Terregannoeuck was rocking from side to side, making an odd humming noise.
Molineaux eyed him nervously. ‘You oh-kay?’
The Inuk just went on rocking himself from side to side. It was giving Molineaux a creepy feeling. He decided the best thing to do was to ignore it. He hacked the lid off a tin of soup with an ice-axe. The soup was frozen in the tin. He put the tin on the portable stove until it had melted enough for him to tip it into a saucepan in a solid cylinder and then sat and watched it slowly melt.
After a while Terregannoeuck became perfectly still. Molineaux stared at him, and then got up and crossed over to shake him by the shoulders. ‘Hey, don’t go to sleep! The pill-roller says it’s a bad notion to fall asleep in the snow. He says you won’t wake up.’
Terregannoeuck could not be roused.
‘Wake up, wake up!’
This was crazy! Sure, it was cold – damned cold – but if a London boy like Molineaux could take it, then surely an Inuk would not succumb? ‘Don’t do this to me, Terry. Mr Killigrew needs you. Christ, I need you! ’ Molineaux was not sure that he could find his way back to the Venturer without the Inuk. He raised his eyes to the heavens, wondering if he could navigate his way back to the ship by the stars. There was a rent in the clouds somewhere off to his left, but the only constellation he could see was Ursa Major. Not a good omen.
‘Hot food,’ Molineaux muttered to himself, concentrating on the melting soup. ‘That’s what you need, Terry, some hot soup inside you…’
Somewhere not too far away, he heard a wild, bestial roar. Molineaux stood stock-still for a second, and then ran across to the sledge to retrieve the shotgun. He checked both barrels were primed and loaded, and peered into the thick snow all around them. No sign of the bear, but the snow was coming down so thick it could have been ten yards away and he still would not have seen it.
He tried shaking Terregannoeuck awake again. ‘Come on, Terry!’ he persisted. ‘Don’t do this to me!’
But the Inuk remained in a trance.
Molineaux paced up and down, cradling the shotgun in his arms, jumping at every shadow. At last the soup was melted. It looked as if it was steaming. He tasted a little, but it was still tepid. Well, that would have to do. ‘Come on, Terry, have some…’
He glanced across to where the Inuk had been sitting, but Terregannoeuck had vanished. Molineaux gasped in shock and looked around to see him striding across to the sledge. ‘We go!’
‘Don’t you want some soup?’
‘We go!’ insisted Terregannoeuck.
With 2,000 pounds of savage carnivore wandering about out there somewhere, Molineaux was not inclined to argue. He put out the stove and carried it back to the sledge. ‘Are we going back to the Venturer?’ He hated to think of abandoning Killigrew, but he could not see what else they could do.
‘Get on.’
Molineaux climbed on the sledge.
‘Marche!’ The dogs took up the strain and once again they raced over the snow. Molineaux illuminated the way as best he could with the bull’s-eye. Terregannoeuck seemed to know where they were going. Back to the Venturer? Molineaux had no idea. Normally he was pretty good at keeping his bearings, but in this blizzard it was hopeless.
They had gone about half a mile over the snow before Terregannoeuck stopped the sledge again, in the middle of nowhere. ‘What are we doing here?’ demanded Molineaux.
Ignoring him, Terregannoeuck climbed down from the sledge and walked a few yards through the snow until he came to a low hummock in the ice, about six feet long. He started to dig into it with his hands.
Molineaux took a shovel from the sledge and went to help him, but Terregannoeuck had already uncovered something. It took the petty officer a moment to work out what it was he was looking at, still half-buried beneath the recent snowfall. When he recognised it, his stomach lurched. He reeled in horror, and his heel tapped something else buried in the snow.
Terregannoeuck indicated the corpse he had uncovered. ‘Marine?’
Molineaux nodded. ‘Osborne.’ His face was unrecognisable, but there were still scraps of uniform left on the chewed cadaver, enough to distinguish the wearer as a bombardier in the Royal Marine Artillery.
‘Something bad happen here,’ said Terregannoeuck.
‘You don’t have to be an angakok to know that!’ Molineaux started to dig in the snow to exhume the object his heel had brushed, terrified of finding the corpse of one of the others. Instead he found the makeshift bomb-gun. It had not even been fired. The petty officer had no love for marines, but he could not help feeling sorry for Osborne: the poor bastard had never stood a chance.
