by Dan Simmons
This morning they had hiked inland for more than five hours. The group stayed on the slight gravel rises when they could; the wind was stronger and colder there, but the walking was easier than in the snow- and ice-filled swales. They had seen nothing that might enhance everyone’s chance of survival — not even green lichen or orange moss growing on rock. Irving knew from reading books in Terror’s Great Cabin library — including two books by Sir John Franklin himself — that hungry men could make a sort of soup from the scrapings of moss and lichen. Very hungry men.
When his reconnoitering team had stopped for their cold dinner and water and some much-needed rest while huddled down out of the wind, Irving had handed over temporary command to Captain of the Maintop Thomas Farr and gone on for a while by himself. He told himself that the men were exhausted by their extraordinary sledge pulls of the past few weeks and needed the rest, but the truth was, he needed the solitude.
Irving had told Farr that he would be back in an hour and that to make sure he did not get lost he would frequently dip down across snowy patches out of the wind, leaving his boot tracks for himself to follow back or for the others to use to find him if he was late returning. As he walked farther east, blissfully alone, he had chewed on a hard biscuit, feeling how loose his two teeth were. When he pulled the biscuit away from his mouth, there was blood on it.
As hungry as he was, Irving had little appetite these days.
He waded up through another snow field onto frozen gravel and trudged up the rise to yet another windswept low ridge, then stopped suddenly.
Black specks were moving in the broad snow-swept valley ahead of him.
Irving used his teeth to tug off his mittens and fumbled in his Male Bag for his prized possession, the beautiful brass telescope his uncle had given him upon entering the Navy. The brass eyepiece would freeze to his cheek and brow if he allowed it to touch, so it was harder getting a steady image while holding it away from his face, even holding the long glass in both hands. His arms and hands were shaking.
What he had thought to be a small herd of woolly animals turned out to be human beings.
Hodgson’s hunting party.
No. These forms were dressed in heavy fur parkas of the sort Lady Silence wore. And there were ten figures laboriously crossing the snowy valley, walking close together but not in a single-file line; George only had six men with him. And Hodgson had taken his hunting party south along the coast today, not inland.
This group had a small sledge with them. Hodgson’s hunting party had no sledge with them. There was not a sledge this small at Terror Camp.
Irving fiddled with the focus of his beloved telescope and held his breath to keep the instrument from shaking.
This sledge was being pulled by a team of at least six dogs.
These were either white rescuers wearing Esquimaux garb or actual Esquimaux.
Irving had to lower the telescope and then go to one knee on the cold gravel and lower his head for a moment. The horizon seemed to be spinning. The physical weakness he’d been holding back for weeks through sheer force of will welled up through him like concentric circles of nausea.
This changes everything, he thought.
The figures below — they still did not appear to have seen him, probably because he had crossed over the rise and would not be very visible here with his dark coat blending into the dark rock — could be hunters out from some unknown farther-north Esquimaux village that was not far away. If so, the 105 survivors of Erebus and Terror were almost certainly saved. The natives would either feed them or show them how to feed themselves up here in this lifeless land.
Or there was a chance that the Esquimaux were a war party and that the crude spears Irving had caught a glimpse of in the glass were meant for the white men they’d somehow heard had invaded their lands.
Either way, Third Lieutenant John Irving knew that it was his job to go down, encounter them, and find out.
He closed the telescope, set it carefully amid extra sweaters in his shoulder bag, and — throwing one arm high in what he hoped the savages would see as a gesture of greeting and peace — started down the long hill toward the ten humans who had suddenly stopped in their tracks.
36
CROZIER
Lat. 69° 37′ 42″ N., Long. 98° 41′ W.
24 April, 1848
The third and last day on the ice was by far the hardest.
Crozier had made this crossing at least twice before in the last six weeks with some of the earliest and larger sledge parties, but even with the trail less established, it had been much easier then. He’d been healthier. And he’d been infinitely less tired.
Francis Crozier was not truly aware of it, but since his recovery from his near-fatal withdrawal illness in January, his severe melancholia had made him an insomniac. As a sailor and then a captain, Crozier had always prided himself — as most captains did — on needing very little sleep and waking from the deepest sleep at any change in the ship’s condition: a slight change in the ship’s direction, the rising of wind in the sails, the sound of too many feet running on deck above him during any specific watch, any alteration in the sound of the water moving against the ship’s hull … anything.
But in recent weeks, Crozier slept less and less each night, until he’d fallen into the habit of only half dozing for an hour or two in the middle of the night, perhaps catching a nap of thirty minutes or less during the day. He told himself it was just the result of so many details to watch over and commands to give in the last days and weeks before taking to the ice, but in truth it was melancholia trying to destroy him again.
His mind was sodden much of the time. He was a smart man whose mind was stupid with the chemical by-products of constant fatigue.
Sleeping at Sea Camps One and Two had been damned near impossible for any of the men the past two nights, no matter how tired they were. There had been no need to erect tents at either camp since eight Holland tents there had been left up permanently over the past weeks, any wind or snow damage being repaired by the next party that came through.
