The Ministry of Time

Chapter VII

A couple of weeks after the shooting incident, Gore leads a small party of men and two officers from the ice-bound ship to land. They march across the pack ice for sixteen miles and reach Cape Felix.

They have had unseasonably bad hunting, bringing home a scarce few hundred pounds of meat. All quarry is turned over to the common table, though the hunter may keep the head and heart of larger game. Gore shares his first heart (caribou) with Goodsir, who gives thanks by way of an impromptu lecture on parasitical animalcules that prey on warm-blooded mammals. “Do you mean the darts of Cupid?” one inveterate bachelor asks another. But Goodsir is only seven-and-twenty—he’ll wed yet, once he’s published his papers on Arctic insect species and made his name.

The camp at Cape Felix is intended as a magnetic observatory and a base for hunting parties when daily sojourns from the ship in search of game are no longer practicable. The journey to and from the ships exhausts all but the most determined hunters, and one can recognize the most determined hunters by their disfigured faces. Gore isn’t sure what he looks like anymore and that suits him fine. Perhaps frostbite will take a half inch off his nose.

Lieutenant Hodgson of Terror is the chief magnetic officer at the base. Hodgson is charming as a lap dog and brave as a terrier, but he’s young and not a scientist. His presence at the camp is a troubling sign. It suggests Crozier—a talented scientist and a fellow of the Royal Society—sent his greenest lieutenant because he places no value in the work being done here. It could even suggest Crozier does not expect the fieldwork to ever reach England.

Earlier this year, in May, Gore led a party to John Ross’s cairn to deposit a note from the late Sir John Franklin, intended for the Admiralty via wandering fur traders or Royal Navy chartists. Now, as reconnoiter (no one dares say “rescue”) fails to materialize—as it becomes clearer that no Hudson’s Bay Company trapper has found the cairn and its message—a melancholy lethargy, rimed with hunger, crusts over the group. It takes all of his charisma, his good cheer, and the unexpressed presence of the cat-o’-nine-tails for Gore to keep the Cape Felix camp lively, running, responsive.

Mornings are the worst. The sealskin sleeping bags freeze overnight, and then in the light of the dawn the frost evaporates, mists on the canvas ceiling, and drips onto their heads. All their clothing is several exhausting pounds heavier, because they sweat into the wool and they cannot get the wool dry.

No, mealtimes are the worst. They put cold things into their mouths, and the cold walks around their stomachs. The camp was running low on spirit fuel, and Gore gave his men a choice between no grog or cold rations. They all chose grog—Jack was ever a jolly tar. But water needs to be melted too, and they’re even thirstier than they are hungry or tired. He’s had to stop more than one man eating snow and scorching his throat. Des Voeux and the Marine Sergeant Bryant shot a hare two days ago and knelt to drink the blood from the welt in its flank.

No, what’s worst is that there are no Esquimaux. This is their seasonal hunting ground. Last year they’d come aboard the ships to trade seal meat and furs for knives and wood. They’d patted sailors’ faces and cheerfully resisted conversion to Christianity (hell sounded too delightful—a land of eternal heat). This year, the natives are nowhere to be seen. They have leaped into the sky, sunk into the earth.

Gore thinks his trigger fingers might be going. They are swollen, sheening enamel white. It takes him longer than he’d like to get his gloves on because he can’t feel what he’s doing. Still, he’s dealt with worse than this. He’ll give himself another week unless his fingers start to blacken. He still wants to bag an ox.

When it happens, it happens very quickly. Later, he will hardly be able to line the words up to describe it.

“The—flash of lightning, I thought it was. Then that—doorway of blue light.”

The horizon splits like a knuckle. A bright blue slit in the world. He raises his gun. He will wonder, some time from now, what would have happened if he hadn’t, if he’d met his future another way.