Minds of Winter

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Minds of Winter Page 7

by Ed O’Loughlin


  ‘How do you know that Sergeant Peake?’

  He tossed away his cigarette. ‘I’ve never seen him before in my life.’

  You were right, she told herself. You shouldn’t have asked him. The nicotine had made her feel sick. God knows what this man has done that you don’t want to know about. And now he’s having to lie to you, and you have to go along with it. He’s clearly had dealings with police. You’re out here alone with him.

  But she took another drag on the cigarette. ‘He thinks he knows you. He said he met you in Aklavik.’

  ‘I’ve never been there.’

  ‘He knows your name.’

  ‘Okay.’ He said it quietly, as if he was tired. ‘Okay,’ he said again. ‘He just thinks that he knows me. He’s mixing me up with my brother.’ He leaned back against the car, waiting.

  ‘Your brother.’

  ‘My brother whose car this is. My brother whose apartment I’m staying in. We look alike.’

  ‘Right . . .’ This would probably be a good place to let things lie. ‘You didn’t put him straight?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You could get in trouble, lying to police like that.’

  He took out another cigarette. ‘He lied to himself.’

  ‘You’re not wanted, are you?’ She said it facetiously, as if she didn’t care. She’d known all sorts in her younger days in south London, and at college, before her life had tamed her.

  ‘No. I just didn’t want him to know that I wasn’t my brother, because the next thing he’d ask me is how my brother is, and then I’d have to tell him that I don’t know how my brother is.’ He lit the cigarette.

  Fay thought, That doesn’t make a blind bit of sense. Has he killed his own brother and hidden the body? Is that really so out of the question? Why else was he so desperate to get away from Inuvik yesterday, before the passes were closed?

  He must have been able to see her face better than she could see his. He gave a sour laugh.

  ‘My brother’s gone missing. He told me he needed to see me, so I drove all the way up from Alberta and when I got here he was gone. But he’d left me this car and the keys to his apartment. And now I’m beginning to think that he might have done something . . . He left all these crazy notes and stuff on his desk.’

  Fay decided that she didn’t want to care about this man’s brother and the rubbish on his desk. So she said nothing. He waited, then went on.

  ‘Like, there was this letter I was reading last night. I think Bert must have copied it from somewhere, because it’s written in his handwriting, but it’s really long, and the language is really old-fashioned.’

  ‘Really.’ She got back into the car.

  He got in beside her, put the car in drive. ‘There’s this guy called Crozier, who was on the famous Franklin expedition, the one that got lost in Baffin Bay or wherever. He’s writing to another guy to tell him why they abandoned their ships and what he did after.’ He glanced across at her. ‘It’s almost like a suicide note.’

  ‘It’s fake. Your brother must have written it himself.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Because right now the Canadian government is putting on a big underwater search for Franklin’s lost ships. It’s all over the TV and newspapers. And the articles all say they never found any letters or journals or logs from that voyage. They only found bones, and one short note.’

  ‘Really? . . . You want to take a look at the letter? It’s in that folder on the back seat.’

  Before she could refuse him he had reached back and dropped a folder in her lap. It was made of plain Manila cardboard, the same sort of folder they use for suspension files. Written on it in neat ballpoint letters was ‘Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier: from Room 38’. She looked at it distastefully.

  ‘I get sick if I read in a car.’

  ‘Oh . . . That’s okay then. Don’t worry.’

  He reached for the folder to put it back in the rear seat. But he picked it up clumsily, distracted by the driving, and one of its pages slid out on her lap.

  Fay couldn’t help looking at it. It was a copy of an article from the Guardian of London, a newspaper that she often read herself. But she must have missed this issue, which dated from several years before. If she had seen it she would definitely have remembered it.

  The piece concerned the mysterious reappearance of a Royal Navy chronometer that had been lost with Franklin’s ships. She had never seen the article, but she recognized the clock in the photograph, a little brass instrument with a round white face and spiky black numerals.

  She had seen that clock before.

  ‘This does look interesting, I suppose . . . Maybe I’ll take a look at it when we’re back in Inuvik . . . I suppose I could read it overnight.’

  Lancaster Sound, 1848

  Private and personal:

  To Sir James Clark Ross

  Number Two, Eliot Place

  The Black Heath, Kent

  Captain F.R.M. Crozier RN

  at Beechey Island, Lancaster Sound

  20th of August 1848

  My dear James

  It is more than two years since I last set foot on this island, an interval so filled with dire incident that I scarcely know where to begin this account.

  Of all the officers and men who wintered on Beechey Island three years ago I alone have returned here alive. I last saw the other men of the expedition this spring, far to the south of here when, after two winters locked in the ice, they abandoned Erebus and Terror and fled south on foot.

  As their lawful commander (poor Sir John died of old age in June of last year, when all still seemed quite well) I had urged them to take the contrary course and head north to Fury Beach, where there are stores and boats which might bring them safe to the whalers which visit Baffin Bay. But they would not accept my orders, or heed my warnings on the sodden nature of the mainland, its vast and lifeless extent and its shallow impassible rivers. I do not think any will survive the attempt to flee in that direction. Alas, I have failed in my first true command.

