CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Robinson had made his decision. “We shall leave him.”
He stood beside Honey’s shrouded corpse, studying Adams’ face for any sign of dissent. The man would not meet his gaze, and that, he decided, was enough. He stood with his back turned, staring up into a glaucous sky.
Robinson had awakened the evening before at the sound of Adams’ knife scraping Honey’s bones. He looked out from the tent to see Adams crouched by the corpse. He felt only yawning detachment where there might once have been shock or disgust. What had the seaman Walker said? Understand it, or do not. Robinson thought if he held his hand over a flame or plunged a knife into his flesh, he would feel nothing.
But he needed to protect himself. A man who would eat the flesh of one man might eat the flesh of another. He decided he would not allow Adams to walk behind him. He would keep the nipple of his gun clean and dry, the percussion cap fresh. The lead balls in his shot bag were a comforting weight in his hand. He sharpened his knife on a stone, ensuring that Adams saw him do it. Once they reached the cache of deer meat, they would both be safe, and there would be no need to speak of it. His spirits rose. Surely he could convince Adams to leave this part of the tale out of his report. Then it would be easier to persuade him to omit others. He waited, giving Adams a final opportunity to object. Finally, Robinson pulled the sledge out to a clear patch of ice and slid one of the track ropes over his shoulder. Adams picked up the other. Neither glanced at the swathed corpse on the ice.
They walked away and did not look back.
Harnessed with Robinson, Adams walked more urgently than he had in days. He found himself several strides ahead of the lieutenant. The track rope stretched uncomfortably, forcing him to slow his pace.
Now that it was done, he sought only to flee the scene of his disgrace. He tried not to think of it, but as the ache in his belly subsided and his strength returned, the shame rose within him like a monster emerging from a cave. It had been lurking unseen, driven into the shadows by his need, but it snarled at him now. An act that hours earlier seemed not only permissible but essential, he saw now as the most egregious of sins. He still felt the knife in his hand, imagined the blade in the corpse’s leg, the strips of red. He glanced across at Robinson, hating him for not waking to take the knife from his hand, for not hauling him back from the precipice. He touched the Bible in his pocket. It felt puny and impotent against the enormity of his crime—a weapon so paltry, it could only bounce off the thick hide of his remorse.
He was most frightened by the notion that nothing he knew of the world would help him here. Not law. Not God. He looked at a burnished blue sky and saw no clouds. Naught to obscure him or protect him.
How can Thou not see me, Lord? I am here.
“Good Lord, why are there no wars anymore?” Robinson’s father puffed on a cigar as he strolled along beside him. He wore a patterned velvet waistcoat over a white linen shirt. “The navy does no fighting! Chastising slavers and pirates, chaperoning British merchantmen—it is all the navy can find to do.”
“I shall soon be a captain,” said Robinson. “You shall see how wrong you were.” Only out here, walking over dead land and dead sailors, could he say things to his father he would never say to his face.
“So what will your story be, lad? Make it a good one.” His father’s coattails flapped like a pair of blackbirds in the wind. “I would have placed a wager on you to find the Passage, but in truth the odds were always too long to tempt me. I am investing in railways now, you know. The returns are entirely satisfactory.”
“I might not only be the man to find the Passage,” said Robinson, “I may yet be the first to sail through it if the Admiralty gives me command of the next expedition.” His mind raced, considering the possibilities. “If we can get across the North Water early enough in the summer, there will be time enough to leave a depot at Barrow Strait and more caches at locations along the west coast of Boothia.”
His father lifted an eyebrow and stroked his whiskers. “Perhaps I should go into shipping. Surely, as the father of the man who found the Passage, I shall receive some dispensation. Perhaps the Crown will give me preferential access to the Passage.”
“No doubt Mother will be pleased,” said Robinson. “She enjoys living in a manor with a large court and walled gardens built four hundred years ago by a knight whose name she cannot remember.”
“Ah, well. We are from money. It is what she knows.”
From money? Robinson frowned. His father’s father was a farmer and potter, barely a generation removed from costermongers. “If there is one thing I have taken from you, it is that a man can make history with ink, a quill, and a penchant for mendacity.”
“Then I have at least achieved something. You know, do you not, that celebrity cannot be shared, it can only be diluted? Your reputation would be greatly enhanced if your companion is not there to contradict your version of events. Their Lordships of the Admiralty have a short span of attention, and men have short memories. They can only remember one name. It must be yours, not his. There can only be one hero here.”
“He is brave.”
