CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Robinson approached and stood beside Billings. Far ahead, an object shifted on the shingle.
Robinson’s breathing was loud in his head. He raised the telescope to his eye. More than one object, he decided. They were too small to be musk ox and exhibited none of the lope and nod of reindeer.
“People,” he said at last. “At least two.”
They walked faster, limping and rolling on sore feet. Billings and Adams drew the sledge, holding the track rope in their hands to spare their bleeding shoulders. An adult Esquimaux couple and a child of no more than ten watched them approach. Their faces were dark with sun and smudged with soot. All were clad in reindeer-skin parkas and trousers. Beside them, a pack of dogs stood hitched to a sledge.
“Hello!” Robinson called out, his hand raised in greeting.
The man and woman stared warily. The man held a bow and arrow in one hand. He raised the other and responded with a shout. He did not smile. Adams and Robinson placed their shotguns on the gravel and raised their hands. Billings stood behind them. The Esquimaux couple watched in silence.
“They are not afraid like the other fellow we met,” said Adams.
“They have seen white men before.” Robinson kept his voice calm.
The man had not discarded his bow and arrow. There was no bonhomie in his manner. The boy sat on the sledge, his ruddy face ringed by a halo of caribou fur. His lips were a lustrous red, and the brown skin of his cheek was smooth and unblemished. A rectangular metal box sat on his lap, its hinged lid open. Robinson felt something flutter in his stomach.
“What is that? What does he have there?”
From his position closer to the boy, Adams tried to peer into the box.
“A journal or logbook of some kind. Leather-bound, I think.”
The child picked a piece of paper from the box and held it above his head. Robinson’s mouth was dry. “No. Please, do not—”
Before he could say more, the child tore the piece of paper in two, the dry slashing sound incongruous in the barren landscape. He flung both scraps into the air. The breeze snatched them away in an instant, flapping and tumbling like tiny birds in a gale. His eyes round with fascination, the child twisted his torso and watched until the paper was out of sight. Robinson thrust out both his hands.
“Stop!” he shouted. “For God’s sake, stop!”
The boy froze. He stared at the two white men, the box still open on his lap. The woman scowled and stepped in front of the child. The man shouted angrily at Robinson in words he did not understand. Robinson cursed his own impatience.
“I am sorry!” He bowed his head and backed away, waving his hands in what he hoped was a conciliatory gesture. “I will not hurt the boy.” He attempted a smile. The parents glared at him. Robinson reached into his backpack and brought out his last packet of needles. He held it out to the woman. The suspicion melted from her face, which was instantly blank. She inspected the contents of his hand. Unsmiling, she reached out and took the needles. Robinson pointed again at the box.
“Where did you get this? Were there white men there? Kabloona? ”
The woman spoke to her husband, then looked back at Robinson. He heard the word kabloona but understood nothing else. The woman pointed to the northeast and spoke again. Her gibberish stirred irritation in Robinson. How could these throaty grunts and clicks constitute a language? He glanced sideways at Adams.
“You try,” he said quietly.
“Please,” Adams said to the boy, affecting a soft, lilting tone. He pointed at the box. “May we see that?” Smiling broadly, he approached slowly, his hands spread wide. He pointed again at the box. “Please may we see your box?” He slapped one hand with the other and pointed two fingers of one hand at his eyes, then pointed at the box. “I will not take it. Will not touch it.”
The man and the woman stood motionless, their eyes fixed on Adams. The boy tore another piece of paper from inside the box and tossed it into the air. It bucked and flew away on the wind. Again the boy swivelled to watch the paper until it disappeared. Robinson wanted to scream.
The Esquimaux couple glared at him again, their nostrils flared and their jaws set. The woman muttered something in her throat. Her fingers closed around the handle of a small knife. She took two steps forward. Robinson caught the odours of oil and sweat and fish. If I had my cutlass, he thought, I would run you through, you witch. He attempted an apologetic smile but could feel his blood hot in his face. “I am sorry. Sorry.” He pointed at the box, then spread his hands in an interrogative gesture. “This box. Where did you find it?”
Her eyes were black. She bared her teeth at him and snarled, the sound of a knife blade across bone. Robinson felt his fists clenching. His throat tightened. The situation was slipping from him. His patience snapped like a thread pulled on once too often. These savages had something he needed. He no longer cared whether they understood.
“Enough!” he exclaimed. “We shall have that box. It is Royal Navy property.” He pointed at the boy and said, “Billings, retrieve it this instant. That is an order.”
Billings strode forward. The boy stared at him, round-eyed. Billings’ shadow fell across him. Alarm flashed on the woman’s face. She raised her knife, hissing. The man nocked an arrow and raised his bow in one fluid movement.
“No!” Adams shouted, both hands in front of him, fingers splayed. For an instant the man hesitated.
