JAMES DICKEY
459
north, but was at the same place; the thing nobody could say.
By feel I pulled out the compass again, though [ didn't want to
take too much of the adhesive off my body-tape. [t would be better,
though, if [ knew whether the compass was luminous or not; it was, and
that was good; night was going to be my time, at least until [ got to
the heavy snow. "An asshole compass, " I said out loud, my voice com–
ing back from the sides of the pipe and maybe having some kind of
roundness to it, from the shape of the galvanized tin or iron, or what–
ever [ was in, looking off at the little circle of nearly-black blue that was
the bay, the ocean, the rest of the world. "Some compass, " I said, to
the echo. "Right here I've already got a pretty close connection to half
the assholes in Tokyo." The pipe walls told me it was so, and the slow
moving stuff [ was sitting in. I wondered how I would smell when I got
out among people; something would have to be done about it, first
thing. "Come on, boys," I said to Tinian [sland, out through the round
walls and the little ocean at the end of them. "Come on with all that
fire. Let me out of this place. Come on, night. Come on, fire."
[ thought of the snow, and one long kayak trip [ took with an
Eskimo buddy, Tornarssuk, east toward Kakrovik, hunting for seals. At
one place we went by a big glacial berg that calved-off about half a mile
from us with a sound like a woman who had been reamed up through
the gut. When the ice slid off the near side of it the brightest blue I ever
saw in my life came right at us, it seemed like, so deep and pale it could
have been some new kind of scientific thing, a new kind of light that
nobody had ever seen before. The ice just slid down off it , and it was
there, a thing, a new color just invented , but one that had also been
waiting in the ice for a long time, a real long time, just for two guys in
a kayak to see it; we were the only ones who did.
We sat there for a while. Tornarssuk had his paddle out of the
water, and [ looked at myself for a second, and I had, too. We just
stared off at that pale blue that came to us out of the big white; that
came to us and right through us, and I didn't ask Tornarssuk what he
was doing, or why he was doing it for so long, because I knew all that.
There is not much color in an Eskimo's life; not more than three or our
that that's on the ground, the blue of the sky when it's clear, the gray–
green of the ocean when the floes break up, and red, which is blood, the
brightest blood in the world, wherever you see it up there . So I let
Tornarssuk stare on, let the split glacier come into him as it must have
been doing into me - that pale, concentrated pure huge-sided light, and
I used it now, in the shit-tunnel, as part of the plan [ was making. [n
the pipe [ sat like I had in the kaya k with Tornarssuk, with the iceberg
coming through me. Every now and then I brought in the red of the far
wall of my father's cabin, as [ would see it coming in off the Range, as
