‘Thank you.’ Killigrew lowered his voice as he crouched down to fasten the snow-shoes on to his boots: the gliding ‘ski’ under his left foot nearly ten feet long, the other shorter, wrapped in sealskin to give him traction as he pushed himself over the snow-covered ice. ‘Part of me wishes you were coming with us, Molineaux. But if the worst comes to the worst and we don’t come back, someone’s got to stay behind and get the others to safety. Strachan’s a good man, but he’s no sailor.’
Molineaux nodded and glanced across to where the assistant surgeon stood. ‘Don’t you worry about that, sir. I’ll look after him. But I’m hoping the worst doesn’t come to the worst. We’ll all be going back to England, with you on my damned back if I have to carry you all the way from here to Montreal.’
‘That’s the spirit. Remember, if we’re not back within two weeks—’
‘I’ll see you then, sir,’ Molineaux said firmly, and produced his Bowie knife. ‘Would you take this with you, sir? Just in case?’
‘Thank you.’ Killigrew pulled up the skirt of his greatcoat and tucked the knife in the small of his back. Ursula had freed Unstead and untangled the traces of the huskies’ harnesses. Killigrew slithered across to where Bähr, Osborne, Jenkins, Walsh and Phillips were shrugging on their knapsacks.
‘All right, let’s go!’ Killigrew gestured them forward with a ski-pole and pushed off, blazing the trail as he followed the bear’s massive paw-prints in the soft snow.
* * *
Molineaux found Fischbein sitting at one of the tables on the mess deck, staring into space. He put a mug of cocoa down in front of the half-deck boy, but Fischbein did not seem to notice it.
‘It would have worked, Ignatz,’ said Molineaux. ‘The bomb-gun, I mean. It’s not Jenkins’ fault he didn’t see the bear in the fog. We’ll get it next time.’
Fischbein did not respond. Molineaux snapped his fingers in front of the youth’s face. ‘Ahoy there! Anyone in?’
Fischbein looked up sharply, then shook his head. ‘Entschuldigung! I was just thinking if the Carl Gustaf had not been nipped, I would be back in Hamburg by now.’
‘You got family waiting for you there? A frow, maybe?’
Fischbein smiled. ‘A Fräulein. Luise Grünholz. I only met her a year ago. There was an Aufruhr… In English you would say…? Men fighting in streets, industrial workers protesting, throwing bricks at the soldiers…’
‘A riot?’
‘Yes, a riot. I went down to the Rathaus with some mates – we’re not Radikaleren, but we heard there was going to be a protest, and we never pass up the opportunity for a chance to fight with the police. Anyhow, Luise was there with her mother. They went out shopping and got caught up in the Aufruhr, the riot. I helped get them to safety. Luise’s parents are very wealthy, her father is a teacher…’
Molineaux arched an eyebrow. ‘A wealthy teacher?’
‘More wealthy than me, anyhow. And you know how teachers look down on those of us who have never been to school. I thought a girl like Luise wouldn’t give a Kerl like me a second glance. But a girl that beautiful – I knew I’d regret it the rest of my life if I did not ask if I could call on her. Can you believe my surprise when she said yes?’
‘I’ve been there, shipmate.’
‘We’ve been… what is the word, when a man and a woman get together?’
‘Chauvering?’
Fischbein had been living on the lower deck long enough to know what that meant. He scowled. ‘Luise is not that sort of girl.’
‘Oh! Courting, you mean.’
‘Yes, courting. Of course, her parents do not know about us. If they did…’ Fischbein shook his head.
‘You’ve been seeing her over a year and you still haven’t mounted her?’ Molineaux exclaimed incredulously. ‘I don’t know whether to admire your restraint or damn you for a booby. I couldn’t go out with a blower for one week if I wasn’t getting my oats, never mind one year!’
Fischbein grinned. ‘What can I say? I’m in love. Sickening, is it not?’
‘Very! So you’re pretty serious about this Luise, then?’
The youth nodded. ‘I’m going to marry her.’
‘You don’t think her parents might have something to say about that?’
‘I’m more worried about what Luise will say. If she’s willing, I think she would be happy to durchgehen… run away with me?’
‘Elope?’