The three-person reindeer-skin sleeping bags were many times warmer than the sewn-together Hudson’s Bay blanket bags, and these good bags had been drawn by lottery. Crozier had not even taken part in the lottery, but when, the first time he’d been on the ice, he’d come into the tent he shared with two other officers, he found that his steward, Jopson, had laid out a reindeer-skin bag tailored for him. Neither the ailing Jopson nor the men thought it right that their captain would have to share a bag with two other snoring, farting, shoving men — even other officers — and Crozier had been too tired and grateful to argue.
Nor had he told Jopson or the others that sleeping in a bag by one’s self was much chillier than his experience sleeping in three-man bags. The other men’s body heat was the only thing that kept them warm enough to sleep through the night.
But Crozier hadn’t tried to sleep through the night at either sea camp.
Every two hours he was up and walking the perimeter to make sure that the watch had changed on time. The wind came up during the night, and the men on watch huddled behind hastily erected low snow walls. Because the biting wind and blowing snow kept the men curled low behind their snow-block barriers, the thing on the ice would have been visible to them only if it actually stepped on one of the men.
It did not make its appearance that night.
During the fitful minutes of sleep he did find, Crozier was revisited by the nightmares he’d had during his January illness. Some of the dreams returned so many times — and startled the captain out of sleep so many times — that he remembered fragments of them. Teenaged girls carrying out a séance. M’Clintock and another man staring down into an open boat at two skeletons, one sitting up and fully clothed in peacoat and slops, the other just a mass of tumbled and gnawed bones.
Crozier walked through his days wondering if he was one of those skeletons.
But the worst dream, by far, was the Com
munion dream in which he was a boy or a sicker, older version of himself and was kneeling naked at the altar rail in Memo Moira’s forbidden church while the huge, inhuman priest — dripping water in shredded white vestments through which showed the raw, red flesh of a badly burned man — loomed over him and leaned closer, breathing carrion breath into Crozier’s uplifted face.
The men all rose in the dark a little after 5:00 a.m. on the morning of 23 April. The sun would not rise until almost 10:00 a.m. The wind continued to blow, flapping the brown canvas of the Holland tents and stinging their eyes as they huddled to eat breakfast.
On the ice, the men were supposed to heat their food thoroughly in small tins labeled “Cooking Apparatus (1),” using their small spirit stoves fueled by pints of ether carried in bottles. Even without wind, it was often difficult or nearly impossible to get the spirit stoves primed and started; in a wind like that morning’s, it was simply not possible, even when taking the risk of firing up the spirit stoves inside the tents. So — reassuring themselves that Goldner’s canned meats and vegetables and soups had already been cooked — the men just spooned the frozen or near-frozen masses of congealed glop straight out of the cans. They were starving and had an endless day of man-hauling ahead of them.
Goodsir — and the three dead surgeons before Goodsir — had talked to Crozier and Fitzjames about the importance of heating Goldner’s tinned foodstuffs, especially the soup. The vegetables and meats, Goodsir had pointed out, had indeed been precooked, but the soups — mostly cheap parsnips and carrots and other root vegetables — were “concentrated,” meant to be diluted with water and brought to a boil.
The surgeon could not name the poisons that could be lurking in unboiled Goldner soups — and perhaps even in the meats and vegetables — but he kept reiterating the need for full heating of the tinned foods, even while on the march on the ice. These warnings were one of the main reasons Crozier and Fitzjames had ordered the heavy iron whaleboat stoves transported to Terror Camp over the ice and pressure ridges.
But there were no stoves here at Sea Camp One or at Sea Camp Two the next night. The men ate all the tinned foods cold from the can when the spirit stoves failed — and even when the ether of the little stoves lighted, there was just enough fuel to melt the frozen soups, not bring them to a boil.
That would have to suffice, thought Crozier.
As soon as breakfast was finished, the captain’s belly began rumbling with hunger again.
The plan had been to fold up the eight Holland tents at both sea camps and haul them to Terror Camp on the sledges, to serve as backup should the groups have to go out on the ice again soon. But the wind was too high and the men were too weary even after just one day and night on the ice this trip. Crozier conferred with Lieutenant Little and they decided that three tents would be enough to bring along from this camp. Perhaps they would do better the next morning after Sea Camp Two.
Three men in harness broke down that second day on the ice on 23 April 1848. One began vomiting blood onto the ice. The other two simply fell in their tracks and were unable to pull for the rest of that day. One of those two had to be set onto a sledge and hauled.
Not wanting to reduce the number of armed pickets walking behind, ahead, and to the sides of the procession of sledges, Crozier and Little tied on harnesses and man-hauled for most of that endless day.
