It takes a certain kind of madness to live as far up south as Glint Strait. And nobody can live through the winter.
Look at the water. Look how it sits; too choppy to freeze but too cold to move. Like mown grass made waves.
Look at the cliffs. They glitter in the summer; in the winter they sparkle. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful lethal faces, soaring up high.
Look at Stonehead Glacier. Hanging off its mountain, looming over the water, crawling its way along to its dissolution at its old-man pace just a hair slower than it’s being born.
But the ship that had ventured this far so many summers ago didn’t look at those. They were too busy looking at the little fjord underneath the glacier, and at the exposed rock there.
It shone fit to make the cliffs look dim as a dead eye.
***
Here is the Glint Strait harbour. Tight and cramped; that sort of place that’s made to soak in the weight of the cold and snug beneath it rather than crack.
There are no boats in it. There is no air in it.
Here is the Glint Strait street, the only one for a thousand miles. Company sheds, company walls, company halls. Hammered in company steel-mills by company drill-presses and shipped on company rail to company vessels.
Here are the Glint Strait mines, crawling up underneath old Stonehead like ants under a house. Chewing out the worthless stone and clawing frantically, nails bloodying and backs breaking for that one more fistful of precious soft metal.
Here are the company bodies. They’re standing still. They’re talking. They’re eating. They’re laughing. They’re swearing. They’re sweating. They’re not moving.
They’ve been doing all that for two months.
There’s no silence. That needs sound to break. This is just cold. Words are hanging in midair. Thoughts are stalled in cold heads. Eyes are on pause. The air is too thin to hold a sunbeam up; it creaks under the hazy weight of the southern twilight.
***
The icebreaker is five thousand tons and it is filled with heat and light and coal and it shakes from bow to stern, sawing as much as sailing. It chews the water up and spits it out again, moving like a hungry shark.
Its crew are moving and laughing and shouting. They’ve never been this far south before. They’re excited to see the mines at the end of the world, to judge if they’re really worth all this trouble and nonsense.
They’re excited to put foot on shore for the first time in weeks, even if it’s in the ass-end of god-lost who-knows-where.
And a few – just a few, the young ones – are excited to watch their ship shred apart a frozen day that’s stretched on all winter, tearing a season in half with nothing but noise and heat.
So it does. It roars through the fjord and tears apart the ice and the air and the cold and the quiet and fills it all with a great billowing GOUT of warm life, blistering through Glint Strait’s single street and leaving it iceless. Eyes blink. Mouths talk. Lungs breathe and hearts beat.
And Glint Strait is alive again, in the heart of a bottomless winter that nobody could live through.
That is how things are. Let’s see how they were in the end.
***
The end started about three days later, when the good new booze had run out and everyone had gotten enough of the bad old rotgut in them to have bad ideas but not enough to be unable to act on them.
More importantly, it was payday. The company store took company pay, and if a company worker didn’t have any they could curl up and starve to death outside their company shackhouse with a belly empty of company food. Glint Strait was the end of the world, the farthest south anyone had ever lived. It meant a lot to keep things right and proper and natural there, and so effort was put into it.
Now, things would’ve been alright if a few things hadn’t stacked up just the wrong way, just so.
First, Dinnel Haks, miner of the fourth shaft, was shorted by twelve cents on her pay. This wouldn’t have put her back up particularly hard most days, but…
…Second, Matron Haks was ill at home, two thousand miles and more away with half her leg trying to get up and walk away without the rest of her. And the medical fee to stop that sort of thing was expensive.
And THAT wouldn’t normally have made much of a dent anywhere, but for third, which was that the paymaster was sick after overdrinking for the first six hours and the four after that. So it was being handled by his aide, Kebbl. And Kebbl, well, she was a good girl, but she had a bit of a temper.
Even so, things might’ve ended there, even if Dinnel was a popular lady around the pubs for her quick hand on her horn. But she landed awful heavy on her playing hand, and there were a few of her friends waiting outside the paymaster’s shack, and well.
***
Words were exchanged. Heated words, with some fiery euphemisms.
Blood grew hot, pumped hotter-yet muscles and harder fists.
Dinnel went down again, landed on her horn-playing hand again, and someone in the crowd decided enough was enough and fired a pistol for order and someone ELSE saw them draw it and drew theirs first and ANOTHER someone else saw that.
And after all that long cold winter, things got a little TOO heated.
The crew ended up on the boat. They were young and arrogant and tough and they’d been eating better than the miners, but there were fewer of them and they weren’t as angry by half, which was saying a lot because damnation on a caw-gull they were furious enough to melt lead.
They’d come all this way to save those ungrateful slugs. Those burrowing moles. Those slow-witted sluggards, hauled up here like a boxful of coal and dumped in the snow, left to freeze themselves without their (gracious, gifted) aid.
They told them so.
The miners had stayed here still and stocked through the worst in the world. Frozen to the word, to the eye, to the mind. They’d put up with that, and they were at work again. And they weren’t getting their due, and that wasn’t half the due they were warranted.
The miners didn’t tell the crew so, though. They were practical people. Instead, they climbed the icebreaker’s hull to show them so firsthand.
Funny thing about blood, it gets hotter even as more of it leaves the bodies. The air was sizzling with terror and fury and it boiled over. The icebreaker was screaming again, the captain barricaded in his cabin, the boilers overclocking. Time to run, time to go. But the ship was tethered fast to the docks and all it could do was roar and heave and fry until at last there was one noise that made everyone stop again.
It wasn’t a big noise, just a little hum. But it came from old Stonehead Glacier, and it was getting louder. And louder, and closer. And louder, and closer, and faster.
The hull hissed, the metal screamed, the people roared, and out went the light, the heat, the sound, and all of Glint Strait
***
The next icebreaker was a long time coming, and when it did, it couldn’t find a thing, and that thing was Glint Strait.
The water was a solid mass of ice.
There were no cliffs, just endless tides of snow.
No mountain, no glacier.
And no fjord, no coast at all left to see.
So it went home, and its crew were a little more sober and quiet than they’d been when they left.
It takes a certain kind of madness to live as far up south as Glint Strait. And nobody can live through the winter.
They’re waiting until it’s over.