CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The bear appeared from the thinning fog between Adams and Robinson. It swung its head to study one man, then the other. Adams knew that Robinson, standing with his back turned, had neither seen nor heard the animal. He opened his mouth to shout a warning, but his breath was trapped in his chest. His shotgun was too heavy to lift.
For a moment, he hoped the bear might retreat at the presence of a human threat on each flank. Then it raised its head and sniffed the breeze. The long white snout was crosshatched with scars. It had smelled the calf’s blood. Still oblivious to the bear, Robinson stared into the fog where the fleeing oxen had vanished. He knelt beside the fallen calf and laid his shotgun on the gravel. He drew his knife, his fit of rage forgotten.
“Fine shooting, Mister Adams! We shall have meat after all!”
Fingers of sunlight stroked the earth through the remnants of the mist. The bear tossed its head and broke into a lumbering trot toward Robinson and the dead ox. Adams’ breath returned. He forced air into his lungs and cried out, a wordless shout. The bear’s shadow fell across the gravel in front of Robinson. The lieutenant whirled around. The bear stood on its hind legs a few paces from him, its head five feet above his own. Adams’ feet would not move. He watched, helpless, his stomach a cold pit, knuckles skeletal-white on the stock of his shotgun.
Robinson raised his arms above his head, his knife in one hand. He bellowed at the bear, a drawn-out shout of anger. The animal dropped to all fours and lunged forward like an enormous cat. Robinson’s shout was cut off abruptly as the bear’s paw knocked him off his feet. He tried to scramble backward, but it was on him. He flung both arms up to protect his face, and the bear raked him again with his paw. Blood sprayed. The bear seized Robinson’s shoulder in its jaws and shook him. Robinson’s body convulsed in the animal’s grip, fluttering like a rag in a dog’s mouth.
Adams’ blood was hot in his fingertips and cheeks. He aimed his shotgun, squinting down the quivering barrel, and fired. At the boom of the gun, the bear released Robinson. Its snout was red with his blood. Adams heard the heavy ball from his gun strike the gravel somewhere out in the mist. Robinson lay motionless beside the ox carcass.
Adams screamed at the bear. It tossed and shook its head at him. Adams’ limbs began to function, and he shuffled toward the creature. Guessing his distance at just over thirty yards, he stopped and dropped to one knee, took aim, and fired. The ball struck the bear on the flank. It wheeled around and roared. Blood streaked its fur. It swung its gaze back to the prone Robinson.
“No!” Adams shouted. “Here, damn you! Here!”
The bear turned its head back and stared at Adams. Without making a sound, it began snapping its jaws, its massive incisors flashing. His shotgun was empty. Adams reached for the shot bag slung over his shoulder but found it unnaturally light. His ammunition was gone. His fingers found only a tattered canvas edge where the bag had torn, spilling the heavy lead balls onto the ground in the miles behind him. He wheeled around and scanned the gravel. His eyes were wet and his vision blurry. He could see none of the balls among the broken stones. The bear stood still, staring at him. It lowered its head like a bull preparing to charge.
Adams locked eyes with the bear and knew it would come at him. He seized his powder bag and poured a measure down the barrel of his shotgun. He could see the bear approaching across the gravel from the corner of his eye. He detached the ramrod, shoved it down the barrel as far as he could, then placed a fresh percussion cap on the nipple. In a single motion, he threw the shotgun to his shoulder and swung the barrel around. The bear was on him, its enormous ivory mass filling his vision. He caught a glimpse of the yawning jaws, smelled the stench of its breath. His bladder released, and hot liquid gushed in his groin. He pulled the trigger, and the shotgun bucked and boomed, snatching away all sound. The bear collided with him, knocking him backward, forcing the breath from his lungs. The back of his head struck the stones, and the shotgun spun from his grasp.
His only thought was: It is done now.
He opened his eyes and held his breath. Through holes in the fog above, wispy clouds swirled in a blue sky. His head throbbed from the shotgun blast. The bear’s head was heavy on his chest. A massive paw lay across his leg. He smelled blood and piss and the odour of algae on the bear’s fur. He lay still, playing dead. His lungs screamed for air, desperate for more than silent, shallow breaths through clenched teeth. Fractured slabs of limestone dug into his cheek.
When the bear woke, it would rake him with its claws and clamp him in its jaws. He listened for the sound of its breathing but heard only the hiss of the breeze over the empty ground.
