CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Adams hunched his shoulders into the wind. The rain came at him in freezing bullets out of the north. He stepped off the shingle and ran out onto the frozen strait, where the gravel shore met the unbroken section of ice spanning the channel. The floe under his feet was intact, but ahead he could see cracks where the shore ice met the pack. Behind him, Walker followed down the slope, knife in hand, his knapsack and bedroll shouldered. He hopped desperately on his left leg, the injured right leg flailing. He crumpled and fell but was almost immediately on his feet again, using his shotgun as a crutch.
Adams turned away and hobbled forward over the ice. The heavens were the colour of old steel. The hills on the far shore rose in the dim light. He pulled his heavy coat tight around himself and dropped his head into the face of the gale. A crash of thunder shook the air. His body convulsed in the cold. He splashed through shallow pools, his injured ankle numb in its boot. Slung around his shoulders, the remnants of the tent canvas flapped against his legs.
Pieces broke off the pack and floated away, bobbing in the violent current. The width bridging the strait had narrowed to only a hundred yards. Squinting through the gale, he could feel the ice bucking under his feet, wanting to burst. Far to his left, the floe split open as cleanly as skin parting under a scalpel blade. A chunk the size of a carriage floated free of the pack. Black water fountained through the widening gap like blood from an artery.
He looked back. Walker remained in pursuit. The seaman had reached the edge of the icebound strait and set out across it with his shotgun crutch, slipping and scrambling like some demented three-legged insect. He waved an arm, held a hand to his mouth as if shouting, but Adams heard nothing over the storm.
Adams was halfway across the strait when he slipped and fell on his face, his chin ploughing the ice. A hot smear of pain licked his jaw, and bright blood trickled in his beard. He scrambled to his feet and kept moving, blood pumping in his throat, muscles twisting like cords. Three hundred yards ahead of him, three indistinct grey shadows moved on the ice. A bear and two half-grown cubs stood between him and the far shore of the strait. They moved with a languid indifference to the gale. The adult sow padded patiently over the ice, her head swinging back and forth. The two cubs trailed in her wake, their coats slick with rain.
Adams dropped to his knees, blinking through the teeming water. The sow wandered across to his left and out of his path, her attention focused on the floe’s edge. Behind her, the two cubs stopped and sat on the ice. One nuzzled the other, which raised its snout and yawned and lazily batted its sibling with a paw. He looked over his shoulder. Walker was four hundred yards behind him, dragging his bad leg in a crab-like scuttle, something between a crawl and a stagger.
Adams gripped his wet and useless shotgun. Beyond the bears he could see the ice cracking, pounded by the dual onslaught of wind and current. The span to the far side was now barely fifty yards wide. The sow raised her head and seemed to gaze directly at him through the wall of rain. He did not move. His knees and hips were afire, the wind like a scourger’s cat on his neck. The bear stood unmoving, her snout in the air. Blood dripped from his lacerated chin onto his hands. He held his breath.
The bear swung its head to look back at its offspring. The cubs moved toward her, their padded feet sliding over the ice. The three animals ambled away. As he watched, the ice they rode broke up, and they slid casually into the black water. Their heads moved away in the current.
Lord, keep me and make me strong.
Adams wiped the rain from his eyes, then rose to his feet and ran in his hobbling, broken gait. A violent gust caught the saturated blanket on his back and threw him sideways. For an instant he mistook a crack of thunder for a shotgun blast, thinking Walker had somehow kept his weapon dry and opened fire. He did not look back.
He ran on. The ice bridge ahead of him was almost gone. Chunks separated from the edge every few moments, ripped away by the current. Water spouted up through the ice as it cracked and split around him.
He was yards from shore when a fissure opened in the ice beneath his boots. He raised the shotgun, heavy as an iron bar, and threw it with both hands. It fell on the rocky shore and slid to a halt inches from the water’s edge. The ice below him parted, and he sank waist deep in the freezing water. The pain took all his breath, tearing at him as though some great jawed beast had seized him around the midsection. He took the last few steps up the slope onto the shingle and sat, shaking and gasping. The rain eased to a drizzle, and the wind abated.
Walker stood on a small, jagged floe thirty feet across, two hundred yards away in the strait. The ice between him and the shore was gone. He glanced down at the cracks in the ice at his feet, then looked up and stared across at Adams. The little floe fractured and burst, and Walker dropped straight down into the black water.
