Heartbroke Bay

by Lynn D'urso

  Between Haines and Lituya Bay he scratches a crosshatch of lines. “Glacier Bay and the ice fields lie between us and Haines. We climb up onto the ice fields, circle north across the top of Glacier Bay, and hit the headwaters of the river that drains down to Haines. Can’t be more than fifty or sixty miles.”

  His proposal is met with silence. Harky and Dutch stare at the scratchings. Hannah wiggles her toes, feeling the stones beneath her feet through the worn soles of her boots.

  Michael disagrees. “I’ve climbed the ridges above the glacier when I was hunting and seen the ice. It’s impossible to travel there. Too rough, and the crevasses are too deep. Even the goats don’t go onto the ice.”

  Hans nods, then points with his stick at Lituya Bay. “I agree. The glacier where it comes from the mountains is far too dangerous. But I’ve been thinking about it, and it seems that it must be broken just here, where the glacier comes downhill to the sea. Higher, where it is level, I’m willing to wager it is solid.”

  Harky looks up and rumbles, “Mountains are too high. Lots colder up there.”

  “We don’t have to go over,” says Hans, tapping the ground emphatically with the kindling. “Look, the ice fills the mountain valleys, right? Just think of it as a frozen lake, and you will see that I am right. Lakes are smooth when they freeze, so we don’t have to worry about crevasses once we are on top. And it will provide us a level trail between the high peaks. It will be like crossing a prairie in winter, that’s all.”

  With that poorly informed geography and a route hatched in the mud with a stick, a plan is formed; Michael is assigned the task of killing a sea lion; the meat will be jerked and the animal’s thick hide used to reinforce the soles of their boots. Blankets must be sacrificed, sewn into coats and mittens. Capes of untanned seal and goat hides will protect them from the cold.

  Dutch is reluctant and covers his fright with another of his yarns. “I climbed in the Alp Mountains of Europe when I was younger. It’s damned dangerous, I’ll tell you. A bad storm catches us up there, and we’re done for.” Snapping his fingers to demonstrate the suddenness of death. “Done for just like that.”

  Hans pushes his jaw out and leans forward. “You’ve never climbed off your own ass, so just keep your poxing lies to yourself. You can walk out with me or stay here and starve. It’s your choice.”

  Three days later, as Hannah is helping Michael prepare strips of dark meat sliced from the haunch of a sea lion for drying, he whispers fiercely, “If we get out of here, I’m taking you with me. Tell me you’ll come, Hannah.”

  She hammers at a strip of meat with a mallet, beating it tender, then closes her eyes and gives a sharp nod. When she opens her eyes, she strikes the meat once, then again, without looking at Michael.

  The first of November, 1898

  Whosoever finds this message shall know that we were five prospectors cast away on this coast in the winter of 1898: Mr. Hans Nelson of Blue Lake, Minnesota, and his wife, Hannah Butler-Nelson of Bristol, England; Michael Severts of Inishboffin, Ireland; and two Americans who we know only as Harky, from Texas, and Dutch, home unknown.

  After being marooned and suffering the privations of hunger and cold, a decision has been made, in hope of preserving our lives, to effect our own rescue by walking out over the ice fields to the settlement of Haines, near Skagway.

  I ask the discoverer of this note be so kind as to attend to the attached letters and see to their delivery as addressed. Thank you.

  May God keep and preserve us,

  Hannah Butler-Nelson

  Lituya Bay, Alaska Territory

  Dear Mother,

  If you receive this letter, it will mean that I have perished in the wilderness of Alaska, where I have been prospecting for gold this past year with my husband, Mr. Hans Nelson, of Blue Lake, Minnesota. I write to tell you that my thoughts are of you, my dear mother, as well as Poppa and my home in England, all of which I miss very much.

  We have suffered harsh ordeals here in this wilderness, but I must believe such trials are brought upon us by our own misdeeds. Oh, Mother, I regret so much the unhappiness I caused you and Father when I broke my engagement, and again when I left Lady Hamilton’s entourage to elope with Mr. Nelson. Perhaps it will give you some measure of comfort to know that he has been a loving husband, and should we survive, our fortune and happiness will certainly be secured by his hard work and intelligence.

  Forgive me and pray for me, Mother.

