CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The knife shook in Adams’ hands as he crouched and scraped lichen from the rocks. When he had a small pile, he scooped water from a meltwater pool and concocted a thin soup with fragments of dried reindeer meat. His heartbeat quickened at the exertion. Pain pulsed in his bowels. He sat back on his heels. Something moved on the eastern horizon.
“What is that?” Adams pointed. “There is something there. Jimmy, can you see it?”
Billings stared but said nothing. Adams held his gloved hands around his face, willing his eyes to focus. A small group of black dots moved slowly northward.
“Is it men?”
Robinson unstrapped his telescope and held it to his eye. “Reindeer,” he said. “Three of them.”
He jerked his chin at Billings. “You stay with the sledge. Look after these two.”
Slack-jawed, Honey and Handford sat in silence on the ground. Billings grasped Adams’ arm, misery in his face. “Mister Adams, let me come.”
Robinson barked at him. “You will stay!” He swung his shotgun from across his back and checked his ammunition bag. To Adams, he said, “We shall have to chase them.” He pointed to the north. “You get around in front of them. I will approach from their eastern flank. We will trap them on the shore.”
Billings tugged harder on Adams’ sleeve, his eyes glistening. “Please, sir, don’t leave me alone with them two.”
Adams wiped his gun barrel and spoke in a soothing tone. “Jimmy, the deer will see you from miles off, and we shall never get a shot at them. You must stay. Don’t worry, they will not hurt you. I will be back soon.”
Billings hung his head, beaten. Adams left him gnawing on his knuckle. Robinson walked off across the stones. Adams hefted his shot bag and set off to the north.
They shadowed the deer most of the evening, shepherding them west toward the shore. A pattern of grey clouds stretched across the blue sky was like a fleece flung high into the heavens. A strong breeze blew out of the north, numbing Adams’ cheekbones. He stumbled over the stones, often losing sight of Robinson. When the distance between himself and the deer began to close, he saw the lieutenant far out on the plain to the northeast.
Adams looked around for cover. He dropped into a shallow depression in the earth and lay on his stomach, peering over the lip of the hole. Propped on his elbows, he looked along the trembling shotgun barrel. The soil smelled of decay. He eased off his right mitten with his teeth and blew on his fingers. The clouds thickened and darkened, spreading across the sky like ink spilling across a canvas.
Lying prone, he had lost all sense of distance. Were the reindeer in range of his gun? He removed his snow goggles for a clearer view. Immediately his eyes teared in the wind. His entire body shook. Hunger was a fist under his ribs. It began to rain. Countless tiny projectiles slammed into his back and struck the earth around him.
He heard a shout. Robinson had begun his charge. How far away was he—half a mile? The lieutenant shuffled across the stony earth on scurvy-stiffened legs, yelling and waving his arms. The three reindeer tossed their heads and wheeled away from Robinson. The distance between them and Adams began to close.
He squinted through the rain, taking aim at the three brown shadows. He exhaled slowly and squeezed the trigger. The barrel of the shotgun bucked. He listened for the soft slap of the ball striking flesh but heard nothing. All three reindeer peeled off and galloped away across the empty expanse. Still stretched out on the ground, Adams lowered his head and let his tears run down on the stock of his shotgun.
Robinson approached, his face dark. He kicked at the stones and spat on the ground.
“You had three to aim at,” he said between clenched teeth. “We only needed one.”
Stretched on the ground, Adams was possessed of the notion that Franklin and his men had pushed the spirits of this land too far. Parry, Ross, Back—they had all lost men. Perhaps the spirits were issuing a warning that was ignored. Persist no more with this folly, they were saying. Then with Franklin, their patience ran out, and they said, You have not heeded us. Very well. This time we shall have the lot of you.
“Something’s dead there.” Billings stopped and pointed. His voice was soft and toneless.