Robinson was on his knees. He swept up the shotgun and fired in a single motion, the weapon only inches above the earth. The recoil spun the gun from his grasp. The barrel sprang back, striking him above the eyebrow. A hot pain shot through his hand. The ball took the Esquimaux man in the chest and kicked him backward. The woman shrieked—a long, high-pitched wail that continued for longer than Robinson knew a human could exhale. The smell of gun smoke and blood settled like a cloak. The man lay motionless, one leg bent under the other. He stared upward, his fingers curled around the bow.
Robinson put his uninjured hand to his brow, astonished when it came away bloody. The woman stopped screaming, the sudden silence louder than any sound he had ever heard. She seized the reins of the sledge and made a noise in her throat. The dogs ran, bounding off quickly to the south. The boy sat like a stone idol on the sledge, expressionless, the round hood of his fur parka shrinking as it pulled away. Within a minute they were black specks far out on the stony shore.
The three men stood in silence. Each avoided the others’ gaze. Billings’ face was ashen, both his hands clapped over his mouth. He turned his back and stared out at the pack. Adams went to the fallen man. The wound in his chest welled with glistening blood. He turned to Robinson, pale and shaking.
“Did you have to press them like that?”
Blood dripped into Robinson’s eyes from the gash on his brow. He touched the burn on his hand. “It could have been Crozier’s log,” he said. “It could have told us everything.” He wanted to explain to Adams the alacrity with which the passion overtook him, how he was helpless against it. He wanted Adams to understand that he had needed a moment of authority, just one thing over which he had control, but even as he rehearsed them in his mind, the words sounded frail and hollow. They would not carry the weight he needed them to bear.
Adams’ eyes were wet. “You frightened them! What parents would not defend their child?”
“I never meant—”
“We could have traded something.”
“We have nothing left.”
Adams’ glare denounced him now. A vein throbbed in his neck. “Are you blind?” He waved a hand at the dead man and shouted, “You saw he was armed!”
Robinson could summon no more words to explain himself. “It ... it was Royal Navy property.”
“Here is your navy property.” Adams lifted the volume the boy had dropped and held it out to Robinson. “We were already too late. That was the last page. The boy tore them all out.”
He fingered the eviscerated spine, then hurled the book at Robinson. Too heavy to be carried off by the wind, it dropped like a bird felled by a bullet. Robinson stared dully at it, as if it might spring magically to life. Adams stood glaring, his chest heaving. Judging him.
Robinson felt a sudden fury rise in him. He had indulged Adams thus far, but the man’s callowness was a source of mounting exasperation. His tolerance was waning like a wick burning down to its end. Why could Adams not understand? The man believed that whatever he desired should be his merely because he bowed his head and carried a Bible. He had set out to find Franklin because he thought himself anointed by some celestial magician. Robinson had never considered himself entitled to anything. He had always known that whatever he wanted, he would have to earn. Whatever he could not earn, he would take. Sanctimonious windbags and obstreperous savages be damned.
They left large stones on the shallow grave in case she returned for her man.
Adams said nothing more to Robinson, wretched by the Esquimaux’s death, wretched now that he could do nothing but bury the man in this emptiness. Wretched that when it was time to make their report, he would say it had all been an accident, the result of a misunderstanding. An act of self-defence. If the Esquimaux woman were ever to report the incident, her word would not be taken over that of a Royal Navy officer. He was appalled at the finality of it, that a man could die so needlessly and there would be so little to say about it. To further reproach Robinson demanded a strength he no longer possessed. Pity for the dead man was futile. He could make no more sense of it than that, and it left him sick with guilt. There was no keeping men alive here.
The plain to the east was veined with meltwater streams snaking to the sea. Swathed in grey haze, the sun guttered like an old lamp. A single yellow poppy nodded in the dirt. Adams worried for Billings. The young seaman walked with his head down, far behind Adams, making no attempt to close the distance. He had not spoken a word since the man was killed. Adams wondered how to explain it all to him. His words seemed to reassure the simple lad less and less.
Robinson had rendered his own verdict. Already he had begun to weave his own story, contrition fading into exculpation. “There was nothing to be done,” he said. He walked alongside Adams, hands in his pockets. His expression was grave. “They are not known to be so hostile. It is their way to discard their weapons and greet travellers unarmed on the ice. We did our part when we dropped our guns. I can only think they had met white men who had mistreated them.”
Adams sighed. It was someone else’s fault, then? Perhaps Robinson’s attempts at extenuation were not entirely without merit. Could Crozier have so enraged the Esquimaux?
They trekked north along the beach toward Victory Point. Ahead, the horizon gleamed, white like hot metal. After two days’ clambering over icy hummocks, they found progress easier on the long, flat stretches of shingle. The wind was a hollow hum, the scraping of the sledge runners like an axe on a whetstone. The three men marched in step, their boots rising and falling in unison. Adams watched the ice for seals and the skies for geese.
After they had walked for half a day, an object appeared on the shingle ahead, above the tidemark. A ship’s boat, thirty feet in length, sat on a long wooden sledge. Lacking a mast, rudder, and sail, it seemed oddly bare. Then Adams realised.
