by Sten Nadolny
Why did George Back have so much strength? Was it just that someone so vain and so fickle could hold out for so long? Beautiful people often have strengths at their disposal that cannot be easily gauged. Bent on saving their beauty above all else, that gave them their sense of purpose.
For supper, tripes de roche, just a handful each after hours of searching. Grey, wrinkled faces.
14 September. Sighted a few reindeer but bagged none. Michel’s finger, trembling with excitement, had got on the trigger by accident and a shot had gone off too soon; the whole thing was lost. Michel wept in despair; Crédit joined him.
Hood had fallen far behind. He arrived at the tents a few hours later, aided by Richardson. They had just harvested a few tripes de roche, the stuff that didn’t agree with his stomach. ‘I frolicked about a little.’ He smiled. Then his knees gave way and he collapsed. He was not unconscious – Hood was too curious about what went on around him for that – but he couldn’t draw well any more. His eyes and brain were occupied with all kinds of things, only not with his own suffering.
Perrault rummaged in his bag and pulled out a few morsels of meat for Hood, saying he had saved it during the last few days. He gave Hood his last handful of meat. All nineteen of them wept, even Back and Hepburn. What did it matter where Perrault had actually got the meat? There it was once more, the honour of mankind – for only a brief moment, it is true, but made manifest.
‘And I think Junius will come back, too,’ said Augustus. ‘He’ll bring much meat.’
‘Yes, meat!’ They embraced each other as if drunk with hope. They’d be home soon. Only a stroll.
Thus ended 14 September, a good day.
23 September. Peltier, who had complained for days about the weight of the canoe, threw it on the ground in a fit of rage, shattering some of the wooden crossbars. He had to pick it up again and keep on carrying it, because with a little luck it could still be repaired.
When a snowstorm set in, Peltier turned the canoe so that the wind could blow it out of his hands. Now they had to leave it behind for good. Peltier showed frighteningly little shame in pointing to his triumph. Jean-Baptiste Bélanger carried the other canoe – for how long? John appealed to his conscience: ‘We’re on the right track, but without a canoe we’re lost.’
Soon John discovered that they were not on the right track. In those parts magnetism was unreliable; jeering, the compass needle twirled round the dial as if on a merry-go-round. A bad moment: the half-starved commander had to tell his half-starved crew that they must change course. This required courage, which by now had come to involve an enormous effort.
‘The hour of truth,’ Back mumbled, and looked into space. ‘He’s botched it!’ hissed Vaillant.
‘If you knew as much about navigation as I, you wouldn’t be afraid. It’s a bit difficult here, but it all works according to logic and science.’ They believed him only because they had to. They had all grown too weak to believe in anything. They were now all afraid that they would die.
Hood’s courage was important. The midshipman looked like a corpse, but his confidence put anybody who felt the remotest self-pity to shame. Somehow, they all knew that when Hood died the end would not be far off.
When, on a lake shore, John ordered that the ice be cracked for fishing, all the nets were found to be missing. The voyageurs had thought them too heavy; they were lying buried in the snow miles away. Two hours later, Jean-Baptiste Bélanger stumbled like a bad actor who had been told to stumble. The place, however, was well chosen. They were just crossing a steep slope. Their last boat was smashed.
In the evening they chewed partly decomposed reindeer skin which they had scraped out of the snow. Here there were not even tripes de roche, or firewood. If I found Trim the tomcat, thought John, I would shoot him at once and eat him. He was alarmed at the thought but too sick to prohibit it entirely; it therefore took an even more tormenting path: cat flesh, the most delicious meat in the world. John tried to direct his fantasies on another track: brawn made of pig’s head. But the traitor brain didn’t go along: it made the brawn taste like tripes de roche and Trim’s poor body like fillet of veal.