A body lay on a thin bed of snow. Robinson took it for a pile of blankets or buffalo robes as they approached. The breeze flicked at the tips of the shaggy brown hair covering the carcass of a partially eaten reindeer. Nubs of bone protruded through dark-crimson patches of meat rent by deep striations. At one end of the carcass was a helmet of bone, antlers thrusting like talons raking the air. Robinson examined the remains, lifting flaps of skin with the tip of his shotgun barrel.
“There is some meat left here,” said Robinson.
“We shall have some marrow for our soup tonight,” said Adams.
Robinson scanned the area. “The bear that killed this beast may return. God knows how far they can smell blood.”
Honey stared at something to the east. Three wolves paced back and forth on the stony ground a mile off, eyes fixed on the men. To Robinson they seemed like spies, not bold enough to mount an assault but slinking harbingers of some larger and darker menace.
Adams had Billings retrieve the cookpot from the sledge. Together they lifted it as high as they could and slammed it down on the spine of the deer carcass. The bone snapped, and with his knife, Adams scraped out fragments of red marrow from the broken sockets. Honey and Handford sat on the ground, watching him drop tiny shreds of marrow and flesh into the pot.
Robinson held his shotgun across his chest. He walked out toward the wolves as they watched with yellow eyes, their heads low. He approached them until he was almost within range, then held the shotgun up and fired a single shot into the air. The wolves peeled off and loped away over a low rise. Robinson stood watching the empty skyline for a long time.
From somewhere far away came a faint sound. Robinson cocked his head and closed his eyes, waiting. The sun settled into a bank of grey clouds stretched across the horizon. The wolves did not return. He walked back to the tent, twisting his fingers in his beard. He sent Billings to stand watch and sat with Adams on the floorcloth next to the two sleeping invalids. A wind rose. The tent wall shook.
“I have lost much flesh,” Robinson said.
He gripped his left forearm with his right hand, then ran both hands down his thighs to his knees. Would there be enough of him to finish this? He looked at the two sleeping men. For some time now, he had wondered how a man like him became a man like them. It no longer seemed such a mystery.
“I think a man’s resolve crumbles in stages,” he said. “Like a castle in the sand washed away by the incoming tide. Once swept away, it loses all cohesion and cannot be reconstituted.” His head ached. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger.
“I used to be comforted that Franklin had so many men with him,” Adams whispered. He sat staring at his hands. “I thought if one must be lost in the wilderness, it would be better at least to have companions than to be alone. I thought it would not be so frightening.” Adams’ gaunt, white face was stark against the shadowy canvas in the tent’s gloom, like a marble bust on a shelf.
“Be sure not to leave the muzzle of your shotgun on the ground,” Robinson said. “Water in the barrel will result in a wet charge.”
Outside the tent, the sound of the wind was like countless voices gasping.
Adams sifted through the items discarded on the shore at Victory Point. Honey and Handford sat on the sledge. The gravel plain to the east was tinged with the first tendrils of summer green. A pair of sandpipers flitted over the stones, then rose in the air and vanished into the sky. The salty smell of the ocean was light on the air. Robinson kicked a cooking stove with his boot.
“What is this, sir?” Billings stared at an object on the ground that appeared to be a large square knapsack.
Robinson stood over the object, staring down. “I think it is a Halkett boat,” he said.
“A boat?” asked Billings.
“An airboat.” Robinson knelt to examine it. “It inflates like a balloon, then floats. There is a bellows here, and oars. You row it like a raft. It might help us to cross the ice from King William Land to Boothia. Three weeks ago the ice was still intact, but it may not be so now. There could be open water between Cape Felix and Boothia. Even if the floes have not broken up, the meltwater pools could be waist deep.”
Billings took their wet socks and laid them out on a large flat stone to dry, then sat on the ground to darn the holes in his trousers. Inside the tent, the two Franklin survivors sat like a pair of ascetics over a thin soup made with fragments of meat from the deer carcass. They stared into their bowls but could not seem to lift their spoons.
