Chapter Thirty-Four
After this conversation, Ministik and Keasik are careful not to arouse the Englishmen’s suspicions by behaving any differently or speaking again, even in secret, of their plans to leave.
They keep apart, walking for six more days in a poised and patient silence, and then one night, when the moon is bright and full, while Hearn and Shaw are fast asleep, they slip out of the tent together and disappear into the darkness of the woods carrying Shaw’s good English musket and powder horn and the one copper kettle.
When Hearn wakes up at dawn, he doesn’t realize what’s happened at first; he thinks the two of them must just be out hunting or gathering food as usual.
But when an hour passes and then another hour and neither Ministik nor Keasik returns, he begins to understand that something has gone wrong.
He shakes John Shaw from his slumber and tells him that both the Indians are missing.
“They’ve taken what’s left of the black powder,” he says, “and the kettle too. I don’t believe they’re coming back.”
Shaw rubs his face and gives Hearn a sour and disbelieving look. Then he gets up and stands in the center of the clearing, squints his eyes, and peers about at the tree trunks and branches as though looking for clues.
“I can’t believe that skinny lad had the courage to abandon us,” he says.
“How much courage does it take? They walk much faster than we do and they’ve had four or five hours’ head start at least. If they’ve really gone, then we have no hope of catching up with them now.”
“We have the tent still, and your musket,” Shaw says. “What else is left?”
“We have some lead but no powder. We both have our knives, and I have a fishhook and awl and some twine. The only meat we have is whatever’s left on the bones from yesterday’s supper.”
“There are other Indians out there somewhere,” Shaw says. “We need to find them, that’s all, and trust that when we do, they’re more honest than the last one.”
“If you hadn’t threatened him before…,” Hearn says.
“Don’t you start with that,” Shaw says. “Don’t you dare.”
Hearn estimates that they are still two hundred miles west of Prince of Wales’ Fort, but it could be less than that or a lot more since he has no instrument to measure their latitude now and all the maps and careful notes he made on the journey north were destroyed in the esquimaux attack.
If they can quickly find another band of friendly Indians willing to guide and feed them, then all might be well, he thinks, but if not, alone with the weather turning colder and no powder to hunt with, their survival is far from assured.
When he tells this to Shaw, the deputy insists that, despite their present troubles, all is far from lost.
“We’ll build a bonfire,” he says, “just as we did before, and when whoever is out there sees the smoke, they’ll come running to us, you’ll see.”
They build a fire and keep it burning, but no one comes, and after two days of fruitless waiting, they agree to strike the camp and move farther to the east. Without powder for hunting, they live off nuts and berries and the occasional lake fish caught on a line.
They don’t starve, but they are always hungry and suffer grievously from the flux, which weakens them and makes the long hours of walking yet harder to endure.
At first, there is rain most days and sometimes a frost at night but no snow as yet and no ice except in a few shaded places at the edge of streams and rivers where the water is slow-moving and shallow.
Then, after ten days, the air turns suddenly colder, the wind sharpens from the north, and they wake one morning to find the brown and green world turned all to a brilliant white.
They remain where they are for the rest of that day while Hearn, using bent birch twigs and withies made from spruce root, fashions, as best he can in the straitened circumstances, two crude but usable pairs of snowshoes.
In the morning, freshly shod, the two men continue their progress slowly eastward through the deepening snow.
Both of them are weary and footsore, but it is Shaw who needs to stop more often for rest, and who at the end of each day is so stiff-jointed, and queasy with fatigue that bending over or lying down is an agony.
Hearn, although he was never Shaw’s friend and blames him still for Abel Walker’s death, is nonetheless dismayed to see him so reduced.
The skin of his face, previously plump and ruddy, is taut and yellowish, and his eyes, usually so fierce, have lost their luster.
Although when asked, Shaw insists that he is perfectly well and there is no reason for concern, Hearn wonders how much longer they can continue without proper food or shelter.
If we don’t find some friendly Indians soon, he thinks, the little luck we have left will surely expire.
The weather may be keeping kind enough for now, but it can worsen in a moment and neither one of us has the strength or stamina to survive the ordeal of a two- or three-day blizzard.
Trapped inside the tent, we would quickly perish of the cold and our hard frozen bodies would lie there ignored and unburied to be gnawed on by scavengers.
Such gloomy trepidations, which in normal circumstances he would have sufficient willpower to deny or push aside, encroach upon his thoughts more and more as the days go by and their situation worsens until, after another week with no relief, Hearn finds himself assailed almost hourly by images of death and, following in their train, the inevitable attendant hosts of morbid and unanswerable questions.
I have kept myself alive these thirty years, he tells himself, but if this is to be the end, what purpose has it all served?
Is there something else I might have done but haven’t, some higher duty that in my foolishness I have lost or let slip, or is there really nothing to this life but a few passing moments of pleasure or pain?
Is our existence not, as some would claim, a great prize to be cherished but only, as it has most often seemed to me, a confusion and a turmoil, a glimpse caught through a darkened window of a face we cannot recognize or name?
He is still trapped in such dark and desolate imaginings when, one day in the late afternoon, as they enter a small clearing on the side of a steep hill, Hearn sees with a start, off to the south just beyond the curve of a river, like a sudden answer to a long-forgotten prayer, a thin line of smoke rising between the snow-covered treetops.
Holding his breath in fear that this vision will vanish as quickly as it appeared, he looks again through the brass spyglass to be certain he’s not mistaken, and then he shouts to Shaw and points.
Shaw looks across, blinks, looks again, and gives up a roar of delight.
