Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Years

by Michael Kurland

  While Lucy watched the store, Sigerson, Bergsson, and I walked to the village to find Tungweruk, the prospective guide. I knew him because he came occasionally to the store to trade skins and meat for lead for bullets, tea, flour, and household goods. We found him in the big house of his whaling crew, and he led us to his hut. Apparently he already had a wife, because a young woman was outside, cleaning a caribou hide. She followed us into the hut and listened as we talked, occasionally making a comment to Tungweruk in their language. They were a handsome couple, with broad, attractive faces and thick black hair. Their reindeer skin clothing was trimmed handsomely with rabbit, fox, and ermine, and their hut was orderly and well supplied with tools, cooking gear, and skins for bedding.

  Tungweruk’s wife made tea, tossing a handful of leaves into a pot of water heating over the seal oil lamp. As we drank, we discussed when and how long Sigerson intended to travel on the ice field. Tungweruk, too, asked how he intended to feed himself, saying, “There is no game in there; no seal, no bear, only ice.” As I translated for them, they discussed obtaining dogs and supplies, the number of dogs and sleds that would be needed, and how Tungweruk would be paid for his work. Tungweruk had had a good season whaling and hunting for caribou and had stored a good supply of meat for the winter, but he wanted provisions to be made available for his wife while he would be gone, during the lean times in the early spring. He and Sigerson arrived at an agreement easily, and at the end, we celebrated their bargain with ship’s biscuit and strips of dried whale blubber.

  With Tungweruk’s help, Sigerson soon acquired a couple of sleds and a dozen dogs, so that they could begin learning to drive them. They arranged to have four new sleds built to carry the men and their supplies and began buying dogs to pull them. Sigerson, Mayes, and Bergsson then left Cape Stevenson to stay with the lieutenant and his men at the weather station. Tungweruk, with his wife, also moved out by the weather observatory to teach the three men how to drive their dog sleds.

  During the fall I saw Sigerson and his companions now and again, usually on clear days when one or two of them sledded here to pick up some of the supplies Sigerson had stored in my warehouse. Mr. Mayes seemed the keenest on visiting. From early on, he took to skating alongside the dogsled on a pair of odd snowshoes, like two sled runners. “They’re a Norwegian invention,” he said, when I asked, “called skis. Nansen used them when he crossed Greenland, and Sigerson wants to use them, too, and Bergsson is teaching us. They’re much faster than running with the sled—look!” And with a push from his staff he sped down a small slope.

  Sigerson made a study of the customs and language of the natives. He spent days at a time in the village, watching the men and women at their daily tasks and questioning the Strongs, Lucy, and me about them. He and Bergsson went with Tungweruk to hunt seal and caribou. And he worked at learning the native language, impressing us all with how quickly he mastered its intricacies.

  In the middle of November, the sun dipped below the horizon, not to return until February. Once I had stacked enough driftwood for the stove and shored up the store and our house against the winter storms, I had little to do, and anyway the winter darkness makes me dull. I slept a lot, whittled dishes and cups from driftwood, and visited with the Eskimos from the village who came by to trade or just to pass the time in our sitting room, and read and traded books with Reverend Strong. Lucy helped Mrs. Strong teach at the mission school, knitted socks and hats, and made little gifts for Christmas and the big winter festival the villagers call Kivyik.

  That winter, too, our little settlement was enlarged by the inhabitants of the Myra, a steam whaler that had left the whaling grounds above Canada a little too late and, its passage south blocked by ice, had had to turn back and winter at Cape Stevenson. She was a particularly sorry example of that enterprise: the ship rusty and poorly maintained, her captain a weak and irritable man, and her crew mostly ruffians. Even the Eskimo women soon tired of their uncouth ways and, for the most part, left the ship alone.

  The father of one girl, Neakpuk, however, traded her to the first mate in return for tobacco and rum. The mate, Sanders, was a boor and a drunkard. When he was in his cups, which was often, he beat Neakpuk and called her the vilest of names. The poor girl, who had been a cheerful, simple young woman, now scarcely raised her head and seldom smiled. Reverend Strong, who frequently visited the ship to talk with the men, spoke more than once to Sanders and the captain, Belcher, about Sanders’s treatment of Neakpuk, but to no avail.

