Across Frozen Seas

by John Wilson

  ACROSS FROZEN SEAS

  Across Frozen Seas

  BY JOHN WILSON

  Copyright © 1997 John Wilson

  Third Printing: 2003

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage, retrieval and transmission systems now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This book is published by Beach Holme Publishing, #226—2040 West 12th Ave., Vancouver, BC, V6J 2G2. This is a Sandcastle Book. A teacher’s guide is also available from Beach Holme Publishing at 1-888-551-6655.

  The author and publisher acknowledge the generous assistance of The Canada Council and the BC Ministry of Small Business, Tourism and Culture.

  Editor: Joy Gugeler

  Cover Art: Barbara Munzar

  Production and Design: Teresa Bubela

  Printed and bound in Canada by Webcom

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data:

  Wilson, John (John Alexander), 1951-

  Across frozen seas

  (A sandcastle book)

  ISBN 0-88878-381-7

  1. Northwest Passage-Juvenile fiction. I. Title. II. Series.

  PS8595.15834A721997 jC813’,54 C97-900649-X PZ7 . W6959A371997

  FOR EEUN, WHO TOLD ME STORIES.

  PROLOGUE

  In the first dream that I remember I am sitting at a long, rough-hewn table with about forty other boys. The table is set in a narrow, dark hall and there are cobwebs hanging from the blackened wooden rafters. At one end, in front of a vast, empty fireplace, sits a large man in a grey uniform of coarse cloth. On the mantle above his head are carved the words, “Work boy or out.”

  We range in age from five or six (down at the far end of the table) to twelve or fourteen (where I sit). We are all dressed in heavy, woollen clothes that are ragged and often patched at the elbow and the knee. Several boys have flat caps sitting on the table beside them. In front of each boy, including me, is a bowl of thin vegetable soup. We are eating in silence. In fact, there is no sound at all in my dream; I cannot hear or smell, and the soup I am passing up to my mouth has no taste. My only sensations are sight and touch.

  The table feels uneven beneath my arm and the soup spoon cold in my hand. I can also feel, clenched in my fist in the warm darkness of my pocket, the small lead figure of a sailor, Jack Tar. He is the only thing I have from my parents and, as long as he is with me, I am certain nothing will go wrong. More acutely, I notice that my backside is extremely tender where it comes in contact with the hard wooden bench.

  The whole experience is like watching an old movie, except that I am in the movie. I have the distance of a member of the audience and yet I am much more than a passive observer. I am one of the actors. At least I can see through the eyes of one of the actors and feel his pain. I know what he knows, and his past is my past. Although I have never seen this hall or met these children, in my dream everything is very familiar. This place is my home and I feel as if I have been here forever.

  I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the man in uniform is called Mister Marback and that, in addition to the large set of brass keys hanging from his belt, he also owns a cane switch he uses on anyone who has broken his rules. This explains the pain in my backside.

  The scruffy-looking boy across the table from me is the reason I have felt the brunt of the switch, but I don’t seem to mind. He is teaching me to read and write. In fact, it was after candles-out last night, when we were illicitly reading my friend’s stolen copy of Mister Dickens’ new book A Christmas Carol, that Mister Marback caught us. My friend heard him coming an instant before the door opened and slid under the bed, keeping silent while I was beaten. But this injustice doesn’t matter; he is my only friend in the world and I would gladly endure this, and more, for him.

  My friend is taller than I am and has a mop of sandy-coloured hair that looks as though it has never seen a brush. His face is thin, narrow and unremarkable, except for his eyes. They are deep brown, large and have a droop to the edges, giving his face a sad expression. As I look at him across the table, he lifts his head and smiles at me. Instantly, his eyes come alive and sparkle with mischief. The name George Chambers flashes through my mind and I think, tonight we will escape.

