by Yuri Rytkheu
John MacLennan soon found his future boss Hugh Grover, almost a fellow countryman, and the owner of a merchant schooner, in a port saloon. The ship’s owner, who was also its captain, hailed from Winnipeg and, like John, had become irresistibly entranced by the sea in his youth, drawn by the the stories of his uncle, who had once sailed the Hudson Bay. Hugh Grover turned out to be this uncle’s sole heir when the latter died, collapsing on the green lawn in front of his house, having trimmed it himself moments before.
Aboard the ship, filled with a motley crew, most of whom had trouble remembering their homeland, John took up a privileged position, and although it was not customary for the captain to have an assistant, John became one, and moreover, became a close friend of Hugh Grover’s.
Everything was going smoothly. Steadily climbing north, along the edge of the Arctic Ocean, and making short stops to trade with the aborigines, Hugh and John dreamed of setting a record and reaching the mouth of the distant Siberian river Kolyma. This would have been a huge event in the history of sailing the Russian Arctic, and the names of Hugh Grover and John MacLennan could have been preserved for posterity on the maps, like those of Franklin, Frobisher, Hudson, and other great men who had conquered the snowy silence.
On fire for explorers’ glory, Hugh and John didn’t hear the muttering of the crew and had forgotten about the calendar, relentless in counting down the days of the short northern summer.
Beyond Long’s Bay, when the mouth of the great Siberian river was very near, so near that the waters carried the mangled trunks of taiga forests, swept off her banks and out to sea, there appeared on the horizon a harmless-looking white stripe – the most terrifying sight in the whole of the Arctic Ocean.
Only then did Captain Grover come back to his senses; he wrenched the wheel sharply, and turned the Belinda back.
By evening, the white stripe became a clearly recognizable ice field. The captain ordered raised sails and shouted down to John, in the machinery chamber, to squeeze every drop of energy from the old motor.
For three days they ran, and the ice field relentlessly followed, always gaining. In the evenings, when darkness descended over the water, and the ice was lost from view, the sailors’ hearts filled with hope that they had outrun the white death at their heels.
But by morning, as soon as pale dawn rose over them, the ice shone more brightly than morning light, and the sailors, standing around in despairing silence, could hear the grind and crackle of ice floes.
Soon the ice had caught Belinda in its grasp, and tightly embraced her. Now the ship moved along with the ice field, unable to change course or find refuge on a beach.
There was no need now for motor and sails, Belinda’s speed depended on the speed of the north-easterly wind that was driving the churning ice floes toward the Bering Strait. The ship’s hull creaked, but it still held.
The last hope they had was that the ice would carry the vessel through the straits and into the open waters of the Bering Sea. This hope grew stronger with each passing day, but when their goal was almost within reach, the ice came to a stop by the cape of Enmyn, and the ship was pushed to a rocky outcrop and immured there.
“We’ll have to spend the winter here,” Captain Grover said gloomily. “We’re not the first, and we won’t be the last. At least there are natives ashore.”
However, a working relationship with the natives proved difficult to manage. The locals could not believe that there was nothing to trade aboard the ship, that everything had been traded long ago, that the hold was crammed full of polar fox pelts and walrus tusks.
Among the natives, they discovered a man who spoke a little English. He was something like an elder or leader of the group, though strangely, the inhabitants did not accord him any visible honors; it seemed that the respect toward this man was rooted in something else entirely. He was called Orvo. Unlike the other, difficult to pronounce local names, Orvo’s had a reasonable sound, and there was no need to twist your tongue – as, for example, when John attempted to pronounce the name of Orvo’s daughter, Tynarakhtyna.
Orvo gave the sailors some hope, hypothesizing that a south wind may yet push the ice offshore, opening the way to the Bering Strait.
A hint of the change in weather had come two days before. The ice had begun to shift slightly, and a wide crack of water opened up almost directly in front of Belinda, pointing straight on course.