His father tapped ash from his cigar and watched it fall like snow. “I knew you would not amount to much. There is no room for sentimentality.”
“That is your other lesson, then, is it?”
His father sighed. “Frederick, why could you not have had a head for business?”
“I thought it akin to gambling. And too much time spent with dishonourable men.”
“Dishonourable men?” His father let out a blue cloud of cigar smoke. “Your comrade ate a fellow. I question your standards, boy.”
Adams looked up at the sun, pinned high in the heavens like a brooch on a gown. The sky was a blue shell. A light breeze blew. They left the ice and stepped ashore on the coast of Boothia. The stony beach stretched away to the north. They left the sledge on the shingle and clambered up a low bluff to survey the landscape. The climb left them breathless and shivering, their hearts hammering in their chests.
Robinson lifted his telescope and swept the western ice pack below them for a long time. He lowered it, wiped the lens with a cloth, and held it to his eye again.
“Are we pursued?” Adams asked.
Robinson hesitated. “I thought I saw movement. Perhaps a bear.” He lowered the telescope. “We have no time to return and chase it.” He pointed to the north. “The cache is close. Two days’ walk, I should say.”
Adams coughed. He grimaced at a pain in his hip that he had not noticed before. “How far is Fury Beach?”
“No more than two hundred miles.”
No more than that? Robinson’s casual tone brought a smile to Adams’ lips. Two hundred miles. Once he might have comprehended such a distance. “Through great trial does man know himself. And thus does he know God. The Bible tells us this.”
“Two weeks.” There was a hardness in Robinson’s eyes. “We will manage it in two weeks.”
Adams prayed silently. Consuming Honey’s flesh had left his body stronger but placed a great weight upon his spirit. He remembered the texture of it in his mouth, the click of his jaws and the wet sensation of the meat between his teeth. Most of all, he remembered the taste of the man’s flesh. It was forever in his mouth now, a glowing-hot sensation blistering the surface of his tongue but no longer offering nourishment. He hawked and spit on the ground and rinsed his mouth with freezing meltwater, but the taste remained.
They descended to the beach. Small flocks of ducks flew low over the sea. They checked their guns, concealed themselves among the rocks above the waterline, and lay down to wait. Minutes later, another flock appeared. Both men lifted their weapons and fired. A single bird tumbled from the air and splashed into the water a dozen yards from the beach. It lay in a few inches of water, its feathers ruffled by the wind. Adams removed his stockings and boots and danced out into the freezing shallows to retrieve it.
When he returned to the pebbled beach, he knelt at a patch of moss between the stones and pried it up with the tip of his knife as Robinson cleaned the bird. Adams struck his flint and steel against the clump of moss and blew on it until it caught. Smoke from the cooking fire billowed around them, cloaking them in a choking fog. The duck was only half-cooked when the two starving men could wait no longer. They tore the bird to pieces. The sun climbed. They rolled out their floorcloth, pulled the tent canvas over them like a cocoon, and slept like creatures hibernating in the earth.
Light rain fell. Adams put the tent, floorcloth, and blanket bags on the sledge. He knelt and began to roll up the deflated airboat.
“Leave it here,” said Robinson. “The lighter our load, the sooner we shall get to the meat.”
Adams hesitated. Weeks earlier they had walked across frozen bays and inlets that might now be free of ice. Was it worth hauling the extra weight to save walking around bodies of water?
Robinson sensed his misgivings. “We have no time to waste.”
They both looked up as more ducks passed overhead, outside the range of their guns. Robinson collected a handful of feathers from the fire-blackened stones and tossed them into the breeze.
“We were lucky to get this duck. We may not soon encounter more. We must have the deer meat.”
Adams remembered butchering the reindeer carcass, the scrape of his knife on the bones and the snap of the spine. The misted dead eyes of the animal, the red flesh and the white fat. The misted dead eyes of Samuel Honey. The sallow skin and the yellow fat.
They must have the meat. Once they had the meat, they could make Fury Beach. He dropped the airboat on the shingle, and they set out in a gloomy twilight. The sea to the west was the colour of lead. Adams’ beard was wet with rain.
On their best day, they made seventeen miles when the ground was firm.
They skirted a small bay fringed with green lichen and limped over the muddy earth, through a place where nothing lived or grew and where all was slush and gravel and clay and rock scraped flat by the ice for millennia. More than once they came upon a bay or headland that Adams could have sworn they had already traversed, as if a great cosmic hand had swept up the land in their wake and set it down in their path to make them endure it again. At dawn, they pitched the tent on the stony ground. Each watched the other check and clean his shotgun. They crawled beneath their blankets with the weapons tight in their grasp.