‘Yes, elope. But I want to do the right thing. I thought, if I could get enough money from one more voyage on a whaling ship, I could put on a show, impress her parents.’
‘It’s worth a try,’ acknowledged Molineaux.
Fischbein gestured around the mess deck. ‘Alas, the best laid plans…’
‘Don’t you worry about this, Ignatz. We’ll get you safely back to your Luise, never fear.’
‘Yes, but with empty pockets.’
‘But richer in spirit. Think about it, shipmate. You’ll be a hero. All the men that go on Arctic expeditions are heroes when they go home. I used to know this seaman called John Hepburn; he went on one of Franklin’s earlier expeditions – you know, the one where they had to eat their boots? You should’ve seen him in the waterfront gatherings when he got back. With the stories he used to tell, he didn’t have to pay for his own drinks for a year. And he couldn’t fight the blowers off with a big stick – not that he tried! So you get back to Hamburg and tell your Luise about your adventures, and she’ll run away to Timbuctoo with you, if you ask her.’
Fischbein smiled. ‘Is that why you volunteered for this expedition? For the girls?’
‘For the money,’ said Molineaux. ‘There’s double pay on discovery service, and I need every penny. Besides, I’ve already got a gal.’
‘Yes?’
‘Yur – she’s a Hamburger too, come to think of it. There’s a lot of German gals in Whitechapel. Hold on, I’ve got a picture somewhere.’ He stood up to lift the lid of his seat-locker, and took out his copy of Beowulf. The dog-eared calotype of Lulu was tucked between the pages as a bookmark. He handed it to Fischbein.
The youth regarded the calotype incredulously. ‘This is your sweetheart?’
Molineaux grinned. ‘Yur. I like that picture of her: makes her look like a duchess, don’t it? Them ain’t her real togs – she borrowed them from the costume basket of the penny-gaff where she sings, to pose for that calotype. Maybe you’ve heard of her? Lulu Kisswetter?’
Fischbein shook his head.
‘Tell you what: when we get back to England, I’ll take you to the penny-gaff where she sings; you can catch her act before you sail for Hamburg. She’s not much of a singer, but… well, she makes up for it in other ways, if you catch my drift.’ Molineaux winked, and Fischbein blushed.
Molineaux stared at the calotype wistfully. ‘I still don’t know what she’s doing with a cove like me. We met five years ago: I’d just got back from the Guinea Coast with a wounded leg; I was getting around on crutches. I got knocked down by a gang of rampaging medical students, the next thing I knew there was this angel crouching over me. We’ve been dabbing it up ever since. I ain’t green enough to fool myself into thinking she’s faithful to me when I’m at sea – she’s got bills to pay, after all, and I can’t honestly say that I’m faithful to her… Well, you’re a sailor, you know how it is. But when I’m back in London, it’s just the two of us.’ He tucked the picture back in his book and slipped it into his locker once more.
Fischbein sipped his cocoa. ‘You really think we’ll make it back home?’
‘Don’t you worry. Me and Tom Tidley have faced worse dangers than the Arctic. We’ll make it, never fear. It’ll take more than some mangy old bear to get the better of Tom Tidley, believe you me.’
* * *
‘This is lunacy,’ said Killigrew. ‘We travelled four and a half thousand miles to search for Franklin and his missing crews, and what are we doing now that, we’re here? Searching for a damned polar bear!’
‘A damne
d bear that’s killed five of your men,’ Bähr reminded him. ‘A damned bear that will come back to kill again and again, unless we get it first.’
‘Slim hope of that. I don’t know how fast polar bears travel, but I’ll lay odds it’s a damned sight faster than the twelve miles a day we’ve averaged so far.’
There had been no heavy falls of snow since the day the bear had killed McLellan, and the sledge party had followed its tracks without difficulty. Occasionally Killigrew would travel ahead on his skis, blazing the trail with Ursula on the dog sledge where the tracks became hard to follow, but most of the time his skis were strapped to the large sledge and he hauled on the harness along with the rest of the men. By his reckoning they had covered nearly fifty miles in the four days since they had left the Venturer, but the bear had led them on a meandering, circuitous route: due east across the neck of land that connected Boothia to the Canadian mainland.
