CHAPTER SEVEN
Robinson walked with his eyes on the shingle, watching for debris from the missing vessels. Split and broken by the cold, stones clacked under his boots. Slow-moving ice choked the channel to the west. Billings found hauling the sledge easier where they discovered areas of smooth sea ice near the shore, and then they covered twenty miles in a day.
Robinson ordered a halt. They made camp. A wolf howled somewhere on the flatland to the east. Clouds gathered overhead, and the translucent air became thick with vapour. When they woke in the evenings, they forced their swollen feet back into iron-stiff boots. Billings rolled up their blankets, packed the tent, and placed it on the sledge. The route south took them over jagged stones and marsh and clay pans. Snow flurries wrapped them in swirling powder.
The coastline was bare of vegetation. Robinson looked for footprints in the little snow that remained. He peered at the sky for signs of smoke and scanned the ice pack to the west for masts. Where the land shelf dropped off sharply, the sea ice reached to the shore. It crammed the small inlets and bays, determined to rise and swallow the land. Hummocks pocked the surface of the ice like blisters on the sea, their sides patterned with whorls. They climbed hills of scree, their boots sliding backward one pace for every two steps forward, then collapsed on all fours at the top and gasped for breath.
One morning they stopped on a low headland. Two glacial streams snaked across the plain below, bleeding into the ocean. A pair of eider ducks flew overhead. Adams shot one, the sound of the gunshot like a stone through a glass pane. The bird exploded on the earth in a cloud of feathers. Rivulets of blood threaded across the gravel, sparkling in the sunlight. Adams and Billings pitched the tent as Robinson walked the ground around the campsite. They collected driftwood, bleached white as bone and carried high on the shore by the ice, and cooked the bird on an open fire.
Billings ate his fill and sat near the flames, ineffable contentment on his face. Weary and sullen before the meal, his disposition was now unabashedly cheerful. Robinson watched him, awed at the man’s lack of artifice. Billings could not feign stoicism or courage or bluster, would never deceive or beguile. His mood remained on permanent display. When he was happy, his face shone with light. When he was tired or melancholy, he sulked or wept. But perhaps I have it backward, Robinson thought. Perhaps the true marvel is that other men can feign so much. Guile and deceit must be learned. Perhaps it is only natural that a man without the capacity to learn has not acquired them.
Billings looked across at Adams, grinning. “Will we find Sir John tomorrow, Mister Adams?”
“We might, Jimmy.”
Robinson and Adams filled their pipes as Billings flung handfuls of feathers into the air and watched them whirl away on the wind.
When Robinson slept, Adams pulled on his boots and heavy coat. He took his pencil and journal and sat on a boulder. The wind dropped, and the sun scoured the sky of clouds. Long sweeps of his pencil failed to soften the lines of the crenellated bluff south of their campsite. Despite the imminent arrival of summer, the hills were still dusted with snow, square and wrinkled like the head of a sperm whale. He shaded, then shaded again, but could not properly reproduce the iron grey of the sky. The faintest of halos circled the moon, but the one on his page was too stark, too well defined.
There is too much life in this picture, he thought. I cannot reproduce the deadness.
He drew the birds fluttering near the bluffs—merely a collection of dots and specks—then erased them when, even as indistinct flecks on the paper, they lent too much animation to the scene. When he looked up from the page, the landscape before him seemed even more inert than the one on the paper. He wondered how he had done it. Somehow his sketch suggested life, but if one stood here and looked, one would swear there was none.
He tried to write a letter to Frances but found it difficult to describe what he saw. It was easier to name what was absent: people, dwellings, trees, colour. Just grey clouds and grey sea and the ice. He sat with pen poised over the page until he began to shiver, and then he wrote.
Dearest Frances, it is tempting to call this the last place God made, but I think He ran out of elements before He could finish it. There are not even shadows here, for there is nothing to cast them. I see now there is great comfort to be had in shadows—they are the shapes of those things we find familiar. Their absence makes this place so much vaster and more frightening. Will there ever be an end to it? There are times when I am overwhelmed by the beauty of this place, and others when all around me is ugly and harsh. Perhaps God does not reside here; perhaps He pays only the occasional visit. I think the Arctic is like a slow-acting poison. It is intoxicating. It can induce euphoria. But too much will kill a man.
