As the ascent went on, these erosions became blisters, then the blisters became sores. Within a few hours, every member of the team was suffering from open, weeping wounds around their hips, one more ailment to add to the chronically blistered feet and the problems of burns from the fire.
‘Can’t we camp?’ Mel begged after five hours of hauling. ‘I’m really in pain here.’
‘We keep going,’ Lauren insisted. ‘We can make it in one hit. Another few hours and we’ll be at the col.’
An afternoon squall whipped across the mountain, slowing their progress as they contoured around one of the major peaks. A boulder bounced down the slope just a handful of metres ahead of them, crashing quickly out of sight into the cloud.
For an agonising hour, as the visibility continued to fall, Lauren feared they had lost their way; it would be all too easy to head up the wrong arm of the glacier and find themselves in a dead end. She kept to the compass bearing, trusting the instrument to keep them on track; it was essential they followed the same route they had found with the snowcats.
Then they came to a feature Sean remembered.
‘That’s the cliff!’ he reminded her. ‘This is where we stopped to refuel.’
They shared a can of tinned fruit, broke open a packet of chocolate biscuits and ate two each, their bodies greedily absorbing the sugars they contained.
There was no conversation now, just the deep panting as they fought against the incline.
A short while later the squall blew away, taking the dense clouds with it and revealing their position. The col was above them, they were right on target.
‘Remember that last section of ice?’ Sean reminded Lauren. ‘We’ll have to think about that one.’
They pulled in a zig-zag pattern, exploiting the easiest angles of the slope, traversing back and forth, gaining a few metres of height on each pass.
‘One and pull … two and pull…’ Lauren’s throat was sore from the shouting. They were sweating with the effort now, a dangerous state to be in as the moisture froze as soon as they stopped to rest.
Then they came to the final obstacle, the sheer sixty-degree slope which guarded the col. To try and tow the sledge across without the protection of a rope would have been inviting disaster.
Sean derigged the harness and anchored one end of the rope to a big boulder. He inched across the slope and tied the other end off on a shard of rock on the far side. Then he returned and rejoined the group.
‘We’ll use the rope as a handrail,’ he told them. ‘Keep the sledge on the uphill slope.’
‘Are you sure?’ Frank was eying the dizzy drop beneath them. ‘What happens if you can’t hold it…?’
No one replied.
‘Let’s get on with it,’ Lauren said.
They each took a hold of the sledge and started to move, unsteadily, out onto the slope. Murdo fell twice, but he managed to regain his position both times and didn’t let go of the sledge. Frank’s eyes rolled with terror as they hit the steepest section; he was clinging to the side struts, his knuckles white.
‘Keep your eyes on the far side,’ Lauren told them, ‘and for Christ’s sake don’t look down.’
They hit the easier ground, and Sean returned to retrieve the rope.
Forty minutes later, with a last collective heave, they hauled the sledge over the remainder of the pressure ridges and made the final col; they had gained two thousand feet of altitude in nine hours of ascent, and now the Blackmore Glacier was below them.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Murdo gasped as he saw the view, his legs giving way beneath him even as he spoke. ‘Is that where we’re going?’
73
Lauren had focused her mind so sharply on what it would take to get the team up on to the high col that she hadn’t even thought about the descent which waited for them on the other side. Now all sense of exhilaration faded fast as she considered what lay between them and the flat terrain of the next glacier.
It wasn’t that the terrain was terribly steep, the height fell away in a gradient not much greater than the lower slopes of an average Scottish mountain. But it was complicated territory, riven, as is always the case where unseen forces are colliding beneath the surface, by the dissecting fissures of crevasses and crunched-up ice.
Lauren cast her mind back to the snowmobile descent she had made of this same route with Sean, remembering now the many dozens of times they had made a route-finding error, piloting themselves into a dead end where they were blocked by an uncrossable crevasse. With the machines, rectifying such a mistake was simple and painless, just a question of turning the thing around and letting the engine power back up the slope to try another possible route.
But how would it be on foot? How many times could she ask her team to backtrack—always the most demoralising action under any circumstances—particularly as she would be asking them to backtrack uphill?
‘Sean, how much do you remember of the descent?’ she asked him.
Sean looked down at the slope.
‘I think we tried to go through the centre of that ice fall.’ He pointed to the feature which dominated the middle distance. ‘But we couldn’t find a way through that. As I recall, we came back up a-ways and ended up scooting over to that far right wall and going down that gully.’
Lauren followed the line of his outstretched hand.
‘You’re right,’ she confirmed. ‘Do you think you could find the same way again?’
Sean considered the question for a while, trying to spot any familiar landmarks which would guide their way.
‘I can try,’ he told her, ‘but it was a hell of a maze.’
By midafternoon they were penetrating the fractured terrain, weaving a trail beneath intimidating blocks of ice. One was shaped like a sail, another a soaring arch like a killer whale’s fin. The team passed as quickly as they could beneath these obstacles, knowing that they could fall at any moment.
There was no conversation between them now, no room in their minds for anything but the total concentration needed to prevent a slip. Without crampons, the terrain was hazardous, each of them having to think twice about each footstep, searching for the crimps and rugosities in the surface of the ice which would give them purchase against a fall.
