The men had finished cutting the channel through the ice and the Venturer was kedged the last few yards into its anchorage. Astern, the channel froze over fast, locking them in for who knew how many months. When the bows bumped against the ice at the end of the channel, the thud sounded to Killigrew like a knell of doom.
They moored the ship in position with an ice-anchor and set to work stripping her upper works. All the rigging was unrove, and the shrouds that remained in place to support the lower masts were slackened off. The topmasts and topgallants were taken down and stacked on the ice with the boats. The ropes and sails were put on shore to prevent them from rotting, along with the ship’s provisions: the sub-zero temperatures would help to preserve the mix of salted and tinned food; and storing them on the ice made more room on the ship. And if disaster struck and the ship burned or was somehow crushed in the ice, at least they would not lose their stock of victuals.
A foot of fresh snow was spread on the upper deck to act as insulation. The lowest spars were turned fore-and-aft to form a single ridge-pole that ran the length of the ship, and plank rafters were fixed every few feet between the bulwarks and the spars. Then wadding tilt cloth was draped over the peaked framing and tacked into place to form a large tent that covered the entire deck so that only the stovepipes and one companion way amidships protruded. Finally, pylons were set in the ice all around the hull, about a hundred yards distant from it, and connected by ropes to form a perimeter fence beyond which no one was to travel without permission from an officer.
‘Fetch an ice-axe and come with me,’ Killigrew told O’Houlihan. The two of them descended the gangplank to the ice, and the lieutenant indicated a spot nearby. ‘Dig a hole there, two feet across. That’s our fire hole. If there’s a fire on board, that will be our only supply of water. I’m making you responsible for ensuring the hole is free of ice at all times. I want it cleared every morning and every night, without fail. Hoist in?’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’ O’Houlihan went to work.
Killigrew strolled away across the ice to study the Venturer from about a hundred yards away. With the topmasts down and the tent of wadding tilt spread over the deck, it looked less like a modem exploring ship than an illustration of Noah’s Ark in a Sunday school picture-book. It was to be the home of thirty-five men, one woman and thirteen dogs for the next few months. With the exception of Terregannoeuck, as sailors they were all used to getting along with one another in the confined spaces of a ship for prolonged periods, but at least on a ship there was always a chance of a change of scenery, and one had a good estimation of when one’s next shore leave was coming up. Here there was no escape, just the men trapped in the hull with nowhere to go but the ice outside.
Killigrew sighed. He had a feeling it was going to be a long winter. Even by Arctic standards.
* * *
Strachan dreamed that he discovered a perfectly preserved dinosaur frozen in the ice: a new, previously undiscovered species. They took the dinosaur back to London, where Strachan displayed it to the leading lights of the Royal Society, not to mention the Queen and Prince Albert, at Somerset House overlooking the Thames. As they were applauding him, however, Michael Faraday revived the monster with a galvanic charge and it went on the rampage and ate the Prince. Just as Strachan saw his knighthood flying out of the window, the dinosaur turned on him. He was running through the corridors of Somerset House, his legs as heavy as lead, the dinosaur’s breath hot and foul on the back of his neck.
At last he made it to the rooms of the London University and tried to barricade the door with the bookshelves. The dinosaur started to batter at the door, smashing aside the bookcases. One weighty tome flew at Strachan’s head, flapping its pages like a pterodactyl, and he just had time to see it was a copy of the Bible before he woke up with a start. He was drenched with sweat, in spite of the fact it was so cold in his cabin that his breath formed clouds of condensation as it billowed from his mouth.
Someone was knocking at the door.
‘Who is it?’ he called sleepily.
‘Orsini, signore. I bring you some coffee.’
‘Thank you. Come on in.’
The steward entered, holding the mug with the hand that protruded from the sling on his arm. Strachan glanced at the porthole above his bunk; even with the curtain drawn across it he could see it was still dark outside. ‘What time is it?’ he asked, fumbling for his watch.
‘Two bells in the morning watch, signore.’
