by Dan Simmons
The men filled the freezing air with obscenities upon learning that the cans were filled with rotten stuff.
“Calm down, lads,” said Lieutenant Gore after allowing the barrage of best sailor obscenity for a minute or two. “What say you that we open tomorrow’s rations of cans until we find enough for a good meal and simply plan to get back to our ice cache by supper time tomorrow, even if that means midnight?”
There was a chorus of assent.
Two of the next four cans they opened were not spoiled — that included a strangely meatless “Irish Stew” that was only barely edible at the best of times and the deliciously advertised “Ox Cheeks and Vegetables.” The men had decided that the oxen parts had come from a tannery and the vegetables from an abandoned root cellar, but it was better than nothing.
No sooner was the tent up with the sleeping bags unrolled for a floor inside and the food heated on their spirit stove and the hot metal bowls and dishes distributed than the lightning began to strike.
The first blast of electricity struck less than fifty feet from them and led to every man spilling his ox cheeks and vegetables and stew. The second crash was closer.
They ran for the tent. Lightning crashed and struck around them like an artillery barrage. It wasn’t until they were quite literally piled inside the brown canvas tent — eight men in a shelter designed for four men and light gear — that Seaman Bobby Ferrier looked at the wood-and-metal poles holding the tent upright and said, “Well, fuck this,” and scrambled for the opening.
Outside, cricket-ball-sized hail was crashing down, sending splinters of ice chips thirty feet into the air. The midnight arctic twilight was being shattered by explosions of lightning so contiguous that they overlapped, setting the sky ablaze in flashes that left blinding retinal echoes.
“No, no!” cried Gore, shouting over the thunder and grabbing Ferrier back from the entrance and throwing him down into the crowded tent. “Anywhere we go on this island, we’re the tallest things around. Throw those metal-cored tent poles as far away as you can but stay under the canvas. Get in your bags and lie flat.”
The men scrambled to do so, their long hair writhing like snakes under the edges of their Welsh wigs or caps and above their many-wrapped comforters. The storm increased in ferocity and the noise was deafening. The hail pounding them in the backs through canvas and blankets felt like huge fists battering them black and blue. Goodsir actually moaned aloud during the pummeling, more from fear than from pain, although the constant blows constituted the most painful beating he had suffered since his public school days.
“Holy fucking Christ!” cried Thomas Hartnell as both hail and lightning grew worse. The men with any brains were under their Hudson’s Bay Company blankets now rather than in them, trying to use them as a buffer against the hail. The tent canvas threatened to suffocate all of them, and the thin canvas beneath them did nothing to keep the cold from flowing up and into them, taking their collective breath away.
“How can there be a lightning storm when it is so cold?” shouted Goodsir to Gore, who was lying next to him in the huddle of terrified men.
“It happens,” the lieutenant shouted back. “If we decide to move from the ships to land camp, we’ll have to bring one God-awful heap of lightning rods with us.”
This was the first time that Goodsir had heard any hint of abandoning the ships.
Lightning struck the boulder they’d been huddled near during their abbreviated supper not ten feet from the tent, ricocheted over their canvas-covered heads to a second boulder no more than three feet from them, and every man huddled lower, trying to claw through the canvas beneath himself in an attempt to burrow into the rock.
“Good God, Lieutenant Gore,” cried John Morfin, whose head was closest to the collapsed opening of the tent, “there’s something moving around out there in the middle of all this.”
All the men were accounted for. Gore shouted, “A bear? Walking around in this?”
“Too large to be a bear, Lieutenant,” shouted Morfin. “It’s …” Then the lightning struck the boulder again, another blast struck close enough to cause the tent fabric to leap in the air from the static discharge, and everyone cowered flatter, pressed their faces to cold canvas, and abandoned speech in favor of prayer.
The attack — Goodsir could only think of it as an attack, as if from Greek gods furious at their hubris for wintering in Boreas’s realm — went on for almost an hour, until the last of the thunder moved past and the flashes became intermittent and then moved on to the southeast.
