The Ice Master

by Jennifer Niven

  Nonsense, Munro told him; he should rest his back first and recuperate. Then, when he was well enough to go to the ridge, some of the other men would go with him. They were all eager to get their hands on Hadley even though most of them until now had been content to lie about camp, their greatest exertion being talking of food and complaining about their situation.

  The wind blew strong and hard, sweeping over the landscape until the snow was blown away and dark patches of earth remained. It was the season of the midnight sun, and they now went to bed in sunlight at 11:00 P.M.

  Kuraluk set out for the ridge on May 11, with Munro, Breddy, Maurer, and McKinlay following the next day. They took with them a mug and some pemmican and followed Kuraluk’s trail. The snow was deep with a firm, thin crust, which sustained them briefly with each step before they sank into it up to the thighs. McKinlay went along to keep the peace, dreading the moment of confrontation. “I hope some5 of the tempers cool somewhat before then,” he wrote, “or there may be trouble.”

  About 10:00, as the men left the snow and crossed onto the level ice field, they spotted a black object on the horizon. From where they stood, it looked like a sled, but they soon decided it was only a piece of ice. After another mile or so, however, they saw that it was indeed a sled. As they approached it, they soon saw a dejected-looking figure, muttering over and over again, “Me no good6 lose.”

  Kuraluk was snow-blind and had lost the trail. The men asked him what he wanted to do, but it was hard to understand him. Finally, they all turned back to camp, guiding Kuraluk, who could barely see. McKinlay also felt the onset of snow blindness, his eyes painful and gritty, as if they were full of sand. The light was strong that day and it was impossible to wear goggles because they frosted up so quickly.

  The next day, Hadley arrived in camp. No one was happy to see him and the crewmen demanded that Munro come to some sort of understanding with the old man. “Munro’s job is7 not an enviable one,” McKinlay observed. “To provoke ill-feeling would probably make our final state worse than at present.”

  Something had to be done. If Munro didn’t take care of it, the rest of the men would—and not so diplomatically. The following morning, the engineer took Hadley aside and had a private talk with him. McKinlay and the others had no idea what they said to each other; but at the end of it all, they seemed to be on remarkably good terms, and Hadley, it appeared, was forgiven. Some of the more vocal members of the group were not pleased about the private discussion and demanded that they have a “round-the-fire” talk to straighten things out. Williamson, in particular, was unhappy that he wasn’t privy to their conversation, and upon Munro’s return from the meeting, complained bitterly about it.

  Afterward, Hadley avoided the second engineer completely. He would never forget that Williamson’s antipathy nearly cost him his life. Munro had been heading out there to the ridge to have Hadley killed. He had ordered Breddy to do the deed for him so that he wouldn’t have to do any of it himself. If they hadn’t come across the snow-blind Kuraluk, Breddy would have done it. And it was all thanks to Williamson’s lies.

  Some time ago, Hadley had thought Williamson a decent man and had even loaned him his rifle as a sign of his belief in him. That, however, was before he discovered that Williamson was a “contemptable rotter.”8 He had stolen from Hadley’s knapsack and he had made threats. In Hadley’s mind, the second engineer had been out to get him ever since the ship went down.

  “I would not9 Live another winter on this Island another winter with this push for the Dominion of Canada if the ship fails to show up,” Hadley wrote with obvious disgust. “[T]he general plan is to push on for Siberia because it will be Impossible to make a living here any way and Everybody is free to come or stay but if they come They must keep up or get Left.”

  Munro and Williamson had never gotten along well. But now Munro’s dislike for the man had turned into a deep-seated hatred and anger. Williamson had started the trouble and now, Munro could see, he was not to be trusted. The story about Hadley had been a fabrication, from Williamson’s lips to their ears. Most of the men had been so quick to believe it that Munro had never asked Kuraluk to back up the story. Munro realized he would have to be careful what he believed from now on.

