As Crozier crunches his way across the snow and gravel of the beach and out onto the jumbled sea ice, he thinks of the hundreds of times in the past few weeks when he has tried to communicate his need for leaving to Silence, for finding his men, for getting back to his men.

She always looks at him without expression.

He has come to believe that she understands him – if not his words in English, then the emotions behind his pleas – but she never answers by either expression or string-sign.

Her understanding of things – and his own growing understanding of the complex ideas behind the dancing designs in the string between her fingers – borders, Crozier thinks, on the uncanny. He sometimes feels so close to the odd little native girl that he awakes in the night not knowing which body is his and which hers. At other times, he can hear her shout to him across the dark ice to come quickly or to bring an extra harpoon or rope or tool… even though she has no tongue and has never made a sound in his presence. She understands much, and sometimes he thinks that it is her dreams he dreams every night and wonders if she also has to share his nightmare of the priest in white vestments looming over him as he awaits Communion.

But she will not lead him back to his men.

Three times Crozier has left on his own, crawling out the passage as she sleeps or pretends to sleep, bringing just a bag of seal blubber to sustain him and a knife with which to defend himself, and three times he has become lost – twice in the interior of whatever landmass they are on, once far out onto the sea ice. All three times Crozier has walked until he can walk no more – perhaps for days – and then collapsed, accepting death as his just and proper punishment for abandoning his men to die.

Each time, Silence has found him. Each time, she has bundled him onto a bearskin, set robes over him, and silently pulled him the cold miles back to the snow-house, where she warms his frozen hands and feet against her naked belly under the robes and does not look at him while he weeps.

Now he finds her several hundred yards out onto the ice, bent over a seal’s breathing hole.

Try as he might – and he has tried – Crozier can never find these damned breathing holes. He doubts if he could find them in summer daylight, much less by moonlight, starlight, or in the full dark as Silence does. The stinking seals are so clever and so sly that he does not wonder that he and his men killed only a handful in all their months on the ice and never one through its breathing hole.

Through the talking strings, Crozier has been made to understand that a seal can hold its breath under water for only seven or eight minutes – perhaps fifteen at the most. (Silence explained these units of time in heartbeats, but Crozier thought he had successfully translated them.) Evidently, if he understands Silence’s strings correctly, a seal has territorial boundaries – like a dog or wolf or white bear. Even in the winter, the seal must defend those boundaries, so to make sure that he has enough air within his under-ice kingdom, the seal finds the thinnest ice around and scoops out a dome-shaped breathing hole large enough to hold his entire body, leaving only the tiniest possible actual hole penetrating the thin-shaved ice through which he can breathe. Silence has shown him the sharp scraping claws on a dead seal’s flipper and actually clawed at the ice with them to illustrate how well they work.

Crozier believes Silence when she strings that there are dozens of such breathing-hole domes within a single seal’s territory, but he’s damned if he can find them. The domes she shows so clearly in her strings and which she finds so easily out here in the ice jumble are all but invisible amid the seracs, pressure ridges, ice blocks, little bergs, and crevasses. He’s sure he’s stumbled over a hundred of the damned things and never noticed one except as an irregularity in the ice.

Silence is squatting near one now. When Crozier is a dozen yards away, she gestures for him to be quiet.

To hear Silence tell of it with the string patterns making pictures between her hands, the seal is one of the most cautious and wary creatures alive, so silence and stealth are the essence of hunting seal. Here Lady Silence earns her name.

Before approaching a breathing hole – how does she know they’re there? – Silence sets down small squares of caribou skin that she retrieves after each step, setting her thick-booted feet carefully onto them so as not to make the slightest crunch on the snow and ice. Once next to the breathing-hole dome in the dark, moving in slow motion, she softly pushes several forked antlers into the snow and sets her knife, harpoon, lines, and other hunting bric-a-brac on them so that she can retrieve them without making a noise.

Before leaving the snow-house, Crozier has tied sinew thongs around his arms and legs the way Silence has shown him, in an attempt to keep his clothes from rustling. But he knows that if he walks closer to the hole now, he’ll sound, in his white-man clumsiness, like a collapsing tower of tin cans to the seal below – if there is a seal below – so he strains to see the ice surface beneath him, makes out the inevitable two-foot-by-two-foot-thick caribou skin that Silence leaves for him, and slowly, carefully, goes to his knees on it.

Crozier knows that before he arrived, after Silence found the breathing hole, she carefully and slowly removed the snow over that hole with her knife and widened the hole itself with a bone pick set into the butt of her harpoon shaft. She then inspected the hole to confirm that it was directly above a deep channel in the ice – if not, the chances of a good harpoon thrust were low, he understood now – and then she built the tiny mound up again. Since the snow was blowing, she put a narrow gauze of skin over the hole to prevent it from being filled in. Then she took a very thin point of bone fastened by a long piece of gut string to the tip of another bone and slid this indicator down into the hole, setting the other end on one of her antler twigs.

Now she waits. Crozier watches.

Hours pass.

The wind comes up. Clouds begin to obscure the stars, and snow blows across the ice from the land behind them. Silence stands there, hunched over the breathing hole, her parka and hood slowly being covered with a film of snow, her harpoon with its ivory tip in her right hand, its weight being supported at the rear by the forked antler in the snow.

Crozier has seen her catch seals in other ways. In one, she hews two holes in the ice and – with Crozier’s help using one of two harpoons – literally beguiles the seal to her. She has taught him that while the seal may be the animal kingdom’s soul of caution, its Achilles’ heel is its curiosity. If Crozier gets the head of his specially prepared harpoon near Silence’s hole under the ice, he moves the harpoon up and down ever so slightly, causing two small bones rigged with split-feather shafts near the head of the harpoon to vibrate. Eventually, the seal cannot resist its curiosity and pops up to investigate.

In the full moonlight, Crozier has gaped as Silence has moved across the ice on her belly, pretending to be a seal herself, moving her arms like flippers. On those times he can’t even see the seal’s head protruding from a hole in the ice until there is a sudden, impossibly fast motion of her arm, and then she is pulling back the harpoon attached to her wrist by a long cord. More often than not, there is a dead seal on the other end.

But this dark night-day there is only the seal’s breathing hole to watch and Crozier stays on his skin pad for hours, watching Silence standing bent over the almost indiscernible dome. Every half hour or so, she reaches back slowly to her antler-twigs and removes a strange little instrument – a curved bit of driftwood about ten inches long with three bird claws attached – and scratches so lightly at the ice over the breathing hole that he can’t hear the noise even from a few feet away. But the seal must hear it clearly enough. Even if the animal is at another breathing hole, perhaps hundreds of yards away, it seems – eventually – to be overcome by the curiosity that will doom it.