  A number of the men of the crew took to coming to church on Sundays, influenced by the reverend’s kind and cheerful presence, or just looking for something to fill their time in the long winter night. One was Sanders’s son Tom, a lad of sixteen, as good-hearted, generous, and hardworking as Sanders was vicious and mean. Sanders seemed to resent his son’s good nature and his popularity with his shipmates, and lost no opportunity to attack him with slights, biting remarks, and cuffs. Once I was near and heard him muttering, when he saw Tom outside the church. “Sunday school boy, just like your mother. Don’t you have any work to do? Like to sit around, just like her, and just wait for me to bring home money, eh?” Tom said nothing, but I could see his jaw tighten as he turned his head away.

  The ship’s carpenter, a gruff man named Evers, seemed to take a fatherly interest in young Tom and had little use for Sanders, whom he called an “old windbag” and worse. “Don’t let him get to you, kid,” he would tell Tom, clapping a roughened hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  During the gloomiest part of the winter, on a stormy night not long after the end of the Christmas holidays, Sanders vanished. He had been playing cards with some shipmates and lost badly. He rose from the table cursing and consigning the other players to Hell, and stomped from the room. In his cabin, some of the men had heard his cursing and Neakpuk crying and pleading with him—“the usual,” one said cynically. One or two heard footsteps, as if she had run to the deck with him chasing her.

  Sanders wasn’t at breakfast the next day, and when the captain looked into his cabin, it was empty. A search through the ship revealed no sign of him or Neakpuk, but the storm and the darkness made a wider search impossible. It was another two days before the weather calmed enough to let the ship’s crew and some of us from the settlement, carrying lanterns and torches, fan out across the ice in search of Sanders’s body, since it was assumed that he could not have survived the storm. Neakpuk, miraculously, turned up alive and well in the village. When questioned about Sanders’s disappearance, she shook her head, saying, “I don’t know, I ran away.”

  “Sneaky little savage,” the captain growled. “She knows more than she’s telling; you can see it.” Others speculated that Sanders, wandering drunkenly in the dark, had probably fallen into a hole made by an Eskimo hunting for fish or seal.

  The mystery of Sanders’s disappearance soon took a backseat to the excitement of the sun’s appearance over the horizon in February and, not long afterward, Sigerson’s departure on his expedition north on the ice. By his purchases of dogs, sleds, dried fish, clothing, and other supplies, Sigerson had become a well-known benefactor to the Eskimos in the village. They laughed at the foolishness of the white men who went to so much trouble to travel where there was no game to catch, but many of them walked or sledded up to the weather station to see the party off. A number of the villagers followed the travelers for some distance on their sleds. The rest of us watched their forms, with their long shadows, shrink with distance until they were little more than dots, hardly visible in the gathering dark.

  After they left, life in the settlement quickly returned to its regular routine. It was the hungriest time of the year, when game was scarce and the meat and fish stored the previous summer were running low. Tungweruk’s wife, a little baby tucked in the hood of her parka, came to the store a couple of times to draw on her husband’s payment in ship’s biscuit, dried salmon, and tea. The men in the village hunted seals, waiting with infinite patience by holes in the ice,
and the women and children spent long hours ice fishing. Lucy went out with them sometimes, so that we could have fresh fish, but there were few fish to be found, and Lucy and I subsisted mostly on canned food, dried salmon and bannock, and an occasional piece of seal we bought if someone had enough to trade. Nevertheless, we felt fortunate that we didn’t have to go hungry, and our spirits lifted as the days grew longer and brighter.

  A few of the men from the ship sometimes went fishing with us or spent idle hours sitting by the stove in the store, reading old magazines, swapping stories, and grumbling about getting out of “this godforsaken place” and back to catching whales. We speculated occasionally about how Sigerson and his crew were doing, especially when the weather turned bad. “I guess we’re better off marooned in this here rathole than they are right now,” Evers, the carpenter, growled one snowy afternoon as the wind blustered and rattled the windows of the house.

