I went towards him as quickly as I could over the uneven surface. Blood was staining the snow crimson at his side. I saw the beast move, jerking as though injured. From a range of a few yards I pumped a whole magazine into it. I went forward then. The beast was quite still, lying across Bland’s legs. I saw Bland move, trying to free himself. He still had his rifle gripped in his hands and he was trying to work the bolt. I tore it from his grasp and threw it clear of us. Then I saw that the huge brute’s jaws were dripping blood and there was a terrible wound in Bland’s side. He started to say something. Then he lost consciousness.
Looking down at him, with the big carcase of the sea-leopard stretched across his legs, I suddenly realised what this meant. It was the end of Bland, and for us new hope. Here, stretched dead at my feet, was thousands of pounds of fresh meat and blubber. Here was life for Gerda—and hope for the future. Somehow I’d got to go back, go back along those weary miles loaded with meat and fat.
I got Bland’s sledge and dragged it up close to his body. As soon as I had erected the tent, I dug Bland’s legs out from under the sea-leopard and got him into it. Then, when I had bandaged him as best I could, I got to work with my knife and soon I had a blubber stove warming the tent and big steaks of juicy meat grilling in the smoke. Bland couldn’t eat, but I managed to feed him some of the hot blood. Meantime I ate more in a few minutes than I’d eaten in as many days. The blood seemed to give Bland strength for once he shifted his position and asked who had left the iceberg with me. When I told him, he grinned and said, “Now we can all die in the snow together.” He seemed to relapse into unconsciousness then and I lay wrapped in a blanket, unable to sleep for the gripping pains in my stomach caused by unaccustomed food.
In the darkness of the night I awoke suddenly with a feeling of being choked. I sat up, gasping for breath and racked by violent coughing. I didn’t know what had happened for a moment. Then I realised that the tent was filled with smoke. I turned towards Bland and found he wasn’t there. Through streaming eyes I saw an orange glow against the canvas of the tent. I crawled out. Flames were leaping up out of the snow, licking over the body of the sea-leopard, reaching out with wind-fanned fingers towards the fabric of the tent which was already blackened and charred at one side. Bland lay in the middle of the flames, his face buried in the smouldering carcase, the snow steaming and beginning to form in crimson pools.
I pulled Bland clear and scooped up armfuls of snow, throwing it on the flames till they were completely smothered under a white drift. At first I thought Bland had tried to stop the fire. But as I was smothering it, I saw an empty kerosene container and the primus with the stopper of its tank unscrewed lying in the snow. I knew then that he’d started the fire, started it in order to burn the carcase, burn the tent with me in it. Both pairs of skis had been thrust well into the blaze and had been badly charred.
When the fire was out at last I crawled exhausted back into the tent. To this day I don’t know whether Bland was dead when I dragged him clear of the fire he’d made. All I know is that he was dead and frozen stiff when I went outside the tent in the morning. For all I know I killed him by leaving him out there. But I don’t care. I only know I was glad to find him dead.
Fortunately I’d saved the skis in time. They were charred, but they were still usable. I cooked myself a meal. Then I covered Bland with some snow, and leaving the tent all standing, set out on the journey back, carrying Bland’s skis and enough meat and blubber to give the rest of the party a good meal.
The wind had swung round to the west and was blowing hard. And as I started out I was conscious of a slight movement of the ice under me. However, the going remained good, and though a fine drift of snow had sifted across the sledge tracks, they were still visible and I reached the other camp without mishap just after midday.
It was then that I received the most bitter blow of all that ghastly period. Gerda was dead. She had died in the night, never having regained consciousness since my departure. Kalstad showed me the mound of snow where they had buried her, and I stood there in the wind and cried like a child. Lying there, three hours’ journey away, was the means of giving her strength. Her death seemed so unnecessary. Why is it always the nicest people that go? “She look very happy when we bury her,” Kalstad said. “I think per’aps she find her father. If he is also dead, then it is per’aps best. She love her father very much.”