Five o’clock in the morning, in other words. After the brief summer in which the sun had never set, now the days were drawing in, the nights growing longer. ‘How long have you had your arm in that splint now?’ he asked Orsini.
‘Five weeks, signore.’
‘Five weeks, eh? That splint will be ready to come off your arm in another week, I should say. Come to the sick-berth after breakfast and I’ll take another look at it.’
‘Thank you, signore.’ Orsini withdrew.
Five weeks, mused Strachan. Five, since they had been nipped in the ice; more than four since they had settled into their winter quarters at Horsehead Bay, as they had come to name the inlet from its shape. He had expected the days to drag by, but they seemed to have flown past.
Strachan joined Killigrew, Yelverton, Cavan, Ziegler, Bähr and Ursula in the wardroom for a breakfast of bacon, bread and butter, and tea or coffee, and afterwards, bundled up warm, he made his way up on deck. He unfastened the opening in the awning, closing it again quickly behind him to keep the warm air in, and paused at the top of the gangplank. It was cold, but not intolerably so, and the sun warmed the air with its thin rays, a copper orb low over the southern horizon surrounded by a coronet jewelled with sundogs. Strachan drew a deep breath of sharp Arctic air into his lungs, and stepped on to the gangplank. His legs shot out from beneath him; he landed painfully on his backside and slithered down to the ice.
‘Mind yourself, sir,’ O’Houlihan said laconically, chopping with an ice-axe at the film of ice that had formed during the night over the fire hole. ‘The gangplank’s a bit slippery this morning.’
Strachan stood up, dusted snow from the seat of his trousers, and massaged his cheeks ruefully before making his way around the stores stacked on the ice to the ‘observatory’: a large wooden shack built on the ice of spare spars and wadding tilt, insulated with blocks of ice, a short distance from the ship. The barometers and magnetometers were in the observatory, at least, but the thermometers had to be kept outside and were sheltered under one of the Venturer’s cutters, which had been inverted and raised on spare spars to make a sort of awning. The final building in the cluster of huts beside the Venturer was the euphemistically named wash-house.
Strachan checked the current temperature on a standard thermometer, and then recorded highest and lowest recordings of the past sixteen hours on the maximum and minimum thermometers, correlating the results with the extremes measured by the Six’s self-registering thermometer. To any normal man, it would have been tedious work, simply jotting down such statistics, but Strachan was not a normal man. His faith in science was founded on the immutable patterns in mathematics, and as a scientist he was dedicated to research through painstaking observation and note-taking.
His observations made, he turned back to the Venturer, where the morning’s sick parade would already be queuing up outside the sick-berth. The crew were still on six-upon-four, the hands grumbling about it mightily in his presence, as if they thought he had some influence over the captain. He kept a sharp eye out for signs of malnutrition and scurvy. Neither had reared its ugly head yet, although it was early days. But the reduced rations were taking their toll. In addition to becoming increasingly fractious with every passing day, the men seemed to have an increased susceptibility to all manner of minor ailments: coughs and colds, aches and pains.
As Strachan was making his way back to the ship he caught sight of a movement out of the corner of his eye. Ivory on white, he might have missed it if it had remain
ed motionless, even though he was passing within a few feet of it.
He froze at once, and then turned slowly, expecting to see an Arctic fox. Instead what he saw was a polar bear cub.
No – two polar bear cubs.
His heart pounding in his chest with excitement, he hunkered down so as not to scare them away. They backed off, hissing, but then seemed to relax, more curious than afraid. He guessed they could not be more than a few months old, and yet already they were more than five feet long: delightful, cuddly little creatures, no more menacing than his Uncle Andrew’s golden retrievers. Strachan might be a scientist, but he had a weak spot for adorable mammals.
He could barely contain his excitement. Two real, live polar bear cubs, born and raised in the wild, and so close he could almost reach out and touch them. He wished he had his camera with him, but he dared not go back on board to fetch it in the hope they would remain still long enough for him to get a half-decent exposure; they would almost certainly be gone by the time he got back. So he concentrated on studying them, trying to impress every tiny detail in his mind’s eye so he could draw a sketch later.