Robinson saw Adams watching them. “Very soon you shall have to decide,” he said.
“Are we being pursued?”
Robinson’s expression was pensive. “I hear sounds in the mist.”
“Wolves?”
“Not wolves. They might be gunshots. Or just the ice. But we must hurry just the same. We are making barely eight miles a day. At this rate we will not get back to Port Leopold before Captain Ross sails.”
Adams nodded at Honey and Handford. “They cannot go faster,” he said. “Not without meat and rest. They are too weak.”
“Neither will see Port Leopold,” Robinson said. “Pretending otherwise dooms all three of us.”
Adams dropped his voice to a whisper. “We will drag them,” he said. “On the sledge.”
Robinson frowned. “Splendid. Except not even Billings has the strength to haul them. Do we then leave them, or stay and die with them, like Fitzjames?”
Adams hissed through clenched teeth, “You would shoot them both like horses?”
Robinson shrugged. “You are a man of faith. When a patient is badly stricken, do you pray for him?”
“Of course.”
“And if there is no hope?”
“I pray for the Lord to take him quickly and without pain.”
Robinson nodded. “Then pray now. For if He does not take them soon, He will take us all.”
The same hint of menace in Robinson’s tone was there again. It was stronger now, portentous, like a tremor deep in the earth. Days earlier he had dared Robinson to shoot him when he refused to leave the invalids. He had seen the instant of vacillation then in the lieutenant’s eyes. Could he bluff him a second time? The man would accept no counsel, tolerate no dissent. Leave them and live. Take them and die. Robinson had made his decision, but for Adams it was a dilemma with no solution, a boulder he pushed against but could not move. He explored Robinson’s face, then shook a finger at him.
“There will be questions to answer. If not from the Admiralty, then from Fleet Street.”
“I shall inform Their Lordships and the editor of the Times that we have seen the North-West Passage. I shall assure them it is glorious and strongly recommend they come and see it for themselves.”
Adams frowned. “But they would never do such a thing.”
Robinson nodded wearily. “Precisely.” His was the expression of a man winning an argument. “Finally you understand.”
Adams and Robinson set out again in the evening in a light fog. Billings dragged the sledge. The gaunt figures of Honey and Handford stumbled alongside. The sky brightened as though a lamp was suddenly hung overhead. Golden bars of sunlight reached through the grey clouds, steaming away the mist.
The first ball took Handford behind the right shoulder. He spun around, jerking like a fish on a line. The sound of the gunshot followed an instant later. A second ball struck him in the chest, twirling him in a grotesque jig. He pitched to the earth, crumpling in his overcoat in a heap so small, Adams could hardly believe there was a man within. The assailants had approached under cover of the mist, forced into their attack by the emergence of the sun. They walked three abreast like infantry with weapons levelled, their shadows rippling darkly on the ground.
“Spread out!” Robinson ducked his head and ran, bent at the waist.
Adams ran in the opposite direction. Honey dropped to the ground beside the sledge. Frozen, Billings stared down at Handford’s body, mouth agape. The three attackers stood together in the open. They did not seek cover, for there was none. The man who had killed John Handford was reloading with twitching hands. The second man swung the barrel of his gun toward Adams as he ran across the open ground. The man’s body jerked with the recoil. A ball whined past Adams’ head. The man fired again, but Adams saw he had rushed the shot. The ball pinged off the stones behind him.
Adams stopped and raised his shotgun. His first ball struck the man in the chest. He went down, the back of his head bouncing on the gravel. Adams looked across and saw Billings still standing by the sledge. Honey lay face down, his hands over his head.
“Jimmy! Get down!”
