Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  In February, when the sun showed itself again, Olonkin and Amundsen went sledging whenever the weather permitted. They would leave the Maud early in the morning, when the stars blazed overhead and the snow crust groaned like the deck of a steel ship. Amundsen, who had broken his arm twice in the winter – once in a fall on the ice, the second time when attacked by a bear – couldn’t do much to help with the sledge. Instead, he skied ahead to give the dogs something to follow. When Amundsen spied their last positional marker, a red flag on a tall bamboo pole, they would tether the dogs and throw up a snow-wall, pitch their tent, melt pemmican and chocolate in the dish of their Nansen stove. Then, as the sun crawled over the Byrranga mountains, leeching the life from the southernmost stars, they would go to work with theodolite and plane table, triangulating the cape’s bays and islands. At noon Amundsen would take a control sight on the sun while Olonkin stood by with the ancient chronometer he’d borrowed from Meares, noting their local time relative to Greenwich and thus their exact longitude. He was the only man Amundsen trusted with the lucky old clock. When the twilight deepened it was time to go home.

  Sometimes the wind would rise in the night and blow drift snow across the stars, or the great stillness would descend with its minus-fifty temperatures. Then Amundsen would stay in his magnetic observatory, the snow-house he’d built on the shore of the bay where Maud lay sheltered in the ice. Here, the delicate instruments wouldn’t be disturbed by the ship’s ferrous metals. It was a private place for him to work on his maps and his measurements, warmed by the patent vapour lamp that hissed on a bench by the door.

  One windless night, above the hiss of the pressurized kerosene and the tick of his clockwork self-registering instruments, he heard a sound in the snow outside.

  Amundsen turned on the crate that he used as a seat and stared at the door, straining his ears. He was sure he heard footsteps, someone pacing around the snow-walls then stopping at the door. He waited. Nothing. Then nothing again.

  He could no longer stand it; he went to the door and pushed it open. The lamp threw a square of yellow light on the snow. There was nothing there.

  He walked around the hut, the lamp raised in his hand, just to be sure that nothing hid behind it. On the second circuit he saw footprints. He halted, held his breath. Then he realized that the footprints were his own. He cut short his work and went back to the ship.

  The next day was clear, so he and Olonkin trekked the dozen miles to Cape Chelyuskin. They were getting very close to the end of their mapping. Alone in the tent, Amundsen warmed up their lunchtime stew. Outside, he heard a boot scuff in the snow. Olonkin, he thought. What if it was him last night?

  On the way back to the ship a haze spread across the sky from south to north until the stars were hidden and the evening turned grey. They followed their own tracks homeward, the men in silence, the dogs subdued. The wind grew stronger and it began to snow, the tiny dry flakes of the high Arctic, drizzling steady and fast. Amundsen, dropping behind to adjust a ski ­binding, found himself alone in a pale spinning void. Yet he could hear the dog-team somewhere close ahead, panting and whimpering, as if it were receding from him in a large and empty room.

  Descending a shallow stream-bed, he had to stop every few feet in case the accumulation of speed, imperceptible in the white-out, sent him spinning from the tracks and into the unknown. At the bottom of this draw he came across another track beside the sledge trail: huge, oval prints like a man wearing snowshoes. He stopped and studied them. The sun and the frost, he knew, could do strange things to prints in a snow-field. These must be bear tracks, and they must be quite old, given the state of their decomposition. But it was odd how they paralleled the ­sled-tracks for several hundred yards before they diverged at a shallow angle, vanishing into the curtain of falling snow. He hooked his mittened thumb into the lanyard which looped around his neck, felt the comforting weight of the pistol on the end of it. He’d noticed no such tracks on their outward journey.

  Next day it was still snowing. Despite warnings from Wisting about white-outs and bears, Amundsen skied across to his observatory. But this time he brought the revolver, hidden from the others inside his parka. He also brought a patent Ever Ready lamp. Crossing his skis in the snow ten yards from the observatory, he hung the pistol and the flashlight by their lanyards from the crux. That’s not too close, he told himself. The metal shouldn’t affect the magnetics. Or not so much that he should care. He had to be pragmatic. Some aspects of this voyage were more import­ant than others.