Adams listened to the wind. He thought of nothing but the squelching of boots in the mud and the scrape of sledge runners on the gravel. In a dream his hand hovered over Honey’s corpse with a sharp knife that pricked the waxy skin. Steam rose from the meat, and clear pink fluid gushed from the limb like the juice from a turkey. The image was still vivid when he woke, the tart taste of Honey’s flesh lingering on his tongue. For the hundredth time he thought, I have damned myself. There is no forgiveness to be had for this.
The next day he shot a hare. They ate the last scraps of the creature and sucked the bones, then pounded them into powder and swilled them down with water. In a shallow depression in the earth, a collection of large flat stones stood atop one another like broken teeth. Moss grew on the stones. Bones lay scattered on the ground. They searched the area for meat cached by passing Esquimaux but found nothing and walked on.
Adams was so weak, the thin flesh on his bones was itself a tremendous burden, like a suit of armour growing heavier with each step. His bones clicked and scraped. He shuffled to a stop and gripped his wrist to feel his galloping pulse. His foot was a club on the end of his leg. His hip ached, and his gums were sore and swollen, teeth unsteady in his head.
Robinson limped along a dozen yards from him. He muttered to himself, sometimes angrily, other times in a gentle murmur. He cast sidelong glances at Adams, looking away quickly if Adams returned his gaze. He no longer strapped his shotgun across his back but carried it ready in his hands. In the morning they rested. Adams lay awake and watched Robinson until the lieutenant fell asleep with his gloved hand on the stock of his gun.
Clouds massed overhead. Fog blanketed the shore. A freezing northerly breeze numbed Adams’ face. They hunched into their coats and listened to the ice disintegrate in the channel to the west.
Robinson pointed. “We are close!” he said, grinning. His mood had lightened. The excitement in his voice was boyish, unfamiliar. “Do you remember that hill? The boulders were at the foot of it.”
Adams watched him, jaw agape, exhausted. Which Robinson was this? The brave and resourceful officer? The sullen and selfish bully, the coward? The killer? Adams did not know which man he followed along the stony beach on aching feet. Above the tidemark, two hundred yards away, a cluster of large boulders emerged from the fog at the foot of a slope.
Robinson slipped his shoulder out of the harness and unslung his shotgun, dropping it on the sledge. He broke into a shuffle. His left leg moved unnaturally, the knee barely bending. His telescope wobbled on his back.
Adams halted, swaying with fatigue. His eyes streamed in the wind. Overcome by dizziness, he sat down on the sledge and tried to force air into lungs that felt half their normal size. When he looked up, Robinson had reached the boulders. The lieutenant was kneeling, his chin on his chest, obeisant to the rocks before him. He crawled forward on all fours and began scraping at the earth at the base of one boulder with his hands. As Adams watched, the strength seemed to depart Robinson’s body, and his forehead sank to the earth. Then he reared, shouting at the boulder before him. With the breeze rasping across his ears, Adams could not make out his words.
And then, with a jolt, he understood.
The meat was not there.
His empty belly dropped out from under him, and he thought he might topple. No, he thought, Robinson must be mistaken. He must have dug in the wrong place.
Adams staggered along the beach toward him. The stones beneath his boots glowed green with copper ore. The lieutenant sat on the ground, staring vacantly at his muddy hands. Nothing remained of the meat they had buried. The stones they had placed over the hole at the foot of the boulder lay six feet away, flung aside by powerful claws. Robinson rose to his feet, his face twisted in fury. He retrieved his shotgun from the sledge and spun to face Adams.
“Damn you! We might have meat if you had not missed your shot at Victory Point!”
Adams’ ire flashed instantly, standing and roaring like a flame in dry grass. He rose to his feet, shaking. “Do you think I missed on purpose? You put the message back in the cairn and say we must tell them nothing, so it is all for naught!”
Adams saw that Robinson had been straining to keep something within him in check, something that now crumbled. Robinson raised a balled fist and screamed into the cold air—a long, drawn-out howl of anguish.
“And the seals! Three to aim at, but you could not fire a shot! Why?” He planted his feet, grasping his shotgun across his chest, and stared at Adams with eyes red from pain and glare. With his unkempt whiskers and his jacket stained and torn, he resembled the first of Franklin’s men that Adams and Billings had encountered weeks earlier. “Is it that you covet a different kind of meat?”
