The Ice Master

by Jennifer Niven

  The next day, Kuraluk crawled out onto the ice and shot another uguruk as it lay near its hole. Hadley and McKinlay helped him haul it back to camp, trudging through the rotten ice, and towing the uguruk through the water. They were forced to walk most of the way in the water themselves, “often on ice28 perforated all over with small holes and very often above the knees so that the water poured in over the tops of our boots,” wrote McKinlay afterward.

  This uguruk was similar in size to the first one, and the Eskimos compared the sizes by studying the hollows in the claws of the flippers of each animal. It had taken Kuraluk, Hadley, and McKinlay two hours to haul the uguruk into camp, and when Auntie had cut it open they discovered its stomach was full of worms, but otherwise empty. Not an encouraging sight for the men. If the uguruk was starving, what then were their own chances for survival?

  Toward the end of July, the wind shifted once more and the ice, loosened by the eastern blow, once again grew impenetrable. Young ice formed over the open leads every night and was at times so thick and strong that it would pierce a hole in the kayak. Fortunately, this was easily fixed by a patching of boiled seal oil, which the Eskimos used as a pitch substitute.

  On July 29, Hadley thought he saw the smoke of a ship in the distance. There was great excitement as everyone took turns peering toward the horizon through the field glasses, but there was no ship. There was nothing. Only ice. McKinlay wrote with great dejection, “It may be29 the wish is father to the thought.” They were running out of hope.

  FOR MUNRO, MAURER, and Templeman, every day was the same as the one before, and soon all the days started running together in a long, blank, forgettable string of hunger, rain, and idleness. There was nothing to do but watch the rain and take shelter in the tent. When they could, they went hunting, but there was very little game to be found and the weather made it difficult. There was no use hunting in the rain, so on the bleakest days they stayed inside, still talking obsessively of food and the meals they wanted to devour when they were finally back home. On the days when the rain was mostly mist and the wind wasn’t quite as contemptible, they trekked out to the headlands or to the spit to hunt for eggs, but there weren’t many to be had. Sometimes they were lucky enough to get a few ducks, but their harvest, it seemed, was over.

  The only positive aspect they could find in the strong, shifting winds and the pelting rain was that the elements would break up the ice and blow it off the coast, making it easier for a ship to get through to the harbor. For this reason, they didn’t curse the rain and the winds as fiercely as they might have, and they tried to stay in a positive frame of mind, although it was a struggle. “We are all30 getting impatient here expecting the ice to go any minute and let in the boat,” wrote Munro. “’Patience is a virtue.’”

  Templeman was the only one who seemed to lack that virtue. Indeed, he had been causing a great deal of trouble lately. His constant worrying about their predicament didn’t help his comrades’ spirits. Munro lit into him a couple of times. It seemed to do some good, but Munro was frankly past the point of caring, worn down and disgusted by their situation, so most of the time he let Templeman grumble.

  They had found some thirty-two eggs recently, but only five of these were edible. The others were rotten and nauseating, at such an advanced state of development that they could hardly be called eggs anymore. At the beginning of July, they had been lucky enough to catch two seals, which made three and a half in the larder. But since then, the seals rarely showed their faces on the ice, and Munro and the others were only able to get the eggs, and a few ducks. The ducks were scared of them by now and stayed away from the area for the most part.

  The seal meat had run out on July 17. They ate every last tainted, rotten bit of it, including the hide. After that, they lived on pemmican in short rations because there wasn’t much left. There was enough of the pemmican, they calculated, so that they could make it last until August 5 if they ate small portions and filled it out with blubber. The rescue ship would surely find them by August 5, Munro believed—hoped—so they would not have to worry about what would happen to them once the pemmican ran out.

  On July 23, the graves dug, they buried Mamen and Malloch beneath a crude wooden cross and a border of stones. It was a solemn and grim reminder of what might lie ahead for the living, and they lowered the Canadian flag to half-mast in honor of the two. There was nothing to do but turn their thoughts heavenward and pray for relief. The gusting winds were now smashing up the ice around the beach, as they had hoped, but there was no sign of open water in the surrounding ice pack that divided the island from the world below.