One of the huskies started to bark frantically, then they were all at it, staring off through the snow like pointers. ‘What the hell’s got into them?’ Molineaux asked Terregannoeuck.
‘Nanuq near.’
Those two words sent a chill down the petty officer’s spine. As Terregannoeuck crossed back to the sledge and unstrapped his harpoon, Molineaux removed the percussion cap from the bomb-gun and replaced it with a fresh one from his cartouche box. For all he knew, Osborne had had time to aim and squeeze the trigger, but had been betrayed to death by a faulty cap. If it was the bear out there, Molineaux wanted to avoid having a misfire at the worst possible moment.
Terregannoeuck crouched by the dogs and unfastened their harnesses one by one. Tensed and panting eagerly, nonetheless they waited until the Inuk had released the last dog. He gave them an order in his native tongue, and as one they all sprang off into the snow in a pack. Clutching his spear, Terregannoeuck scurried after them, and in the blink of an eye Molineaux was left standing on his own by the sledge. Realising there was no one left to watch his back, he glanced fearfully over his shoulder, and then hurried off in the direction Terregannoeuck had gone after the dogs.
The driving snow blinded him, but he only had to follow the sound of the dogs. A second noise was soon added to the cacophony: the snarling of a large creature. He almost bumped into Terregannoeuck, poised to throw his spear, although at what Molineaux could not tell. He could just make out the dogs, formed into a rough semi-circle, all barking at something amidst them, and then…
‘Jesus Christ!’
The bear was huge, well over ten feet tall on its hind legs. It lunged towards one of the huskies with a sudden access of speed, seizing it in its powerful jaws and twisting its head this way and that while the dog yelped pitifully and the barking of its companions became all the more frenzied. Only when the husky’s yelps were silenced did the bear toss its limp corpse to one side.
Molineaux levelled the bomb-gun, bracing the stock against his shoulder. He aimed at where the bear reared up, less than fifteen yards from where he stood, and squeezed the trigger.
There was a loud bang, the stock slammed into his shoulder, and he was thrown back into a snowdrift behind him as a whooshing sound filled his ears. His first thought was that the gun had exploded, but then there was a small explosion, a blossoming of bright orange amidst the swirling black and white of the winter snowstorm. He raised his head, saw the bear still standing between him and where the bomb had exploded, and realised with a sick feeling that he had missed.
But the explosion had distracted the bear. It half turned, and that was when Terregannoeuck ran in under the guard of its massive paws and drove the tip of the spear deep into his chest. Blood dribbled down its white fur. It raised its head to the heavens, gave one last agonised roar and toppled sideways, forcing two of the remaining huskies to get out of the way sharpish, or else be crushed beneath its massive weight.
Terregannoeuck backed off, panting hard. The dogs continued to bark, as if they feared the bear was playing possum. Molineaux could not blame them. He picked himself up out of the snow and crossed to where the bear lay. He prodded it with the empty muzzle of the bomb-gun, fearing it might burst back into savage life and wishing he had a fresh bomb handy to reload the gun with. The bear did not twitch a muscle. Molineaux gave it a sa
vage kick, then ran away a few feet and turned. The bear lay still.
Terregannoeuck approached the bear and pulled his spear from its chest. A little more blood spilled from the wound, not much. The Inuk crouched by the massive body.
‘Easy, Terry!’ warned Molineaux.
Terregannoeuck placed his hand against the bear’s chest, over its heart. ‘Him dead.’
‘You sure?’
‘Terregannoeuck sure. No heartbeat,’
The truth of the matter finally sank in. Molineaux let out an exultant whoop of joy. ‘You sonuvagun! You actually killed it!’
The Inuk began to pray over the carcass in his own tongue – thanking it for allowing him to slay it, Molineaux supposed. ‘Say one for me, Terry,’ he said, feeling equally grateful. The reign of terror that had begun two months ago and claimed the lives of at least five of his shipmates – not to mention Ziegler and perhaps Killigrew and the others as well – was finally over.