Billings turned his gaze on Adams. A beam of sunlight fell across him. His eyes were yellow lamps in his head. The third man had his shotgun levelled. Robinson had dropped to one knee, his weapon at his shoulder. Both fired simultaneously, the two gunshots resounding as one colossal blast. Neither man fell, but Billings folded and dropped, nerveless, as if beaten on the back of the knees with a baton. He crashed face-first to the earth, limbs splayed. Adams swung the barrel of his gun around and shot Robinson’s attacker. The man’s head snapped back in a bloody spray. His body arched and struck the earth.
The distant sun boiled in the cold air. As rays of light streamed across the stones, Adams wondered if the assailants’ errant shots had somehow pierced the clouds. The remaining attacker abandoned his attempt to reload and flung his weapon to the earth. He stood unmoving, hands by his sides. Only now did Adams see an unarmed fourth man stumbling in from the east. The melting snow created a patchwork of shallow lakes and rivulets on the flat terrain. Ripples rose on the surface of the water. The stink of gunpowder hung in the air, too heavy for the wind to disperse.
Robinson approached the two survivors with his gun raised. Adams went to Billings, heavy-footed. His face was hot, the rest of his body freezing. The wind ruffled Billings’ hair, and for the briefest moment, Adams thought he might be moving. But then he saw the wound in his throat and the blood on the ground. He knelt, dizzy and dry-mouthed.
The man who had thrown down his gun watched Robinson and Adams approach, his expression doleful. He hung his head, his great brown beard on his chest, and sighed.
“Well, that didn’t work out so well.” He looked at Robinson’s shotgun. “Go on, then. Get on with it.”
“Which one are you?” Robinson asked. “Are you Gregory?”
“I am James Walker, able seaman.” He gave a casual salute, then pointed at the unarmed man who had walked in from the plain and now stood behind him with terror in his eyes. “That there’s Francis Dunn.” He gestured at the body of the man Adams had shot through the heart, who now lay on his back with his arms flung wide. “That’s Gregory there.” Walker looked at the body of the second man. “And that’s Billy Orren.” He winced. “Oh, Jesus, you made a right mess of his face.”
Adams’ heavy ball had taken much of Orren’s tongue and jaw. Shards of bone flashed white in the sunlight. Blood pooled around his head. He was still moving, his eyes rolled back to yellow moons, eyelids flickering. Fingers curling and grasping at nothing. His head fell to the side. A great gob of blood fountained onto the gravel, and he died. Walker looked past Adams and Robinson at the two bodies lying behind them. He sighed.
“Ah, bugger. I got Johnny Handford. Didn’t mean to do that. My eyes ain’t much good no more. I went for the one in the middle. Thought he was one of you.”
“Gregory had you do this?” asked Robinson.
“We was gonna come when you slept. Then the fog lifted, and we got caught out.”
“You could not refuse him?”
Walker sneered. “You know what makes one man follow another?”
Robinson kept his gun trained on the man’s chest. “Explain it to me.”
Walker regarded him with indifference. “You know what to tell a man who’s starvin’? When he’s just a death’s head upon a mopstick?”
Robinson said nothing.
“When he’s so hungry, he’ll boil down his shoes and his belt and his wolfskin and the bones of a lemming that’s dead for a week? When he’ll pull a knife on another man over a bit of meat the size of your fingernail?”
“There is no excuse for—”
“Have you ever seen a man so hungry, he will shoot his messmate dead and eat him? Have you seen that?”
Robinson met the man’s gaze. “I have not seen that.”
Walker looked tired. “Well, then, you’re hardly likely to understand.”
“What happened to you?”
Walker shrugged. “A war.”
“A war?”
Walker gestured at the man standing behind him and spread his arms wide. “Behold the victors.”
“No. The losers.” Robinson took a step toward him and raised his shotgun at Walker’s head.
The man stared back at him, satisfaction in his eyes.
Adams put a hand on Robinson’s arm. “No,” he whispered.
Robinson stiffened, disbelief in his voice. “Good God, man, he has just killed your best lad!”
Adams had no appetite for an argument. “I am tired. Are you not tired? I know only melancholy.”