  This private letter is intended only for your eyes, and for our friends in Room 38, so I shall not trouble here with any detailed account of the ruin of the North West Passage Expedition. You will find all you need on this point in the papers of Erebus and Terror, which I ordered Captain FitzJames to inter in the cairn at Point Victory after we gave up our ships. I also include with this letter some surplus instruments that I took from the ships and that I believe might be useful to Room 38. It is to be hoped that my whimsical cairn, built of food tins and gravel, will preserve them intact from the cold and the damp. I have little doubt, James, that you will be the first to come and search for us, and thus the first to open my cairn on Beechey Island. Perhaps you are already near, leading the search for your old friends and shipmates. I wish that I could wait for you, but an opportunity is afforded to me to make a great journey, and if I do not seize it now it will not come again.

  To explain myself I must begin with a singular event that occurred in April of this year, but of which you will find no mention in the logs of either ship: I was careful to omit it from my own records, and by that time Captain FitzJames, having become as disordered as most of the men, had ceased keeping his own. We had just passed our second winter beset in the ice off King William Land, stores were running low, game could not be found for hunting, and the crews despaired of the ice ever breaking. The men were near mutiny, and disease and scurvy had reduced our numbers to only one hundred. Our ships no longer kept naval watch, except for a few good men who could still be trusted to stay on deck to keep a look-out. Thus my boatswain was alone on deck on the evening of April 18th when I heard him hail me as I worked below on my magnetic records.

  Ascending from the cabin, I saw that the sun had already set and its light was giving way to a most active aurora. By its pale light, and t
he light of the stars hard above us, the boatswain had observed what he thought to be reindeer crossing the ice to our north. I ordered him to fetch my hunting pieces, but before he could bring them up it became apparent that these were not animals but men.

  You may imagine our joy. We had not seen others of our kind since we lost sight of the last whalers in Davis Strait; at such a remove from civilization even the company of natives would be like opening a window in a small and lightless cell. Moreover, it seemed to many, still watching at a distance, that these might even be Englishmen, or at least Europeans, since they man-hauled their sledges, lacking the dogs of the Esquimaux. Perhaps this was some far-flung expedition of the Hudson’s Bay Company, or even Danes from Greenland or Russians from Alaska. Yet as they drew nearer, observing them through my telescope, it became clear to me that these were natives, their faces having much the same cast as the Esquimaux or Innuits.

  I resolved to go out to meet them unarmed so that they might not take fright (though because of the mutinous state of the men I carried concealed the engraved Colt pistol that you so kindly gave me). So as not to alarm the newcomers I brought with me only Johannes, our Greenlandic interpreter.

  The newcomers were half a dozen in number. When we joined them they returned our greetings with apparent cordiality. To my surprise, they spoke a dialect that was at first quite unintelligible to Johannes, though the Esquimaux tongue is known to be consistent from Alaska to Greenland. They were also much taller than the common Esquimaux – as tall as the tallest man aboard our ships and broad in proportion.

  Most striking, though, was their ornament: each wore a polished disc of bone around his neck, scored with radial lines like the points of a compass. Their coats were fastened with toggles and buttons carved with the most minute and finely conceived figures of spirits and animals. One of these men, who seemed to be their chief, wore in addition a string of strange amulets – ivory bears and walruses carved as if they were almost rotted to skeletons. To his chest was attached a mask cut from whale bone: a human face contorted in a hideous scream of terror and pain.

  Johannes, observing this fetish, became dumbstruck from fear. It was I therefore who was forced to begin the conversation, using the Esquimaux phrases I had learned when we spent our winter at Igloolik under Parry’s command. Meanwhile Johannes seemed anxious to keep my person interposed between himself and the strangers.

  After much repetition and gesture, it gradually became clear to me that their language was indeed a cousin of the Innuit tongue, though primitive in form and pronunciation. I learned that they had travelled a great distance from their starting point, which lay somewhere in the east or north. Their leader, finally deigning to address me, said that they had come to view ‘their sun’, but when I pointed to the south, where the sunset showed above the ice, he shook his head and pointed to the north-east, whence they had been observed to come. It thus became apparent to me that they must have observed traces of our passing along the west coast of Boothia, not far from the magnetic pole, and have hastened to follow us southward, as is the habit of Esquimaux eager to trade with white men.

  Yet now, having found us, they declined my invitation to come aboard our vessels, preferring instead to camp on the shore some distance away. We agreed to meet again there the following morning, and I turned in some perplexity back to the ships where they lay in the ice.

  As I walked back, pondering the encounter, Johannes told me in great agitation that he recognized the amulets and fetishes of the newcomers, having seen similar dug from the floors of ancient stone circles in his native Greenland. He said these circles once held down the skin tents of the Tunit, a fantastical race of giants who faded from the north with the coming of the Esquimaux. Their masks and carvings, with their contorted faces and silent screams, are objects of dread whenever they are found. He begged me not to trust my life again to such a savage race.