A minute passed, then another. He had no choice but to try to steal away. Moving as slowly as he could, he extracted himself from under the bear. The animal’s massive head dropped limp to the gravel. An enormous paw lay outstretched and reaching. The huge white body lay motionless. One black eye stared at Adams. Twelve inches of Adams’ ramrod protruded from the other. The remainder was buried in the bear’s brain.
He ran to where Robinson lay. The pool of crimson on the stones was so bright, it sucked away all other colour, turning even the light grey. Robinson’s eyes were closed, his teeth clenched. His complexion was waxy, his breathing rapid and shallow. His shoulder and left arm were a bloody mess of torn flesh and fabric. The bear’s claws had shredded the sleeve of his coat, sweater, and the linen shirt beneath, ripping the flesh between the shoulder and elbow. Shards of bone were visible in the tattered, bloody mess. Adams knew the arm was shattered in multiple places. Blood splashed onto the stones and ran down Robinson’s arm, staining his mitten red. There were more striations across the front of his coat, and blood seeped from deep gashes in his chest.
Adams ran back to the sledge and retrieved a linen shirt. He tore it into strips and bound Robinson’s arm and shoulder as tightly as he could. The cloth was instantly soaked through with blood. Robinson’s eyes flickered open, red with pain and shock. He tried to speak but could only grunt.
“Lay still,” said Adams.
Adams wrapped Robinson in a blanket bag. He cradled the injured man’s jaw in a trembling hand, placing a knapsack under his head. Robinson’s skin was clammy, his pulse weak. His breathing slowed, and then he fainted. Adams could do nothing to stop the bleeding. He breathed into his cupped hands to warm his bloody fingers. Mist rose from the land, and colours changed in the sky.
He dragged the unconscious Robinson behind a boulder to shield him from the wind. He fashioned a crude lean-to from the remains of the tent canvas and the handle of the shovel, then hauled pieces of driftwood from the shore below and built a fire next to their shelter. While the injured man slept, he walked to a stream in a nearby ravine. He washed the lieutenant’s blood from his hands and refilled both their canteens. He stumbled to the carcass of the musk ox calf and pressed his mouth against the creature’s wound. Its blood warmed his cracked lips. Then he sat back on his haunches in the twilight. He hacked and tore at the carcass with his blunt knife, pausing every minute to catch his breath, until he brought forth a chunk of bloody meat. A drop of blood fell from the tip of his knife and splattered on the toe of his boot. Breathing heavily, he wiped the blade on his trousers. He knelt again, sawed away the hide, and cut the meat into small pieces. He sat on the stones and chewed slowly before sitting back. Blood ran down his face.
When he returned to the lean-to, Robinson’s eyes were open and glassy. The evening light cupped his cheek in a yellow hand. A mask of pain, his bloodless face had aged a century. The edge of his whiskered jaw seemed to thrust through the skin, casting shadows along his withered throat.
“Do not move,” Adams told him. He held a canteen to the lieutenant’s lips and waited while the injured man sipped. “You have lost much blood.”
Robinson coughed and winced. “My arm.”
“I have bound it,” said Adams.
“How bad is it?”
“Lay still.”
Robinson attempted to look down at his injury, but his eyes rolled back with the pain. “Must it come off?”
Adams would have removed the shattered arm already if he had a suitable saw. And if Robinson had not lost so much blood. He looked down at his blunt and filthy knife, still red with the blood of the ox calf. The prospect of performing surgery with it filled him with dread.
“We shall see,” he said. “For now, you must eat.” He forced a nonchalant tone. “We have rather a lot of meat—your choice of musk ox or bear.”
Robinson coughed once, turned his head, and spat. “You told me once you felt compelled to sail to the Arctic, to find Franklin. You said it was a calling.”
“I did.”
“Did it never occur to you this might be a punishment? For a lie you told, a person you once maligned?”
“Do not talk anymore,” Adams said softly.
“A penance,” Robinson whispered. “It feels like that to me. Water.”
Adams held his canteen to Robinson’s lips, and he drank.
“In my knapsack,” Robinson said, “you will find two diaries. One is for Captain Ross. It is a bland thing: observations on the terrain, the weather. It’s what he expects. The other diary I would ask that you keep hidden. Give it to my wife if she still lives.”
“I will.” The promise came easily. If we were friends, Adams thought, I would feign horror. No, buck up! Give it to her yourself. We will fetch through. But without bandages and splints and sutures, all he had to salve Robinson’s pain was assurances he may not live to keep.