  That was the first dream. Not really anything too unusual, except that I could remember it very vividly the next day. I could even explain it. Two days before, I had been watching the movie Oliver Twist. Obviously, the workhouse scene where Oliver asks for a second bowl of gruel had stayed with me and crept into my thoughts that night. There was no hint of the adventure and tragedy that would soon unfold and consume both myself and my dream-friend George.

  For a week, I lived my “normal” life. I went to school, played hockey, hung out, got bored and listened to my parents argue. Then I had the second dream.

  I am standing in a dark, narrow alley, shivering uncontrollably. It is raining steadily and on either side of me are stained, damp walls. Below my feet are uneven cobblestones that slope toward an open drain. The drain is clogged with garbage and there are puddles of scummy water around it, making me grateful my dream allows no sense of smell. George is about thirty feet ahead of me peering around a corner into a busy roadway. From what little I can see, there appear to be stalls lining both sides of the street and a crush of people dressed in the same old-fashioned clothes as the boys in my first dream. I want to go closer and look, but George has told me to stay back. Without hesitation, he slips around the corner and out of sight.

  In a moment he returns, running as fast as he can. In each hand he holds a coarse, brown loaf of bread. As he runs past he laughs and tosses me one of the loaves. In that instant, an older boy rounds the corner into the alley and begins running towards us. He is not much taller than I am but he looks angry. Frightened, I turn to follow George, but my foot slips on the slick cobblestones and I fall. The loaf of bread slides from my grasp into a foul black puddle. Before I can get up the boy is on me, holding my collar and hitting the back of my head with his other fist. I try to put my hands behind my head to protect myself, but he keeps on hitting. His blows hurt and I am crying. Without warning, the awful smell coming from the filthy water only a couple of inches from my nose wells up and overwhelms me. It is like nothing I have ever smelled before and it makes my empty stomach heave.

  Abruptly, the hitting stops, the hand lets go of my collar, and I fall to the ground and scramble away from the disgusting drain. When I turn over, I see George. He is tearing into the bigger boy like a whirlwind, punching and kicking furiously. The boy is trying to hit back, but George’s head is down and the blows bounce harmlessly off his back. George’s punches, on the other hand, are finding their mark and the boy is being steadily forced back toward the street. Eventually, he gives up and runs around the corner. George turns back toward me. He is out of breath, but grinning as if he has enjoyed every minute. His loaf of bread is still clutched protectively under one arm. I pull myself up and look disconsolately at the soggy, inedible mass that used to be my loaf. As George draws level, he breaks off a piece of his loaf and passes it to me. We turn and walk off down the alley, George talking happily while I munch hungrily on the bread. It tastes bitter, but it is the only food I have had in days and I wolf it down.

  I awoke puzzled. This dream was obviously related to the one I had had a week before. It had the same vividness and the same feeling of being trapped inside someone else’s head. I had heard of people having the same dream repeated over and over again, but the idea of having a sequence of dreams, where each continues the action from th
e one before (like a television series), was bizarre. Even stranger, I felt as if I were being drawn more and more deeply into the dream world, whatever, and whenever, that was. Now that I could smell and taste, the only missing sense was hearing.

  Equally odd, although I hadn’t dreamt it, I somehow knew what had happened to my dream self and George between the two dreams. He and I had indeed escaped the night after the first dream. I remembered squeezing myself through a tiny window into a dark alley and running until I could hardly draw another breath into my aching lungs.

  After that, George and I had lived on the streets, stealing what food we could and sleeping wherever we could find some shelter. It was always raining. Our only happiness was the stolen copy of A Christmas Carol which George and I, huddled beneath a bridge, would read to one another. My reading was still very slow and George often had to help me, but we both loved the escape into Scrooge’s world of ghosts and Christmas turkey. Our favourite bit was the description of the ghost of Christmas Present, surrounded by piles of food and gifts. We would torture ourselves by reading of the “great joints of meat,” “long wreaths of sausages,” and “seething bowls of punch,” until our stomachs were growling so loudly we couldn’t continue.

