Хэммонд Иннес - Calling the Southern Cross!

Kalstad had trekked out along the sledge route the previous day and found where Bland had buried his companions’ boots in the snow. We were able, therefore, to start out for the new camp as soon as we had had a meal. It was a nightmare journey. The ice was heaving under us, breaking into fissures and growling as the broken edges of floes ground together under their covering of snow.

But for the iceberg, I don’t think we should ever have found the sea leopard again, for by three o’clock we were struggling across a plain of virgin white, all traces of my ski tracks made only that morning having vanished. I saw the iceberg black against the pale circle of the westering sun and within an hour we had a blubber stove going and meat cooking.

At the time, I blamed Fate for what happened. But it was really my own fault. I should have remembered that there had been stretches of open water the previous day and realized how thin the ice was. We should have camped on the berg. But then I didn’t know that any of us had the strength to drag tent land stores and sledges up on to the higher ice.

All that night the wind howled with demoniac force. I slept fitfully, racked with pain, and conscious all the time of the increasing movement of the ice and the rising sound of the grinding floes. Toward morning I must have fallen into a heavy sleep, for I was wakened by the ice splitting with the crack of rifle fire.

In the gray light of early dawn I was horrified to see water slopping at the tent entrance. I put my head out of the tent. The scene had changed completely. In place of the flat white expanse of snow-covered ice, I found myself looking across a black expanse of brash-filled water. All around us the ice had broken up into separate floes, which drove against one another under the lash of the wind.

We were floating on a raft of ice not more than forty feet across, and we were in the middle of the open channel of water. The jagged edge of our floe fitted like a piece of jigsaw puzzle to the main floe from which it had cleaved. The spot was marked by our sledge and the carcass of the sea leopard. It was hard to see us drifting slowly away from all that meat. We had three or four pounds of the meat in the tent, which we were keeping thawed. But it wouldn’t last long. We were drifting away from the only source of life and strength we had.

I was just putting back the canvas to exclude the cold when I saw something — a fin moving stealthily through the water, slipping along like a black dhow sail, making scarcely a ripple. It was a killer whale. As though attracted by my gaze, it turned quickly and came straight toward our floe. The high dorsal fin passed out of my view, and a moment later I heard the great beast snorting on the other side of the canvas. It was an ugly, pig like sound, and deadly sinister. I waited, scarcely daring to breathe. The floe trembled as the monster skimmed beneath it. More snorting. I put back the canvas and lay down, rigid and trembling, waiting, tense, for the moment when the whale would see us and tip the floe over. That was what Gerda had said they did — peered over the edge of a floe and then tipped it up with their weight.

The snorting was close beside me now. I lay still, not waking the others. Better that they should not know till it happened. It would be over quicker for them that way.

The snorting went on for what seemed an eternity. Once the floe tilted, rocked violently, and I tensed, waiting for the sudden flurry of water, the cold and the snapping jaws. But the snorting died away. The floe rocked gently to the movement of the water. I relaxed slowly, and with relaxation came sleep, a queer half coma of things remembered and things imagined.

I woke suddenly to the soft grinding of ice on ice and a knocking, shuddering under the floe. For a moment I thought it was the killer whale back again. Then the soft grinding of the ice told its tale and I peered out, praying that we’d fetch up on the same side of the channel as our meat.

But fortune was against us. About a quarter of a mile of water separated us from the sledge and the sea leopard. Still, at least we had fetched up against a big, solid-looking floe. I woke the others and got them onto firm ice. There we repitched our camp and cooked a meal. And while we ate I racked my brains for a means of getting across the water to the sea-leopard meat.

But it was impossible. The wind had swung to the south and the gap between us and our old camp was widening all the time. I didn’t know whether to push on or wait in the hope that the gap would freeze over or the wind change. Anyway, Kalstad was delirious and seemed too weak to move, and I decided to remain, in the hope of being able to reach the carcass of the sea leopard the following morning.

At some point during that timeless day, Kalstad woke me. His eyes were very big and his face quite white. He wasn’t delirious any more, but he was shaking slightly and seemed possessed of some sort of fever.

“You must go on, captain,” he said. His voice was very faint.

I shook my head. I knew what he meant. His voice was merged with the memory of Gerda’s. “There’s no point,” I said.

“The others,” he whispered. “I shall die here. You must leave me and goon.”

“You’re not going to die,” I told him. But I didn’t believe it. I knew we were all going to die.

As night came on, we made a blubber fire, and though we practically choked ourselves with the acrid fumes, we managed to cook the rest of the meat. Kalstad refused to have any. Shortly after that I went to sleep. For the first time in days I slept like a log, without dreams or any disturbance. It was more a coma than sleep, for I was numb all over, with no feeling whatever in my feet.

When I awoke it was clear and sunny. A channel two miles wide separated us from the iceberg where the sea leopard lay. To the north and west the pack seemed to have closed again in a solid mass. When I crawled back into the tent again I saw that Kalstad was dead.

I roused the others, and we buried him there in the snow. For him the struggle was over. “Now we go on, ja? ” Vaksdal had seen the wide channel of water. He accepted the loss of the sea leopard and the inevitability of going forward until we dropped. His eyes were running and horribly inflamed, so that they seemed rimmed by raw flesh. Both he and Keller were suffering from the beginnings of frostbite due to walking in the snow after Bland had taken their boots. Yet they were willing to go on. They were tougher than I was. I just wanted to crawl into my tent and die as Kalstad had died.

But somewhere there is always a last flicker of energy. We took our tent, our sleeping bags and the rifle. Everything had to be carried. Before leaving, we ate the blubber off the stove over which we’d cooked the last of the meat the night before. Then I got out the compass, set our course, and we started off, leaving Kalstad to his lonely vigil in the ice, just, as we had left Gerda.

We were all very weak. We took turns using the skis. But soon we had to discard them, for we hadn’t the strength to hold our balance, and the extra weight on our legs when we had to lift them over broken outcroppings of clear ice was too much. The food we’d had caused us great pain. So did our feet. We were all suffering from frostbite now. Keller weakened rapidly and only the fact that I refused to give in until the two Norwegians were beaten kept me going.

Our progress was painfully slow. By midday we had made something like two miles, but by then Keller had to be supported between the two of us.

If we’d only had some definite goal it would have given an impetus to our struggle. But there was no goal, only a vague hope that none of us believed in. There was no point in going on. I found myself dogged by an overwhelming desire to drop in the snow and let the relief of death steal over me. It was a thing that had to be fought, together with exhaustion, the griping pains of hunger and the aching stab of my eyes.