When the sun emerged, Adams laid out his blanket to dry on the stones and cleaned his gun, then walked inland through the silence. Winter stalked him across the waste, drawing a blanket of cold and darkness across the land. When the sun slept, either side of midnight, he moved through a cold, murky twilight until it reappeared minutes later, weary and old. Heavy rain churned the earth’s surface, and he was black to the waist. During the brief night, ice had formed on the surface of the mud. He stumbled for twenty miles around the shore of an enormous shallow lake spread across the land like a mirror.
The soles of his boots were holed in half a dozen places, and sharp stones cut into his feet. The pain of his swollen ankle was merely one of many now; fires blazed in his joints, limbs, and bowels. His head throbbed, and his legs swelled with edema. The evening sun dripped molten iron through a gash in a bank of grey clouds. Two days after leaving the coast, his knees buckled, and he could not rise. He scanned his surroundings for a boulder to crawl behind, yet there was nothing but an endless stretch of flat, stony gravel. Green stubble coated a row of hills in the distance.
Perhaps the bears would stay close to the coast to hunt seals and not concern him here. He drew his blanket and canvas over himself, clutched his shotgun to his chest, and slept on the open ground. He dreamed of his own mutilated body in the stony earth, thawing and refreezing with the cycles of the seasons. Dead eyes filmed over, staring into a midnight-blue shroud an inch from his nose, men visiting to cut at his flesh.
He woke in a puddle, shivering with fever. His breath came fast and sharp. An unfamiliar knocking in his ear was the sound of his teeth chattering. He curled into a ball and lay on the stony ground as the sun sank and ignited the horizon in fiery hues.
Lord, I had once hoped for Paradise, but Thou hath sent me to another place entirely.
Something moved over the stones nearby. He pulled the blanket from his face and rolled over, his shotgun cold and heavy in his hands. Twenty yards away, a fox stared back at him. He shot it and crawled over the gravel to where the creature lay. He pulled out his knife and skinned it, ripping the fur from the still-steaming flesh. The blood ran in his whiskers as he ate the fox raw.
The empty land stretched away in all directions. The blue sky pushed down upon him. He sat shivering on the cold ground, his white breath on the air, and wept for a long time. Without knowing he could, he stood and walked.
A shrivelled, skeletal Sir John Franklin walked beside him, his uniform hanging off him in tatters.
“Sir John, it was all lies,” Adams said. “The Arctic has an ocean, but not one a ship can sail across. It has a sun that burns the skin and the eyes but offers no warmth. It has wild beasts that will eat a man but provide precious little food. It has so many dead men but so few graves.”
“It is not such a prize, is it?” Franklin said. “I wonder what made us want it so. Once uttered, a lie can harden and become as durable as clay fired in a kiln. A man need only laugh and spin a yarn for a falsehood to become fact. It takes so little effort to make it true.”
The fingers of night stole out a little farther each day. The sun sank at ten in the evening and rose again at two in the morning. He had lost over an hour of daylight in the past week alone. He limped around a headland and was confronted by another wide river. Yellow poppies grew under his feet. He stopped and leaned on his shotgun. For the first time in weeks, the blue-grey ocean was visible to the east: Prince Regent Inlet.
He drank from his canteen and hobbled on over the gravel. His ankles and hips and knees screamed, and his heart thrashed in his chest. His boot fell apart and lay in pieces on the ground, the sodden leather soft and rotten like old skin. Swaddling his heel and ankle with strips of flannel, he tied the last patches of canvas around his leg and limped on. A hidden sun suffused the clouds with a pink blush, then emerged like the eye of an omnipotent being lifting a heavy blanket to peer down at the forlorn creature shuffling along beneath.
Adams stared out across Prince Regent Inlet from the hills above Fury Beach.
The ice that had covered the sea weeks earlier had thinned, but he could see the waters near the shore rotating and thickening like honey. The ocean would soon freeze again. Leads in the ice were like veins across white skin. A blurry silhouette flickered behind a curtain of wind. Shaking with fever, he stumbled toward it. The wind blew harder. The source was a tremendous taloned beast with three faces, standing in the ice, trapped, beating its wings to drive all warmth from the world. The figures of men, lost souls, hung suspended under the ice. The beast held a corpse in each of its three sets of jaws, pawing at him, raking him with its claws. Adams staggered back, cried out, threw up his hands. The men began climbing up the beast’s legs from beneath the ice, grabbing handfuls of its hair and clutching at him. Franklin’s men, toothless and toeless and fingerless, with their eyes still filmed over from their time in their shrouds, stabbed him with bony fingers. Others pressed him with suppurating sores and bared their teeth to show fragments of rotten flesh. Adams heard them imploring him over the roar of the wind.