Kalstad had trekked out along the sledge route the previous day and found where Bland had buried his companions’ boots in the snow. We were able, therefore, to start out for the new camp as soon as we had had a meal. We all suffered from terrible pains at the unaccustomed food. Kalstad was sick and weakened rapidly. We were trekking straight into the wind, which was rising to gale force and gradually obliterating the tracks. It was a nightmare journey. The ice was heaving under us, breaking into fissures and growling as the broken edges of floes ground together under their covering of snow.
But for the iceberg I don’t think we should ever have found the sea-leopard again, for by three o’clock we were struggling across a plain of virgin white, all traces of my ski tracks made only that morning having vanished. I saw the iceberg black against the pale circle of the westering sun and within an hour we were snug in two tents with a blubber stove going and meat cooking.
At the time I blamed Fate for what happened. But it was really my own fault. I should have remembered that there had been stretches of open water the previous day and realised how thin the ice was. We should have camped on the berg. But then I don’t know that any of us had the strength to drag tent and stores and sledges up on to the higher ground.
All that night the wind howled with demoniac force. I slept fitfully, racked with pain and conscious all the time of the increasing movement of the ice and the rising sound of the grinding floes. Towards morning I must have fallen into a heavy sleep, for I was woken by the ice splitting with the crackle of rifle fire. I crawled to the entrance of the tent, but it was dark and I could see nothing. I lay back and dozed off again to the sound of lapping water.
In the grey light of early dawn I was horrified to see water slopping in at the tent entrance. My feet were numb and the bottom of my sleeping-bag was frozen stiff. It was as though I were lying with my feet in a block of ice. I put my head out of the tent. The scene had changed completely. In place of the flat white expanse of snow-covered ice, I found myself looking across a black expanse of brash-filled water. All round us the ice had broken up into separate floes which drove against each other under the lash of the wind. As I leaned forward on my hands and knees the ice tipped slowly under me. I gazed with fascination as the water lapped the edge and slopped over my hands. When I drew back into the tent the water receded. I fought down a feeling of panic and pulled back the canvas at the other end of the tent.
I knew why the water had lapped over the edge as I’d leaned forward, of course, but it wasn’t nice to have that knowledge confirmed. The two tents were floating on a raft of ice not more than forty feet across and we were in the middle of the open channel of water. The jagged edge of our floe fitted like a piece of a jig-saw puzzle to the main floe from which it had calved. The spot was marked by our sledge and the carcase of the sea-leopard. It was hard to see us drifting slowly away from all that meat. We had three or four pounds of the meat in the tent which we were keeping thawed. But it wouldn’t last long. We were drifting away from the only source of life and strength we had.
I was just putting back the canvas to exclude the cold when I saw something—a fin moving stealthily through the water, slipping along like a black dhow sail, making scarcely a ripple. It was a killer whale. As though attracted by my gaze it turned quickly and came straight towards our floe. The high dorsal fin passed out of my view and a moment later I heard the great beast snorting on the other side of the canvas. It was an ugly, pig-like sound—and deadly sinister. I waited, scarcely daring to breathe. The floe trembled as the monster skimmed beneath it. More snorting. I put back
the canvas and lay down, rigid and trembling, waiting, tense, for the moment when the whale would see us and tip the floe over.
That was what Gerda had said they did—peered over the edge of a floe and then tipped it up with their weight. How long ago that seemed now! I remembered how she’d teased her father that day I had come aboard Hval 4. I remembered other things she’d done and said—her indomitable cheerfulness, her guts, the way she handled the men. And I was comforted by the thought that at least she’d been spared an end like this.
The snorting was close beside me now. I lay still, not waking the others. Better that they should not know till it happened. It would be over quicker for them that way.
The snorting went on for what seemed eternity. Once the floe tilted, rocked violently, and I tensed, waiting for the sudden flurry of water, the cold and the snapping jaws. But the snorting died away. The floe rocked gently to the movement of the water. I relaxed slowly and with relaxation came sleep, a queer half coma of things remembered and things imagined.