  It was always something with Williamson—he was never happy and always complaining. Williamson still had the rifle Hadley had lent him, but was doing nothing with it. In fact, now that they were on the island, Williamson had done nothing at all—except for performing the operations on their feet. Other than that, he never lifted a finger, never walked when he could ride, never did more than his share, and sometimes did less than that. And now he was trying to stir up trouble.

  “It’s hard to10 have to listen to all his hard words,” Munro wrote in his diary, “but I have made up my mind not to quarrel with him so must pass it off, but as there is a God above who spares both of [us] to get out of this, it will do him no good. I’LL get my own back. I have come to the conclusion as many others in the party that its that class of Englishman who has got the English despised the world over. When out of this I pray to God I may never see him again.”

  DIARY OF BJARNE MAMEN

  RODGER’S HARBOUR

  THURSDAY, MAY 14.

  I for my part was out for four hours today, but I don’t know whether it did me any good or not. I swelled up frightfully after it, my whole body, yes, how this will end is hard to tell....

  HADLEY HAD FIRST OBSERVED the glorious midnight sun around May 6, and the men planned to sit up and watch it on the night of May 14. Mugpi turned four years old that day, so there was more than one reason for celebration. They built an enormous fire and sat there shivering and waiting, but at last had to turn in around 11:00 P.M. because of the cold.

  The night of May 15, a heavy fog crept in, obscuring the sun and making the temperature drop rapidly. By the next day, snow was falling in thick, white clouds, and the men spent a miserable day in camp. Bad luck seemed to plague them, whether on land or on ice, and they were, as Munro observed, “fed up with11 everything” by that point, the weather only making things worse.

  A nasty case of snow blindness kept McKinlay from making a trip to Skeleton Island to fetch some medication for Chafe and Clam’s feet. It was there in McKinlay’s knapsack, along with his compass and other belongings, which Mamen was leaving for him. Breddy was sent in McKinlay’s place, although that was worrisome because the fireman was notoriously lazy and couldn’t be trusted to finish a thing once he had started it.

  Clam’s toe was healing well, but Chafe desperately needed the medicine. His foot had gone black and was worse than ever, which meant he was forced to undergo another operation, this time to remove the dead matter from his heel. They were all in rotten shape. Maurer was suffering from snow blindness, as was Kuraluk, who was still hoping to return to the ridge as soon as he was better. Munro would go with him so that they could bring back the remaining seal meat.

  Everyone was sick of the pemmican and barely able to hold it down. It made them sick to eat it. They had sixteen days’ full rations of pemmican left now, so they figured they would be fine until the middle of June. But they knew they had to get some fresh meat soon or they would be in dire straits. On May 23, things looked up when Hadley and the Eskimo saw the first seal on the ice near camp. Kuraluk shot but missed, his snow blindness hampering his vision.

  The weather had been miserable all month, and it stayed that way. The snow blew continuously, and Munro had to postpone his trip to the ridge until further notice. Kuraluk now announced he did not want to go back to the ridge, and Munro knew he could not force him, even though they were all reliant upon Kuraluk, who was their most skilled hunter. Munro knew he had to handle him delicately, being careful not to offend him for fear he would give up the hunt altogether. So he said nothing about Kuraluk’s decision to stay in camp, confiding instead to his diary, “It’s Hell to12 be in a position like this.”

  Then, to everyone’s surprise, Kuraluk left
Icy Spit the morning of the twenty-fourth with a loaded sled. He didn’t say a word to anyone before leaving, just headed off alone, tight-lipped and stoic.

  In the midst of it all, Breddy returned from Skeleton Island with a note to McKinlay from Mamen. He and Malloch and Templeman had been sick and suffering and now they had moved down to Rodger’s Harbour. It was a long way across the island to the harbor—about seventy miles—but no one else at Icy Spit was willing to make the trip. So McKinlay would go alone. Munro would have to keep his own counsel because Mamen, it was clear, needed McKinlay’s help more.