  How I knew all this without actually dreaming it was a mystery. Yet, somehow, I did, and what’s more, I was beginning to care about what happened to my dreaming self. I found myself anxious to go to sleep the next night so that the story could continue.

  CHAPTER 1

  The next night I sat in my small room in our house in Humboldt, Saskatchewan fingering an old ivory button. On one side was a carved crown and anchor and, scratched on the other, a broad arrow which identified it as having come from the uniform of a sailor in the British Navy. I often sat and looked at it. The button fascinated me. Who wore it? How had he lost it? An ancestor of my grandfather Jim’s had found it on an expedition to the Canadian Arctic years ago. He said the owner must have died long before I was even born, but it seemed now as if a part of that sailor were still alive. When I held his button in my hand he was not alone and neither was I.

  As for being alone, I don’t have brothers or sisters, so I’m used to spending time in my room by myself, just thinking. When I was younger, I used to wish for a brother to play with, but now I can amuse myself for hours thinking about where I’ll go when I leave home. Often my mother interrupts my thoughts with her worried knocks at the door asking, “David Young, what can you be doing in there?” I usually reply, “Homework,” and then go back to my plans for the future.

  In the meantime, I play hockey and hang out, and in the summer I canoe and fish, but that’s about all there is to do. Humboldt is definitely not a thriving city. It’s a small town about fifty kilometres east of Saskatoon and about as many years behind the rest of the world. As soon as I’m old enough, I’m gone. My friends are always talking about Toronto or Vancouver, but I’m heading north. As far north as I can get. Maybe I’ll get hired by a government survey or work on the rigs; I’d take any job in order to get up there. If I want to stay though, I suppose I’ll have to go to college first and learn a trade that will be useful in the North.

  The Arctic has always fascinated me. I like the idea of the white wilderness, and of living on the edge of the world. Humboldt’s not quite the edge of the world, but I like the winters here too, especially the storms when the snow whips across the prairie with nothing to stop it but the occasional grain elevator. Nothing matters to the snow—cars, roads, houses—it covers everything in its path, smoothes it over. Even sound is trapped by the falling flakes. Then it gets cold, minus twenty, thirty, even forty degrees sometimes, but then the sun comes out and the air gets so clear you can see forever. When it’s that cold, your nose tingles when you breathe and the snow is crisp and dry under your feet. Mom says that when I was younger, I used to sit at the window and watch the snow fall for hours. I still like to watch those big flakes drift down, thousands and thousands of them blanketing the silent land.

  When it’s snowing you feel as though you could be anywhere. They say no two snowflakes are the same, yet the ones that fall today are identical to those that fell on the huge ice sheet that once covered the prairie, or those that fell on the hairy backs of the mammoths in prehistoric times, or those that settled on bundles of beaver pelts the fur traders carried along the river ways. I love thinking about the past and, somehow, the snow is a link; it feels the same to everyone, regardless of when they lived or died.

  All this I have learned from my grandpa Jim, Mom’s father, who lives on a farm about ten kilometres out of town. His story began when his parents came over from England at the turn of the century, before Saskatchewan was even a province. They didn’t know anything about farming, but I guess things were bad enough where they came from to make them want to leave and take a chance on Canada. Jim has a photograph of them, taken in their first year here, standing in front of a ramshackle sod cabin dressed in their city clothes with high, stiff collars and fancy hats. They did manage to make a go of it; the farm did surprisingly well, even through the depression years.

  Jim was the second of two brothers. Both were born around the time of the First World War and both went off to fight in the Second. Jim was in a tank that was attacked in Holland at the end of the war. He was lucky; he was the only one who got out alive. He has limped ever since due to a piece of shrapnel embedded in his hip. His brother was not so lucky. He was a spitfire pilot who shot down dozens of enemy planes. One day he took off on a routine patrol and disappeared. No one ever found out what happened to him. He must have crashed into the sea.

