The Rope Eater

by Ben Jones

  He looked around at us to see if there was any dissent.

  “Good,” he said, rubbing his hands over the light. “The doctor, Kane, Reinhold, and I will make up the expeditionary party. Preston and Adney will remain to supply the camp with food, Captain Griffin and Ash to maintain the camp and care for Creely. We are nearly free of our grim prison.”

  We gave a rousing cheer, and we clapped each other on the backs.

  “We will spend tomorrow in preparations and depart the following day; if any of you have gear or supplies of use, please pass them over. We will need every advantage if we are to make it there and back.”

  We shuffled and knocked as we sorted ourselves. Adney pressed his nearly whole gloves and a fur-lined hat on me, and took my own ragged set in exchange. Preston gave me his clasp knife, his initials graven into the handle. The others did the same awkward dance, Adney and Reinhold debating lightly the lack of merit of their two rifles. Ash fabricated a second blubber stove and showed the doctor how to use it efficiently.

  The following day Ash crafted crude skates for us, with wide platforms of wood above to act as snowshoes if we came into softer snow. The doctor and Preston made a small sledge from the oars and wood from the dinghy. We had a full three hooshes that day and spent the hours before sleep packing the sledge tightly with heaps of meat and the best four of the bags—we possessed little else of value—and wrapping it in a portion of the tarp stripped from the outside of the hut.

  We had a sing that night, Creely conducting merrily with his stumps, his beard shining with fat from the hoosh. I felt drunk from the food and the excitement of actually moving, of having the chance to leave. I could see the spring, and the light returning to find us whole and triumphant, hailing and astonishing the arrogant whalers.

  We pushed off to cheers and shouts in the morning, our skates rasping on the ice. The weather was promising—only around ten below zero, and a light wind at our backs. The sledge was not heavily laden, and Ash had rigged two harnesses so that we could take turns pulling it.

  We made good time over the ice, the sledge jerking along behind us. By noon, when we stopped for tea, we had gone four or five miles—a different world already. We pushed off again quickly as the wind rose. The weather held through the afternoon, and we sped north along the shore ice, weaving in and out of the coastline as a three-quarter moon rose overhead.

  We made our camp by propping the sledge on its end against a boulder and draping the tarp over one side. On the other, we cut blocks of hard snow and packed the gaps. When we had finished, we had a hut of our own as warm and tight as the one we had left. With the stove blazing and our own mugs of hoosh, we settled contentedly into our bags.

  The next day the weather was colder and the wind stronger, but it was still at our backs. We elected to skip the noon tea as it was too time-consuming to pitch the hut in the cold, and marched on into the afternoon. The coastline wound ahead, low and gravelly, the rocks black and the ice silver. That evening, the doctor estimated that we had covered nearly twenty miles—great progress for men in our condition. Reinhold and I had a sing to ourselves as West huddled smiling in his bag.

  We were roused in the morning by the wind. The doctor came in under the tarp in a great rush of it.

  “Looks like we’ll have to sit tight today,” he said. “But not to worry, we’ve made excellent progress, and we have plenty of meat to sustain us. We can rest today and prepare for tomorrow.” West looked evenly at us, as if measuring us, then retreated into his bag.

  We sat and listened to the wind buffeting the tarp, remarkably cozy in our bags, with the blubber lamp burning extravagantly. The storm blew itself out the following afternoon and we pushed off again. As we got back in the swing of the travel, I began to notice how much slower West was than the rest of us. He was uncomplaining, but he lagged consistently behind, and the doctor gamely slowed his pace and called for halts to let him catch his breath. He made a show of gathering samples and consulting the charts as West puffed up behind.

  Still, it felt wonderful to be moving again, and the rich food was beginning to reinvigorate me. Reinhold and I skated off during the breaks to explore the edge of the heavy ice in case there were seals. We moved so quickly on the skates without the boats that it was difficult to resist just going and going to feel the ice glide underneath my feet. The storm had drifted the snow in long dunes out behind the rocks like silver shadows from a moon low in the southern sky, pointing us north again. The lane was open before us, the ice smooth, and our skates left a glittering trail of sparks behind us.

