own but the sounds took a second to reach him so his senses fell out of synch.
Bodies of all sizes scattered in every direction, rushed in and out of their homes as flashes of fabric and color, and the guns did not discriminate as they tore apart children and adults and rain barrels alike. It happened in a fiery blur, beyond the reach of his rifle—and with all those helicopters, all those shots fired and shells exploded, who could he possible shoot to stop anything if he had been close enough for a shot? He could watch, that was all.
In what felt like seconds but might have been minutes the village was leveled and the helicopters alit in a ring on its edges more gracefully than they deserved.
Through the impotently powerful scope of his rifle, designed for longer range than the rifle itself, the hunter watched men and women in pixelated grayscale camouflage rush from those helicopters one after another and charge through what remained of the village, guns drawn and occasionally firing.
Their uniforms bore no insignia, not one single ribbon or stripe and not even a flag, and the helicopters’ hulls were pure black apart from matte, ashy streaks where the rockets had fired. The hunter swung his sights from one anonymous enemy to another, lining up their heads, their heartless torsos, but who could he shoot? Felling one target wouldn’t remove all the others. He might have crept forward to squeeze a shot off before they knew he was watching and turned their attention to fire on him but at this distance, alone, he couldn’t prevent anything and in short time the firing was over. The blood had been spilled.
As the village burned in flames whipped up and around by strong wind off the water, those men and women in gray worked in pairs, one always covering the other with a rifle as the partner pulled bodies from rubble and embers, laying them out along the dirt road. A man in an identical uniform but without a rifle walked up and down the line holding a clipboard, counting the corpses with a wave of his pen and checking off items on a sheet.
The hunter zoomed in as close as he could with his scope but couldn’t make the list into more than a blurry white square, no more distinct than the clean-shaven face of the man wielding it.
The wind picked up, making uniforms stand at sharp angles where extra cloth hung, and before the man with no rifle could grab it a pink sheet blew away from his clipboard. He chased it and some of the others did, too, but it was too fast on the gust and cleared the village and got into the brush without being outrun. The man stood with his clipboard up to shield his eyes, watching the sheet blow away and looking—not that he knew it—right in the hunter’s direction with his face in the crosshairs of the scope.
The man with no rifle had come close enough for the hunter to watch his mouth shape two soundless curses, one after another, before the gray body turned and walked back toward the violence he seemed to be in charge of.
The hunter could have fired. He almost did. But his life in the village was already lost and he was outnumbered by dozens, so he waited and watched them instead. He trusted his own time, his own vengeful moment, would come.
He watched the destruction for hours. At near-dark they set up a circle of high intensity floodlights on poles around the village while tearing down every last scrap of cabin and house. They burned the boats and then burned the pier, and what couldn’t be burned was scattered or gathered into bins and hauled aboard helicopters or into huge cargo nets.
When they were done it was morning, or daylight at least in those timeless hours of the Arctic. They took down the lamps by early sunlight as if they had planned it that way. The first four helicopters lifted just high enough for the cargo nets containing those last scraps of life to be hung from their bellies, then they flew away across the water. The remaining men scoured the ground, scraped or stamped out every trace, and when the man with the clipboard had been satisfied they boarded the last of the clattering beasts, lifted off, and were gone.
Only then did the hunter descend.
There was nothing for him to go through. Nothing left to cry over. His cabin, his family, his whole life in that village erased. They’d left him only a gun.
He scoured the scrub at the foot of the trail, parting branches and briars, crawling through tangled growth, until he found that pink sheet blown away from the rifleless man. He sat with the base of his backpack taking his weight, the gun strapped to it lending support, and read a list of his family and his friends and his neighbors, every life lost in that village. He read his own name and was silently grateful, though sorry, for the stranger who had arrived in the village a few days before—too recently to have been on the list but there to make the body count seem accurate.
Hashmarks to one side of the page counted the dead, the recently living, and though not quite every victim was accounted for by those ticks he knew it was only due to the wind’s interruption. That they were dead in life if not on paper, and on the original if not the pink copy.
The hunter looked at the purple duplication of the other man’s handwriting pressed from one page to another. Angular. Rushed. Businesslike. A man who only has time for results.
And he looked at some other markings near the top of the sheet. Marks that weren’t letters or numbers or names but the faintest outline of a logo, a stamp, applied to the top page of the form. When he held it to light the hunter could almost make it out and with a stub of pencil drawn from his pack he darkened the shape: an unfilled, indistinct circular outline of the north. A map in wait to be filled.
5
Work was being done at the end of the street as seemed to always be the case. Oscar and Julia joked sometimes about roving bands of road workers wandering the District and trying to look busy. Especially in summer it seemed you could go to work in the morning and come home to a whole different landscape, the digging and paving and constant rerouting were so much a part of routine.
Sidewalks had been cordoned off and a yellow tent erected over a manhole while men and women in hardhats and reflective vests crowded around. A thick, corrugated blue hose ran from one of their trucks down the hole and under the street, vibrating and jumping in the arms of the workers while a machine of some kind roared and rattled on the back of the truck. At his approach, one of the workers waved Oscar off, jabbing his finger at a folding signboard nearby reading DETOUR with an arrow pointing away from the building his apartment was in. Oscar pointed toward his front door, visible on the other side of the trucks and cordons and workers, but the interloper shook his hardhatted head, scowled, and gestured down the block. “Detour!” he mouthed, or perhaps yelled; it was hard to tell over the roar of equipment. “Go!”
Oscar liked his routine: the same path from BIP’s basement to the Metro to his apartment. He stood at the same spot on the platform each day while awaiting his train because he knew that particular car would line up with the stairs when he reached his stop, and he noticed the same sidewalk cracks everyday when walking home: which ones were growing weeds and how tall they’d become, which had been filled with tar or embossed by lichen or moss. So as he turned left and headed around the next block down a street more or less like his own—the same brick row houses, the same magnolia and dogwood trees growing in sidewalk cutouts, the same types of cars parked at the curbs—it wasn’t unfamiliar, exactly, but he felt out of sorts. Thrown off. So after he’d walked all the way around the far end of the block and approached his building from the other direction he had to stand on the stoop for a moment not to catch his breath but to catch up with himself and regain his bearings. At least it had happened on the way home, because a surprise like that in the morning could throw off the day’s prognostications. It would have shown in his work, because it was hard to explore the unfamiliar realms of the north without knowing things remained unchanged at home. Peary brought his wife and their furniture all the way to Greenland before setting out for the Pole so the comfort of domestic routine would stay as fresh in his memory as possible for the remainder of the expedition, and all Oscar wanted was to walk down the same street every day and come home to the same apartment and TV and marriage.
From the stoop he checked the Pole cam where nothing had changed—not the light, not the snow, not even the footprints that weren’t—and Oscar relaxed as he watched. The rumbling equipment at the end of the block, emitting low tones that