They were yoked to the sledge in tandem, one pair behind another, Killigrew leading the way with Bähr beside him. Behind them were Osborne and Walsh, while Jenkins and Phillips brought up the rear.
Ursula drove the smaller dog sledge up ahead of them. Killigrew had not been entirely comfortable with the idea of using dogs as beasts of burden at first. But they had hauled the sledge with such enthusiasm under Ursula’s skilful handling, he had realised that they had been born and bred for such work, and were a lot happier hauling a sledge across the wide, open spaces of the Arctic than they would ever be cooped up in their kennels on board the Venturer.
They travelled from seven in the morning until six in the evening, resting for ten minutes in every hour and for an hour between noon and one; not that time as they understood it had much meaning in a world that hovered between the dusk of midday and the pitch black of midnight. Yet even the thin light of the stars, reflected blue off the snow and ice all around them, was enough to guide their way. On some days, when the trail led over the relatively smooth ice of frozen lakes, they covered as much as seventeen miles; on others, when the way led through rocky hills, they were lucky to cover four, and at night crawled into their chrysalis bags exhausted. But at least their exhaustion allowed them to sleep soundly in spite of the freezing temperatures inside their tent. And as the days progressed and they consumed more of their rations, the large sledge they hauled behind them became perceptibly lighter.
They were moving across the sea again now.
‘Where the devil’s it going, anyhow?’ Killigrew panted in exasperation. ‘It seems to be roaming all over the place.’
‘Terregannoeuck told me that the Esquimaux call polar bears pisugtooq, “the great wanderer”,’ said Bähr.
‘I can’t help wondering if this bear is simply trying to wear us out before—’ Killigrew broke off abruptly.
‘Sir!’ Phillips hissed urgently. ‘Look!’
Killigrew glanced over his shoulder and saw that the marine was pointing up ahead of them. Following the direction he indicated, the lieutenant saw something on the ridge ahead of them where the rise of the land suggested the coast; with snow and ice covering everything, sometimes it was impossible to tell where land ended and the water began. At first Killigrew thought it was nothing more than a rock, poised on the low ridge overlooking the coast ahead, silhouetted against the indigo sky. Then the rock moved, and he realised it was an animal of some kind.
‘Is it…?’ asked Phillips.
Killigrew took out his pocket telescope, rubbed the palm of his gauntlet over the eyepiece to take the chill off it – he did not want it freezing to his face and pulling his eyelids away when he lowered it – and looked at the animal.
‘It’s a polar bear, all right,’ he confirmed. ‘Whether or not it’s the one we’re after—’
‘Of course it’s the one we’re after,’ said Bähr. ‘The tracks lead that way, don’t they?’
Killigrew was not convinced. ‘How we managed to keep up with it…’ He trailed off. The bear was looking back at him. Impossible to tell what it was thinking, at that distance in that light, but the lieutenant was willing to hazard a guess.
Ursula was some way up ahead of them, following the bear’s tracks where they curved round to the west before approaching the shore below the ridge where the bear stood watching them. She had not seen the bear itself.
‘Frau Weiss!’ Killigrew called, as loud as he dared. He did not want to frighten off the bear, but at the same time he did not want her to blunder into a messy death in the bear’s paws. Fortunately she heard him, and glanced back in his direction. He indicated the bear. She glanced in that direction, nodded, and reined in the dogs with a cry of ‘Whoa!’, waiting to see what Killigrew and the other men would do next.
Phillips unslung his rifle and levelled it at the bear, but Osborne knocked the barrel of his rifle up. ‘Don’t waste your shot, lad. Even you couldn’t hit it from here.’
Then the bear turned abruptly and trotted on, disappearing out of sight on the other side of the ridge.
It hit Killigrew all at once: ‘He’s leading us into a trap.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ said Bähr. ‘What, do you think he’s got half a dozen of his ursine friends waiting for us on the other side of that ridge? He’s just a dumb animal, Killigrew.’
The lieutenant saw the sense of what Bähr was saying, but all the same he could not help thinking that something was not right.
‘There are six of us, armed with shotguns and rifled muskets,’ persisted the doctor. Killigrew could only presume he was discounting Ursula in the event of a violent encounter. ‘The devil take it! Even if there were six of them, we’d be a match for them.’