“There they are at last, by Christ,” he says. “They’ve been hiding from us all this time, but now we see them. Now we see them plain, I swear.”
“Six miles away, I’d guess,” Hearn says, “or seven at most. We have a couple more hours of daylight left, so if we move quick we’ll get there just in time.”
“Oh, I can move quick,” Shaw says, laughing. “I can fly there if I have to. There’ll be meat again for supper tonight, lad. Meat to make us strong. I can almost taste the blood and juices on me tongue.”
Flush with hope after days of weariness and misery, the two men descend the hill in a rush, then eagerly strike southward in the direction of the smoke.
As they stride side by side through a tangled underbrush of ivy, fern, and bramble, Shaw, whose habitual cheerfulness has lapsed of late, begins to sing “The British Grenadiers” in a lusty voice, and Hearn, after a moment’s hesitation, because the jubilant mood is upon him also, joins in.
Their songs combine in a ragged harmony and the brave English words furl and flap above their heads as they march like a snapping banner in the wind:
Some talk of Alexander, and some of Hercules
Of Hector and Lysander, and such great names as these.
But of all the world’s brave heroes, there’s none that can compare.
With a tow, row, row, row, row, row, to the British Grenadiers.
After another hour of walking, they begin to hear the sound of rushing water ahead of them and then, as the noise steadily increases, through a thick colonnade of trees, in fragments at first and then all together as a sinuous whole, the river appears, dark and quick-flowing.
A few minutes later, the two Company men, no longer singing or smiling, stand together on the high clay bank looking down at the rough and rapid surface.
“It’s a good deal bigger and quicker than it looked through the spyglass,” Hearn admits. “Perhaps we should search about for an easier crossing place or try to build a raft.”
Shaw shakes his head.
“It’s getting dark already and there won’t be any moon tonight. If we tarry here much longer, we’ll lose our best chance.”
“You think we can wade across?”
“I think we must try it. Use a tent pole as a sounding rod and step carefully. I have a feeling she may not be so bad as she looks.”
To attempt such a crossing is a risk, Hearn knows, but Shaw is right; their bodies are weakening by the day and if they let this chance slip past, they may not get another one.
He looks again at the river’s restless fluctuations, the way it moves both fast and slow, swirling and eddying here and there.
Then, deciding they must take the chance despite the danger, he removes a length of rope from the bundle, ties one end tight around his waist, and hands the other end to his companion.
Thus conjoined, they scramble down the red-clay bank and with Hearn leading the way step carefully out into the river’s icy margin.
Hearn waits until the water is up to their waists and then, as Shaw advised, holding a tent pole in both hands, he begins to poke the riverbed in front to test the depth before moving farther forward.
Step by careful step, with the dark river water coursing all around them, they proceed until only their upper chests and arms remain above the agitating surface, and it is all Hearn can do to keep steady as the current, like the stirrings of a vague, otherworldly power, presses itself against him and tries to carry him away.
He knows that if he moves too suddenly or leans too far, he might lose his balance completely and be swept downstream, so every action he takes is tentative and measured out precisely.
Yard by careful yard, they advance until they are nearly at the river’s whirling, restless center.
All around them there is flux and deviation, movement and slippage, a dark, liquid tumult, ceaseless and unending, that makes the dogged constancy of the land seem by comparison abstract and concocted.
Hearn probes again with the long wooden pole but this time senses nothing solid underneath, neither mud nor rock nor gravel.
He withdraws the pole, waits, then tries again in a different spot, but there is still nothing there, no firmness or resistance at all.
Shaw from behind calls out to ask what’s wrong, and Hearn explains that he can’t find the bottom any longer.
“Go downstream a little way and try again!” Shaw shouts. “It might be better over there.”
They move sideways thirty feet or so and Hearn takes another sounding but with the same unhappy consequence.
He glances back at Shaw, hoping to see some sign of calmness or reassurance, but finds in his pale frowning visage only a troubling echo of his own metastasizing fears.
If we have to turn back now, our last chance will be gone, he thinks.
Even if we find a better crossing place tomorrow or make a raft, by the time we get across, the Indians will most likely have disappeared.
As he moves his position and lifts the pole again, willing it to meet some solid obstacle—For God’s sake, he thinks, let there be something there, not nothing—the sense of pressing danger is so strong within him that instead of moving slowly and staying upright and balanced as before, he overreaches and, as he stretches out, his left foot slips.
Feeling himself start to fall, in a panic he grabs for Shaw’s arm and pulls him down as well.
The two men, roped together, disappear, tumbling beneath the river’s rushing surface, blinded and choking, then rise up ten yards farther downstream.
For a moment, coughing and blinking and gulping the air, released from a watery tomb, they cling together like desperate lovers breast to panting breast, but then just as quickly, they are pried apart by the river’s power and, while Hearn looks on, appalled, Shaw, still dazed from the near drowning and hampered by the dead weight of the sack of gold tied around his neck, spirals away and sinks into the deeps.
Much later, when the chaos is concluded and he has time to think about his part in it, Hearn wonders if he might have acted differently, more nobly, perhaps.
But in that singular moment of terror, caught up in the burgeoning swell, gasping and bewildered, as the rope tightens around his waist and starts to drag him hopelessly downward in John Shaw’s train, there is no choice or decision to be made.
What courses through his mind and body as he reaches for the knife and cuts the cord that binds the two of them together are not thoughts of what should or might be done but rather, like the wordless blood-borne urgings of a baited animal, the pure, instinctual need, in the face of death’s malign insistence, to refuse.