This is what awaits you if you abandon us.
Hands gripped Adams’ shoulders, pawed at his arms.
“Edward!”
Adams screamed. He tore himself from the men’s grasp, but they followed him. He wheeled away and fell, sprawling on the stones. Their shadows fell across over him, blocking the light. His pursuers reached down to him. He covered his face with his hands and thought, I am damned.
“Edward? Is that you?”
Adams opened his eyes and peered through his fingers. Five men stood over him. He lowered his hands and stared into the face of his friend, John Barnard, second lieutenant on Investigator . His own ship. Next to Barnard, he recognised Thomas Osbourne, Investigator ’s boatswain. Adams stared at the smooth faces and trimmed whiskers in wonder.
Barnard’s face went slack in shock. “Edward, can you stand?”
The men started talking in a rush. Adams could not make out their words. Their faces were clean, their backs straight. They were giants, as strong as oxen. Barnard helped him to his feet. Adams looked around and saw the weathered timber bones of Somerset House. He had been here before. With Robinson. With Billings and Humphreys, looking for Sir John. It was the ruined hut built at Fury Beach by John Ross a quarter century earlier, now more imposing, more breathtaking than the grandest mansion. So long ago now.
A large boat, fifty feet long, was drawn high up on the stony beach. A steam engine sat in the boat just forward of the centre, its exhaust tube rising ten feet above the gunwale. For a moment, Adams could only stare at it. Then he understood what he saw. Captain Bird had sent Investigator ’s steam launch. Twelve miles an hour, he thought. If the water was calm and there is little ice, it can do twelve miles an hour.
“Edward, where is Lieutenant Robinson?” Barnard’s hand gripped his shoulder. “Is he following behind?”
Adams dropped his shotgun and blanket. Barnard caught him as he fell.
Later he would have no memory of it, but Barnard told him the journey back to Port Leopold from Fury Beach took nine hours.
“We were fortunate,” Barnard said. “Captains Ross and Bird have had us cutting a canal in the harbour ice to get the ships out. The ice will break up soon. And then we shall leave.” He put an arm around Adams’ shoulders. “I think perhaps Sir John and Captain Crozier will be there on the dock at Woolwich when we get back. I can only think we have missed them somehow.”
Adams woke to the smell of unwashed bodies and pork fat. Mission commander Captain Sir James Clark Ross gazed down at him. Captain Edward Bird, his face impassive, appeared behind Ross and gently closed the door to the tiny room. Adams recognised the timbers and shelves around him—he was in Investigator ’s sick bay.
Ross’ face was pale and deeply lined, as if somebody had gone to work on him with a knife, sculpting him crudely from a lump of his own flesh. For a moment, Adams thought Ross was frowning at him, but the grimace on his face told him the man was in considerable pain. Leaning on a cane, Ross carefully lowered himself onto a stool beside Adams’ bunk, grunting with the effort.
“Well, Mister Adams,” Ross said, “I am glad to see you back with us. We had thought you were lost. All the other sledge teams have been back for weeks. Most of the men are terribly fatigued. I understand you have endured much hardship. My own sledge journey was not easy either. You must get well. We have need of your services—there is much sickness aboard. Debility, scurvy, and more. We shall discuss that. But first things first.”
The captain leaned forward, placing his weight on his cane, until his face was inches from Adams’ own. Ross’ breath stank of brandy. Adams turned away.
“Tell me, did you find anything?” Ross asked. “How far south did you go? Was there any sign of him?”
If his body was stronger, his mind clearer, he may have tried to soften the edges of the tale. He might have stitched together a narrative from facts, half-truths, and outright lies to satisfy Ross and Adams’ own conscience. But when he began, the words gushed from him and would not stop. He omitted no detail, embellished nothing. Ross remained silent for most of it. He interrupted only occasionally to ask short, pointed questions. Ross shifted in his chair to relieve the stiffness in his limbs. His face bore a guarded, pained expression. Standing behind Ross, Bird remained impassive, his face gradually draining of colour. When Adams had finished, Ross stared at the blank wall and chewed his lip. Adams waited for an outburst, a reprimand, but Ross looked thoughtful, his expression no longer one of shock but of indecision. His gaze returned to Adams.
“You are not to breathe a word of this to anyone.”
Without waiting for an answer, Ross stood abruptly and left the room. Bird glanced down at Adams with a look of the purest wonder, then followed Ross out and slid the door closed.