On 25 September, several voyageurs ate the top leather of their spare boots, and the next day they tried their soles. Hood, too, tasted it. He didn’t get down much. He looked at John, shrugged with a great effort, and whispered, ‘Pretty tough. When I buy boots in London next time …’
Hood still managed well during the day, but at night he became delirious, raving about Green Stockings and his child. He had two Indian women now, a big one and a little one. Then again he imagined he was at home in Berkshire, cutting thistles and nettles on a sunny morning. ‘Unbearable to listen to’ was Hepburn’s comment.
On 26 September, they came upon a great river.
John shoved his swollen tongue in place and mumbled, ‘This is the Coppermine river. We must get across, then we’re almost there.’ They believed him only after more than an hour, but they no longer had a boat. ‘Build a raft,’ mumbled John. After three days, something resembling a raft was finished. But how could they keep it from drifting with the current as they crossed? Richardson, who called himself a good swimmer, tried to get across with a rope in order to set up what he called a ‘ferry station’. He prayed a while, then undressed to his underwear and started to swim. But he froze stiff almost at once. They pulled him lifeless out of the water with the rope and undressed him completely to rub his body with snow. Horrified, they stared at his naked body, eighteen fearful pairs of eyes in emaciated faces. Solomon Bélanger was the first to speak: ‘Mon Dieu! Que nous sommes maigres,’ he moaned. Benoît, the man from St-Yrieix-La-Perche, suffering a new attack of homesickness, sobbed loudly, and soon all of them were in tears. When weeping broke out now, it became infectious at once. Perhaps we’ve all become children again, not more than three years old, thought John, wiping away his tears. Desperately they rubbed Richardson’s body. He came to, but they kept on rubbing, as if with their last strength they wanted to restore his original figure, to put more on his ribs than snow and tears.
A snowstorm. The first raft broke loose and disappeared in the rapids. Only with the second raft did they get across the river on 4 October. No time to lose. ‘Only forty miles to Fort Enterprise!’ But how much time does forty miles take if one can’t go on? How much can be asked of a man’s will? Actually, the will was supposed to command, ‘Go on! Go on! Don’t die!’ But again and again he ran off course, made common cause with the stupid body, and self-importantly considered reasons for immediate surrender – sinking down, sleeping, and dying. The will was a sturdy but vain fellow, swayed with unpredictable ease. Suddenly he would announce, full of energy and noble defiance, ‘All this is too much to ask of a man. Now is the time for courage to take a break.’ As soon as the tired, sick body heard this, it surrendered to gravity and lay down. Good thing that didn’t happen to all of them at the same time.
John had not yet collapsed, but he knew he had strength only because he was the commander. My system does not protect me from the vagaries of fate, he thought. Sometimes I’m the right man for a situation, sometimes the wrong one, and one can die of that. We should have cooked that soup. We would have had … If I don’t watch out …
Suddenly he saw the town of Louth before him, surrounded by its peaceful cow pastures, hills and forests in the distance. He even saw barges laden with freight passing through the canal. Then he was in the town, watching people walking on both sides of the street, cheerfully waving, respecting and understanding each other. On the other side of town, a gigantic mountain – but that was he himself. Only he and the other mountains were truly travelling. He alone was the commander. He held the rope for others …
When he came to again, Augustus sat beside him whistling a tune.
‘Why are you whistling?’
‘Whistling drives death away,’ the interpreter replied.
John got up. ‘That’s how it is, then? I thought that I was a mountai
n and that my feet could walk on without me. Where are the others? Has Dr Orme shown up yet?’
Augustus looked at him in alarm. John turned around vigorously and marched on. He now realised that what he feared most was happening: he found himself in a sea of madness, was capsizing, and would sink then and there, like a badly navigated ship. Fear made him walk faster and faster. It seemed to him as though the first heralds of madness were already reaching out their hands to seize him so that he might believe in the devil, be pursued by the dead – who, being even slower than he, would have to catch up with him. There were not only badly navigated ships; there were also unfortunate ones.
Back’s the one who drives me crazy, he thought. Whether my suspicions are justified or not, he drives me mad. I must send him away.