  ON PEARY’S 1909 NORTH POLE expedition, while the admiral and Bartlett and the rest of the company were camped at Cape Sheridan, Dr. J. W. Goodsell and Professor Donald B. MacMillan had opened a case of books and afterward had come down with violent colds. The books were brand new and had never been read or owned by anyone. But they had, apparently, been packed by a man infected with a cold.

  Bartlett thought of this as he sat in the relative comfort of civilization and suffered through an excruciating case of tonsillitis. Because of the extreme cold and remoteness of the region, germs didn’t breed in the Arctic as they did in more normal climates. All those weeks trudging through the Arctic freeze, snow, blizzards, without so much as a sniffle, and now he was laid up in East Cape, his throat ulcerated and searingly painful. He coated it with peroxide and alum, which eventually seemed to help, and finally he began to recover.

  On May 10, he was still weary and ill, his legs and feet mysteriously swollen. His host, Baron Kleist, was eager to leave for Emma Harbor, aware that, this late in the season, a thaw might come at any moment, breaking up the ice and thus complicating their sled journey. Bartlett could only walk with difficulty, but he decided it was time to depart. It would be best not to wait for a complete recovery, since there was no telling how long it would take for him to be fully well again.

  Kataktovik saw them on their way. Bartlett gave him the rifle they had carried with them from Wrangel Island on their journey across the ice and wilderness, and then he shook hands with him and thanked him for all he had done. Bartlett was indebted to Kataktovik, and he told him so, thanking him for showing faith in their mission and having faith in Bartlett himself. He had been the bravest and most reliable companion the captain could have wished for and Bartlett was loath to say good-bye.

  The distance from East Cape to Emma Harbor was about the same as the distance from New York to Boston. With dog drivers and sleds, Bartlett and Baron Kleist set out shrouded in fog in the late afternoon of May 10. Both the captain and Kleist were worried about how they would feed the dogs; the season was so advanced that the meat supply of the Eskimos was beginning to thin. Bartlett left his own dogs at East Cape.

  They traveled through heavy snow and thick fog, rain, and wind, frequently finding their way strictly by compass because they were unable to see ahead of the dogs. They often drove on through the night, stopping at different arangas for nourishment and rest.

  Bartlett had searched for an oilskin coat at East Cape because his fur clothing was soaked through from his trek across the Siberian wilderness. There were none that fit him, though, and now he worried about the effect these wet clothes would have on his already poor health. He rode on the sled most of the time, to save his strength, and this gave him a chance to appreciate the views of this wild and unfamiliar country. But now and then he walked alongside to keep warm. His legs were still weak and swollen, and before long, he would climb back onto the sled.

  They were headed for a reindeer settlement on the north side of Saint Lawrence Bay. On their way there, they lost all sense of direction, and as the dog drivers stopped to discuss the matter, the dogs suddenly took off, tearing across the ice with the sled flying along behind them and a surprised Bartlett hanging on for life. The path was scattered with boulders and blocks of ice, and Bartlett expected to be thrown or crushed at any moment. Somehow, though, they reached the bottom of the hill and the dogs stopped, having momentarily lost the scent they were chasing—the scent of reindeer.

  But there, miraculously, was the trail they were searching for, bringing them right into Saint Lawrence Bay. Here, Bartlett saw his first Siberian reindeer. Because spring was arriving, the animals had just moved to the coast from parts inland, where they had wintered.

  Bartlett and his group were averaging five miles an hour on the journey, and the captain admired the skill and speed of their dog drivers. He didn’t speak their language, but they were colorful and memorable characters, especially a man called “Little,” who was a strapping four feet tall. Little promised Bartlett that he would take him in his motor boat to Alaska, if the captain wasn’t able to find a ship at Emma Harbor. Bartlett was touched by the offer and promised Little he would take him up on it if it came down to that. Little knew a few words of English and was quite proud of his vocabulary. “Me make baron13 speak ’em plenty English,” he boasted many a time.