  After his wound healed, Jim came back to Saskatchewan and took over the farm. He married a local woman named Elly, and my Mom was their only child. I think they were a little disappointed when Mom married my father and moved to town. Dad’s not a farmer, so there is no one left to take over the farm. I suppose it will be sold when Jim dies. Elly died six years ago, but Jim is still there. He’s too old to do any of the work now so most of the land is rented out. Last fall, Jim found even working around the yard too much, so he hired a Hutterite boy named Jurgen who lives on a farm across the road. I’ve never met him, but Jim says he’s a hard worker and good company.

  I imagine Jim tells Jurgen his stories. Jim has always been a great storyteller, and he even loves the Arctic as much as I do. His ancestor, the one who found the button, was a sailor on an expedition to the Arctic in the 1850’s. They went north to find out what had happened to Franklin and his men on an expedition to the area ten years earlier. Franklin was trying to find the Northwest Passage to China, but they never reached their destination and all the sailors and both their ships disappeared just as strangely as Jim’s brother had.

  Jim’s ancestor didn’t unearth much except bones and Inuit stories, but he did bring back some relics: spoons, knives, bits of wood and rope. Most of them are in museums now, except for my button. But we still don’t know much about what happened to Franklin.

  Jim also told me stories of other explorers: Charles Francis Hall, who lived with the Inuit for five years; Schwatka, the cavalry officer, who covered five thousand kilometres by sled; and De Long, who died on the coast of Russia because his men couldn’t make the locals understand that he was starving to death nearby. And, Jim said, at the other end of the world, there were Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen racing to reach the south pole. Jim tells great stories, so great that I often used to sit by the fire in his living room for hours, listening to him talk while the snow fell outside.

  I don’t seem to have time for stories any more, but they have left me with a love of the North and the certainty that one day I will go there and see it for myself. But for now, I will have to be content with this button, Jim’s stories, and my dreams.

  CHAPTER 2

  I am cold, wet, hungry and miserable. We are standing on a grey street under a leaden sky. In front of us, steps lead up to an imposing, carved wooden door. I am looking around and through the haze of my dream I
think, perhaps the cars will give me a clue as to the year. But there are no cars to be seen. The street is cobbled and the only transportation visible is a black, polished coach. It sits on two wheels almost as large as I am and is drawn by a single brown horse. A driver sits at the back, guiding the reins over the roof and, as the vehicle passes, I catch a glimpse of the white faces of two passengers inside. I turn back to the door. George is saying something and, almost before I realize it, we are climbing the steps. I stand back while my friend raises the brass, lions-head knocker.

  After a moment, the door opens and a woman in a maid’s costume looks out. She is obviously unimpressed by the sight of us. George is moving into the open doorway and talking fast, but not fast enough. With a look of utter disgust, the maid slams the door in his face. I can’t really blame her. We must look pretty scruffy after living on the streets for two weeks. Turning, we slump dejectedly down on the step. Now, how will we get in to see Sir John, the naval hero, the talk of all London, and our only chance to go to sea?

  I shiver in the damp air and pull Jack Tar out of my pocket. He is a lead figure, only about three inches tall, dressed in a bright blue sailor’s uniform with white trim and a hand capped over his eyes. He gazes into the distance at some far-off shore, just as George and I had hoped to do. Will I ever get to see the things he has seen, or am I destined only to look out on the damp, rainy back streets of London?

  Jack Tar is still in my hand twenty minutes later when a carriage pulls up in front of us. It is larger than most of the others that have gone by, with four wheels and two horses. A footman, who has been riding on the back, jumps down and holds the door open for an elderly, heavy-set man with the largest ears I have ever seen. He is wearing an impressive dark blue uniform with two rows of buttons down the front. The shoulders are decorated with gold epaulettes and he is wearing heavy-looking medals on his right breast and at his throat. His hat is like the ones you see in the old pictures of Admiral Nelson, peaked and triangular with a tassel of gold braid. In his left hand, he carries a thin gold baton.