The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison

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performances of Verdi and Leoncavallo. It’s another month before Bigelow reassembles the stairs, the project slowed by a shortage of nails that plagues the entire settlement. Two crates of them are to arrive on the same ship that brings Bigelow’s windowpanes, but once unpacked, both boxes are discovered filled with misaddressed nutmeg graters—useless in a place without even one imported kernel of the spice; the Chugach buy the graters cheap and sew them to their dance rattles, and the nails that hold the crates together (along with nails salvaged from every other packing box on board) sell for ten cents apiece, nine cents more than Bigelow can afford.

      But the conditions under which the territory’s official meteorologist sleeps and eats and works make no difference to the weather. Bigelow’s anemometer turns and clicks in the wind; his ground thermometers are sunk into the earth to the official standardized depths of 30, 60, and 120 centimeters; his copper siphon rain recorder, complete with tipping bucket and weekly float gauges, bolted to its thirty-centimeter platform. He has adjusted his aneroid barometer to reflect his position at forty feet above sea level, and housed it along with the wet and dry bulb atmospheric thermometers in the louvered shed he assembled upon arrival. His snow measurement apparatus—density tube and spring balance, as well as a Kadel snow stake—is poised for the first flake’s arrival.

      Each morning he goes to the telegraph office, walking on boards laid over the mud. There he cables his observations on the weather to Washington, D.C., where bureau clerks and cartographers plot temperatures and pressures, precipitation indexes and wind speeds, from all over the country onto composite maps that reveal the direction and severity of storms, the arrival of killing frosts, the patterns of drought. Because of the earth’s rotation, winter storms that paralyze the east originate in the west, and Bigelow’s eight A.M. report will provide the Weather Bureau its earliest warning of trouble to come, as much as another day, or night, for farmers to thresh and for ranchers to gather their livestock into barns, for Great Lakes passenger boats to quickly find a port, for orange growers in Okeechobee County, Florida, to light smudge pots among their trees.

      Bulletins. Warnings. Advisories. The Weather Bureau was once a division of the Army Signal Corps and speaks the language of alarm. Famous for its mercilessly swift transfers, for personnel orders effective within forty-eight hours, the bureau gave Bigelow just that long to book his passage and pack what he owned—no time to worry about where he was going until he was standing on the deck of the Siren as it left Seattle, his sudden apprehension almost something he could see, a lead-blue haze hanging over him, burnt off in spots by the hilarity of other passengers, fortune seekers from San Francisco and Portland and even New York, Chinese packed into steerage like consignments of firecrackers, a flock of Tanaina women returning from a year’s employment in Vancouver.

      Not exactly seasick, Bigelow stood on the Siren’s quarterdeck, looking backward at the wake, trying to imagine what he’d hurriedly read about Cook Inlet: one of the greatest tidal differentials in the world, chunks of ice as big as houses, as big as courthouses, ebbing and flowing as much as sixty miles in half a day. All the epic white buildings he’d seen: St. Louis’s Festival Hall and her Palace of Horticulture. Chicago’s Art Institute. Supreme courts and municipal courts. Legislatures. Opera houses. Departments of Commerce and Agriculture. The Weather Bureau and even the White House itself, dome cracking and colonnade collapsing. Having lost sight of land, Bigelow saw all of civilization’s big white edifices turning and jumbling on great curling spits of freezing foam.

      The fantasy of a city boy, he shrugged it off and went below deck, sat on his narrow bunk, and stared at the wall. For another eight dollars he could have had a porthole, he could have had the sky.

      Except that it isn’t a fantasy; it turns out to be true. In October, ice appears. With his binoculars, Bigelow watches the last ships of the season stalk and catch great slabs of it, haul them up in nets, pack them in sawdust, and return south to San Francisco’s restaurants and butchers, to the ice cream parlors on Clay Street.

      And in October, Bigelow receives an unofficial letter from a friend in the bureau, who warns that the department’s new budget hasn’t been approved, with salaries for Bigelow’s rank stuck at the impossible $1,100 per year. How is he faring in Anchorage? the friend inquires. Does a town so new have a pool hall or a dance pavilion or moving-picture shows? Is there any opportunity for social gathering, female company?

      Bigelow crumples the letter and shoves it into his pocket. $21.16 per week is not nearly enough. At least, it won’t be in December, when he has to spend that much on light and heat alone. He chews his lower lip, thinking. All right then, he’ll find extra work. He will when he needs to.

      It may be that his pay is insufficient, but Bigelow has discovered something. In Alaska he is his own boss. For the first time in his life, he can order his days as he sees fit. He can build what he’s seen in those minutes before he falls asleep, drawn on the red insides of his eyelids. Equations that he knows by heart, sketches he’s copied onto scraps and into margins, analyses of friction impacted by velocity and altitude: a kite, a two-celled box kite that will soar above his station on the creek, whole miles higher than any kite has ever flown before. A way to understand not just the air, but the heavens.

      Bigelow digs out his friend’s letter, smoothes it to read the date. August 8, 1915. More than a month has passed. Already he’s hired and fired the Indians. He’s traded his father’s watch chain and fobs for a parka with wolverine trim. He’s eaten strawberries that have grown to the size of fists in the long summer light.

      And he’s seen the Aleut woman. He’s followed her along the town’s new main street.

       Chapter 2

      AT FIRST HE THINKS she might be a deaf-mute, but she isn’t deaf, because she startles at the diagnostic noises he makes, dropping an armload of wood, clattering a pan on the stove. And she isn’t mute, either. She cries out in the bed, mews and moans and even, sometimes, giggles.

      It is snowing on the day he follows her home. Small, dry flakes blow like dust behind the lenses of his glasses. Eleven degrees at noon, with a shifting wind, first from the west, then from the north, then west again. On his way from the cable office he breaks a bootlace, and when he bends to fix it, knotting the two ends together, it breaks in a new place. So he stops at Getz’s General Merchandise.

      She has three tusks of walrus ivory and a bundle of pelts, red fox mostly, pups and summer skins not worth more than a dime apiece. She leans forward over the wide counter to point at what she wants in exchange—tea, tobacco, toffee, a bottle of paregoric. Her arm up, her ungloved fingers outstretched, she waits until Getz takes each item from the shelf, slaps it down on the counter in a manner intended to convey impatience and condescension.

      At Getz’s, payment is accepted in a number of forms: gold, flake or nugget; coins, American, Russian, and Canadian; skins—sable, marten, mink, otter, seal, rabbit, lynx, wolverine, caribou, bear, wolf, moose, fox, lemming, beaver—anything bigger than a rat that has a hide to tan; and miscellany, blankets, boots, eggs, nails, needles, knives. Two walls of the store are devoted to complications of equivalence, and while certain values are not negotiable—gold is gold, and it is twelve dollars an ounce, this is painted on the wall in black—the worth of an egg, for example, goes up and down according to the number of chickens that make it through the winter. And that population depends on how many have worn themselves out laying without cease when days are twenty hours long. So Getz inscribes the cost of eggs in chalk.

      “Not un—uh, ornamental,” he says, noting how Bigelow stares at the woman. With one proprietary elbow pinning down the pelts, he ties her purchases together with twine. “If the war paint don’t bother you.”

      As if she understands, the woman turns and stares back at Bigelow, her jaw thrust forward, unapologetic, even defiant. In what way does she see him? How does he look to her? He thinks of himself as handsome—handsome enough, anyway—with a broad face, pale blue eyes almost too widely set, a straight nose, and a wide mouth that balances the eyes. There’s nothing sharp in his face, nothing mean. His big forehead appears even bigger because of his

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