Robinson led them south over vast gravel plains where tufts of olive grass had begun to poke up through large patches of snow unwilling to relinquish their grip on the land. The wind was a veil of whispers. Clouds so dark and heavy and full of rain, he thought they must surely crash to the earth. They passed a small bay. The sea between the beach and the ice pack was as still as water standing in a bowl. Billings knelt and scooped up a handful of snow, thrusting it into his mouth.
Robinson’s jaw tightened. “Billings! I told you before: do not eat snow.” He sighed and waved a gloved hand at Adams. “Make him understand, will you?”
“Mister Robinson is correct, Jimmy,” he said patiently. “It will make you cold and burn your mouth, likely as not.”
Billings hung his head. “But I’m thirsty, Mister Adams. My canteen is empty. We ain’t crossed a stream in hours.”
A fox scampered out from behind a low rise. Robinson dropped to one knee and shot it. With a whoop, Billings ran out across the plain to retrieve it. Robinson drew his knife, cut out the entrails, and tossed them on the ground, then licked the blood from his fingers and threw the carcass on the sledge.
In the morning they stopped and pitched the tent where mist lingered over the ground like gun smoke after a battle. Adams and Robinson agreed to conserve their meagre supply of candles. The tent’s interior was dim, but the canvas wall glowed as the sun climbed in the sky. Robinson tied a strip of black cloth across his eyes and lay down in his blanket.
“I think time stops here,” he said. “There is nothing to measure its passage. The seasons change, but each year is the same as the one before. If I stood on this spot a thousand years ago, I daresay it would have looked just as it does today: rock, ice, and wind. In England, one can watch time passing. Timber rots, colours fade, and people die. There is nothing like that here.”
“Will we find Sir John tomorrow, Mister Adams?” Billings’ voice was that of an exhausted child on the verge of sleep.
The heavy ice in the channel to the west did not break up. Adams stared at crags and hummocks studding the floes like nuts on a cake. The shoreline was featureless, sweeping brown ridges of shingle thrust upon the land over millennia by the shifting ice. Patches of brown earth had begun to appear, but a thin crust of snow still covered much of the ground inland from the beach.
Adams’ shoulders ached from the sledge harness, and his empty belly throbbed. His feet were sore, and a freezing wind numbed his face. It sucked his energy, dried him out, made his head ache. The sun was like the flash of a shotgun muzzle through the fabric of the grey sky. His eyes burned as if lined with pepper. He removed the strip of green crape from his snow goggles and retied it, folding it over itself. He gingerly touched his blistered cheeks with his fingertips.
They pitched their tent in the early morning. Robinson searched for driftwood but returned with empty hands held high in surrender. Adams sat Billings on the ground and unbuttoned his shirt. He sat back, eyes brimming, as the rank odour of the man’s unwashed body rose and clawed at his throat.
Robinson approached, his shadow falling across them.
“My God,” he whispered. “We might as well have flogged him.”
The track ropes had left angry red weals in the flesh of Billings’ shoulders. The skin was broken and turning purple in several places along the edges of the welts. Blood had oozed into the fabric of Billings’ linen shirt and dried in rivulets down his back. Adams sighed and shook his head. An infected wound could kill a man in such a remote place.
“Oh, Jimmy,” he said, “we shall have to lighten your load.”
Billings looked up. “Cat’s paw,” he said. He pointed into the sky. “That cloud looks like a big cat’s paw.” He lifted his hand, fingers curled into the palm, and rocked it forward like a cat batting a toy.
“It would be a very big cat, wouldn’t it, Jimmy?”
Billings nodded solemnly. “Maybe a lion.” No longer shivering, he stared into the heavens with eyes that saw nothing.
“Have you ever seen a lion, Jimmy?”
Billings did not appear to hear him. Adams watched his face. This was how the man sank into himself, walling himself off from his hunger, fear, and pain. He merely made the decision to go. Adams felt a spark of envy.
“Come now, Jimmy,” whispered Adams. “We must get you to bed.”