Good though Sean’s navigation was, they twice ran themselves into a dead end, having to turn and tediously retrace their steps back up the slope to try their luck on a different line. But little by little they made a safe descent, Sean lowering the weaker members of the team by rope where the ground was too steep to tackle on foot.
By this process they reached the gully Sean and Lauren had remembered from the first time, a kilometre-long ice chute leading in an almost straight line down to the glacier. Here Sean checked his watch and called Lauren over.
‘We’re too slow,’ he told her. ‘We’ll never get down onto the glacier before dark. You think we can glissade down this?’
Lauren looked down the smooth expanse of ice. ‘It looks OK here, but what about the bottom end? What if it ends up in a crevasse?’
‘It doesn’t,’ Sean said with certainty. ‘We took this whole section at about twenty miles an hour when we came down on the snowcats. The bottom runs off gently onto the glacier.’
Now Lauren recalled. ‘You know, I think you’re right. I think we could try it. Like Shackleton on South Georgia.’
‘He did the same?’
‘When he crossed the interior. 1916. There were three of them, with few supplies and just a short length of rope. They had to cross the mountains to get to the whaling station at Grytviken. If I remember rightly, they ended up glissading down a huge glacier—it saved them half a day.’
‘If it’s good enough for Shackleton…’ Sean said, with a smile. ‘I think we should try it. It’s about fifteen hundred feet from here to the glacier. We’ll never get there by dark if we carry on at this pace.’
‘What about Frank?’
‘He can stay on the sledge. I’ll sit on the back and
steer it with my feet.’
Once they understood the principle, most of the team were prepared to throw themselves down the slope; anything was preferable to the pain of trying to descend on blistered feet. They followed Lauren’s example, sliding on their backsides, using their feet to brake by jamming their heels into the compacted surface when they felt themselves going too fast.
After six days at walking pace the sensation of speed was breathtaking, the wind-polished walls of the gully shooting past at a tremendous rate. The sledge was fastest; bearing the heaviest load, it shot past the others at breakneck speed, Sean whooping with excitement on the back, Frank white-faced and looking anything but happy at the front.
Less than five minutes of exhilarating slide put the team at the foot of the gully, where they were spat out onto the flat surface of the glacier. Lauren ended up in a deep bank of drifted snow, the powder penetrating every gap in her clothing.
They regrouped, smiling foolishly at each other after the excitement of the glissade, a quick head count confirming that everyone had made it down safely.
‘Let’s get the tents up,’ Lauren told them. ‘We’re running out of light.’
With just minutes to spare, they had the tents erected and the stoves lit. It was Sean’s turn to cook, but no sooner had he got the first of the pre-packed food sachets lowered into the boiling water than Lauren was calling him from outside, her voice hissing at him through the tent fabric.
Sean poked his head out of the front flap.
‘What is it?’
‘I think I saw a light.’ Lauren was pointing up to the high col, faintly visible in the moonlight as a looming mass of snow way above them.
‘You serious?’ Sean was out of the tent in a moment.
‘Yes … at least I thought I did…’ Now Lauren was uncertain.
‘What was it?’
‘Could have been a headtorch. It was only a flicker, nothing more.’
Then they both saw it, the briefest pinprick of artificial light, glimmering in the darkness.
‘You were right,’ Sean whistled. ‘That’s Fitzgerald, he’s camping up on the col. How the hell did he get on our trail?’
Lauren turned to him, her face drained of all blood.
‘He didn’t fall for the false note. He knows we’re heading for the plane.’
‘Shit.’
‘My thoughts exactly.’
‘We’ve got to stop him,’ Sean said. ‘If he gets to that second depot before we do, we’re as good as dead.’
‘But how, Sean, when he’s so much faster than us?’
‘Let me sleep on it,’ Sean told her. ‘If I come up with something, I’ll let you know.’
‘Don’t tell the others,’ Lauren begged him. ‘They’ve got enough problems as it is.’
74
The moment came just past nine a.m. on the tenth of September—the eleventh morning of the trek. They stood there together, watching the yellow blaze of light breach the horizon for the first time in six months.
‘Hallelujah!’ Sean cried. ‘Where’ve you been all my life?’
The grey ice of the glacier—the half-lit world they had become so used to—was suddenly alive with colour, the ice dancing with blues and radiant whites as the rays painted light and shade. Suddenly, there was texture and depth where previously there had been monotone uniformity, the bright colours of their clothing picked out in brilliant detail.
It made them smile, turning their faces to bask in the sun’s rays, even though there was no perceptible heat to be felt.
‘I always wondered about the guys who built Stonehenge,’ Mel said. ‘I mean, I never thought of the sun as such a big deal. But I won’t take it for granted again.’
All too soon, the sun sank beneath the horizon once more, returning the glacier to the dusk-light of winter. But—Lauren and her team knew—tomorrow it would be back for longer, then the day after it would appear for longer still.
The arrival of the sun, even if it was only for a quarter of an hour or so, was the final confirmation that winter was drawing to an end. But it still wasn’t fast enough for Lauren’s liking. The lack of full daylight was still a serious handicap, and by three o’clock each afternoon they were stumbling in the dark.