  Inside the hut the vapour lamp sang to him. He took off his parka and mittens and worked in his silk gloves. The ink, warmed by the lamp, flowed easily from his pen.

  This time there was no doubt about it. There was somebody outside. Two steps, then three, feet squeaking in the new-fallen snow. A bear, he knew, wouldn’t make so much noise. A fox would be silent.

  He stole to the door and opened it a crack. It was pitch black outside, the overcast hiding the stars. Snowflakes flitted like moths through the thin bar of light from the crack in the door. He could barely make out the black cross of his skis. Did his pistol still hang from them?

  His heart pounded. A foot crunched. Then another. The stranger made his way slowly along the side of hut towards the door.

  Amundsen threw the door open and hurled himself towards his skis. He could see them through the whirling snow flakes. I have the advantage, he told himself. I’ll be first to the gun. But his feet were strangely heavy, or perhaps the snow was deeper than it had been when he’d come from the ship. He felt his head and shoulders draw away from his feet. He felt oddly bemused. He was falling.

  The skis clattered around him as he sprawled in the snow. His hand found the flashlight but the gun wasn’t there. Turning onto his back, he felt the shock of fresh snow invading his clothes. The observatory, its door flung wide, dazzled with light.

  His enemy could be anywhere outside the cone of its illumination. He could be coming at him from the darkness. He might even have the gun.

  Amundsen switched on his torch but the batteries, left out in the cold, had died. He rose to his knees, holding the torch like a weapon, and heard his breath moan in his ears. It felt as if his heart would tear itself in two.

  Nothing. Snowflakes brushed across his cheeks and his ears. He was desperately cold, so cold that his frozen knees made him gasp with pain when he got to his feet again. He looked to where the ship must lie in the ice, snug in its snow-banks and awnings, but the falling snow had closed around its shadow, hiding the lantern which hung from a yard.

  I have to go back into the observatory. If I don’t, I’ll die. That’s where my coat is. That’s where there’s warmth.

  But the observatory frightened him. The vapour lamp, set just inside the door, shone like the light of some demonic shrine, throwing everything beyond it into quivering darkness. There was someone moving about in there, at the far end, where he’d set up his instruments. He could see it, a pale, slender figure with no meaning here.

  No one, not even his many enemies, had ever suggested that Amundsen lacked courage. But it took an effort of will that left him trembling and sick before he could drag himself back to the door. There was nobody there, of course. If there’d been any tracks they were drifted with snow. Fastening his skis in the darkness, he felt something hard brush his gloved fingers. His pistol lay in the snow where it had fallen.

  He stayed on the ship the next day. The following morning was clear again. The deep new snow, not yet compressed by wind and time, made for heavy going to their destination – Cape Chel­yuskin itself. Olonkin had to join him in front of the sledge to break trail for the dogs, tramping down the snow with their skis, sometimes their whole bodies, puffing and heaving. The tem­perature had dropped again, back to minus thirty, and the dogs strained at their traces as the sledge runners snagged in the dry sandy snow. By the time they found their last map marker, on a low rise above
the sea ice, it was almost local noon; just in time to take a control fix on the sun.

  The day was bright and almost windless. Once the sun fix was taken, Olonkin set up the tent to make lunch. Amundsen, who could do little to help because of his stiff arm, skied inland a short way to keep warm. Here the land sloped gently down to the sea; the tent and the sledge, the fluttering flag, the intermingled tracks of dogs and men, formed a tiny patch of detail against white-and- grey strata of land and sea and sky. A mountain of bruised cumulus hid the seaward horizon.

  By the time they’d finished their work that day the early stars burned in the north. The sun’s last rays brushed low across the snow-field, and just over there, a couple of hundred yards from where they’d placed their last marker, Amundsen noticed a strange discoloration, a patch of dark grey that showed through the snow.