  I too had heard of these Tunits. You will recall that when we wintered at Igloolik with Hecla and Fury I spent many nights in the house of the old sorceress Iligliuk, who told me that these old ones persisted in regions too bleak for the Esquimaux. A few were said to linger still to the east of Igloolik, in fog-shrouded islands which she drew for me on a map, though she said it would be death for any man to go there.

  When I left the ships next morning the men had commenced stripping them of all the useless junk they would bring with them in their flight. Boxes and barrels crashed onto the ice, scattering their contents, and men argued and fought over choice pieces of clothing and fine silver cutlery and porcelain place settings. Turning my back on this scene of degradation, I saw a trickle of smoke on the shore which guided me to the strangers’ camp.

  Angak, their leader, waited for me outside their tent, seated alone on the sledge. The others were within, cooking seal meat and talking in low voices. No sooner had I stopped before him, having nowhere to sit myself, than the old man pointed to the bulge in my coat which concealed my Colt revolver, your parting gift to me at Greenhithe.

  Overcoming my misgivings, I took out the revolver and showed it to him. He made no effort to touch it, but only nodded, satisfied, then pointed to himself. Next he indicated the hunting piece which I carried in its skin case, and then pointed five times at the snow-house, as if enumerating the men within. And I realized at once, without any word being spoken, that he wanted five hunting pieces for his men and my pistol for himself. The guns would be payment. But payment for what? They had nothing with them that I wished to buy; I was already well furnished with reindeer clothing and sealskin boots from our visit to the Greenland settlements. Then Angak stood up and – gazing at me from his flat and expressionless face – raised his hand and pointed north.

  At once I understood his proposal. They were offering to guide me! And what a fine offer this was! Travelling in the company of such natives, living as they did off the land and the sea, who knew what journeys I might compass? The

  North West Passage might lie within my reach, the secrets that lie beyond Parry’s furthest north. I might even set eyes on Sir John Barrow’s grail, his open polar sea, and add it to our science!

  Two days later, when the crews of Erebus and Terror set out for the south, heaving the ships’ heavy boats across buckled ice on groaning wooden sledges, I went with FitzJames to add a note of the expedition’s intentions to the cairn at Point Victory. Then I returned to my magnetic observatory on the shore nearby, telling poor FitzJames that I would follow in a day or two when my observations were complete. Instead, I turned into the north with my new companions.

  They are outside my tent now as I write on Beechey Island, once again lashing down gear on their sledges. I must hasten to join them, so I will be brief.

  Leaving the forlorn ships behind us, we travelled along the coast of King William Land until we came to Ross Strait, where we turned north up the west shore of Boothia. What a pleasure it was, after two years confined in the ship, to journey with such hardy companions, who thought nothing of making twenty miles or more a day, moving swift and light-footed along the smoothest of the shore ice. And though I struggled at first, unused to such hard exercise, I soon felt my spirits and strength revive. My muscles knitted and my appetite adjusted to its new diet of seal meat and blubber (for the Tunit would not eat our naval rations, nor permit me to bring any for myself). After the first week I took my place in the traces, hauling with the best of them.

  Our route here passed close to that happy spot where in 1831 you were the first to attain the north magnetic pole. Yet to my surprise my new observations showed that the pole now lay elsewhere, having moved northward some twenty miles or more along the shore of Boothia. The magnetic pole wanders, James, as if it were alive! If I could trace its journey, predict its future path, I might at last find some glory in James Ross’s footsteps!

  Forgive me, James. I know that you too would like to see

  that old jibe thrown back at those who have mad
e it at my expense – I may not even call them my enemies, because of enemies I have none. And that is its own kind of poverty.

  Where we are bound next I do not know; Angak says only that he will take me to places never yet seen by Europeans, but when I ask him to look at my maps and place these new lands for me he refuses: they are his homeland, the few remaining refuges of his dwindling tribe, protected by strong taboos and perpetual fogs. But he is clear on one thing: their journey will take them far to the north and then the west, perhaps even – I tell myself – across the unknown region of the north pole itself!

  I am done now with writing. It is very late, and almost dark outside, though we are still in the term of the midnight sun. An hour ago I took a turn on the beach and saw a flight of Ross’s gulls – your gulls – winging northward, as if fleeing the south for the winter. Do they really spend winter in the furthest north, as the whalers and Esquimaux say? And if that is the case, and they perversely fly south in the summer, what is it that drives them there? Is it love of darkness that sends them southward when their polar home is bathed in perpetual light? Well, I shall follow them now to places beyond knowledge. Perhaps I shall learn where your little gulls nest.

  I had thought to enclose with this letter a short message for Sophia but I have decided against. Her aunt would surely come to hear of it, and dear Lady Jane, as one of the first women of our time, is not to be sullied with knowledge of a secret correspondence. Nor do I have any desire to trouble Sophia’s youth and tranquillity, if trouble them I could. Look for my message cairns in the far north, towards the pole, where our maps remain untouched. There, perhaps, I shall find something fit to honour with the name of Cracroft.

  Your friend now and always,

  Frank Crozier

  Part Two

  Bellot Strait

 

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