This dark morning he’s awakened in their snow-house by Silence, who is using the string shapes shifting between her fingers to tell him that it is time to go seal hunting again. She is already dressed in her parka and disappears out the entrance tunnel as soon as she’s finished communicating with him.

Grumpy that there is to be no breakfast – not even some cold seal blubber from last night’s dinner – Crozier dresses himself, pulling on his parka and mittens last, and crawls downhill out through the entrance passage that faces south, away from the wind.

Outside in the dark, Crozier gets carefully to his feet – his left leg still sometimes refuses to accept his weight in the morning – and looks around. Their snow-house glows slightly from the blubber lamp that is left burning to keep the temperature up inside even while they are away. Crozier clearly remembers the long sledge voyage that brought them to this place. He remembers watching, fur-bundled on his sledge and as helpless as he had been those many weeks ago, with something like awe as Silence had spent hours digging out and then constructing this snow-house.

Since then, the mathematician in Crozier had spent hours lying beneath his robes in the snug little space and admiring the catenary curve of the thing and the absolute and seemingly effortless precision that went into the woman’s cutting of the snow blocks – in starlight – and the near perfection of the rising, inward-tilting walls made from those snow blocks.

Even as he watched from beneath his furs that long night or dark day – I’m as useless as tits on a boar, had been his thought – he’d also thought, This thing should fall. The upper blocks were almost horizontal. The last blocks she’d cut had been trapezoidal, and she’d actually shoved that final block – the key block – out from the inside and then trimmed the edges and tugged it into position from within the new snow-house. Finally Silence had come out and climbed onto the catenary-curve almost-dome of snow blocks, scrambled to the top, jumped up and down, and actually slid down its sides.

At first Crozier thought she was just acting like the child she sometimes looked to be, but then he realized that she was testing the strength and stability of their new home.

By the next day – another day without sunlight – the Esquimaux woman had used her oil lamp to melt the inside surface of the snow-house, then let the walls freeze again, coating it with a thin but very hard glaze of ice. She then thawed the sealskins that had been used first for the tent and then for the sledge and rigged them with sinew cords punched through the walls and ceilings of the snow-house, hanging the skins a few inches from the inside walls to provide an inner lining. Crozier had seen immediately that this protected them from dripping even while raising the temperature inside their living space.

Crozier was astonished at how warm their snow-house seemed: always, he guessed, at least fifty degrees warmer than the outside temperature and frequently warm enough that neither of them wore anything but their caribou-skin shorts when out from under the robes. There was a cooking area on the snow ledge to the right of the entrance, and the antler-and-wood frame there not only suspended their various cooking pots over seal-oil flames but was used as a clothes-drying frame as well. As soon as Crozier was able to crawl and go outside with her, Silence explained through her string-language and gestures that it was imperative that they always dry out their outer clothing upon coming back into the snow-house.

Besides the cooking platform to the right of the entrance and a sitting shelf to the left of it, there was the broad sleeping platform at the rear of the snow-house. Edged with what little wood Silence had brought – reused from the tent and then from the sledge – that wood, frozen in place, kept the platform from being worn down. Silence then spread the last of the moss from her canvas bag on the shelf, presumably as an insulating material, and then took great care spreading the various caribou and white-bear skins on the shelf. She then showed him how they should sleep with their heads toward the door and with their now-dry clothing bunched up as pillows. All of their clothing.

For the first days and weeks, Crozier insisted on wearing his caribou shorts under the sleeping robes even though Lady Silence slept naked every night, but soon he found that so warm as to be uncomfortable. Still weakened by his wounds to the point that passion was not yet a temptation, he soon became accustomed to crawling naked between the sleeping robes and re-donning the perspiration-free shorts and other clothing only when he rose in the morning.

Whenever Crozier awoke naked and warm under his robes next to Silence in the night, he tried to remember all the months aboard Terror when he was always cold, always wet, and when the lower deck was always dark and dripping and ice-rimed and reeking of paraffin and urine. The Holland tents had been even more miserable.

Now outside, he pulls his ruffed hood forward to keep the deep cold away from his face and looks around.

It is dark, of course. It had taken Crozier a long time to accept that somehow he had been unconscious – or dead? – for weeks between the time he was shot and his first conscious awareness of being with Silence, but there had been only the shortest, dimmest glow in the south during their long sledge trip to this place, so there was no doubt that it was now November, at the very least. Crozier had been trying to keep track of the days since they had come to the snow-house, but with the perpetual darkness without and their strange cycles of sleeping and waking within – he guessed that they sometimes slept twelve hours or more at a stretch – he could not be sure how many weeks had passed since they came to this place. And storms outside often kept them inside for unmeasurable days and nights, subsisting on their cold-stored fish and seal.

The constellations wheeling around – the sky is very clear today, and thus the day very cold – are winter constellations, and the air is so cold that the stars dance and shake in the sky just as they have all those years Crozier has watched them from the deck of Terror or some other ship he’d taken to the arctic.

The only difference now is that he is not cold and he does not know where he is.

Crozier follows Silence’s tracks around the snow-house and toward the frozen beach and frozen sea. He doesn’t really have to follow her tracks since he knows that the snow-covered beach is a hundred yards or so to the north of the snow-house and that she always goes to the sea to hunt seals.

But even knowing his basic directions here does not tell him where he is.

From Rescue Camp and his crew’s other camps along the south coast of King William Island, the frozen straits were always to the south. He and Silence could now be on the Adelaide Peninsula south across the straits from King William Island, or even on King William Island itself, but somewhere along its uncharted eastern or northeastern coasts where no white man has ever been.

Crozier has no memory of Silence transporting him to the tent site after he was shot – or of how many times she might have moved the tent before he returned to the world of the living – and has only the haziest recall of how long their journey on the fish-runner sledge was before she built the snow-house.

This place might be anywhere.

They didn’t have to be on King William Island at all, even if she has brought them north; they might be on one of the islands in the James Ross Strait somewhere to the northeast of King William Island or on some uncharted island off either the east or west coast of Boothia. On moonlit nights, Crozier can see hills inland from their snow-house site – not mountains, but hills larger than any the captain has ever seen on King William Island – and their campsite itself is more sheltered from the wind than any place he or his men ever found, including Terror Camp.