After a short conference, they agreed to try blasting with dynamite the ice ridge that still separated the ship from the water.
The sailors bored hollows in the ice.
Early in the morning, just after breakfast, John MacLennan descended to the ice. He paused briefly by the side of the ship, taking in the beauty of the rising dawn, and then slowly moved toward the drilled holes, carrying the blast charges and fuse. He placed large paper-wrapped cartridges into the ice holes, buried them in snow, and tamped it down with his feet. He adjusted the fuses and set fire to the main one. A spitting blue flame raced toward the charges.
John walked back to the ship and sat down on an ice-crusted boulder. Silently, he counted down the seconds. There was an explosion. Against expectation, it was muffled and weak. But the ground trembled and John could feel the ice that had seemed forever glued to the rocky shore move slightly under his feet. Came three more, louder blasts. After each, John was covered in ice dust and small splinters.
He waited for the fifth. What had the explosives done to the fissure? Did it widen, as he and Captain Grover had plotted? But there was no reason to look, not until the fifth blast had sounded.
The allotted seconds came and went, then again as many.
John peeked out from his shelter. No smoke, no flame. He waited a little longer and, deciding that the previous blasts had buried and extinguished the fuse, he went back to the fissure. It had become no wider; the explosives were useless. The four charges had merely enlarged the hollows, and did not even reach down to the water. The fissure looked exactly the same as before.
The fifth cartridge was smothered in crushed ice and snow. A little smoking tail protruded from the clump. Not thinking, John kneeled and started to clear away the snow, trying to reach the cartridge.
And then it exploded. That first instant, John saw a blazing light, as though it were the Northern Lights rearing up in front of his eyes. Then the sound wave hit his ears, compressing his eardrums. John fell forward and lay there, until he could feel an acute, bone-piercing pain flood his face and hands. It was then that he started screaming. He screamed and could not hear himself, holding out the bloody tatters of fur mittens, the rags of his own fingers, and some kind of bluish-red strings that dripped bright crimson blood onto the snow.
Sailors were coming down from deck. Captain Grover ran to him.
“What have you done, boy!” he shouted, carefully lifting John. “Help me! Hold him up!”
The sailors approached John gingerly, throwing suspicious glances at the remains of the fuse and cartridge.
“Don’t worry,” John rasped, “all the cartridges have blown.”
While they were carrying him to the ship, he keenly felt that it was life itself, along with his blood, that was running out of his body. It was an astonishing sensation that grew into horror. And when they lowered him to the bed in the tiny wardroom, he moaned and begged:
“Won’t you stop the bleeding!”
One of the sailors was quick-witted enough to bind a rope across his wrists. The blood stopped gushing, and now John felt his entire body suffused with fire, the hot stream pulsating in his wrists, his toes, and his mouth filling with foul, metallic saliva.
“Will I die?” he asked of Hugh, who was standing at the head of the bunk and nervously plucking at a sideburn.
“You won’t die, John,” Hugh answered, “I’ll do everything I can to save you. You will go to a hospital. To Anadyr’. There’s a doctor there.”
“You’ll wait for me here?” pleaded John.
“How can you ask a friend tha
t question?” Hugh was offended. “We’re clamped so tightly to this shoreline that we couldn’t move an inch even if we wanted to.”
“Thanks, Hugh,” John sighed. “I always knew you were a true friend.”
“Damn, if we had open water from here to Nome, you’d be in a hospital in three days!” the captain avowed despondently. “I give you the word of an honest man: We will wait for you.”
John looked at the captain’s steadfast face, whose sympathetic, thoughtful expression somehow lessened the pain and fire raging through John’s entire body.
“You’ll go on the dogsleds to Anadyr’. I’ll fix it so they treat you well,” the captain promised.
“And they won’t do anything to me?” asked John.
“Who?” Hugh didn’t quite understand.
“You know, these savages, the Chukchi. Their faces don’t inspire my trust. These people are just too unsavory-looking. Unwashed and unschooled.”