  “What if they end up eating each other like those poor b——ds at Cape Sabine? Have a big inquest, we’ll all get to go to Washington to testify,” Guest, the third mate, added, with a sort of dire anticipation. Once in a while someone would mention Sanders, and from what the men said it was clear that he wasn’t missed by them, and they seemed uninterested in speculating about his fate.

  Contrary to Guest’s dreadful predictions, Sigerson and his crew returned, ragged and exhausted, but unscathed, at the end of April. They had traveled to the eighty-second parallel, making observations along the way, a journey of some sixteen hundred miles, in which they had found no land or anything but a vast expanse of pack ice. “It appears,” Sigerson told us at dinner a few days after their return, “that there may be no islands north of Point Barrow, such as there are above Canada. Instead, there appears to be a permanent, year-round pack of ice, possibly extending to the pole itself.”

  I had a nice, legible hand and little else to do at the time, so Sigerson hired me to make a fair copy of his logs and journal from the expedition. Mayes regaled us, for the weeks that followed, with dramatic tales of daring and privation—how one of the sleds slipped into a crack in the ice and would have been lost, with all its dogs, but for Bergsson’s immense strength in holding it until it could be pulled to safety; how they barely escaped when their tents were buried in snow and ice after a storm; and how Sigerson’s lead dog, Heda, had saved them from a polar bear by keeping it at bay until Bergsson could bring it down with a well-aimed shot. Sigerson and Bergsson smiled at his enthusiasm, but said little. Sigerson’s journals confirmed Mayes’s stories, but in the most matter-of-fact manner, as if such adventures were merely small obstacles overcome by intelligence and careful thought.

  One spring evening I returned from a day of hunting geese to news of a grisly discovery. A man’s body had been found in a collapsed snow house on the frozen bay, between the Myra and the village. I walked immediately over to where a small crowd of sailors from the ship and several Eskimos were gathered near the heap of dirty snow that had been the snow house. My glance fell on Tom Sanders, who was standing a little apart with Evers. His pale, stricken face made it immediately clear whose the body was. Several people greeted me and let me through to the center of the circle. There, to my surprise, I saw Sigerson, standing over the corpse, which had been dug out of its snowy grave and placed on a board on the snow. I could see little except its dark clothing and wet, crumpled hair. As I approached, Sigerson turned his head and waved me back impatiently. “How often must I tell you, this is the scene of a crime. Don’t destroy the evidence by trampling over it like a bunch of London—oh, it’s you, Mr. Osborne. Please stand back—thank you.” He looked back at the corpse, then to me. “This is the missing Mr. Sanders,” he said, “killed by this.” He picked up an object from the table near the body. I recognized it as a barbed harpoon head of ivory turned almost the brown of mahogany with age.

  “It’s an Eskimo piece. Quite a handsome artifact.” He pointed to some markings along its side, and I noticed, for the first time, how long and slender his hands were. “Note the incised carving; it’s rather a distinctive artifact. The captain has gone with a posse of men to the village to arrest Neakpuk. I tried to tell him that he was wrong in thinking that she was the murderer, but he would hear none of it.”

  For a minute I simply stood in confusion, looking from him to Sanders’s body and back again. Then Sigerson said, in his brisk manner, “May I use your storehouse for Mr. Sanders’s remains until I can complete my examination?”

  I nodded assent.

  “Good. I’ll get some of the crew to help me carry him.”

  I turned and started back toward the settlement, to unlock the warehouse door. As I left I stopped near Tom Sanders. “I’m terribly sorry,” I said.

  He looked at me with something like desperation. “They’re blaming the girl,” he said. “It—”

  “There, now, let’s not discuss it till we knows more,” Evers broke in. “He’s not himself, sir,” he said to me, “with the shock of it and all.”

  At the storehouse, I helped construct a makeshift table of planks and sawhorses for Sanders’s body to lie upon. Then, leaving Sigerson with the key, I walked over to Reverend Strong’s house. I couldn’t help hoping that someone had warned Neakpuk in time to let her escape or hide; but the captain’s party had found her outside her hut and had brought her to Reverend Strong, insisting that she be locked up somewhere until Lieutenant Edgewater could be fetched to preside over an inquest of sorts.