A sextant, a compass, a sketch with the locations of Fort Enterprise, Fort Providence and most of the important lakes and rivers – that was what Back received from John. The ammunition was divided: Back received a good fifth. After all, he had only four men with him, and they were the strongest: Saint-Germain, Solomon Bélanger, Beauparlant, and Augustus. Moreover, he’d be in Fort Enterprise, where the supplies were waiting, long before the others. Let him fend for himself. Even if there were fewer provisions than expected, even if Back and his men used up too much, it was still far better than a mutiny of the quick against the slow.
So the system was preserved: John Franklin remained the commander, and they could all keep on being men of honour.
Back marched off; Franklin stayed behind. They had to wait in any event for Samandré, Vaillant, and Crédit, whose condition had meanwhile become worse than Hood’s. Half an hour later, Samandré dragged himself into camp and told them that the other two had stayed behind in the snow; he had been unable to persuade them to get up. Richardson retraced Samandré’s footsteps. He found the two men in an open field, half frozen and no longer able to talk. Since he was too weak to carry either one of them, he returned to the others.
Franklin had sprained his ankle and was limping. Who had enough energy? They tried to persuade Benoît and Peltier, who were still the strongest, to bring in the two lost men, but in vain. On the contrary, the two voyageurs urged John to send them after Back and to leave it up to everyone to see how they could get away. John grabbed Benoît by the shoulders and shook him as hard as he could. ‘You don’t know the way. Do you understand? You don’t know the way.’
‘We’ll follow Mr Back’s footsteps.’
‘A little snow or rain and you won’t see them any more. Then it’ll be all over for you.’
Benoît saw the point with difficulty. But he didn’t want to pick up the freezing men: ‘Then it will be all over for me, too.’
For a few moments John fought with himself. Finally he said, ‘Let’s go on. We’ll leave them behind.’
It was a defeat. He had not been able to save those two men. What kind of a commander was he? Now at least he had to keep the rest from dying of despair or blindness. But his foot got more and more swollen and became cruelly painful. He began to sense how this journey would end for him.
After a few more miles Hood collapsed, unconscious. Since he couldn’t be carried, somebody had to stay with him. Richardson wanted to be the one. He knew John would send food from the fort to keep them both from dying. ‘No,’ John replied. ‘I am the captain. Also, I’m slower than you. I’ll stay with Hood. You go on with the others. Here are the compass and sextant.’
He made this decision because he couldn’t go on, and only for that reason. He couldn’t keep up with the others, and therefore, as matters stood, he couldn’t lead them.
They pitched one of the tents and bedded Hood down inside. Then the doctor assembled the rest of the crew around him. John impressed on them: ‘You must stay together. Anyone who walks ahead is gone, for he’ll lose his way and drag the others in his tracks with him into disaster. Stay together.’
Hepburn stepped forward. ‘I’ll stay with you and Hood.’
Richardson went off. John and Hepburn went looking for firewood, tripes de roche, and deer tracks. They felt no more hunger, only weakness. It was no longer a matter of well-being but, with a great deal of luck, of surviving.
Hepburn shot a partridge, which they fried. They fed it to Hood and he seemed to recover a little. For themselves they found a small quantity of tripes de roche.
Two days later, Michel, the Iroquois, suddenly turned up. He had asked Richardson’s permission to return to the tent along with Perrault and Jean-Baptiste Bélanger. Unfortunately, he had lost those two in the dark and hadn’t been able to find their footprints. That surprised John, because it had neither rained nor snowed, and the wind had died down completely.
Fontano was probably also dead, Michel went on. He had fallen when crossing a lake and had broken his leg. They had had to leave him behind, but he hadn’t discovered him on his way back.
Michel had been lucky and had found a dead wolf, probably killed by a blow from a reindeer’s horn. He still had some of the wolf meat; they devoured it greedily and praised the Indian highly. He asked for an axe to get more. When he was gone, John worried about this and began to calculate.