“They’re an honest enough people,” Hugh reassured his friend. “Especially if you pay them well.”
“So be generous with them Hugh, won’t you?” John’s voice held a note of pleading. “Give them anything they want . . . I’ll make it up to you later, in Port Hope.”
“What are you talking about!” Hugh was indignant. “There’s no reckoning between friends!”
When Toko appeared on the doorstep, and the captain shouted coarsely at him to leave, John said:
“Don’t be like that with them, Hugh. Treat them more gently.”
“I’m sorry, John. You’re probably right,” the captain mumbled, flustered, and asked for Orvo to be fetched.
John was barely following the captain’s conversation with Orvo. The Chukcha’s English was so atrocious that you had to strain to understand him.
John closed his eyes and felt the revolting wave of nausea rise up in his throat. He could barely manage to hold on until Orvo’s departure, strangely unwilling to show his weakness in front of the man.
The captain ordered for John to be moved into another cabin, and the wardroom cleaned up.
The sailors moved the wounded man. They carefully removed his clothes, and dressed him in fresh, clean underthings. Over that, a woollen shirt, thick canvas trousers and double-thick knitted socks, and then they dressed MacLennan in some just-bought Chukcha fur-lined winter garments. Hugh dragged over John’s trunk and an enormous sack of provisions.
“There’s coffee, biscuits, sugar, tins, condensed milk, and a flagon of vodka,” Hugh enumerated, businesslike. “And in the trunk, I’ve put another change of underclothes, your papers, letters, and photographs of your family.”
“Thanks, Hugh,” John was struggling to smile, “but there was no need to bring the trunk. I imagine I won’t be in Anadyr’ for that long.”
“The papers and money will come in handy. You’ll have to pay for the treatment.”
“You’re right, Hugh,” John replied. “It’s so good to have you near at a time like this. I will never forget your kindness. This morning has made you closer to me than a brother, closer than father or mother. Thank you, Hugh . . .”
Captain Grover, not usually a sensitive man, took his handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed at his eyes; he was sincerely touched. He was genuinely fond of the boy. He had noticed him back there, in Nome, in the port saloon, and thought that John would make a good companion for him and help him while away the time, surrounded as he was by the rough and delinquent gang of which his crew was comprised.
Grover had wasted much breath to prove to John how naïve the younger man’s outlook was, in this cruel world where everyone seeks a warm place to lie and a bigger, fatter piece of the meat. He’d conducted long, inspirational talks with the boy, at times when the rest of the crew was engaged in luring women onboard. He stroked John’s shoulder, which quivered in outrage, and spoke to him, eliciting compassion for the wretches who have only one joy in life – to get drunk when the voyage ends and their share is doled out, or to eke out a moment of carnal pleasure during a lengthy, exhausting trip.
John, equipped for the journey, lay on his back, thinking about the wealth of kindness and sincere compassion in the man who, at first, had seemed to him only a cynic and a materialist . . . Undoubtedly, Hugh was right in some things. In many things, really. But he was just too cynical and forthright. He’d spoken so disdainfully of the Chukchi, and now he was forced to ask for their help. Of course, they would be well-paid, but if there had been even a grain of trust between the indigenous people and the crew of the Belinda, John would feel much easier now, setting off on a long journey to the unknown Russian town of Anadyr’.
3
Three dogsleds drove up to the Belinda and the drivers, having first hammered their ostols9 into the ice, ascended to the deck.
Three Chukchi entered the scrubbed wardroom, and the captain, politely and amiably, ushered them toward the table, which held three impressive silver goblets full of rum.
John was propped up on the couch. Clad in a fur-lined kukhlianka, fur-lined trousers and kamuss10 torbasses, in an overall trimmed with wolverine fur, he was almost indistinguishable from the drivers.