  They crossed the ice of Saint Lawrence Bay and followed its shores east. From there, they traveled over land for several miles before setting out on the ice again, this time in the mouth of Mechigme Bay. They stayed along the coast, heading west, and then drove across the opening of the bay until they reached the southern shore. After this, they traveled the coast for twenty miles and then once again took a land route to Neegchan.

  The air was heavy and damp with fog, and Bartlett was often wet to the skin. At the various arangas, he was often able to give his clothes a cursory drying, and was thankful for this because his throat was still vulnerable and not yet healed. He feared a relapse. Once you became sick or injured in the Arctic, it was twice as hard to heal as it would have been in the rest of the world. Resistance was down, and without adequate shelter from the cold the body’s immune system wasn’t able to do its job, which meant a relatively simple thing—tonsillitis or a cut on the finger—could soon prove fatal.

  They were, at last, entering the final stretch of their journey. Here and there, they stopped for tea at one of the many arangas they happened upon, and in one of them an Eskimo told them he had heard of a whaler at Indian Point with a master named Pedersen. From the description, Bartlett decided it was the same man whom Stefansson had originally hired to skipper the Karluk. Bartlett knew Captain Pedersen personally, and the fact that he was in the area was good news. Perhaps Bartlett could persuade the captain to take him to Alaska.

  MAMEN HAD SKIED in the mountains, taken leaps off of cliffs, trekked through snow, scaled rocks, jumped over precipices and ravines. He fell down, he got injured, he got back up again, he kept going. He was invincible. He could do anything and nothing could touch him.

  Because his father was the leading funeral director in Christiania, Norway, Mamen had grown up with death, but it never changed his feelings of immortality or his firm belief in his own strength. Life just kept going, and he knew it always would.

  But now he had to face the thought that he was weak, that Malloch was ill, that Templeman was helpless, and that the entire expedition might not make it off Wrangel Island alive. The worry never left him. Yet despite his own weakness, he roused himself every day to take care of his two comrades, both of whom had come to depend almost entirely upon him.

  Malloch was still careless with his feet. Just as they were beginning to improve he would get them frozen again. He was in a kind of delirium now. He seemed helpless and unable to look after himself, but remained blissfully ignorant of the harm he was doing to his body. Mamen would find him outside in his stocking feet, wandering through the snow, a smile on his face.

  When Mamen was too weak to tend to him, Templeman took over, washing out bandages for the patient under Mamen’s supervision. But mostly it was Mamen, who went without food, giving his rations to Malloch and tending to his feet when he was negligent, which was all the time. He was, as Mamen said, “the worst man14 I have seen in all my life . . . he will never do what other people do, it is no use telling him anything.. . .”

  It made Mamen a
ll the more determined to see Malloch and Templeman better and to beat this mystery illness himself. Though still weak, he was improving steadily and soon hoped to have his usual good health back. Their biscuits were gone, the pemmican inedible, but they looked forward to the birds that would soon be there and the eggs they could already taste in their vivid imaginations.

  The weather could not have been worse. Hurricane-like gales blew snow and threatened to rip their fragile tent apart. Unable to build a fire and with little oil for the Primus stove, the men often had to content themselves with dry meals—plain pemmican, with no tea to wash it down. They had enough pemmican to last them through the rest of the month but it was now their only food source and, as Mamen observed, “Half a pound15 of pemmican twice a day is certainly not much, but we have to be glad as long as we can get that. It will soon be better times for us, as soon as the birds come from the south and the ice breaks up the sun will shine for us day and night.”

  As the gale raged on for days, the men were confined to the tent, making tea sparingly on the Primus stove out of water from melted snow. There was only enough for a mouthful for each one of them, and the flavor was unsavory; but they were grateful for a hot drink.

  When the weather cleared at last, leaving sunshine, Mamen left the tent to go walking. He headed down the sandbank, but his strength soon gave out and he was forced to turn back.

  On May 5, as the wind began to blow about the tent and another blizzard swept through the camp, Mamen lay inside and remembered the people he had left behind when he’d set out on his quest for adventure a year ago.