Robinson lay unmoving for so long, Adams thought he had lost consciousness. Then he spoke again, his voice a faint croak.
“Do you hear God’s voice?” he asked.
“When I pray. In here.” Adams tapped the side of his head.
“I used to listen. When I was a boy. I never heard it.”
“He listens to you.”
“What does He sound like?”
Adams lifted the canteen to Robinson’s lips. “I hear my father’s voice,” he said. “He is with God now. To you, He will sound different.”
Robinson coughed weakly. “What was your father’s sin? It must have been great.”
Adams hesitated. “He drowned. He was ... affected by melancholy.”
Robinson digested this in silence. Finally, he asked, “Would you forgive him that sin?”
“Of course.”
“Then why do you imagine God would not? Why must you appease Him with a bauble like the Passage?”
Adams’ tears ran into his whiskers and dripped onto his gloves. “Because my father’s death was my doing,” he whispered. “He chose to be with God because I was not enough to keep him in this world. If I found Franklin or helped him find the Passage, my father would know I had honoured him. And God would forgive him his sin.”
“You have been punishing yourself, then.”
Adams hung his head.
“Edward.”
Adams looked up at Robinson’s use of his first name. The lieutenant fixed him with a gentle gaze.
“Understand this: your faith is your greatest strength. I envy the courage it lends you.” Robinson coughed and winced. “But you said yourself, all is as God wills it. I doubt He will smile upon you merely because you find a lost captain or a waterway through the ice. I suggest you cease trying to bend Him to your will. It smacks of hubris.”
Adams could only nod, ashamed.
“You seek to atone for the sin of another,” said Robinson. “It is like taking on another man’s debt merely because you think it noble. You would make a poor banker. Best atone for your sin and leave others to settle their own accounts.”
At this, he groaned and slumped back. Adams sat up in alarm. Blood dripped from the bandage around Robinson’s shoulder and pooled in tiny depressions in the gravel.
His eyes closed, Robinson grunted, “I see it now.”
“What is it you see?”
“Both our fathers have much to answer for.”
Adams looked down on the gravel beach as the sun fell from sight. The midnight sky along the horizon was a flaming orange lit by subterranean fires that charred the clouds above. He saw contorted pieces of melting ice reaching from the water near the shore like damned souls in torment.
Robinson whispered in tones barely audible. “I think the Arctic is like an abyss,” he said. “A man ventures into it, and it draws more of his kind in his wake. The Passage is no great undertaking, no path to salvation. Purgatory is not a place of purifying fire; it is a place of ice and cold, a kingdom of wind and bones and monsters and dead things.”
Adams woke in a blue-grey light. Beside him, Robinson’s eyes were open, unfocused. His breathing was shallow, his pallor whiter than the chunks of ice scattered on the beach below. His starved visage was skeletal. The flesh sank into the hollow of his throat, and his eyes were deep in their sockets, his legs as thin as a child’s. Blood seeped again from his wound, saturating the makeshift bandage and soaking into the earth beneath the injured man’s elbow. Adams ripped another piece of linen from the shirt and bound the wound again. Robinson lay limp and unflinching.
“Elizabeth.” Robinson spoke softly. His right hand stirred on his chest, as if he sought to raise it to her cheek.
Adams held his breath.
“Elizabeth!” Robinson’s voice was an urgent rasp.
“Yes, my dear,” Adams said softly. If all he could do was pretend to be her, he would do that.
“Father was not pleased,” said Robinson.
Adams held his canteen to Robinson’s lips. “Drink some water.”
The injured man appeared not to see the canteen. He made no move to drink. “‘What will you do to move up, Frederick!’ he would say. ‘Eight years a lieutenant! What will you do?’”
Adams placed the palm of his hand on Robinson’s forehead. It was hot with fever.
“I embarrassed him. What a sin that was,” said Robinson. “What a crime.”
Adams spoke softly. “Do not talk.”
“I shall not let him have the boy, Elizabeth.”
Adams saturated a piece of linen with water from his canteen, held it above Robinson’s parched lips, and dripped water into his mouth. The injured man’s tongue touched his teeth. He coughed twice and swallowed, his Adam’s apple huge, like a stone trapped in his throat.
Robinson’s voice dropped to a whisper. “I could never go against him.”
“My dear, you must rest.”