On the easier terrain, where no crevasses threatened them, the team could continue for a few hours with the occasional use of a headtorch or by using the faint light of the stars. On more dangerous ground, there was nothing to do but pitch the tents, a big frustration on the days when the team was going well and might have continued for a couple more hours.
The long black nights created a problem of their own: the tedium and depression of fifteen hours spent in total darkness with little or no torchlight to relieve the gloom. On a good night, eight or ten of those hours could be spent in sleep, but that still left plenty of down time, most of which was spent in silent contemplation of their miserable situation, bodies throbbing from the demands of each daily trek, minds struggling to cope with the uncertainty of their fate.
‘We have to talk,’ Lauren begged Sean and Frank, ‘distract ourselves, or we’ll go crazy here in the dark.’
‘Fairy tales?’ Frank said quietly.
‘Anything.’
‘Only one type of story I want to hear,’ Sean said, ‘and that’s stories about people who were in more shit than we are … and lived to retire to a life of obscene comfort on some beach somewhere.’
Lauren thought for a while. ‘How about Franklin?’ she offered. ‘The man who ate his boots.’
‘I like him already. He sounds like my sort of person. What’s his story?’
‘We’re talking about the early part of the nineteenth century, the 1820s more or less. His mission was to fill in some of the gaps in the Arctic. Like, for example, how did Canada end up in the far north.’
‘And don’t tell me … he’d never been anywhere cold before?’
‘Good guess. In fact, on paper he was totally unqualified.’
Sean gave an amused cough. ‘I like that about the British. How come you guys always choose such duffers for these gnarly trips?’
‘National characteristic, I suppose, but I wouldn’t call Franklin a duffer … more a big softy, a sort of wholesome, mild-mannered giant if you like.’
‘Cut to the drama,’ Frank told her. ‘Where did it all start to go wrong?’
‘Oh God, it’s years since I read the book, but if I remember rightly it actually started going pear-shaped right from the start. They had about seventeen hundred miles to complete across the wilds of Arctic Canada, but as bad luck would have it the weather was dead against them.’
Sean sucked in his breath in mock sympathy. ‘Weather against them, eh? Who would have thought that in Arctic Canada … I’d have taken my Bermudas myself.’
Lauren ignored his sarcasm. ‘Their plan wasn’t that bad … to hire native Indians as guides and to hunt food.’
‘And don’t tell me … no one checked if the native Indians actually wanted to do this?’
‘Right. In fact, most of them mutinied. By that time, they were skin and bone. Their supplies ran out and they were down to eating lichen from the rocks to try and get some sustenance.’
‘Lichen,’ Frank whistled. ‘That’s a bit rough. Couldn’t they shoot anything?’
‘I think they got the occasional deer, but I seem to remember most of their protein in the winter months came from a couple of wolf carcasses they found.’
‘Great stuff! Sucking the marrow out of a wolf carcass. Those guys were pretty macho, I guess.’
‘I suppose they were. But they were literally starving to death. At one point they were squeezing the maggots out of infested animal hides and eating them like grapes.’
‘So how did it wind up? Did they get to eating each other?’
‘Strangely enough, there’s some evidence to suggest they did, at least some of the corpses showed signs of having been chopped about. There’s no doubt that at least a couple of them went
stark raving mad … they were shooting each other in the end.’
‘And Franklin? He survived?’
‘He survived the first expedition … that was the one where he ate his boots. When he got back he was a national hero, his book a bestseller, made for life. That was despite the fact that eleven of his expedition wound up dead.’
‘Wait a moment…’ Sean was laughing in the dark. ‘I get the strangest feeling about this, but would I be right in thinking that after surviving that disaster by the skin of his boots, your jolly Mr Franklin went back to the Arctic and did it all over again?’
‘Uncannily, you’re right,’ Lauren confirmed, laughing herself now at Sean’s infectious humour. ‘He did exactly that.’
‘Lauren?’ Sean asked.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘How come all your national heroes screwed up? I haven’t heard about a single one that didn’t get themselves in all sorts of shit. Have you got one that, like, went out, completed the expedition and didn’t have to eat his boots to survive?’
Lauren thought about this for a while, amused to realise as she sorted through her mental list of childhood heroes that Sean was pretty well right—the people the British admired the most were the ones who had got themselves into desperate predicaments.
‘It’s not the getting into trouble I admire,’ she told him after some thought, ‘it’s the getting out of it.’
‘Amen to that,’ Sean told her. ‘You get us out of this one, you can put your own name on the list.’
All was silent for a long while as they listened to Frank’s unsteady breathing. He had fallen asleep near the end of the story.
‘You think I can do it?’ Lauren whispered.
‘I reckon, but promise me one thing. If we get to the boot-eating stage, don’t make me eat my own. Those babies stink like a couple of skunks crawled in there and died.’
75
‘You know what we should try?’ Sean was sitting next to Lauren during one of the breaks. The team was shattered, spread around the ice, lifeless and despondent on this, the fourteenth day of the trek. Progress that day had been grotesquely slow, their pulling power reduced to just a few hundred metres before they were forced to rest.
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