Billings blinked and dropped his head. He groaned, misery creasing his face. Adams saw it now. Returning from that far-off place hurt Billings. He could take himself away, but returning was like bursting forth from beneath the calm, silent water only to find the air full of smoke and knives.
Adams rolled Billings into his blanket bag and wrapped his torn shoulders in strips of clean linen before removing his own boots. The stink of his own feet made Adams gag. He bathed them in meltwater, hissing at the pain of the icy water on his skin, then rubbed them dry with a scrap of linen and pulled on his dry bed socks. He and Robinson stretched out inside their blanket bags. The wind whistled and flicked at the corners of the tent. As they lay shivering, their breath rose in clouds, and moisture dripped from the tent’s ceiling. Adams touched the Bible in his coat pocket.
I would like to read a prayer, he thought. I should read a prayer.
He slept.
The next day they arrived at the edge of a large frozen bay and walked eight miles over the ice before making camp on the opposite shore. The snow on the ground was melting, and it was harder to pull the sledge through the thick slush, but there was less glare, and the burning in their eyes began to abate. Adams removed his wet boots and lay down in his blanket bag. Billings snored beside him.
“It has been ten days,” said Adams.
Robinson sat unmoving, his eyes glazed.
“A few ducks, a couple of foxes,” Adams continued. “It has allowed us to stretch our supplies but is not enough to sustain us much longer.”
Robinson blinked, reanimated. “The reindeer will migrate north.” He began filling his pipe.
Adams pulled off a mitten and scratched his beard. “They follow certain routes. We may not be on one.”
Robinson grunted. He massaged his leg. “My knees are very sore. And my feet are swollen.”
“Jimmy’s shoulders are bad. They will not soon heal up,” said Adams. “I taste blood on my tongue. I have a couple of loose teeth, and my gums are putty.” He sighed. “Strange that it should come on so soon. Scurvy, I think, is like a sin returned to haunt a man. An injury long healed opens and bleeds for the first time in years. A sore knee, an injured back, is again painful. A reminder that your past can return to visit you and make you lament it all over again.”
Robinson pulled his shotgun onto his lap. He replaced the wadding and wiped the nipple and barrel dry. There was a stiffness to his movements. He turned away to scribble in his journal. After a while he put down his pencil and lay in his blankets. His breathing slowed, but Adams knew he was awake. Eventually, the lieutenant spoke, resignation in his voice.
“Very well. There is nothing for it. We shall hunt this evening. Then we shall turn around.”
Adams took Billings and went hunting along the coast to the south. Robinson ventured inland with his shotgun, promising to meet them after midnight. With no sledge to haul, Billings trudged behind Adams without complaint, but Adams worried the light in the man had dimmed, leaving a hollowness he knew not how to fill.
The two men made their way along a brown stony beach to a spit of shingle that twisted away around a low bluff. The sky was dusted with low grey clouds. They shivered in the shadows of the cliffs rising overhead. The stones shifted and muttered under their boots, and a northerly breeze chilled their backs. The shingle beach narrowed, and the earth sloped sharply up to the east. Adams stopped where a small stream of meltwater gushed from a crevice, spouting over a jagged boulder like a tiny waterfall.
“Are you thirsty, Jimmy?” He shrugged his knapsack from his shoulder and laid his shotgun on the stones. “Let’s fill our canteens.”
He looked at Billings. The young seaman stared up at the slope above them, his mouth agape and his eyes wide in astonishment. From somewhere on the hillside behind him, Adams heard broken shards of rock slide and click under the weight of something large.
Bear.
Dread was a heavy stone in his belly. He swung around, his head full of images of yawning jaws and soulless black eyes and claws like obsidian blades. Something heavy struck him between the eyes. He fell backward, his nose crushed, eyes welling with tears. Panting, a large dark shape moved above him, indistinct in the gloom. He could not see Billings. His forehead burned, and liquid ran into his eyes. He shook his head to clear it. Flecks of blood spattered his gloves. He tried to sit up. The stock of his shotgun was smooth and familiar in his fingers. He dragged the weapon up, heavy against his shoulder, and aimed at the centre of the grunting mass above him. Only then did his vision begin to clear. The creature coalesced from a collection of blurry shadows, its edges suddenly sharper. Adams lowered the gun.
Crouched on the slope above him was a man.