‘There were thirty-five of us when we first reached Horsehead Bay, but that didn’t stop Bruin from killing five of us on his own,’ Killigrew pointed out. Nonetheless, he knew they had come this far to kill the bear; they could not turn back now, not when they had come so close.
There was nothing except smooth ice between them and where they had seen the bear to their right. Killigrew led them straight across to the shore, loading a shell into each of the barrels of his Verney-Carron shotgun as his shoulders took the strain of his sledge harness.
‘We’ll drag the sledge as far as the lake shore, then leave it there with Osborne and Ursula while the rest of us spread out to go after the bear,’ he decided. ‘Don’t anyone shoot until we get closer. We want to kill it, not frighten it off.’
‘Don’t you worry,’ said Bähr. ‘This bear may think it’s rather clever, but so far it’s just been lucky. I’ve got a feeling that its luck is about to run out—’
‘Halt!’ said Killigrew.
The six of them came to an abrupt stop. ‘Now what’s the matter?’ demanded Bähr.
‘Did anyone else hear that?’
‘Hear what?’
Crack!
‘That.’
They exchanged nervous glances and then, as realisation set in, slowly and apprehensively lowered their gaze to the ice beneath their feet.
Crack – crack!
‘Down!’ Killigrew grabbed Bähr’s arm and dragged him down after him as he threw himself flat. ‘Down on the ice, fast! Spread yourselves out!’
The six of them sprawled on the ice, breathing hard. In the silence that followed, as they strained their ears for further sounds of the ice cracking beneath them, Killigrew could feel his heart pounding.
‘Is everyone all right?’ he asked. They murmured their assent. ‘All right, this is what we’re going to do. Slowly, carefully, inch by inch if we have to, we’re going to make our way to the land.’
‘On our bellies?’ protested Bähr. ‘It’s got to be at least half a mile!’
‘It’s probably only a few fathoms to the bottom of the sea, Doctor. Would you rather go that way?’
‘This is daft.’ Jenkins pushed himself to his feet. ‘The ice supported the weight of the bear, didn’t it? If it can support the weight of a two-thousand-pound bear, it’s not going to break under our weight, is it?�
��
‘Get down, Ted!’ gasped Phillips.
‘Look – I’ll prove it.’
To Killigrew’s horror, Jenkins started to jump up and down on the ice. He expected to see the marine drop straight through into the freezing waters below. ‘Belay that, Jenkins, damn you! Get down, like I told you!’
But Jenkins’ confidence in the ice proved well founded. ‘See? I’m probably the heaviest one here, and it’s more than strong enough to support my weight. You five can crawl on your bellies if you like, but I’m walking to the shore on my feet.’ He made as if to shrug off his harness.
Crack… crack… crack!
Killigrew’s eyes were focused on Jenkins, expecting the ice to open up under the marine. But the ice was solid beneath his feet; the lieutenant realised belatedly it was not the marine, but the sledge – the one they were all harnessed to, with their tent, chrysalis bags, victuals, cooking apparatus, dry clothes, spare ammunition and tools – that was sinking.
Chunks of ice tilted up all around the sledge as it settled slowly down, and then disappeared abruptly. The strain snapped at their harnesses. Jenkins was pulled on to his back, while Killigrew felt himself being dragged across the ice towards the hole where the sledge had sunk. Walsh squirmed out of his harness and picked himself up, sprinting for the shore.
‘Walsh!’ roared Osborne. ‘Come back here, you damned coward!’ On his back, the bombardier tried to grip the harness with his mittened hands while the heels of his boots sought purchase on the ice. But Walsh was already dozens of yards away and showed no intention of returning.
Still holding his shotgun in one hand, Killigrew scrabbled at the ice with his other hand and his toecaps, but he felt himself being pulled back inexorably with the others towards the gaping hole in the ice. If only he had had the ice-axe… but the axe was on the sledge, with the rest of the tools.
Phillips was at the edge of the hole now. ‘Cut through the harnesses, lad!’ gasped Osborne.
‘I can’t do that, Bomb. We’ll never make it back to the Venturer without what’s on that sledge!’
Killigrew and the North-West Passage Page 36