  “We’ll not go too far,” grunted Reinhold happily. “Drop the sledge and have a bit of a hunt—see if we can’t make real pigs of ourselves.”

  We pulled away steadily with the sledge for three hours, long after we’d lost West and the doctor behind us. The shoreline bowed and sank into the sea; offshore, the pack was low and uneven, with a few icebergs poking out in the moonlight. The cold air was blazingly clear, but the light sat softly on the ice and made distances hard to judge. Reinhold kept an eye on the pack, looking for promising spots to hunt. We came into the center of a broad bay and Reinhold turned out toward the sea. He slipped out of the raddies, took the rifle from the sledge, and motioned for me to follow him. He wrenched off his skates and began sliding forward. I took off my own and followed. At the edge of the shore ice, the hummocks were sharp and heavily jumbled, but only four or five feet high.

  Reinhold crouched low and began to creep along, setting his feet down with great delicacy and sweeping his head from side to side. I did the same, though I had no idea what we were looking for. After a time he stopped, unslung his rifle, and lowered himself to the ice. He motioned for me to do the same and pointed to the featureless ice in front of us. I lay down and squinted at the ice, looking for the dark blob of a seal. Reinhold inched forward on his elbows, then lay listening and holding his breath. After a pause he moved forward again. I did the same, but when I snapped off the tip of a small wind ridge, he looked sharply at me in annoyance, so I simply lay still and watched.

  He moved ahead of me about thirty feet, and then lay still again, drawing the rifle up beside him. He inched around until he was facing me. Still I saw nothing in the low hummocks. We waited; nothing moved, there was no sound, there was no interruption in the low ridges of the ice. If I had not been cold, I would certainly have fallen asleep. As it was, I struggled not to move, though tremors started in my legs. Reinhold drew the rifle up at last, and pointed it directly at the ridge in front of him. The rifle cracked and he sprang forward, bashing dementedly at the ice. I came up beside him as he lay the rifle aside and began jumping on the ridge of ice with both feet. To my surprise, it split, and he kicked to open a hole in it.

  Inside was a low dome, only about eighteen inches high, sitting above a dark pool of open water less than two feet in diameter. Reinhold fell on his stomach and plunged his arm into the water, thrashing it around under the ice.

  “Damn,” he muttered, “damn bastard better not have . . . Ha ha!”

  He roared with pleasure and reared back, hauling out a huge seal through the hole and slapping it down on the ice. He had a jury-rigged hook in his hand that he’d caught under the seal’s jaw. A stream of blood pulsed out onto the ice and sent small bursts of steam into the air like breaths.

  “But how did you know it was there?” I asked.

  “They keep a hole open through the winter out here so that they can breathe. You need to get out past the thick ice near the shore. Small hummocks are best—the space between the floes. They bob up to keep it open as the ice around it freezes—sometimes they have to gnaw at it to keep the air space.”

  “But it wasn’t open. How did you spot it?”

  “The tops freeze over eventually, but they are a little higher than the regular ridges, and end up round at the bottoms, but sharp on the top like the others. You can see from the shape which direction they come up to breathe.” He pointed at the dome, which was sli
ghtly oval.

  “The top of the oval’s where the head comes up when he breathes, and also where the ice is the thinnest. The water splashes down and the other end get thicker and thicker, so it’s hard to shoot through, and even to break through.”

  “How did you figure it out?”

  “The doctor got the basic idea for it from the Eskimo. So he sent me out with some nice sharp principles for seal hunting. I spent a long time out on the ice just looking around and listening. Finally one time I heard a scratching under the ice—a seal working his hole a little bigger, gnawing away at it like a squirrel. So I shot into the ice at the noise. I hacked down to the hole and there he was. Sometimes they sink when you shoot, so you have to be quick about it.”

  “Master Gooka,” I said, “esteemed perfesser of Eskimology.”

  He laughed, and hauled the seal up onto his shoulders.