I woke suddenly to the soft grinding of ice on ice and a knocking, juddering under the floe. For a moment I thought it was the killer whale back again. Then the soft grinding of the ice told its tale and I peered out, praying that we’d fetched up the same side of the channel as our meat.
But fortune was against us. About a quarter of a mile of water separated us from the sledge and the sea-leopard. Still, at least we had fetched up against a big, solid-looking floe. I woke the others and got them on to firm ice. There we repitched the tents and cooked a meal. And whilst we ate I racked my brains for a means of getting across the water to the sea-leopard meat.
But it was impossible. The wind had swung to the south and the gap between us and our old camp was widening all the time. I didn’t know whether to push on or wait in the hopes that the gap would freeze over or the wind change. The break-up of the ice might mean we were nearing the edge of the pack. But when I mentioned this to the others, Vaksdal shook his head gloomily and pointed to the west. “The ice-blink,” he said. “I think there are many miles of pack yet.” It was true. There was no longer a water-sky to the west of us. Ice and cloud were merged together in a void of blinding white. Anyway, Kalstad was delirious and seemed too weak to move, and I decided to remain in the hope of being able to reach the carcase of the sea-leopard the following morning.
At some point during that timeless day, Kalstad woke me. His eyes were very big and his face quite white. He wasn’t delirious any more, but he was shaking slightly and seemed possessed of some sort of a fever. “You must go on, hr. Kaptein,” he said. His voice was very faint.
I shook my head. I knew what he meant. His voice was merged with the memory of Gerda’s. “There’s no point,” I said.
“The others,” he whispered. “I shall die here. You must leave me and go on.”
“You’re not going to die,” I told him. But I didn’t believe it. I knew we were all going to die.
As night came on we made a blubber fire, and though we practically choked ourselves with the acrid fumes, we managed to cook the rest of the meat. Kalstad refused to have any. Shortly after that I went to sleep. For the first time for days I slept like a log without dreams or any disturbance. It was more a coma than sleep, for I was numb all over with no feeling whatever in my feet.
When I woke it was clear and sunny. A channel two miles wide separated us from the iceberg where the sea-leopard lay. To the north and west the pack seemed to have closed again in a solid mass. When I crawled back into the tent again I saw that Kalstad was dead. The skin of his forehead was waxen under the dirt. His mouth was slightly open in the stiff mat of his beard and his eyes stared at me sightlessly. I felt his hands. They were rigid and quite cold.
I roused the others, and we buried him there in the snow. For him the struggle was over. “Now we go on, ja?” Vaksdal had seen the wide channel of water. He accepted the loss of the sea-leopard and the inevitability of going forward until we dropped. His eyes were running and horribly inflamed, so that they seemed rimmed by raw flesh. His long beard looked dirty against the transparent pallor of his gaunt face. Both he and Keller were suffering from the beginnings of frost-bite due to walking in the snow after Bland had taken their boots. Yet they were willing to go on. They were tougher than I was. I just wanted to crawl into my tent and die as Kalstad had died.
But somewhere there is always a last flicker of energy. We took one tent, our sleeping-bags and the rifle. Everything had to be carried. Before leaving, we ate the blubber off the stove over which we’d cooked the last of the meat the night before. Then I got out the compass, set our course and we started off, leaving Kalstad to his lonely vigil in the ice, just as we had left Gerda.
We were all very weak. We took it in turns to use the skis. But soon we had to discard them, for we hadn’t the strength to hold our balance, and the extra weight on our legs when we had to lift them over broken outcrops of clear ice was too much. The food we’d had caused us great pain. So did our feet. We were all suffering from frost-bite now. Keller weakened rapidly and only the fact that I refused to give in until the two Norwegians were beaten kept me going.
Our progress was painfully slow. Constant detours had to be made round patches of open water. But the ice was fairly flat. By midday we had made something like two miles, but by then Keller had to be supported between the two of us. The glare was like a red-hot needle against my eyeballs. I began to see things that weren’t there. At times the landscape vanished into a blur of blinding white. It was the beginning of snow blindness.