“They removed all the iron fittings.”
“To make her lighter,” said Robinson. “They were dragging her.”
“On this?” Adams kicked the wooden sledge with the toe of his boot. “It looks like mahogany. It must be at least as heavy as the boat—six, seven hundred pounds. They were planning to haul this all the way to Back’s River?”
Adams thought of the davits standing empty on the deck of Erebus . He imagined Franklin’s exhausted and hungry men dragging the boats from the stricken ships over the broken ice pack to shore, pushing them up twenty-foot hummocks and lowering them down the other side. They stood at the gunwale of the boat and looked inside. The body of a large man lay across the stern, swathed in pieces of a bearskin and the remnants of a blanket. The corpse’s bare head lay under a thwart. Some portion of the scalp remained, patches of grey hair adhering to the skull.
Adams’ chest tingled. Upon leaving Erebus he had not expected to find any trace of Crozier or his papers, but hope remained his intractable companion, returning to him even when unexpected.
“Is it him? Is it Crozier?”
Robinson leaned over to inspect the corpse. “I think not,” he said. “Crozier was not this tall.”
Birds had taken the eyes. Blotchy yellow-white skin was tight across the cheekbones below the empty sockets. Thin whiskers sprouted from the shrivelled skin of the chin. The man’s jaw hung open, teeth bared. He reclined as on a throne, each arm positioned on a large pile of discarded clothing stacked on either side. He wore mittens on his hands and stockings on his booted feet. Sections of the limbs were exposed, the thin flesh yellow and shrunken over the bones. Adams explored the corpse gently with the tip of his knife.
“The torso has suffered trauma, but of what origin, I cannot say. I think foxes have been in there and consumed the soft parts.”
“And bears, perhaps.”
Robinson pointed to the bow of the boat, and Adams noticed a second body, a collection of bones scattered across the floor of the boat beneath the foremost thwarts. There was no sign of the dead man’s clothing. No flesh or skin remained on the bones. Adams picked up a jawbone but could not find the skull.
“I am not even certain this man’s entire body is here.” Adams examined the other bones. “I see only a single femur.”
Robinson examined two double-barrelled shotguns standing in the stern, their barrels pointed at the sky. One barrel of each gun was loaded. Bags of powder and shot and brass percussion caps were stacked in the stern. A cobbler’s awl, its sharp steel point sheathed in a cork, lay near an empty pemmican canister amid empty cans, pieces of silver cutlery, and pairs of steel scissors. Robinson collected a pocketknife and tested the blade carefully with his thumb before placing it in his knapsack. They searched the piles of clothing and equipment for messages. Adams retrieved a book and peered at the cover.
“ The Vicar of Wakefield. And there is a Bible here too.”
Robinson pulled off his cap and scratched his head. He picked up a pair of spectacles, examined them, then tossed them back into the boat. A small packet of tobacco lay there. He held it to his nose. Satisfied, he put it in his pocket.
“Do you think these two went with Crozier?”
“If so, they must have turned around. If one were dragging the boat south, would not the bow be pointing that way? But look.” He pointed to the northeast. “It is pointing that way. Toward the ships.”
“They were ill, or too weak to hunt with Crozier. They were going back to join Fitzjames.”
Robinson grimaced. He scanned the empty land. “Or else there is something they were trying to get away from here.”
They finished their pipes crouched in the boat’s lee to escape the wind. Stretching endlessly to the east, the raw earth was like an enormous pan of ash in the evening light. A mile along the beach, they discovered a tent ring on a low rise. Neatly positioned in a circle, the stones were free of moss and lichen. Robinson filled his pipe with the tobacco he had salvaged from the boat. He held out the packet to Adams, who accepted it with a nod. Billings knelt, his arm buried to the elbow in a lemming burrow.
They approached the abandoned campsite and scanned the earth. Scraps of navy-blue cloth and slivers of wood were scattered around the ring of stones. A broken axe handle stuck out of the ground, the shaft splintered like a jagged piece of bone. Long pieces of white lay scattered on the ground. Adams counted a dozen bones. Two others protruded from the ground at odd angles. He wondered if they had been tugged from the icy gravel by foxes or wolves.
“Reindeer bones,” he called to Robinson. “Perhaps there is game here.”
He stepped among the scattered remains, then stopped. At his feet lay a longer bone. He picked it up and turned it over in his hands. It was a human femur. He looked back at the bones on the ground. Human ribs. He pushed his goggles up to his forehead and peered at the head of the femur. He threw his mitten off and ran his bare fingertips over the bone. Then all strength left his hands, and the bone clattered on the gravel. Ten feet away, Robinson looked up and turned to him.
“What is it?”
Adams did not answer. At his feet was a human skull. Its jawbone was missing. He knelt to examine it. He turned the skull over carefully. In the side of the skull was a round hole about the size of a sixpence.