  “Come on,” he said. “See if the ladies are caught up.”

  The doctor and West had not reached the sledge by the time we returned. We turned the sledge on its side and built up the hut. Reinhold did the butchering while I fired up the stove, and in a few minutes we had chunks of meat simmering in the seal blood. After we had eaten, we kept the stove burning and watched the greasy smoke curl up and disappear out the ventilation hole.

  “What do you suppose has happened to your man Aziz?” asked Reinhold. “Do you think he got off the ship before it went down? Made it to the islands?”

  “I hope so,” I replied. “Somehow I don’t think the islands were what he was after.”

  “What else is up here? Was there something in the journals West didn’t mention?”

  “If there was, Aziz never told me anything about it.”

  “Maybe he’ll be basking on the beach with old Strabo when we get there.” Reinhold held his wrists together and gave a waggling double wave.

  “Do you still think we’re going to find the islands?” I asked.

  “No. I don’t know. I think we’ll find something, but I doubt it’s what we’ve been promised.”

  “So why go at all? Shouldn’t we be pushing south?”

  “Not really our place to say, is it? At least not yet.”

  “But when will it be? The way we are going, we’ll all starve to death before we get a chance to decide for ourselves.”

  “Rest easy, Saint Brendan. I’m getting seals pretty steadily now, so we won’t starve. Keep your strength up and bide your time. We’ll make it back one way or another.”

  “What about Creely? And Captain Griffin? They’ll never make it.”

  “I spent a winter out once before, up in Spitsbergen. We were whaling until too late in the season and got caught by the pack. We had to overwinter at the whaling camp. Even with plenty of blubber and meat, it was a long, cold winter. To pass the time, we bet on toes—whose would fall off when, in what order. There’s only so much you can control, and best to have a sense of humor about the rest. I won,” he said chuckling.

  “You like freezing to death at the ends of the earth?”

  He laughed again. “Better than being in prison,” he said. “Or brawling for money in the carnivals. I won there also, by the way.”

  “You’ve been in some rough places.”

  “Best not to let me steer,” he said. “Bad luck seems to land in my path.”

  I was silent for a moment.

  “So we just leave them behind?”

  “You do your best for them but at a certain point you’ve done all you can and you need to move on to save yourself. We have the chance to help each other through this, as many as we can—and it will not be all.”

  The hut was warm and close, and the flame on the blubber lamp swirled and danced. We sat in silence mostly, ate when we were hungry, and listened to the wind scrape across the ice.

  Finally from outside the shelter we heard the crunch of footsteps. First West, then the doctor crawled into the hut. West collapsed on the floor and fell asleep immediately, without removing his clothes or getting into his bag. Reinhold gave Dr. Architeuthis a mug of hoosh and we wrestled West into his bag.

  “Well,” asked Reinhold, when we were settled again, “how much further do you think?”

  “Twenty or thirty miles,” replied the doctor. “The land is starting to steepen along the channel; we should reach low mountains tomorrow. I’ve been a little surprised that we haven’t seen more young icebergs here, but I suspect that when the pack forms, the bay where the two glaciers sit traps most of them and melts them there, and then sends sheets out to the south. Keep your eyes open for driftwood that has come down the channel, either cast onto the shore or embedded in the ice.”

  “Can’t wait to warm my toes,” said Reinhold. “And you”—he elbowed me—“I’ll need a fan boy to keep my brow dry.”

  “Yes sir, Master Gooka,” I replied. “I am your humble servant.”

  “I’ll consider you for the position,” he said. “I’ve got very high standards. Best to practice up.”

  It was snowing hard in the morning, but it was not cold, and the wind was light. West sat blinking in his bag. He seemed recovered after three mugs of hoosh, and urged us to get moving. We broke down the shelter and strapped the seal onto the sledge. West spent some time fumbling with his skates as Reinhold and I rigged up and started to shove off.

  “Stay closer,” said the doctor sharply. “In the snow there is more chance for us to be separated, especially if the ice is smoother the closer we get to the glacier.”