If we’d only had some definite goal it would have given an impetus to our struggle. But there was no goal, only a vague hope that none of us believed in. There was no point in going on. I found myself dogged by an overwhelming desire to drop in the snow and let the relief of death steal over me. The longing for death became an obsession that completely replaced any hope of finding survivors from the Southern Cross or the store of whale-meat the crew had landed. It was a thing that had to be fought together with exhaustion, the griping pains of hunger and the aching stab of my eyes.
That night Keller wanted to be left behind. He said he was too weak to go on. But we couldn’t leave him. There was only the one tent. We had to go on together or stop and die together. Vaksdal told him he was a coward. He didn’t deserve to be called that, but it had its effect and he came on with us. There is an entry in my log made that morning which reads: 14th Day. We are going on. But this is the last day we can hope to move. Those on the iceberg will run out of food to-day. God help them.
Barely able to stand up for weakness, we made about a mile that morning. My eyes had become so bad that I could hardly see to lay a course. Keller was barely conscious as he stumbled on with his arms about our necks. At times he was actually delirious as he walked, babbling incoherently in Norwegian. Vaksdal and I were in little better case.
Shortly after midday we pitched our tent for the last time. It was whilst we were doing this that Vaksdal seized my arm and pointed into the snow-glare. “Pingvin” he croaked. Penguins? That meant food. I followed the line of his arm, screwing up my eyes against the glare. Several dark dots hovered in the mirage of the ice, waving their flippers. I picked up the rifle. God give me strength to shoot straight. The gun was incredibly heavy. The barrel wavered. I could not get the sights to stay for a second on the target. I told Vaksdal to kneel in the snow and I rested the barrel on his shoulder. The penguins were waving their flippers over their heads and vaguely, like sounds in a dream, I heard shouts. The trigger was heavy. I couldn’t see the sights properly and the shouts kept ringing in my ears.
Then suddenly I knew they weren’t penguins. Penguins didn’t wave their flippers over their heads. Those shouts were real. I dropped the gun and started forward. The figures melted, lost in a mirage of light that wavered uncontrollably. It was all a dream. There was no substance in those dark dots against the snow. I was delirious and imagining things. I knew this was the end even as I stumbled
forward at a ridiculous, wobbly run. I heard hoarse raven croaks coming from my throat. Then I stumbled and pitched forward. The snow was soft. A wonderful lethargy stole through me. I knew I must struggle to my feet. But I hadn’t strength. And I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to struggle any more. I remember I thought for a moment of Judie, dying of starvation up there on the ledge of the iceberg. But there was nothing I could do about it—nothing. I was finished. And slowly—luxuriously—unconsciousness came like a blanket to cover me.
I woke to warmth and the smell of food. A spoon was pushed between my cracked lips. My gorge rose as I tried to swallow the hot liquid. I opened my eyes. Pain flamed at the back of my eyeballs. Captain Eide was bending over me. I couldn’t believe it at first. I was convinced that I was dead. But then he was forcing hot liquid between my teeth again and I knew that I was alive and that I’d linked up with the survivors of the Southern Cross. His face came and went in front of me and I heard a croaking sound that was my own voice. There were things I had to tell him. But I kept losing the drift of what I wanted to say as I slipped back into unconsciousness.
I’m told I slept for sixteen hours. When I finally got my eyes open I found Kyrre, the second officer of the Southern Cross, in the tent beside me. The things I’d been trying to tell them rushed to the forefront of my mind. “They have no food,” I croaked.
Kyrre put out his hand to steady me. The violent urgency of my voice must have shaken him. “It is all right, Craig,” he soothed me. “Lie down and rest. Kaptein Eide left yesterday, you know, with nine men. We are to follow.”
“But he doesn’t realise the urgency,” I cried excitedly. “He doesn’t know they are—”
He smiled and patted my arm as though I were a child. “He knows everything. You have been delirious. For hours you say nothing else but that they have no food and will die soon if no one reaches them. You are still telling us that long after Eide has left. He has two sledges and a week’s meat for them and he is making forced marches. He tell me to say—do not worry. He will get there.”
The White South Page 29