Gore was the first to emerge, but even the lieutenant whom Goodsir knew to be almost without fear did not rise to his feet for a full minute or more after the barrage ceased. Others crawled out on their knees and stayed there, staring around as if in stupefaction or supplication. The sky to the east was a latticework of air-to-air and air-to-ground discharges, the thunder still rolled across the flat island with enough violence to exert a physical pressure on their skins and to make them cover their ears, but the hail had ceased. The smashed white spheres were piled two feet high all around them as far as they could see. After a minute Gore got to his feet and began looking around. The others then also rose, stiffly, moving slowly, testing their limbs, heavily bruised, Goodsir judged, if his own pain was any measure of their common abuse by the heavens. The midnight twilight was dimmed enough by the thick clouds to the south that it almost seemed as if real darkness was falling.
“Look at this,” called Charles Best.
Goodsir and the others gathered near the sledge. The tins of food and other matériel had been unpacked and stacked near the cooking area before their aborted supper, and somehow the lightning had contrived to strike the low pyramid of stacked cans while missing the sledge itself. All of Goldner’s canned food had been blasted apart as surely as if a cannonball had struck the stack — a perfect roll in a game of cosmic ninepins. Charred metal and still-steaming inedible vegetables and rotten meat were scattered in a twenty-yard radius. Near the surgeon’s left foot was a charred, twisted, and blackened receptacle with the legend COOKING APPARATUS (I) visible on its side. It was part of their travel mess kit and had been sitting on one of their spirit stoves when they had run for shelter. The metal bottle holding a pint of pyroligneous ether fuel next to it had exploded, sending shrapnel flying in all directions but evidently just barely passing over their heads as they huddled in the tent. If the lightning had ignited the stack of fuel bottles sitting in their wooden box next to the two shotguns and shells a few feet away on the sledge, the explosion and flames would have consumed them all.
Goodsir had the urge to laugh but didn’t do so out of fear he might weep at the same time. None of the men spoke for a moment.
Finally John Morfin, who had climbed the low ridge of hail-pummeled ice above their campsite, cried, “Lieutenant, you need to see this.”
They climbed up to look toward where he was staring.
Along the backside of this low ice ridge, coming from the ice jumble south of them and disappearing toward the sea northwest of them, were absolutely impossible tracks. Impossible because they were larger than any tracks of any living animal on earth. For five days now, the men had seen the paw prints of the white bears in the snow, and some of those tracks were absurdly large — some twelve inches long — but these indistinct tracks were more than half again larger than that. Some appeared to be as long as a man’s arm. And they were new — there was no doubt whatsoever of that — because the indentations were not in the old snow but pressed into the thick layer of fresh hailstones.
Whatever had walked past their camp had done so during the height of the lightning and hail storm, just as Morfin had reported.
“What is this?” said Lieutenant Gore. “This can’t be. Mr. Des Voeux, be so kind as to fetch one of the shotguns and some shells from the sledge, please.”
“Aye, sir.”
Even before the mate came back with the shotgun, Morfin, Marine Private Pilkington, Best, Ferrier
, and Goodsir began trudging after Gore as the lieutenant followed the impossible tracks northwest.
“These are too large, sir,” said the Marine. He had been included in the party, Goodsir knew, because he was one of the few men aboard either ship who had ever hunted game larger than a grouse.
“I know that, Private,” said Gore. He accepted the shotgun from Second Mate Des Voeux and calmly loaded a shell as the seven men strode through the heaps of hail toward the dark clouds beyond the iceberg-guarded shoreline.
“Maybe they’re not paw prints, but something … an arctic hare or something hopping through the slush, making the prints with its entire body,” said Des Voeux.
“Yes,” said Gore absently. “Perhaps so, Charles.”
But they were paw prints of some kind. Dr. Harry D. S. Goodsir knew that. Every man walking near him knew that. Goodsir, who had never hunted anything larger than a rabbit or partridge, could tell that this wasn’t the track of some small thing throwing its body left, then right but rather the footprints of something walking first on four legs and then — if the tracks were to be believed — almost a hundred yards on two legs. At that point they were the tracks of a walking man, if a man had feet the length of his forearms and could cover almost five feet between strides while leaving no impressions of toes but rather the striations of claws.