‘Hullo there, ma wee bairns,’ he murmured softly, soothingly. ‘What are you doing here? Lost your mama and papa, eh?’ He held out his hand to them, wishing he had some food on him with which he could tempt them. ‘It’s all right, I’m no’ going to hurt you.’
Strachan’s reassurance was completely unnecessary: the cubs seemed to have no fear of him whatsoever. One of them edged forwards, sniffed his outstretched hand, even licked his gauntlet. He realised he was probably the first homo sapiens the cubs had ever seen; who could blame them for being curious? Even as he crouched there, he felt a frisson of excitement, like the time he had been walking through a glen near his native Crieff and had encountered a magnificent stag; this was the kind of moment he knew would stay with him for ever.
Then the moment was shattered as the two cubs started at a sound from the direction of the Venturer, too low for Strachan to hear. They backed off, hissing.
‘Mr Strachan, sir!’ O’Houlihan called from the gangplank. ‘Whatever you do, don’t move!’
Strachan cursed inwardly at the seaman’s well-intentioned blundering. ‘It’s all right, O’Houlihan,’ he called back as loudly as he dared, not wanting to frighten the two cubs away. They stood their ground now, glaring towards O’Houlihan and bobbing their heads up and down. ‘They’re just bairns…’ He backed away from the cubs to reassure them.
‘No, sir!’ The Irishman almost screamed with hysteria.
Strachan heard a snort behind him, and froze.
‘There’s a bear behind me, isn’t there?’ His cracked voice sounded high and reedy to his own ears, as if it had broken yesterday rather than fourteen years ago.
‘Wes has gone to get help,’ said O’Houlihan.
‘Is it big?’
‘Big enough, sir.’
Slowly – very slowly – Strachan turned. The bear was about seven feet from head to tail, weighing perhaps 550 pounds, her fur a yellowish-ivory. She drew black lips over sharp fangs and snarled at the assistant surgeon, bobbing her head up and down, muscles tensed to pounce.
Strachan swallowed hard, and whimpered. His whole life flashed before his eyes. One incident seemed to have particular resonance: he was eight years old, visiting his Uncle Andrew in London, and the two of them were in the Zoological gardens in Regent’s Park. Strachan liked his uncle – preferred him to his father, at any rate – and had always loved animals (ironic – but perhaps inevitable – that he should die at the hands… well, paws… of one), so it was a day he had numbered among his happiest childhood memories, which were few. He had sat on his uncle’s shoulders, the better to see the animals in their cages over the heads of the crowds.
‘You know what that is, don’t you, boy?’ his uncle had asked him at the bear pit.
‘Of course,’ Strachan had replied, full of boyish impatience at such a foolish question. ‘It’s an Ursus arctos.’
‘Oh, an Ursus arctos, is it?’ his uncle had replied good humouredly. ‘And there was I thinking it was a grizzly bear. You know they say you should never come between a mother bear and her cubs?’
Strachan had almost been too proud to admit his ignorance, but then as always his scientific curiosity had got the better of him. ‘Why not?’
‘Because mother bears are mortal protective of their bairns. If you come between a sow and her cubs, she’ll tear you apart.’
At the time, it had struck Strachan as one of the most useless pieces of advice anyone could ever have given him. It was true his uncle had also told him that if you stepped on the cracks in the paving stones on Princes Street, a bear would come out and get you. In a spirit of scientific inquiry, Strachan had refuted that hypothesis in one second flat, satisfying himself that, regardless of whether or not he stepped on the cracks, the chances of him meeting one bear – let alone a mother and her cubs – in Great Britain were so slim as to be non-existent.
The mother bear growled.
A warm, wet feeling spread through Strachan’s crotch. He felt afraid – more than that, he felt terrified – but most of all, he felt embarrassed. He could imagine everyone standing over his corpse, laughing because he had soiled himself.
The bear pounced. She slammed into him, all 550 pounds or so of her, with both massive paws on his chest, throwing him back down on the ice. A moment later, Strachan was not feeling much of anything at all.