“What?” Adams’ mouth was dry.
“You say you will tell them everything. What will you tell them about Honey?”
Adams held Robinson’s gaze. He fought to suppress the tremor in his voice. “That he died of starvation and scurvy.”
“I know what you did,” said Robinson. The shotgun was massive in his hands. “Your special calling is nothing but a conceit. But your sin? That is undeniable.”
“I do not deny it.” Exhaustion sapped him of all desire to argue. “Condemn me. It is no more than I deserve.”
His acquiescence seemed only to inflame Robinson further. He clenched his teeth. “What will you tell them about Billings?” His fingers opened and closed on the stock of the shotgun.
Adams was afraid now. He cleared his throat. “That it was an accident,” he said quietly. He felt he was staring down a wild beast of the forest.
Robinson’s rage boiled and broke now, like floodwaters through a dam wall. Flecks of spittle spotted his beard. The pitch of his voice rose. “Liar! You will blame me. Never once did you intend to support my claim. And now we have naught to eat.”
He raised the shotgun and trained it upon Adams’ face. Inches from his eyes, the mouths of the barrels were oddly round and symmetrical, alien shapes in a landscape of jagged, broken edges.
“I see how fragile are the shackles we place upon our true natures,” Adams whispered, “and how readily they shatter and fall away.” He closed his eyes. A sense of relief washed upon him. This was how he would atone for his sin. Gratitude and pity for Robinson swirled within him. He would not condemn a man boiled down by circumstance to his most urgent of instincts, no more than one could blame a sick man raging and twisting with fever. Surely the man was God’s instrument. He was no longer hungry. The pain in his limbs was gone. Salt air fresh on his tongue.
The wind changed, a warmer breeze blowing from the south. Robinson’s boots crunched on the gravel. A second may have passed, or a minute. Adams opened his eyes. Thick mist swirled around him, but the sky directly overhead was a deep navy blue, empty of stars.
Robinson faced away from him, staring into the fog. He held the shotgun down by his side. When he looked back at Adams, he had changed again. The rage and pain were gone from his face, replaced with an expression of puzzlement.
Adams opened his mouth to speak. Robinson shook his head and put a gloved finger to his lips. He pointed at the curtain of mist. Adams held his breath. Both men stood and listened. With a raised palm, Robinson instructed Adams to remain where he stood. He trod silently over the earth on the balls of his feet, taking care not to kick any pebbles. Adams peered into the fog but saw nothing. Robinson halted. With a languid, unhurried motion, he lifted his shotgun to his shoulder and pointed it into the mist.
Three huge shapes appeared at the edge of the fog. Their long brown hair hung almost to the earth. They seemed to float above the ground in the mist; then Adams made out the creatures’ hooves beneath. Huge bony helmets, each with horns that curved outward, rested atop shoulders six feet above the ground. The animals raised their heads from the stunted grass and stood motionless, watching the two men.
The largest of the three musk oxen stood in front of the other two. The tips of the bull’s shaggy hair flickered in the breeze, hanging down around its hindquarters like a skirt flecked with mud and snow. Adams guessed the animal’s weight at six hundred pounds.
Robinson looked back at Adams and pointed at the assistant surgeon’s gun. With a sweep of his arm, he instructed Adams to circle away at an angle to Robinson’s position. Adams nodded, understanding that Robinson sought to catch the oxen in a cross fire. He slowly walked sideways. A wind began to rise. His heart knocked against the thin wall of his chest.
The ox watched Robinson approach. Adams swung around to the creature’s left flank. The ox took a step in Robinson’s direction, then another. When it stood fifteen yards away, it stopped and swung its head from side to side. The fog began to melt away.
Robinson and the ox stared at each other.
The ox dropped its head and charged.
The lieutenant aimed and fired. Adams heard a sound like a stone striking a rock as the ball ricocheted off the ox’s bony helmet. The animal halted and shook its head. Robinson pulled the trigger again, and Adams saw the creature’s long hair flicked by the heavy ball that slammed into its shoulder. Snorting, the bull wheeled away and ran.
The cow and calf broke into a run, shadowing the bull. Adams fired at the fleeing cow but missed. He knelt and steadied himself, then exhaled and fired again. The second ball struck the calf behind the shoulder, and the animal dropped, its face crashing into the dirt. The two larger oxen disappeared into the fog.
A new sound made Adams wheel around—an urgent, angry grunt.
Then he saw the bear.