  Munro, Maurer, and Templeman were disheartened, but each of the three men maintained his faith in God. He would see them through this, they told themselves, no matter how drastic their situation. They would look to the future and expect the best.

  On July 28, Munro wrote with a heavy heart, “It seems as31 if our luck has gone altogether. We haven’t seen a seal or any living thing except ducks for weeks past. We put our trust in the good Lord who has provided for us so far and who isn’t going to desert us at the last in this, our 199th day since we lost our ship.”

  August 1914

  . . . what will be1 our fate, God alone knows.

  —WILLIAM MCKINLAY, MAGNETICIAN

  On August 9, the whaler Herman arrived at Herschel Island with news, at last, of the Karluk. The members of the Southern Party who were there listened eagerly as Captain Pedersen relayed the story. It was the first concrete news they had heard of the ship or her men since Stefansson had become separated from the Northern Party in September of 1913.

  They tried to absorb it all—the ship locked in ice, the sinking of the Karluk in January, the struggle of Bartlett and the staff and crew to live on the ice and then to reach land, and Bartlett’s journey for help with Kataktovik. Pedersen could not remember which of the scientists had accompanied Dr. Mackay when he left the main party. He thought, though, that Murray had gone, as well as one of the seaman, a big, brawny fellow. He also thought, incorrectly, that Mamen had, too.

  From what the members of the Southern Party knew, Wrangel Island was reported to have plenty of driftwood and plenty of game, especially polar bears and walrus. Therefore, they concluded, their former colleagues would be in no danger of going hungry.

  “WE ARE NOW2 ALL ANXIETY, forgetting all our ills and complaints, and thinking only of the coming of the ship,” McKinlay wrote in his journal on August 4. “This all depends on the captain; if he won through, we are safe; if he was lost, we must winter here.”

  On August 1, he had written, “August has opened under good auspices, the sky being speckless & the sun very warm.. . . Altogether a promising start.” Kuraluk killed an uguruk and they hoped it was a good omen for what they could expect for the rest of the month. Kuraluk had been constructing a meat rack when he spotted the creature. The rack would be used to sun-dry all of the fresh meat they obtained, so that they could then store the meat and live on it during the winter, should they—God forbid—have to remain on the island.

  They dissected the great bearded seal on the cake of ice where they always cut up the animals they caught. The white of the ice had been stained red long ago and was a barbaric reminder of their crude and desperate existence. The hide and flippers were set aside to be used in the building of an umiak, the construction of which was on their list of winter preparations. They had already discussed the possibility of having to winter on the island and begun to plan ahead so that they wouldn’t be unprepared by the end of the month, if a ship still hadn’t come.

  Other than this, life continued as usual. McKinlay picked scurvy grass while Hadley walked up to a nearby lane of water every day to watch for game. But there was no game to be found. Hadley did get off a shot at another uguruk, but it sank before he could reach it. The kayak was too far away down the beach for Kuraluk to use, so he took his nixie and tried retrieving the creature that way; but soon the ice drifted over the spot and he
had to give up.

  Hadley was livid. He claimed Kuraluk wouldn’t have given up so soon trying to fetch the uguruk if he had killed it himself. They had enough to worry about without this kind of competition. What’s more, he said, the Eskimo was becoming “unbearable” because everyone was always praising him, giving him a swelled head. Hadley declared that from now on he didn’t intend to shoot anything that he couldn’t get on his own—or, to be more specific, to do anything that required help from Kuraluk.

  As winter approached, the game was thinning alarmingly. Their situation was grim, and quickly becoming hopeless. McKinlay had done all he could to stay well and strong, but his body was tired, weak, and suffering. He refused to lie in the tent and be sedentary, so he forced himself to get up and out and to walk around, step by painful step. It had started as influenza; at least, that is what it had felt like. As his legs and ankles began to swell to twice their normal size, he feared it was something else—the mystery disease. Auntie seemed to be suffering from it, too, and neither one of them had any feeling in their legs.