Robinson did not look at him. He held the shotgun high, staring down the barrel at Walker. Adams saw his finger twitch on the trigger.
“Three dead men,” said Adams. “What good will two more be?”
Robinson bristled. “They will hang, in any case. There will be quite the crowd at Newgate.”
“Show them mercy,” said Adams.
“How am I not merciful?” Robinson turned to face Adams now, his expression incredulous. His chest rose and fell in great heaves. “It is precisely why I would shoot them both now. As the senior officer, I have the authority. I will have you acknowledge that.”
“Consider what they have endured—”
“Step back, sir. We can hardly take them back. We have no shackles. They shall be on us as soon as we turn our backs.” Robinson’s eyes were wild and shining. Adams saw his expression and, for the first time, feared him. He could not fight this. Something had fractured in the man, and the air between them was changed forever.
“For God’s sake, hurry and be done with it,” said Walker, his tone bored.
High against Robinson’s shoulder, the shotgun no longer trembled in his grip.
Adams looked past him at the vast landscape. A meltwater pool glittered with an encrusted film of ice, and he thought it more exquisite than any jewel. He fought off a wave of nausea and lost all sense of time passing, of distance traversed, of the number of men dead.
Robinson lowered the shotgun. “My powder and ball is precious,” he said. “I shall not waste it.” His gaze was locked on Walker’s face, but his words were directed at Adams. “You should know it is more than they would have done for us.”
“I do not thank you,” said Walker, taunting him. “You do us no favours.”
“Go back the way you came,” Robinson said. “Try for Repulse Bay. Or the Red River Colony. Maybe west to the Columbia District. Tell them your story there.”
Walker scoffed. “Jesus, man, d’ye think we’d speak of this? We’ll hang if we do. Once you’ve done what we’ve done, there is nowhere you can go. We might as well have tattoos on our faces.”
“You will not walk with us and slit our throats in the night.”
“You send us to our deaths.”
“You would just as soon send us to ours.”
Walker stared back at him. He appeared to be readying another plea. His gaze went to Billings’ body. A quizzical expression creased his features. “Y’know, I didn’t see Billy Orren aiming for that big fella. We could see he wasn’t armed. I reckon that was an accident.” Then he shrugged and spat, resigned to the futility of apologies. “Give us a gun and a shot bag, at least. You can’t deny us something to hunt with.”
“I’ll deny you whatever I damn well please,” said Robinson, but appeared to mull over the man’s request. He looked at the second survivor, Dunn, and pointed at Gregory’s body. “You. Take his ammunition bag and walk over that way, two hundred paces.” To Walker: “You wait over there, apart from him. Stay that distance from each other and walk until I cannot see you.”
“So it’s to be lemmings and hares for us, then?”
“Look for the reindeer.”
“Reindeer.” Walker chuckled and shook his head ruefully. “More likely to find a bloody unicorn. Captain Crozier told us there were herds of reindeer and musk oxen at Back’s River, but we knew they wouldn’t migrate this far north, not in the winter. We lost two men who went shooting in the snow and never came back.”
Robinson said nothing more. He still held his shotgun across his chest.
Walker studied him, then sighed.
“So be it. But I must say a last farewell to Mister Gregory. We were together four years. If you don’t like it, shoot me if you can spare the ball.”
He strode toward Robinson and stood before him, touching an index finger to the point between his eyes. “Only make sure you do it right here—there’s a good fella.”
Robinson did not move.
Walker waited.
Adams held his breath.
Walker gave a derisive grunt. He turned away and went to Gregory’s body, then pulled out a knife. “You may not wish to watch this, but we need provisions for our journey, and there is nothin’ else. Understand it, or do not.”
Walker knelt next to Gregory’s corpse and began cutting. He called to Dunn.
“Frankie, bring me a canvas bag, will you, mate?” He grunted with the effort as he sawed and stabbed. “I need something to carry this in.”