  We waited patiently as the doctor helped West to his feet and we moved off. The snow swept slowly out of the darkness, and the whispering as it settled onto the ice created a sensation of gentle intimacy, as if we were headed down a padded corridor to see a beloved but convalescent relative. The snow hid the shoreline and the edge of the uneven ice, leaving our small circle scraping along the soft darkness.

  West did not call us to stop. He merely slowed down, then stopped and sat down on the edge of the sledge. He made no apology of any kind, nor did he offer up when he would be ready to continue. He sat, and we waited, and eventually he rose again and we could continue. In the morning he could go an hour before resting. By the middle of the afternoon he was stopping every fifteen minutes, and needing five minutes of rest each time. Reinhold leaned impatiently into the harness as we stood waiting. Around midafternoon in the timeless darkness, the doctor called a halt and said we were camping. The wind was coming up, and the snow was starting to drift heavily—better to wait for it to clear.

  I had no objection to an early halt and a big dinner; we were so close now that we could afford to take our time. We pitched camp and made a hoosh, hacking out big chunks of meat from the seal. The wind continued to rise, and keened over us; tongues of snow drifted in through seams in the sledge, and the stove light jumped and wavered. We sat in silence, Reinhold tending the stove from time to time, and drifting in and out of snorting sleep.

  After a look from West, the doctor pulled out the hoosh pot again and prepared a second dinner. Reinhold and I made no objections and filled pot, mugs, mouths, bellies, and drifted into sleep. We awoke to find that we were buried deeply under the drifting snow, and it took quite a lot of work to dig ourselves free. The shore ice was largely covered by the drifts, with small patches of ice showing in the center of the channel. Over our shelter, nearly two feet of snow had drifted up, and it was still snowing.

  Reinhold and I began to dig out when the doctor stopped us.

  “We’ll stay today, until the snow stops; we’ve got plenty of food and a windproof shelter. The more we eat, the less we carry. This will blow out by the afternoon.”

  Reinhold grumbled a little, but we packed the walls back up and returned to our bags. West had cocooned himself inside his, and showed his head only to get his hoosh. We had been eating so much and so well lately that my bowels were a mess—noisy and uncertain, and completely unproductive—but it didn’t prevent me from enjoying another hoosh at noon, and two more in the evening.
Even my heart purred greasily along through the enforced rest.

  The storm took another full day to blow itself out. We kept a tunnel open so we wouldn’t have a hard time leaving at the end, but it took us two hours to dig out the sledge finally. Our bags, which had gotten damp in the shelter, froze quickly as we folded them onto the sledge. Outside, the shore ice had been transformed into a maze of sweeping drifts, exaggerating the sweep of the shoreline and obliterating the low hummocks in the distance.

  Ash’s skates worked as well on the snow as they had on the ice. We were able to march over the drifts without sinking in deeply, and the skate blades gave us traction when we pushed down to the ice itself. After two days in the tent, I was ready to pull, and the doctor did not object as we moved ahead rapidly. It was too dark to see much of the land along the shore. I pictured towering mountains looming over us, and the spitting glaciers in the distance. The snow evened out as we pulled, and the sledge moved quickly over the snow. After three hours of steady pulling, we headed into the shore and set up the shelter for lunch. We fired the smoky stove and made up a thick hoosh.

  There was still no sign of the doctor and West, so we ate our own hoosh, doused the stove, and went back to look for them. We found them more than a mile behind us; the doctor was half carrying West, who glared angrily at us. The doctor looked cold and worn.

  “Up we go, sir,” said Reinhold cheerily, as he slid his head under West’s arm and lifted him off the doctor.

  “Shelter’s just down the ice, and the stove’s all set up for lunch. A little hoosh in you and you’ll be feeling like new.”

  We marched back up to the shelter and prepared a hoosh for the doctor and West. West fell asleep immediately, and the doctor followed soon after. Reinhold fidgeted for a while, then headed back outside.

  “I’m going to head inland a bit, see what the land is like—if we’re in mountains yet. Maybe I’ll find some of the doctor’s fruit trees.”