They reached the windswept area of stones where Goodsir had thrown himself down on his knees so many hours before — the hailstones here had shattered into countless icy shards so the area remained almost bare — and here the tracks stopped.
“Spread out,” said Gore, still holding the shotgun casually under his arm as if he were taking a walk through his family’s estate in Essex. He pointed to each man and then pointed to the edge of the open area he wanted that man to check. The rocky space was not much larger than a cricket pitch.
There were no tracks leading away from the stones. The men shuffled back and forth for several minutes, checking and double-checking, not wanting to pollute the unbroken snow beyond the rocks with their own footprints, and then all stood still, staring at one another. They were standing in an almost perfect circle. No tracks led away from the rocky space.
“Lieutenant … ,” began Best.
“Quiet a minute,” said Gore sharply but not unkindly. “I am thinking.” He was the only man moving now, striding past the men and looking out onto the snow, ice, and hail around them as if there were some schoolboy prank being pulled. The light was stronger now as the storm passed farther east — it was almost two o’clock in the morning and the snow and layer of hail remained untouched beyond the stones.
“Lieutenant,” persisted Best. “It’s Tom Hartnell.”
“What about him?” snapped Gore. He was beginning his third circuit of the loop.
“He’s not here. I just realized — he hasn’t been with us since we got out of the tent.”
Goodsir’s head snapped up and turned at the same second the others’ did. Three hundred yards behind them, the low ice ridge hid the view of their collapsed tent and sledge. Nothing else moved on the vast expanse of white and grey.
They all began running at once.
Hartnell was alive but unconscious and still lying under the tent canvas. There was a huge welt on the side of his head — the thick canvas had torn where the fist-sized ball of hail had ripped through — and he was bleeding from his left ear, but Goodsir soon found a slow pulse. They pulled the unconscious man from the fallen tent, retrieved two sleeping bags, and made him as warm and comfortable as they could. Dark clouds were streaming overhead again.
“How serious is it?” asked Lieutenant Gore.
Goodsir shook his head. “We won’t know until he wakes … if he wakes. I’m surprised more of us weren’t knocked unconscious. It was a terrible downpour of solid objects.”
Gore nodded. “I’d hate to lose Tommy after the death of his brother, John, last year. That would be too much for the family to bear.”
Goodsir remembered preparing John Hartnell for burial in his brother Thomas’s best flannel shirt. He thought of that shirt under the frozen soil and snow-covered gravel so many hundreds of miles to the north, the cold wind below that black cliff blowing between the wooden head markers. Goodsir shivered.
“We’re all getting too chilled,” said Gore. “We need to get some sleep. Private Pilkington, find the staves for the tent poles and help Best and Ferrier get the tent erected again.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
While those two men were hunting for the tent staves, Morfin held up the canvas. Their tent had been so riddled by hailstones that it looked like a battle flag.
“Dear God,” said Des Voeux.
“The sleeping bags are all sodden,” reported Morfin. “The inside of the tent is soaked.”
Gore sighed.
Pilkington and Best returned with two charred, bent stubs of wood and iron.
“The poles were struck, Lieutenant,” reported the Marine private. “Looks like the iron core in them attracted the lightning, sir. Not much good as a centre pole now.”
Gore just nodded. “We have the axe still on the sledge. Break it out and bring the extra shotgun to use as double poles. Melt some ice to use as an anchor for them if you have to.”
“The spirit stove’s busted,” Ferrier reminded them. “We won’t be melting no more ice for a while.”
“We have two more stoves on the sledge,” said Gore. “And we have some drinking water in the bottles. It’s frozen now, but put the bottles inside your clothing until some melts. Pour that into a hole you chip in the ice. It will freeze soon enough. Mr. Best?”
“Aye, sir?” said the stocky young seaman, trying to stifle a yawn.