Grover passed a goblet to each, and, signaling for them to wait a moment before drinking, he made a little speech:
“You are entrusted with the life of a white man. You must deliver John MacLennan to the Russian town of Anadyr’ safely, wait there until he is recovered, and then bring him back here. You know how much we value the life of our friend,” here, he nodded in John’s direction, “and on your heads be it, if anything should happen to him.” After a pause the captain continued in a completely different tone, “But if everything goes well, a rich reward will await you. Orvo, you understand what I’m saying and can translate for your fellows.”
While Orvo translated, Toko was looking over the wounded man. He didn’t like his icy, cold eyes. They had the strange quality of looking right through a person, as though that person were an empty place.
Toko could feel John’s stare pierce him through, giving rise to such a strange chill in the pit of his stomach that not even the fiery rum could chase it away.
Orvo finished translating Captain Grover’s speech:
“Curse the hour I agreed to this! He’s got me, the wily one! I was swayed by the Winchesters. And now what can we do? We’ll have to take him. And he’s like a hungry louse. If anything should happen to him, it’ll be our heads . . . What do you think? We will go, eh?”
Orvo addressed Armol’, but the latter, only half-listening to the translation of the captain’s speech, caught nothing except the last words and nodded silently.
And Toko, after a moment’s hesitation, quietly said:
“I’ve never, ever had a real Winchester.”
The wounded man was carefully carried from the wardroom and lowered onto Orvo’s dogsled, where a little deer-hide canopy had been prepared for him. The remaining two sleds were loaded with provisions, dog feed, John’s trunk, and extra clothing. Besides that, a small cloth yaranga was lashed to Toko’s sled in case they had to spend a night in the tundra.
They might have set off long ago, if every sailor had not considered it his duty to touch his face to John’s. Captain Grover took the longest time doing this, until tears ran down John’s cheeks. It was strange to see a grown man weeping.
Toko stared at the ice-floe eyes that were melting now with large hazy tears, and a feeling akin to pity, mixed with triumph, moved within him. John caught his glance, hid his own eyes and swiped at his tear-filled eyelashes with the enormous deer mittens covering his mangled hands. The pain of it made him grimace.
Orvo shouted at the dogs, and the sled moved off slowly. The sailors ran after them, seeing off their shipmate and making John even more upset, hanging his head lower and lower, until his face was completely hidden inside the fur-trimmed hood of his warm overall.
The dogsleds came ashore, leaving the ice and the ship behind them. When they rode past the yarangas, Toko braked his sle
d a little and stole a glance at his wife, who stood outside watching the departing sleds. Their eyes met, and this was to be their only farewell. Toko, remembering the sailors’ leave-taking, had the sad thought that, after all, it would not be so bad to press his face to his wife’s, to breathe in her scent and hold it in his memory during this long journey to far-off Anadyr’, where he had never been before.
The sled dogs ran across the frozen lagoon floor. There was little snow yet, and large expanses of clear icy surface stretched from one shore to the other. The pack tried to run down the powdery strips laid out by the snowstorm, where their paws found a less slippery purchase, but the drivers kept turning them toward the ice, over which the sleds’ runners could fly forward most easily, almost catching up with the dogs in their harness.
Toko was looking back at the yarangas that little by little disappeared into the snowy expanses, dissolving in the looming darkness, at the familiar crags that framed the horizon. With his eyes, he held on tight to his own yaranga, the one that he’d built with his own hands, collecting driftwood under the craggy cliff-faces and waiting his turn at the division of a hunt’s spoils to get some walrus hides for the roof. He had saved up the nerpa blubber, pouring it into sealskin bags; he had cut out lakhtak belt-strips to offer to his deer-herder friends, in return for deer hides to make his polog11 . . . The yaranga turned out as well as anyone else’s and seemed, to Toko and Pyl’mau, even better and cosier, because it was their own home. They’d only been married for three years, but it was as though they had lived a long life side by side; they could guess the other’s desires without words and long explanations.
The outline shape of his home faded from view. The horizon grew flat and empty, with nary a sign of life. Now it didn’t matter where you looked – forward, backward, to the side: It was the same everywhere.