The pressure ridges weren’t as high during this middle day of the crossing and the previous sledge tracks had left a virtual highway on this stretch of open sea ice, but the wind and blowing snow eliminated almost all of these advantages. Men pulling a sledge could not see the next sledge fifteen feet in front of them. The Marines or sailors carrying weapons and walking along as guards could see no one else when they were twenty feet or more from the sledges and had to walk within a yard or two of the sledge parties so as not to get lost. Their usefulness as lookouts was nil.
Several times during the day, the lead sledge — usually Crozier’s or Lieutenant Little’s — would lose the worn sledge track, and everyone would then have to stop for up to half an hour while some men unharnessed themselves, tied on a rope so as not to get lost in the howling snow, and walked left and right of the false route, seeking out the faint depressions of the actual track on a surface quickly being covered by inches of blowing snow.
To lose the route midway like this would cost not only time, it might well cost all of them their lives.
Some of the sledge teams hauling heavier loads this spring had done this nine miles of flat sea ice in under twelve hours, arriving at Sea Camp Two only hours after the sun had set. Crozier’s group arrived long after midnight and almost missed the camp completely. If Magnus Manson — whose keen hearing seemed as unusual as his size and low intelligence — had not heard the flapping of tents in the wind far to their port side, they would have marched past their shelter and food cache.
As it was, Sea Camp Two had been largely destroyed by the day’s incessant and rising winds. Five of the eight tents had been blown away into the darkness — even though they had been secured by deep ice screws — or simply torn to tatters. The exhausted and starving men managed to pitch two of the three tents they’d man-hauled from Sea Camp One, and forty-six men who would have been comfortable but crowded in eight tents squeezed into five.
For the men taking turns on watch that night — sixteen of the forty-six — the wind, snow, and cold were a living hell. Crozier stood one of the 2:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. watches. He preferred being able to move since his one-man sleeping bag would not allow him to get warm enough to sleep anyway, even with men stacked like cordwood around him in the flapping tent.
The final day on the ice was the worst.
The wind had stopped shortly before the men roused themselves at 5:00 a.m., but as in evil compensation for the gift of the blue skies to come, the temperature dropped at least thirty degrees. Lieutenant Little took the measurements that morning: the temperature at 6:00 a.m. was −64 degrees.
It’s only eight miles, Crozier kept telling himself that day as he pulled in harness. He knew that the other men were thinking the same thing. Only eight miles today, a full mile less than yesterday’s terrible haul. With more men dropping from sickness or exhaustion, Crozier ordered the accompanying guards to stow their rifles, muskets, and shotguns on the sledges and to tie on to the harnesses as soon as the sun rose. Every man who could walk would pull.
Lacking guards, they trusted in the clarity of the day. The brown blur of King William Land was visible as soon as the sun rose — the wall of high bergs and jostled coastal ice along its rim distressingly more visible, distantly gleaming in the thin, cold sunlight like a barrier of broken glass — but the clear light ensured they would not lose the old sledge tracks and that the thing on the ice could not sneak up on them.
But the thing was out there. They could see it — a small dot loping along to the southwest of them, moving much faster than they could haul. Or run, should it come to that.
Several times during the day, Crozier or Little would unstrap from harness, retrieve their telescopes from the sledges or their Male Bags, and look across the miles of ice at the creature.
It was at least two miles away and moving on all fours. From this distance, it might be just another white arctic bear of the kind they had shot and killed in such plentitude in the last three years. Until, that is, the thing took to its hind legs, rose up above the surrounding ice blocks and minibergs, and sniffed the air as it stared in their direction.
It knows we’ve abandoned the ships, thought Crozier, staring through his brass telescope that had become scuffed and scarred from so many years’ use at both poles. It knows where we’re going. It’s planning to get there first.
They pulled on through the day, stopping only at the midafternoon sunset to eat frozen chunks out of cold cans. Their rations of salt pork and stale biscuits had been used up. The ice walls separating King William Land from the pack ice glowed like a city with ten thousand burning gas lamps in
the minutes before darkness spread across the sky like spilled ink.
They still had four miles to go. Eight men were on sledges now, three of the seamen unconscious.
They crossed the Great Ice Barrier separating the pack ice from land sometime after 1:00 a.m. The wind stayed low but the temperature continued to drop. During one pause to rerig ropes for the lifting of the sledges over a thirty-foot wall of ice, made not at all easier by the passage of sledges in weeks past since the movement of the ice had tumbled a thousand new ice blocks into their path from the towering bergs on either side, Lieutenant Little took another temperature reading. It was −82 degrees.
Crozier had been working and giving commands from within a deep trench of exhaustion for many hours. At sunset, when he’d last looked to the south at the distant creature loping ahead of them now — it was already crossing the sea ice barrier in easy leaps — he had made the mistake of taking his mittens and gloves off for a moment so as to write some position notes in his log. He had forgotten to don the gloves before lifting the telescope again and his fingertips and one palm had instantly frozen to the metal. In pulling his hands away quickly, he had ripped a layer of skin and some flesh off his right thumb and three fingers on that hand, and lifted a swath off his left palm.