Chapter 10
The Transgression
Killigrew was making an inspection of the Venturer. In fifteen minutes’ time the crew would beat to divisions, and immediately after that – while the crew jogged around the upper deck for an hour to exercise – Pettifer and Strachan would inspect the ship formally. But Killigrew liked to carry out his own inspection beforehand, making sure there was nothing for Pettifer to find fault with.
A conscientious officer, it was something he did as a matter of course, even though it had been unnecessary at the outset of the voyage. In those days – had it really been only been six months ago? – Killigrew had been able to do no wrong, in Pettifer’s eyes at any rate. But ever since he had asked for his objection to continuing into the Arctic to be noted in the log, all that had changed. Now Killigrew could do no right, and if anything was amiss in the ’tween decks then he would be the one who would get an earful.
But the lieutenant’s main concern was damp. Excess water vapour was a constant curse, whether exhaled from the mouths of the men as they returned from their daily exercise or billowing from the cooking pots. When Armitage prepared food, the curtain of Fear-Nought cloth that covered the door to the galley had to be kept shut tight to stop clouds of steam flooding through the mess deck and crystallising into hoarfrost on everything they touched.
Breakfast over, the hands had hoisted the mess tables up to the deck head and were fastening them in position. Killigrew noticed a dirty mess kid had been put on the deck. ‘What’s that?’ he demanded crisply. The number on the mess kid was 4 – the number of the marines’ mess. ‘Corporal Naylor?’ .
‘Mess kid, sir,’ the marine responded sharply.
‘What’s it doing there?’
‘Sir?’
‘Clear it away, man! Scrub it and stow it!’
‘Private Phillips is mess cook for today, sir.’
‘Is Phillips here now?’
‘No, sir. He’s on sentry-go topsides, sir.’
‘Then you do it.’
‘Very good, sir.’ Naylor picked up the kid with a grimace.
Feet thundered on the companion ladder leading down from the after hatch. Killigrew glanced aft to see Dr Bähr emerge from the door at a run and disappear into his cabin. Although the doctor habitually moved briskly, Killigrew had never seen him do anything so undignified as to run – with his long legs, it only made him look comical. He headed to the cabin to ask Bähr what was going on and had almost reached the door when the doctor reappeared, clutching his s
hotgun, at such a pace that Killigrew was forced to back off to avoid a collision.
‘Dr Bähr! What the devil’s going on?’
‘Polar bear!’ the doctor called excitedly over his shoulder, thundering back up the companion ladder.
Mildly curious – not sharing Bähr’s keenness to bag a polar bear, or any other Arctic wildlife for that matter – Killigrew followed him up the ladder. He was halfway out of the hatch when he heard first one shot, then another. He had almost reached the opening in the awning when Cavan charged through, cannoning into him. Both of them reeled.
‘Steady as she goes, Cavan! Where’s the fire?’
‘It’s Mr Strachan, sir!’ the mate panted, ashen-faced. ‘A bear’s got him!’
Killigrew ducked out from under the awning and slid gracefully down the slippery gangplank to the ice. Bähr and Molineaux were both there, holding smoking guns – the doctor his double-barrelled shotgun, the seaman a Minié rifle that Killigrew guessed he had snatched from Private Phillips, who stood beside him looking dazed. O’Houlihan clutched an ice-axe. Glancing across to where the barrels and crates of victuals were stacked on the ice, Killigrew saw a bear’s hindquarters jutting out from behind the stores. He pushed between Bähr and Molineaux and dashed across the ice. He realised belatedly that he was armed with nothing more than his dress-sword: the edge honed to razor-sharpness, every bit as deadly as his cutlass, but he would have preferred his shotgun under the circumstances.
He rounded a stack of barrels, almost capsizing as he skidded on the ice, and saw the bear sprawled motionless on the ground, a couple of smaller bears standing nearby. There was no sign of Strachan at first, until he saw the assistant surgeon’s boots poking out from under the adult bear.
Looking cowed and bewildered, the two cubs presented no immediate threat. ‘Get him out from under there!’ ordered Killigrew.
Killigrew and the North-West Passage Page 21