  In spite of this, McKinlay and Chafe set out for the thirty-mile hike to Rodger’s Harbour on August 6, taking with them some dried meat for Munro, Maurer, and Templeman. They hadn’t heard from Munro since June and wanted to make sure that he and the others were surviving. McKinlay and Chafe headed along the coast, walking into a brutal wind from the southwest. They trod over rocks, moss, and mud, and from the high land near Cape Waring they had a fine view of the conditions surrounding the island. There were several miles of open water along the north coast, and a mile or more along the eastern coast. This was promising and they felt their spirits lift as they moved onward.

  When they reached Hooper Cairn, a heavy fog descended, but not before they caught a glimpse of the thick ice, which seemed to grow from the southern coast and stretch out for miles, just how far they couldn’t tell. They turned inland then and noted that the land here seemed more barren, with only scattered vegetation, compared to the land around Cape Waring. The hills were steep and hard to climb, and after several miles, the two men grew tired. The soles of their sealskin boots were, according to Chafe, “less than an3 eighth of an inch thick, and before we got half way there they had many holes in them.”

  They kept going anyway, until they reached a river formed by melting snow, and running down from the mountains through the center of the island. The river was too deep to walk through and at least twenty yards across, so McKinlay and Chafe turned around and headed back to Cape Waring, praying that Munro and the others were all right, and helpless to reach them if they weren’t. For most of the way back, McKinlay walked on his socks because the soles of his boots were now completely worn through. They returned to camp, at last, nearly barefooted, their feet bloody and blistered, and so damaged that they had trouble walking for days afterward.

  There was never enough to eat. Even Auntie’s magic didn’t work anymore. They skipped meals and tried not to think about being hungry. They needed food to strengthen them, but without strength they couldn’t get the food they needed. They felt as trapped on the island as they had been on the ship, and then on the ice pack at Shipwreck Camp. At every turn, the ice was their prison, surrounding them and isolating them from the rest of the world.

  Despite the bitter chill in the air, Hadley spent day after day sitting by a seal hole. He would sit for six or seven hours, looking for a sign of life, but he waited in vain. It was a fruitless task and he was clearly despondent. McKinlay had never known his outlook to be so bleak. Kuraluk, for his part, managed to kill a last flock of crowbills with a throwing stick he had made. But he had not gotten many birds, and what he did get did not last long. More and more, the men felt as if they were the only living creatures on the island.

  As the month wore on and no rescue ship appeared on the blank horizon, the men spent their meager energy squabbling over food—hoarding, begging, counting every crumb, some of them stealing or gorging, others sharing and rationing. Williamson, Chafe, and Clam were, as usual, out of food, “in spite of4 the fact,” McKinlay noted, “that they had nearly half share for their tent with only three of them in it. It means now that we will have to keep them going from our portion. Something will have to be done to put an end to this, if we are destined to be here for a lengthy stay.”

  Just a few days later, the strangest thing happened. Williamson announced he was going to Rodger’s Harbour to visit Munro and the others. McKinlay and Hadley thought, at first, that he was kidding. After all, this was a man who had been strapped to sledges and pulled for miles ever since they were thrust out onto the ice. He never exercised, even when he was healthy, and McKinlay had never known him to exert himself unnecessarily.

  Yet now he wanted to make the nearly thirty-mile hike to Rodger’s Harbour. Of course, he would not tell Hadley or McKinlay why he was going. They couldn’t begin to understand it, particularly since Williamson and Munro had despised each other for months. The reason he gave was that he wanted to go check on Munro, to see how he was getting on. It seemed preposterous.