“He never even let me speak. He just raised his hand to me, cut me off. ‘I will see to it,’ he said. ‘I know people.’”
Adams placed the cold, wet cloth on his forehead. Robinson did not seem to feel it.
Then Robinson whispered again. “I do not know people. I am not like that. And those who know me do not regard me highly.”
Adams sat in the lean-to with Robinson, watching the soft light of the long twilight polish the sea. He lay next to the injured man for warmth, pressing against him from shoulder to ankle, a blanket over them both. Meteors flashed across the sky, scarring its dark-blue canvas. Later, when the sun rose higher, the clouds gleamed and the icebergs were so white, they seemed to glow from within. Adams stood and picked up his shotgun. He left Robinson sleeping and circled the camp to check for bears. Far to the east, a flock of eider ducks floated like toys on a shallow pond. He returned to the lean-to. Robinson’s eyes were open, gazing at the ice.
“Elizabeth,” he whispered, “a man once told me he saw beauty where I saw none.”
“There is beauty all around us.”
“Yes, yes, I see it now,” he said. “I once saw a pretty girl, Elizabeth. When she turned her head, when the light fell upon her a certain way, I could see how her face would age, how it would one day be ... less. The colour in her cheeks would fade, the lines in her face would deepen. Her beauty would go, never to be re-created. That is when I understood—beauty’s temporary nature is what makes it exquisite. We desire it so, for we know it will not last.”
“I think you have struck at the very heart of the matter,” Adams whispered.
Robinson swallowed. “Elizabeth,” he gasped. His eyes were wide.
“Yes?” He took Robinson’s hand gently in his own and leaned closer.
“It is marvellous, Elizabeth.”
“Yes, marvellous.”
Adams gripped his hand. Robinson’s chest rose and fell with agonising slowness. Shadows cast by the rocks crawled over the earth as the sun moved across the sky. Still holding Robinson’s hand, he leaned back and rested on his knapsack. Outside the lean-to, the tips of the wiry grass shivered in the breeze. Robinson’s chest deflated slowly, like a punctured bellows.
Adams lay with Robinson’s cold fingers curled in his own. Water tinkled in the nearby ravine. The smell of rain was on the air. He thought of Fitzjames slipping quietly away, Billings shot down, and mad young Aylmore at the end of a noose. Lord, he thought, if there is a lesson here, I have learned nothing.
Adams opened Robinson’s knapsack and took out his flint and steel, pipe, and notebook. He put them into his knapsack and was about to throw the empty bag to one side when he noticed a flat rectangular object at the bottom. It was a letter. He raised the tent flap and opened it in the grey light.
Captain Sir James Clark Ross, HMS Enterprise
Captain Edward Bird, HMS Investigator
21 July 1849
Dear Sirs,
It is with the greatest regret that I report my failure to discover the whereabouts of Sir John Franklin and his men. The decision to continue our search south of Fury Beach was mine alone, with Assistant Surgeon Edward Adams and Able Seaman James Billings accompanying me only at my direct order.
I must also regretfully report that Seaman Billings, who displayed great energy and enduring pluck, lost his life in the performance of his duty. I request that all appropriate remuneration be made to his family.
Assistant Surgeon Adams has proved himself a courageous and capable officer in the most difficult of circumstances. I ask that the record reflect his exemplary conduct.
Frederick Robinson
Lieutenant
HMS Investigator
Adams folded the letter and sat with it in his lap. Partially melted slabs of ice, thick like gigantic chunks of sugar, sat dissolving in the shallows. The fog had lifted, and the air was clear. A solid mass of cloud stretched almost to the horizon, a grey rug pulled halfway across the pale-pink sky.
He thought of all Franklin’s men: skeletons in the soil of King William Land, rotting in the floating mausoleum that was Erebus , fed on by bears on the ice off Cape Felix. Bubbling in the cookpots of Gregory’s men. Robinson had told him to spend his life another way, to atone for no man’s sins but his own. He spit on the ground again, but the acrid taste of Honey’s flesh on his tongue persisted. God was telling him how he might absolve himself. Recover the dead, and he might yet sluice the bitter taste from his mouth and the stain from his soul. He had stood over so many graves full of bones he wished to see buried in consecrated ground. If God returned him safely to England, he would return for them. If He did not, he would know that no atonement was possible. For the first time, it was clear.
He was unsure of the date. Captains Ross and Bird would leave Port Leopold any day. He was so very tired.