Tikilluarit!

Wally Woodbine showed up with cookies, and that made all the difference. He’d been in Qaanaaq three days by the time he’d pieced together what was available for anyone to figure out.

He had wanted to come by boat from Elsmere Island, as he’d been posted at the Eureka research station with the Canadian government’s small new cryptid team. Small and underfunded. So it was cheaper to fly him out to Resolute Bay, where he could fly commercial to St. John’s, New Labrador, then Nuuk and finally Qaanaaq.

The flights were easy. He’d been emailing with the man from the one hotel in Qaanaaq, and arranged for a pick-up when his flight arrived. He didn’t like hotel vans, and it was a small luxury, easy to afford. He was worried the flight could be delayed, but the man from the hotel explained the airport was not so far, and there were not so many flights. They would see his airplane and the man with the station wagon would have plenty of time to drive up.

So the man was ready and waiting by the time Wally got out of the airport, a box of cookies under his arms.

-You brought cookies, the old man laughed.

Wally had been sent to Qaanaaq by his government after the reports about the cookie company’s interest in some kind of iron or uranium deposit or wolf hunt preserve up there, and their failed expeditions, the last ones apparently devoured by a giant wolf.

Crpytids were not as far fetched as they were when Wally first started studying them, at Bates College, which had one of the first cryptozoology certificate programs. The cryptids had started coming out. Bigfoot was first. It was a huge discovery. “Henry” had entered a town in Maine, his ancestral home cut down in a fresh spree of logging for the growing timber needs warmer weather brought.

Even before the cookie company reports about Qaanaaq, Wally knew this: On January 22, 1968, a B-52 bomber had crashed about a dozen kilometers out from what was then Thule Air Force Base and is now Pituffik Space Base.

The plane, carrying four nuclear bombs, disintegrated on impact, parts of it melting into the fjord below, according to the report Wally had read back in school. Local residents and US personnel scrambled to clean up and retrieve the bombs, but there was one they’d never found.

That kind of radiation exposure would do something to a biome. The earliest contemporary reports of a giant wolf, towering as high as a spruce tree, came from Spiorapaluk, about two hundred kilometers north of Qaanaaq. It tried to get in to the settlement through the cemetery, attacking a nearby home before suddenly running back out into the interior.

Wally didn’t know how reliable that story was, but the legend of the Amarok was a lot older than that, and followed the Inuit who migrated to Greenland until as late as the 1800s. His work in Eureka was actually about Adlets, a half-dog, half-human creature, but they thought they may have found evidence of a colony of Amarok in the interior of Elsmere Island. North Greenland would be a far way for them to go, but it was for the Inuit too. It could have followed them crossing the strait of Etah from Baffin Island, along with the stories.

The cookie company reports were vague but provocative. As one of Europe’s largest companies, it represented part of the European Union’s foreign policy, no matter what Brussels said. Greenland had left the European project back in 1985, before it was even the EU. Now they were on the cusp of joining the US. It wasn’t so long ago that the idea sounded preposterous, but after the carnival barker who first brought it up finally left the world stage, it started to make more sense to people. By now even Canada had started coming around.

The Canadians saw it the same way. The cookie company business crossed the desk of a state department attache in Iqaluit, she thought it was worth the U.S. knowing what was going on, and asked around with her Canadian counterparts, who were more than willing to help.

The request made its way through Canada’s government to Wally’s desk. No one had asked for him specifically but the team he was with in Eureka was the most qualified one on the subject and what it entailed. Wally would’ve wanted to go anyway, but the phrase “favor for the Americans” and “priority mission” led him to believe it’d be a bit more fun getting there. 

He’d really have liked a boat.

Nevertheless, the commercial flights were fine and on time. He arrived toward the end of the solar summer. On the ride in to town, the old man, who introduced himself as Sid, explained the layout of the settlement and what all there was to see and do. He knew Wally had come because of the cookie company, because of the cookies he had brought with him and offered almost immediately.

-Are you with the cookie company? Sid asked.

-Oh no, not at all. But I understand they’ve been here, eh? Looking to find out more about all what happened, and wanted to be friendly about it.

-The last guy didn’t bring cookies. The one brought back torn to shreds.