  “What his real5 motives were would always remain a mystery,” wrote McKinlay, “but what made his proposed trip so utterly incomprehensible was the fact that he had never walked a mile from camp, even at Icy Spit before he had become sick. To me it was the most abnormal, even fantastic event; it did not seem to make sense that a man who had for so long played sick should be capable of covering between sixty and seventy miles in that short period. I confess that it confirmed suspicions I had harboured for a long time.”

  Hadley was furious because his dog Molly was missing, and he was sure Williamson had either taken her with him or set her loose just to spite him. She was pregnant and had been tied to a stake so they could keep an eye on her, because on two previous instances, she had escaped from Hadley and eaten her newly born puppies. Now she was gone, stake and all, and Hadley and McKinlay scoured the area for her. She would have the puppies any day now, and Hadley needed to find her before then. He was planning to get a dog team out of her litter, counting on the fact that by the time they all set out for Siberia in the spring of 1915, the puppies would be grown enough to help their three remaining dogs pull the sledge. It was true the men were starving, and they could have killed the dogs for food, but they knew the animals would be of more use to them alive than dead. Besides, Molly was all the family Hadley had left now.

  There was no sign of Molly on August 18 or 19, but on the twentieth, McKinlay walked up the hill to Breddy’s grave to retrieve a snow knife that had been left there. To his astonishment, burrowed into the grave, was Molly, very much alive, with a litter of eight puppies. She had torn away the protective logs they had used to cover the ends of Breddy’s grave and sheltered herself in the hole, nestled against Breddy’s body. And there, beside the corpse, she had brought new life into the world. From the sight of the body, McKinlay could tell that she and the puppies had been feeding on Breddy, nourishing themselves on his flesh.

  They kept the three strongest puppies and drowned the others because they knew there wouldn’t be enough food for all of them. They also knew Molly wasn’t strong enough to take care of them. Like the men, she was suffering the effects of a starvation diet. In spite of their hunger, it apparently never occurred to the men to eat the puppies. Or if it did occur to them, they quickly dismissed the idea.

  It was growing colder now—bitterly cold. The Arctic “summer” had been so fleeting as to be practically invisible. The wind had picked up, constant and biting, and the midnight sun was gone, leaving darkening nights and frigid temperatures. All during the summer, the ice shelf surrounding the island had broken up promisingly and then reformed again and again. The snow never melted in the hills. The land was surrounded by ice for miles. Even if someone knew they were there, it would take a miracle for a ship to get through.

  Still, some days—most days, really—they looked out toward sea and hoped. Once, Auntie thought she smelled the smoke of a steamship, which caused a l
ot of excitement, until they realized that it was, instead, the smell of the rotting entrails of their walrus. Sometimes, they thought they saw ships, but they were dreams, mirages, hallucinations. They wanted to see ships, so they did. Tall, powerful ships, cutting through the ice fields to reach them, lowering their anchors, helping them aboard, taking them away from there, taking them home. They dreamed of ships.

  McKinlay wrote, “That now is6 our only thought in our waking moments—When will she come? Will she come? Was the captain lost? Only time will answer these questions for us. But God forbid that we should have to winter here. It’s a hopeless prospect.”

  They had set up flags and a beacon, just in case a whaling ship might steam by the island. But winter was already upon them. They were living through their first blizzard. The birds were thinning. The seals were gone. The men were too weak to move some days, too weak to even try to find food. They spent many “blank” days, filled with “the monotony of waiting7 and thinking,” said McKinlay. “Think, think, think! That is all we can do these days—all day and in our waking moments at night. The strain becomes more and more acute as the days pass; there is not enough for us to do to alleviate it. We pray that it may end soon.”

  MAURER, MUNRO, AND TEMPLEMAN had spied a polar bear near camp, just two miles off the shore of Rodger’s Harbour, but the water interfered, and they couldn’t reach him. All they could do was stand there, watching him longingly, and, as Maurer remarked, “savagely . . . with thought of devouring him. Our self preservation urged us through hunger to get and eat whatever appeared in sight and was edible.”8