  It’s nothing, thought Amundsen. He tried to focus on the strange object but tears had frozen in his eyes. He decided he’d have to inspect it up close. But he had only gone half the distance when he turned to Olonkin, who had finished packing up the tent, and shouted for him to come too.

  Olonkin did most of the digging, using their only spade. Amundsen, hampered by his injury, would scrape and heave until his one good arm was trembling, then take a break and watch.

  A little stone cairn had been hidden by the snow-field, all but a few inches that showed at the top. It was three feet tall and almost as broad, made of flat grey stones fitted together in the shape of a barrel-chested man. A large, flat stone on top vaguely suggested a head. Two stubby stone arms protruded at the sides: it was facing inland, or else out to sea; without eyes or a face there was no way of telling.

  The evening was getting dark, and very cold, and they worked as quickly as they could without breaking a sweat. It took an hour to clear away the snow down to the base of the cairn, where sedges appeared in the lumps of crumbled ice. They paused, ate some chocolate, and then, working silently together, they broke open the cairn, throwing its stones on the snow banked around them.

  A message cylinder was hidden in a chamber built into the rocks. It was made of weathered pewter, a foot long and two inches wide, soldered shut at either end. Turning it over in his hands, Amundsen saw the broad arrow sign stamped in the metal. Board of Ordnance. The last time he had seen that symbol had been in a ruined hut on Beechey Island, on rescue stores left half a century before in case Franklin’s men should ever come back.

  Amundsen stowed the tube inside his clothing as Olonkin watched. It was so cold now that they no longer shivered. They would have to put up the tent again and stay here for the night.

  The moon rose above the barren snow-field, ringed by a silver halo from which moon dogs shone like eyes. Turning inland, Amundsen saw something that looked out of place. Off to the south, where the sloping snow-field curved against the stars, several dark figures stood on the skyline. Behind them, an aurora trembled in the haze. It reminded Amundsen of his visit to Flanders during the war, of the light from distant shellfire flickering against the low clouds. The figures didn’t move, but he was sure that they were watching him.

  Olonkin came out of the tent. If I say nothing, thought Amundsen, if I just stand here and stare at them, he’ll follow my gaze, and if he sees what I see he’s bound to say something, and if he sees nothing he’ll say nothing, and there won’t be anything there.

  ‘Are you alright, governor?’

  There was nothing there but the moon and the aurora.

  The dogs settled in their snow burrows. Amundsen, pushing his feet inch by inch into his frozen reindeer bag, took comfort in their sighs and whines. If there was anything out there, any bear or thieving fox, the dogs would alert him. He watched the side of the tent, only inches from his face, ripple from the stirrings of the wind. When he heard Olonkin snoring he went to sleep himself.

  Next morning the distant mountains were sharp against a pink-and-silver sky. Olonkin loaded the sledge while Amundsen skied up the hillside. He made a broad sweep above their camp, half a mile out, where he judged the skyline had showed itself to him the night before. But there was no sign of disturbance, no prints of man or bear. Turning at the top, he looked over the ­frozen ocean.

  The sun, breaking low over the mountains, threw a pink flush on the sea ice, picking out the frozen turmoil of the currents around the Cape. Far off to his left, half lost in the haze, he could see a group of little islands, white pillows on the sea. Turning due north, a bank of fog or low cloud sat on the sea ice. The wind must be blowing out there, clear of the lee of the continent. It seemed to him that the cloud hid streaks of sharper white, of deeper shadows, a half-glimpse of jagged black peaks with snow-filled cols and tumbling glaciers. He stared until the mountains began to change shape in the mist and the clouds closed in around them.

  When they reached the ship it was already suppertime. Despite his exertions Amundsen couldn’t sleep. It was as if the two-day absence had given him new energy. Lying in his silk-lined cabin, staring at Kiss’s portrait on the bulkhead over his bunk, he thought about his magnetic observatory. It was in that little snow-house, where no man would disturb him, that he could open the message tube and learn the answers or riddles which it contained.