“Sweep out the tent as best you can, take your knife and cut the stitchings on two of the sleeping bags. We’ll use those as over-and-under blankets while we all huddle together for warmth tonight. We have to get some sleep.”
Goodsir was watching the unconscious Hartnell for any indications of consciousness, but the young man was as still as a corpse. The surgeon had to check his breathing to make sure he was still alive.
“Are we going back in the morning, sir?” asked John Morfin. “To fetch our cache on the ice and then back to the ships, I mean? We don’t have enough food now to get back with anything like sensible rations.”
Gore smiled and shook his head. “A couple of days of fasting won’t harm us, man. But with Hartnell hurt, I’ll send four of you back to the ice cache with him on the sledge. You make the best camp you can there while I take one man to head south as per Sir John’s orders. I need to cache the second letter to the Admiralty, but more important, we need to press as far south as possible to see if there’s any sign of open water. This whole trip will have been for nothing if we don’t do that.”
“I volunteer to go with you, Lieutenant Gore,” said Goodsir and was astonished at the sound of his own voice. For some reason, pressing on with the officer was very important to him.
Gore also looked surprised. “Thank you, Doctor,” he said softly, “but it would make more sense if you stayed with our wounded messmate, would it not?”
Goodsir blushed deeply.
“Best will go with me,” said the lieutenant. “Second Mate Des Voeux will be in command of the ice party until I return.”
“Yes, sir,” both men said in unison.
“Best and I will leave in about three hours and we’ll press as far south as we can, carrying only some salt pork, the message canister, one water bottle apiece, some blankets if we have to bivouac, and one of the shotguns. We’ll turn back sometime around midnight and try to rendezvous with you on the ice by eight bells tomorrow morning. We’ll have a lighter sledge load heading back to the ships — except for Hartnell, I mean — and we know the best places to cross the ridges, so I’ll wager we get home in three days or less, rather than five.
“If Best and I aren’t back to sea camp by midnight of the day after tomorrow, Mr. Des Voeux, take Hartnell and ret
urn to the ship.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Private Pilkington, are you especially tired?”
“Yes, sir,” said the thirty-year-old Marine. “I mean no, sir. I’m ready for any duty you ask of me, Lieutenant.”
Gore smiled. “Good. You get the next three hours’ watch. All I can promise you is that you’ll be the first man allowed to sleep when your sledge party reaches the cache camp later in the day. Take the musket there that’s not doing tent pole duty but stay inside the tent — just poke your head out from time to time.”
“Very good, sir.”
“Dr. Goodsir?”
The surgeon’s head came up.
“Would you and Mr. Morfin be so kind as to carry Mr. Hartnell into the tent and get him comfortable? We’ll put Tommy in the centre of our little huddle to try to keep him warm.”
Goodsir nodded and moved to lift his patient by the shoulders without removing him from the sleeping bag. The welt on the unconscious Hartnell’s head was now as large as the surgeon’s small, pale fist.
“All right,” said Gore through chattering teeth, looking at the tattered tent that was going up, “let’s the rest of us get those blankets spread and huddle together like the orphans we are and try to get an hour or two’s sleep.”
13
FRANKLIN
Lat. 70°-05′ N., Long. 98°-23′ W.
3 June, 1846
Sir John could not quite believe what he was seeing. There were eight figures, just as he had anticipated, but they were … wrong.
Four of the five exhausted, bearded, and goggled men in the sledge harness made sense — seamen Morfin, Ferrier, and Best, with the huge Private Pilkington leading — but the fifth man in harness was Second Mate Des Voeux, whose expression suggested he had been to Hell and back. Seaman Hartnell walked beside the sledge. The thin sailor’s head was heavily bandaged and he was staggering along as if he were part of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. The surgeon, Goodsir, was also walking alongside the sledge and administering to someone — or something — on the sledge itself. Franklin looked for Lieutenant Gore’s distinctive red wool scarf — the comforter was almost six feet long and impossible to miss — but, bizarrely, it seemed that most of the dark, staggering figures were wearing shorter versions of it.