Where does Michel get so much ammunition? It’s improbable that Richardson left it for him; and why does he have two pistols? When Michel got back and served them more wolf meat, John asked about the pistols. Michel replied that Peltier had given him one as a present.
They went on eating greedily and felt as though strength were already returning to their miserable skeletons. But John’s mind worked strenuously: he was trying to remember something. At one point he left the tent and stood outside to allow inner pictures to pass by his eyes unimpeded. When he returned he said, ‘I simply don’t pay enough attention to details. I could have sworn this was Bélanger’s pistol.’
The others stared at him, horrified.
‘Do you think I killed him?’ asked Michel in an imprecating voice. ‘That isn’t true.’ Suddenly his hand was on one of the pistols.
‘No, no,’ said Hepburn, ‘nobody thinks that. Why would you think so?’ The Indian became calm again. But none of them wanted to eat any more wolf meat.
For days Michel didn’t allow the British to talk to each other alone. When they talked in his presence, they had to use a slave language: saying innocuous things that he understood and at the same time communicating something he didn’t understand. ‘Did perhaps more wolves get killed in this way?’ No one dared to utter the names Perrault and Fontano. Or ‘If a reindeer no longer fears the wolf, it’ll certainly kill more of them.’
Still, Michel suspected dimly what they guessed and feared. He refused to go hunting and became more and more tyrannical, ordering who had to sleep where. But the British realised without speaking to each other: if Michel had known the way and had been able to read a compass, he would have long since killed them or, worse still, made them part of his food supply.
‘Why don’t you hunt, Michel?’
But he refused. ‘There’s no game here. We should start for the Winter Lake at once. We can always come back for Mr Hood later.’
John thought it over. ‘Good. But we must first collect food and firewood for him, because he can’t move.’ He was only looking for a chance to speak to Hepburn. Michel agreed. They left the tent and went off in different directions. As John was chopping wood – as loudly as possible in order to signal to Hepburn where he was – he heard a shot from the direction of the tent. He got there at the same time as Hepburn to find Hood lying dead beside the fire. The shot had pierced his skull. Michel stood next to him. ‘Mr Hood was cleaning my rifle. That’s when it must have happened.’
They buried Hood with difficulty, covering him with a little snow. Now John and Hepburn did not need lengthy communication to understand. Why had Michel left his weapon behind if he was going hunting? How could a half-conscious Hood have even thought of cleaning it? Above all, the back of Hood’s head showed traces of powder burns: the bullet had entered his head from t
he back and had left it through the front. And for some time now their pistols had been within reach.
Now that Hood was dead, the journey could be resumed. They took down the tent and John fixed the course. By evening they had managed only two miles, because of his sprained foot. Their meal was furnished by Hood’s coat of buffalo leather. Michel didn’t let them out of his sight for a moment.
Again and again Michel asked, ‘How many miles left? In which direction is the fort?’ ‘It’s still far,’ said John. But after three days Michel thought he could recognise with certainty a rock which was only a day’s march from Fort Enterprise. John shook his head. ‘Impossible,’ he said. The next morning the Indian crept out of the tent early and took his weapons with him. He wanted to try to gather some tripes de roche. He had never offered to do that since they had formed the rear guard.
‘I’m glad,’ answered John, and Hepburn added, ‘You’re a good man and a friend.’
They waited until the steps outside had moved away. ‘He only wants to load his rifle. He’s got nothing in it any more,’ said Hepburn. ‘When he comes back, we must be quick.’ John loaded his pistol carefully, as though he were doing it for the first time in his life. Hepburn said: ‘We’ve eaten the meat. We’re his accomplices if we don’t kill him at once.’
‘For the first time you’re talking nonsense, Hepburn,’ answered John. ‘He wants to kill us, that’s the reason – more reasons we don’t need; more are bad for us.’ But Hepburn still seemed to fear that John wouldn’t pull the trigger. ‘I’ll do it for you, sir – it’s easier for me.’