  The house was surrounded with curious Eskimos and men from the Myra. Reverend Strong greeted me as I entered his crowded sitting room. “Osborne, hello. Lucy is in the bedroom with Katherine and Neakpuk, and I’m trying to keep the peace out here.” He was standing with two men whom I recognized as elders from the village. Another half dozen villagers sat on chairs and on the floor. Across the room, the captain sat, glowering, with a couple of men from his posse. Tom Sanders stood against a wall, shoulders hunched, looking down at his folded hands.

  “It’s a good thing most of the young men are off hunting walrus right now,” Strong said to me, shaking his head, “or there would have been bloodshed, I suspect. We’re at a bit of an impasse as it is. The elders think this should be handled by them, and Captain Belcher won’t hear of it. He wants the girl to be tried by him and Edgewater and punished as they dictate.”

  “Sigerson tells me she didn’t kill Sanders.”

  “I don’t see how he can tell, but I hope he can prove it.”

  We sat for an hour or more, Strong and I making small talk while the captain and the two men with him sat in uncomfortable silence at one end of the room and the two elders, their faces impassive, stood at the other. Lieutenant Edgewater arrived with Mayes and Bergsson, who had gone to fetch him from the weather station. Martha, an Eskimo girl who helped Mrs. Strong around the house, made tea for everyone, and we gathered around the dinner table to discuss how the case of Sanders’s murder should be handled.

  We had scarcely gotten settled when the door opened and a boy from the village came in shyly and mumbled something to Reverend Strong. Strong stood up and made his way across the crowded room to the captain. “Professor Sigerson has asked you and Mr. Osborne to go to him at the storehouse, where the body is.” We rose to our feet, pulled on our jackets and boots, and crossed to the warehouse. Sigerson greeted us at the door, and with something of a dramatic flourish motioned us inside, to the makeshift table on which Sanders’s corpse lay in the light of a lantern suspended from the roof beam. The clothes had been removed from the body and a piece of canvas laid over its lower half. A long incision, in a Y-shape, started near its chest and disappeared under the canvas at its waist. A little to the left of it I could see the jagged edges of a wound, with a slender wooden dowel protruding from it.

  Sigerson moved next to the body and began his explanation. “As you can see, I essayed a rough postmortem examination of the injuries. Although I am not a medical doctor, I have studied anatomy and have seen several dissections of cad
avers, and I have also learned a little over the years from an old friend who was a battlefield surgeon. I wanted you, Captain Belcher, to see for yourself the injury which caused Mr. Sanders’s death. As you see, the body is in an excellent state of preservation, since it was frozen and sealed under snow and ice for several months.

  “On Mr. Sanders’s abdomen you can see the mark of a single stab wound. When the body was found, this”—he picked up the ivory harpoon head from the table—“was protruding from that wound.”

  “That was Sanders’s,” the captain exclaimed. “I remember when he won it at dice from a sailor at Herschel Island. You mean she killed him with that?”

  “That is the weapon that killed him,” Sigerson replied.

  “Well, it certainly points to her as the killer, wouldn’t you say? She was in his room and could have gotten hold of that—whatever it is—and hidden it and waited for her chance.”

  Sigerson pulled the canvas sheet until it covered the body entirely. “Let us go back to the reverend’s house,” he said.

  When we returned with Sigerson to the crowded room, I saw that Neakpuk was standing in the doorway of the bedroom, her hand in Mrs. Strong’s. In her face I saw the resignation with which the Eskimos seem to accept the terrible hands Fate so often deals them, and it pierced my heart to see it in a girl so young. Tom had not moved from his place, but he watched us as we entered, studying each of our faces.

  After we had sat down at the table, Captain Belcher was the first to speak. “Well, I’ve seen Sanders’s body and heard what the professor here has to say, and it’s as clear as it can be that the girl killed him—waited her chance, I suppose, until he left the ship that night, and stabbed him out there on the ice with his own knife.”