  Your loving daughter,

  Hannah Nelson

  Hannah considers the lie she has told—that Nelson is a model husband, and by implication, that she has been happy with him—and worries what punishment such a falsehood may bring. After all, breaking the disciplines of her life has certainly led to the troubles they have now. Might this falsehood bring more? She weighs the matter carefully, her pen loitering in her hand, then convinces herself that the good intention to ease a mother’s loss might offset any judgment, and folds and seals the letter.

  Hannah places the note in an empty marmalade jar, then rests the jar atop the letters. There is the letter to her mother, another addressed to Mr. Uliah Witt in Sitka, and a message from Michael to his own mother in Ireland. Hans scoffed at the notion of an epistle to his family in Minnesota. “I’ll write ’em from Skagway, just to tell them I am rich!” Dutch sniffs and rubs at his nose. “I don’t reckon anyone’ll miss me.” Harky just shakes his head and says, “I don’t write.”

  On the next windless morning, with the sky clearing at sunrise to a mottled blue and gray, the weight of the gold is again distributed among them. Harky carries half the gold, a load of firewood, and the iron kettle as well. The straps of their packs pull at their shoulders with the heft of ore, meat, ropes, blankets, a scrap of canvas that will serve as a rude shelter, and what extra clothing they own. Hans carries the ax, intending to use it as a mountain staff, and Michael the shotgun as he leads the small party along the hunting trail to the alpine. Underfoot, the moss crackles with frost. Crusts of snow lie in the shadows of the trees.

  An unkindness of ravens plays in the sky, singing klook-klook to each other as they soar, dipping and rolling through the clouds on broad wings like dark angels, watching from the heavens as the marooned miners rise steadily higher.

  Once clear of the timber, the castaways pause for breath, and on the mirrored waters of the bay far below, they see clusters of white seabirds. Slow wisps of clouds move across the sky, by turns revealing, then obscuring, the peaks. They climb higher. Everything not in direct sunlight becomes frozen.

  By noon they have come to the highest point of the alpine, and the glacier lies tumbled and broken below. Everything above is snow and stone. They move slowly, carefully, their hearts in their mouths, across slanting, frost-slicked ground. In the light, the ice is bone white; when a cloud sails across the sun, it turns gray. They climb higher, looking out at an unending treatise of blue mountains, and as the uppermost limb of the sun falls below the horizon, Michael rigs a windbreak, and everyone spreads blankets on the bare granite shoulder of the massif.

  “Don’t be so niggardly with that fire,” orders Hans. Harky is sparing with precious splinters and shavings as he kindles a flame to melt a kettle of snow.

  Ignoring Hans for a moment, he shakes his shaggy head. “Gotta make it last. No wood up here.” His feet ache from the weight of his burden, but the load of firewood he carries must last as long as their journey, or they will be reduced to eating snow and warming their hands on their empty bellies.

  “It’s only going to take three days, maybe four, to get across,” argues Hans. “We’ve got enough to warm ourselves properly.”

  The others look out from their precarious perch and see a universe of bare stone that goes on for eternity. The air grows still and cold, and when Michael hurls a stone into the chasm, everyone listens to the endless, rebounding echo of its falling. Harky picks up a stick of firewood the size of a hammer handle, considers it a moment, then lays it aside. Dutc
h moans and mutters God’s name. The fire and their lives seem suddenly no more than brief, weightless sparks.

  Heaped beneath inadequate blankets, the miners shiver and tremble in a mind-numbing search for warmth. Overhead, in a night sky that is luminous and hissing with silence, the aurora borealis dances: greens the color of sea moss, reds the exact shade of war. Stars shine like fireflies through the curtains of shifting light.

  Rising before daybreak, Hans blows on the ashes of the fire and feeds shavings to the coals until a small flame begins to snap and push against the darkness. Harky must be helped to his feet and groans as he straightens his legs. Michael and Hannah scrape frost into the kettle, while Dutch digs into his pack for a coil of small-diameter rope, cuts it into lengths, then demonstrates how to take several turns around a boot and whip it to a finish at the ankle to improve the friction of slick leather soles against ice. “It’s a trick of the Prussians. They ain’t the climbers the Swiss are, but come up with a dodge or two anyway.”