  The others slept in their cabins as he dressed and crept outside. Amundsen paused at the top of the gangway and saw Jacob the watchdog sitting on the snow bank which sheltered the hull. The dog stared south towards the mountains, his cocked ears twitching as he strained to hear. Noticing Amundsen, he thumped his tail once then went back to his vigil. It must be wolves, thought Amundsen, far away in the mountains, howling at the moon. He must long to join them, though he knows that they’d rip him to shreds.

  He stopped at the foot of the gangway to pat the head of the unheeding dog. Holding his breath, he listened to the night. But he could hear nothing, just the hiss of his own ears. Then far out to sea, beyond the Cape itself, he heard a low groaning noise, then a great shuddering convulsion, the sound of ice-floes working in the tide. Jacob ignored it, his ears spread to the south. I wonder if he’ll follow me. But the dog stayed where he was.

  The lamps of the self-registering needles burned like eyes at the far end of the observatory. Their warmth was enough to keep the clockwork instruments from freezing, but Amundsen pumped his pressure lamp to give heat and light for his work. Now that he was here, away from the warmth and comfort of his cabin, he began at once to feel sleepy. I’ve made a mistake, he thought. I’m too tired for this. But the message tube called to him.

  He took it out and hefted it in his silk glove-liner. He felt unaccountably nervous. His heart beat in his ears. The ticking of the clockwork forced him to admit it: his pulse was not quite sound.

  Stupid. There was nothing to it. He listened to the night outside the snow-hut but he could hear no sound apart from the tick of clockwork and the hiss of pressurized kerosene. The light of that lamp is quite beautiful, he thought. Mesmerized, he stared at it until black spots were burned in his retinas then he roused himself and looked away.

  The message tube was still there before him, lying on the crate where he must have set it down. His two hands, forgotten, lay on either side of it, palms upward, fingers curled.

  I should get on with this.

  He turned the cylinder over. Which end was for opening? It didn’t seem to matter, so he chose the end indicated by the arrow; it would look more respectful to his friends back in England when he handed it over.

  The solder was badly weathered by the cold: brittle, almost crystalline. Amundsen took out his knife and inserted the point in the gap. Very carefully, he wiggled the knife into the narrow space, loosening the solder, until he could work a little more of the blade inside. The solder crumbled and fell away. Slowly, he worked his way around the cylinder until the solder was gone. Now only friction held the cap to the tube. He seized both ends of the cylinder and pulled. The cap came away with almost no effort.
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  There was a paper inside, as he’d expected, rolled up and moulded into the curve of the tube. I’ll have to be very careful, he thought. After so many years the paper could be stuck to the metal. It could tear into pieces or turn to dust. He gave the tube a hopeful shake. The paper slid out and fell on the crate.

  He sat and stared at it. It can’t be this easy, he thought.

  Using his knife as a paperweight, he pressed the lower end of the rolled-up page onto the packing case, then gently unbent the rest of it, just as far as was necessary for him to inspect it. His fingers were numb, which was strange: the temperature in the snow-hut was well above freezing.

  The page was the yellow-red colour of ancient ivory. Letters marched back and forth across its surface, nonsense, beyond his understanding. Amundsen felt an irrational anger. Then he remembered his spectacles, the ones he kept hidden in his jacket.

  He put them on, polishing them with the end of the silk scarf that Kiss Bennett had given him. Now he recognized the page in his hands.

  It was a commonplace form that used to be issued to Royal Navy ship decades before. Blank lines were provided at the top of the form for the name and position of the ship, followed by another three lines for general notes, and then a space for the commanding officer’s signature. Underneath, a printed message in English, French, Spanish, Dutch, Danish and German politely requested anyone who found the paper to send it to the Admiralty or the nearest British consul.

  These forms were intended to be thrown overboard in bottles to help trace ocean currents, or deposited in cairns on remote capes or anchorages to leave word of the ship’s movements: such was long-range communication in the years before wireless.