Another whoosh sounded off to Molineaux’s right, and he turned to see something shooting through the night sky, little more than a rising glow behind the flurries of snow. Signal rocket. He ran across the ice in the direction he guessed it had come, swinging his bull’s-eye to light his path and blowing shrilly on his boatswain’s call.
‘…er …ere!’ A faint voice, whipped away on the wind.
‘Who’s there?’ demanded Molineaux, still running through the snow. ‘Where are you? I can’t see you!’
‘Over here!’ The voice was closer now, but oddly muffled.
Molineaux took a couple more steps, and then paused. ‘Is that you, Mr Killigrew? Where are you?’
‘Stop! Don’t… take… another… step!’
Molineaux realised that the voice was coming up from his feet. Glancing down, he saw the chasm that loomed beneath him, and stepped back hurriedly. He advanced more cautiously and peered down, shining his bull’s-eye into the chasm. In the darkness below, he could just make out Killigrew and Frau Weiss standing on a ledge below him.
‘Mr Killigrew? That you? Boy, am I glad to see you!’
‘Not half as glad as we are to see you, Molineaux, I can assure you,’ Killigrew called back up weakly.
‘Hang on, sir, I’ll get you out!’
Molineaux dashed back to the sledge only to meet Terregannoeuck coming in the opposite direction, leading the five surviving dogs dragging the sledge. They had not brought any rope with them from the Venturer, so they unfastened the dogs from the harness and used that instead, lowering it down to Killigrew and Ursula. First they brought up Ursula, and then the lieutenant. Both their faces were blue with cold. Molineaux quickly bundled them in buffalo robes and heated some soup for them over the portable stove while Terregannoeuck started to construct an iglu for them, carving blocks of ice from the frozen lake with a special ice-cutting knife. He worked so quickly and efficiently, the iglu was finished by the time Molineaux had heated the soup until it was tepid enough to eat.
With its low entrance facing away from the prevailing winds that howled across the landscape, it was surprisingly cosy inside the iglu, and it was not long before Killigrew and Ursula started to show signs of improvement. Still, they both shivered too much to feed themselves, so Molineaux and Terregannoeuck spoonfed them.
‘We found Osborne,’ said Molineaux.
‘Dead?’ Killigrew stammered through chattering teeth.
Molineaux nodded. ‘What about the others? Bähr and the other marines?’
Killigrew shook his head, a haunted look on his face. ‘The bear got them. How in the world did you manage to find us?’
‘I don’t know, sir. We followed your tracks for the first couple of days, but then the snow started to cover them. How we found you after that I’ll never know. It was a miracle…’ Molineaux glanced across to the Inuk, who shrugged.
‘Just lucky, Terregannoeuck reckon.’ His face as impassive as ever, nonetheless he winked at Molineaux.
The petty officer was about to protest, when he realised that Killigrew would never believe it. Molineaux did not believe it himself. He shook his head dismissively. It was like Terregannoeuck had said: just lucky. Yur, in a pig’s eye. He had been at sea for fourteen years, travelled the world over from the Orient to… well, to here, the North Pole, near as damn it, and he had seen some weird things in his time, but this one beat the band. He shivered, and not just because of the intense cold. ‘We still wouldn’t have found you if you hadn’t sent up that signal rocket when you did. How did you know to fire one off then?’
‘Heard an explosion. Kracht’s bomb-gun?’
Molineaux nodded.
‘What were you shooting at?’
‘The bear.’
‘It’s still around?’
Molineaux grinned. ‘He won’t be going anywhere in a hurry. You should’ve seen it, sir, it was incredible. The dogs had it at bay, but it picks one of ’em up in its jaws and worries the poor bugger to death. I takes a shot at it with the bomb-gun, and miss, like a goddamned cack-handed greenhorn…’
‘You missed?’ said Killigrew, and managed a wan smile. ‘I find that difficult to believe.’
‘Happens to the best of us, sir,’ Molineaux said philosophically. ‘Wasn’t ready for the recoil, was I? That thing’s got a kick like a sixty-eight pounder! Anyhow, just when I’m thinking we’ve had it for sure, Terry here just runs up to the bugger and stabs it in the heart with his pig-sticker and… blap! Down it goes.’
‘So it’s over?’ asked Ursula.
‘It’s over,’ said Molineaux.