  With daylight comes the disheartening prospect of the country they must travel, and there is a brief, guesswork discussion to plot a route through the knobbed and broken mountains. As they climb, the snow underfoot grows drier and squeaks in the cold. On the slopes of steep ridges, Hans hacks steps with the ax, and the men pass Hannah from hand to hand across the dangerous traverses. Her cheeks feel frozen. Her fingers go numb.

  After hours of climbing, they come to a place of such terrible perspective that they crouch down and stare, silenced by the great distances and spaces. The chalice of the mountains is filled to overflowing with a sea of ice; sidestepping peaks fade away into infinity. The air is thin and hopeless, and a vast silence fills the sky.

  “Yield,” whispers a wind that freezes the tears in their eyes.

  Overwhelmed by the impossibilities arrayed before them, they agree.

  A north wind sweeps across the spine of the mountains, lifting a stream of fine, hard snow that stings their bare skin and smooths the outline of their tracks. They stagger in retreat, screwing up their mouths as if sand were being flung in their faces; their eyes burn from the white strength of the sun, and the cold saps the vigor from their limbs.

  Harky stumbles, lamed by his freezing feet and by the weight of the gold on his back. Hannah’s fingers are without feeling. She trembles without cease. In the lee of a cliff, the sudden lack of wind gives the illusion of warmth, though moving air whistles above and behind them. Where the ice has separated from the cliff, a snow-packed bergschrund provides a small, secure place for the party to come to a halt and lower their packs for a rest. The slope below is steep, slick with frost, and gives way sharply to a void that hums with the vertigo of empty space.

  “Fire,” says Harky, unstrapping the wood lashed to his pack. “We’ve got to warm up.”

  Michael shakes his head, then mumbles through lips blackened and cracked from the cold, “We should keep moving. Get as far down as we can before dark.” He squints at the sun, measuring its arc above the southern horizon with the caliper of two extended fingers. “Two hours, maybe less.”

  Harky does not pause in his preparations for a fire, untying the splits of wood and setting his heavy pack aside, hooking it on a sharp fang of ice protruding from the edge of the bergschrund.

  “The ax,” says Harky, beckoning to Hans.

  Nelson repositions himself, bracing against the rock face with one hand as he moves around Hannah and Dutch to split a bolt into kindling. Harky hands him a wedge of wood and watches as he kneels, places the butt of the wood against the ground and raises the ax, gripping it one-handed and high on the shaft. The first blow is weak; the wood bounces and falls without splitting.

  Hans balances the log again, standing it upright on its end, and takes a firm, two-handed grip on the ax. The thonk of the blow is solid. The bolt splits cleanly along the line of its grain, leaps into two parts, and falls against Harky’s pack.

  There is a snapping sound as the fang of ice on which the pack is hung cracks, then a moment without motion or sound before the pack begins sliding. The miners, dulled by the cold, watch as it slips away. The grating hiss of its motion grows as the pack accelerates down the slope, then ends as the pack flings itself over the edge of the abyss, disappearing without a sound into eternity.

  The weight of the loss drops crushing and hard onto the cold-addled miners when Dutch thrusts out a hand and cries, unbelieving, “The gold!”

  FIFTEEN

  In the lee of every object, blowing snow aligns itself into dunes as smooth and perfectly curved as the inside of a seashell. A skin of ice scrubbed slick by the wind covers the bathing pond. The door of the cabin rattles. Inside, the four men and Hannah huddle around the stove, feeding splinters of wood to the fire, listening to the sound of surf pounding at the shore. Hannah stitches mittens of seal hide and canvas. The smooth, spotted furs—poorly tanned by a mixture of urine and ashes—leave a revolting smell on her hands.

  Winter has brought seals crowding into the bay to feed and rest on the icebergs. Two days in three the wind rages so wildly that it would be foolhardy to leave the shelter of the cabin, but in the three weeks since they returned from the ice field, Michael has become adept at floating into the herd while lying in the skiff, shotgun braced against the gunwale to supply a steady aim. The flesh and organs of each seal he kills feeds the party for exactly three days. The miners’ stomachs bloat and cramp on the diet of pure meat, but there is enough to assuage their hunger. With Harky’s willing arms to cut firewood, they have time on their hands.

  “Tell us a story, Dutch,” says Michael, hungry for diversion. “Another of your tales.”

  Hans barks, “Bah!” and makes a dismissive slice of his hand through the air. Even in their tedious imprisonment, to solicit another of Dutch’s odd fantasies offends his practical, Nordic sense of life. Severts ignores him.

