scattered around the floor, and a few filthy, wadded blankets lay on earthen platforms that ran down the lengths of the two longer walls.
But there was no Cutthroat. I had watched him drop down into the same hole that Pop and I had tumbled into. I was sure that was what had happened. But I didn’t see him here now.
“What happened to the Eskimo?” I asked.
Pop scanned the interior of the ulax and frowned. “He must have gone elsewhere.”
“There isn’t any elsewhere,” I said, almost shouting. I pointed upward. “Listen to that. And this is the only shelter up here.”
Pop shook his head. “The man we saw was a native. He may know of shelters on this old volcano that we wouldn’t find if we searched for forty years. Or he may even be so used to a wind like this that he’ll stand facing into it and smile.”
I looked up at the big hole and saw what looked like a twenty-pound rock blow past. “I saw him jump down here. That’s how I knew where to go. And I think I would have seen him climb back out. Unless he can disappear.”
And then, from behind the jumble of sod and whalebone at the far end of the ulax, the Cutthroat emerged. His hood was down, and his dark hair shone. He was in a crouch, holding a hunting knife at his side. A big one.
“Who the fuck are you people?” the Cutthroat asked. His voice was low and rough, but still managed to cut through the howling above us. This was a man used to talking over the wind.
Pop gave a single hacking cough. Then he looked at me and said, “Well, Private, it doesn’t look as if he disappeared.”
Right then I wanted to punch Pop, but it was only because I was scared. I wished the Cutthroat really had disappeared. I didn’t recognize his dark, scraggly-bearded face, but that didn’t mean anything. I didn’t remember many living faces from Attu.
But I did remember the Cutthroats as a group. I remembered how they had a
ppeared and vanished in the frozen landscape like Arctic wolves.
And I remembered their knives.
“I asked you two a question,” the Cutthroat said, pointing at us with his knife. “Are you M.P.’s? And if you’re not, what are you doing here?”
Pop gave another cough. This time it wasn’t a tubercular hack, but a sort of polite throat-clearing. And I realized he didn’t understand what kind of man we were dealing with. But maybe that was a good thing. Because if he had ever seen the Cutthroats in action, he might have stayed stone-silent like me. And one of us needed to answer the question before the Cutthroat got mad.
“We aren’t M.P.’s,” Pop said. “So if you’ve done something you shouldn’t, you needn’t worry about us.”
“I haven’t done a fucking thing,” the Cutthroat said. Even though his voice was gravelly, and even though he was cussing, his voice had a distinctive Aleut rhythm. It was almost musical. “I just came up here because a guy told me there was a dead eagle. And I thought I’d get some feathers. I’m a goddamn native, like you said.”
I managed to take my eyes off the Cutthroat long enough to glance at Pop. Pop had the same expression on his face that he’d had when I’d first seen him, when he’d been whipping the strong, shirtless kid at Ping-Pong. He was calm and confident. There were even slight crinkles of happiness at the corners of his eyes and mouth, as if he were safe and snug in his own briar patch, and anybody coming in after him was gonna get scratched up.
It was the damnedest expression to have while sitting in a pit on the side of a volcano facing a man with a knife while a hundred-mile-an-hour wind screeched over your head.
“I understand completely,” Pop said. “We came up to find the eagle as well, although we didn’t have as good a reason. We’re only here because an idiot lieutenant colonel couldn’t think of another way to make us dance like puppets. It’s a stupid, pointless errand from a stupid, pointless officer.”
The Cutthroat blinked and then straightened from his crouch. He lowered the knife.
“Fucking brass,” he said.