‘Indeed,’ said Killigrew. ‘All we have to do now is get back to the Venturer, hope the ice thaws enough to get back to Lancaster Sound in the spring, and sail four and a half thousand miles back to England.’
‘After what we’ve come through?’ Molineaux grinned. ‘Easy as caz! We’ll start back for the Venturer tomorrow morning. We’ll be there by Wednesday.’
‘Only one small problem,’ said Terregannoeuck. ‘Very small problem…’ He held up one hand with the thumb and forefinger a fraction of an inch apart so they could see just how minuscule the problem was. ‘I kill wrong nanuq.’
* * *
‘How are you feeling?’ asked Strachan.
‘First-rate, thanks,’ said Killigrew. ‘As a matter of fact, I think I’m ready to get out of my bunk now.’
‘Oh, no you don’t!’ Strachan pushed him back down against the pillow. ‘You’ll get up when I say you can, and not a moment before. We don’t want you having a relapse, and, incredible though it may seem, I can manage perfectly well without you for now. But we want you back on your feet when the spring thaw happens, so you can get us back to safety.’
‘I hope I’m on my feet long before then!’
‘I’m sure you will be – provided you don’t try to rush things now.’ He laid the back of his hand against Killigrew’s forehead. ‘Looks as though your fever’s finally broken. Here: put this under your tongue.’ He thrust a thermometer into the lieutenant’s mouth.
It was Friday the tenth of December, two days since Molineaux and Terregannoeuck had brought Killigrew and Ursula back on board, not that Killigrew could remember much about the journey back to Horsehead Bay. The last thing he recalled was Molineaux and Terregannoeuck bickering over whether or not it was Bruin the Inuk had killed. The petty officer had insisted that the polar icecap was not big enough for two such massive bears, but Terregannoeuck had stuck by his quietly-stated but firm conviction that it had been some other polar bear.
After that, moments of lucidity – bundled up on the sledge next to Ursula while Molineaux and Terregannoeuck drove them back to the Venturer beneath the aurora borealis – had alternated with delirious, disturbing dreams. Back in the comfort of his cabin – so cold and chilly before he had set out on the bear hunt, so warm and cosy now – it was all too good to be true, and he still half expected the scene to melt into another nightmare.
Strachan removed the thermometer and glanced at it. ‘Well, your
temperature is almost back to normal. We’ll see how you’re doing this time tomorrow, and then I’ll decide whether or not you’re fit to return to your duties.’
‘How’s Ursula?’
‘Doing fine. Better than you, even. Don’t believe any of that gammon they’ll tell you about women being weak, delicate, sickly creatures: they’re as tough as old boots, most of ’em. You ask anyone who’s ever done any midwifery.’
‘Uh-huhn. What was that godawful caterwauling I heard a few minutes ago?’
‘Stoker Butterwick auditioning for Latimer’s Christmas Eve concert party.’
‘Latimer’s still going ahead with that?’
‘Most definitely. With so many men dead, there’s never been a greater need to keep morale up. There could be a long, hard winter ahead of us. Oh, there have been a few changes to the programme: instead of having the crew perform the whole of The Winter’s Tale, Latimer’s just going to read a few soliloquies. Molineaux’s going to do some prestidigitation and a comic song, while Terregannoeuck’s agreed to give us a display of Esquimaux singing and dancing. Endicott offered to sing “Shiverand Shakery, The Man that Couldn’t Get Warm”, but I vetoed that. Thought it might be bad for morale.’
‘I should damned well think so. Everything else all right? How’s Yelverton?’
‘Much improved; better than he deserves to be.’
‘What about Pettifer?’
‘He seems to be better, too. Calmer, at any rate.’
‘You think he’s fit to return to his duties?’
Strachan grimaced. ‘I wouldn’t want to take responsibility for a decision like that. I’ve heard of too many lunatics who could feign sanity to lull their doctors into releasing them, only to prove themselves more deranged than ever. If you want my opinion, Killigrew, you should keep him restrained until you can get a second opinion from a doctor who specialises in cases of insanity.’
‘Now where am I going to find such a doctor around here?’
‘Exactly! And you can have that counsel in writing, if you want it.’
Killigrew and the North-West Passage Page 40