  “What’ll you do after we get out of here, Dutch?” asks the Irishman, smiling. “Spin us a yarn.”

  Dutch’s lips form an O. His wandering eye tracks an invisible mote as he replies, “Owyhee?”

  “Hawaii?” asks Michael. “What about Hawaii?”

  “Well, they’ve never seen ice there, have they?” says Dutch, shrugging. “After Lituya Bay, I don’t ever want to see no snow or ice again.”

  “Amen,” agrees Hannah.

  Encouraged, Dutch elaborates. “Never gets cold there in Hawaii, even at night. And there’s fruit on every tree, fruit of all kinds. Things you never seen in the United States, like papayas and pineapples, or them alligator pears.”

  Dutch sighs and makes a show of smacking his lips. “Maybe I’ll take that gold and buy myself a little trading schooner. Just work around them islands, you know. Never get out of sight of a palm tree again for the rest of my life.”

  Hans grunts, a nasty snorting sound. “You haven’t done your arithmetic, Dutch. We were wealthy before we took our little walk, but this ox here,” he says, jerking a thumb at Harky, who sits up at the gesture. “He made sure we won’t be leaving here rich.

  “Losing the big half of the gold like that, we’re back where we started. We’re splitting half a pie now, and your little piece won’t be buying any schooners.”

  Harky’s eyes slit shut, and his whiskers twitch as he chews at his cheek. The muscles of his shoulders and neck bunch as he swallows against the burning rise of bile.

  Hannah carefully places a mitten on the table beside her, works the needle into the spool of thread, and says, “It was an accident, Hans. I don’t think anyone can argue that.”

  Hans tries to stare Hannah down, then growls, “Well, all I’m saying is that it’d be fair if he didn’t get the same share of what’s left as the rest of us.”

  “Aye,” agrees Severts, “and it was your ax work that knocked the pack loose, Mr. Nelson. Maybe that ought to have some effect on your share. And after all, going into the mountains was your scheme, wasn’t it? Just a little stroll on a frozen lake, you said.”

&nbs
p; Michael eyes each of the prospectors before continuing. “And don’t forget, I’ve lost my boat. Maybe I should be repaid for that before there is any splitting.”

  Hannah senses the emotions in the cabin rising to a flood stage and stands, straightening her skirts. “Please, Mr. Severts. And you, too, Hans. We’ve worked hard together and have much yet to face. Affixing blame for the accident will improve neither our fortunes nor our comfort.

  “We made a contract and must live up to our agreement. We share equally, win or lose.” Saying so, Hannah looks across the stove at Michael and sees a twitch lurking at the corner of her lover’s mouth and a narrowing of his eyes, then feels herself coloring as she thinks of her own hypocrisy toward the contract of marriage.

  “Well spoken, Mrs. Nelson,” says Michael with his best Irish charm. He smiles, but there is a cold flicker—whether warning or invitation Hannah is not sure—behind his pale blue eyes. “And two shares are certainly better than one. As a couple, that is.”

  “How’s that?” asks Dutch. “You mean Mrs. Nelson is to get a share, too?”

  Harky looks puzzled. It takes Hannah, too, a moment to understand Michael’s meaning. She has never expected to share squarely with the men, and wonders if Michael’s apparent intention to include her in the spoils is a genuine desire to treat a woman fairly or a part of his fantasy that she will run away with him and thus enable him to recover a larger share of the gold.

  Hans, sniffing a fresh opportunity, sits upright and answers Dutch in a too-bright, matter-of-fact tone that fails to cover his own surprise. “Yes, of course, Mrs. Nelson must receive a full share. After all, she has worked very hard, too, and taken the same risks.”

  Hannah sees the cards fall. She deserves a full portion, but her husband argues for it not out of fairness but out of self-interest, expecting any share allotted her to become his own. If she argues against it—and she will not, she tells herself, dispute her own interests—she will incur Hans’s wrath. She knows if she insists on equality it will strain things with Dutch and Harky, who, though kind and considerate men, cannot quite enfold the idea that a wife should gain equally with her husband. She realizes they will surely resent such a division—an unattractive consequence to suffer when confined within a small, dark cabin. Faced with this damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t prospect, Hannah does what the rules of society demand women do—she remains silent.