T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

Kresuk, without breaking the studied hand-to-mouth rhythm he has established, looks up and utters a single word: Sealshit.

Berg-Beleaguered

Like a foundling among wolves, a shot-glass of Wild Turkey among winos, a bridge over the River Kwai, the Endeavor drifts among ice peaks that rear malevolently a hundred feet above the water. The bergs are drifting too: battering together like gargantuan rams, shattering the arctic stillness with explosions as the ship-sized blocks thunder down. The brig rocks dizzily in the concussive waves; the men are panic-struck; the sixty-two dogs beshit the decks in fright. But the Captain seems unmoved, absorbed as he is in thinking up names for salient coastal features. Aunt, Aunt, Aunt? he thinks aloud.

Soon the black channel before them vanishes — two titantic bergs roll gently together and lock with a kiss: the open passage has become a cul-de-sac. Accordingly, First Officer Mallaby orders the brig turned 180 degrees. But wait! Even the channel they’ve just passed through is stoppered tight as a nun’s orifices — the brig’s wake trails off into the gullets of two implacable bergs, tall and white as the chalk cliffs at Dover. The open sea becomes a lake — no, a pond — inexorably the ring of ice closes in, like a mountain range seen creeping in time-stop photography through ten million years. Captain Frank! shouts Mallaby. Captain Frank! The Captain looks up, and for the first time assesses the situation. How embarrassing, he mutters, and returns to his notebook, annoyed with the interruption — he’d almost had it, the name he’d been searching for — his great aunt on his mother’s side.

Two hours later the Endeavor bobs in a puddle, surrounded by the sheer ice faces, kicked about now and again by their feet — the feet which even now, deep in the black and secretive depths, are welding themselves together, freezing across in a grim sort of net.

Five hundred yards distant, from their vantage point in Pekiutlik Lookout, two figures, swathed in the hair of beasts, are watching. One grunts: Hmph. What’d I tell you. The other, incredulous, mouths his reply: Mother of Walrus!

Captain’s Log, July 17

It is with great sorrow that I must report the loss of our ship. In searching for a northwest passage we entered a blind bay, became beleaguered by ice, and were finally crushed by the shifting floes. All hands escaped without incident, and due to my own foresight, much of our stores were saved, including a great quantity of wood from the crushed hull. She was a stout little brig, and we all hated to see her go — especially as it means making the eight-hundred-mile journey to Fiskarnaes, on the South Greenland coast, by foot. I have given orders to establish a winter camp here, as the season is so far progressed as to render any attempt at escape impracticable. About five hundred yards from the scene of the Endeavor’s demise is an outcropping of greenstone. I have named it Pauce Point, in honor of my great aunt, Rudimenta Pauce. It is in the lee of this cliff that we shall make our winter quarters with the heavy timber salvaged from the brig, insulating the walls and ceilings with packed ice, Esquimau-fashion. God willing, we shall live to see the spring, and other eyes will come to peruse what I have written here — the record of our tribulations.

The Glare

Out on the floes Kresuk is bent over a tiny hole, no more than two inches in diameter. His ear is to the ice, his fist curled round the harpoon. The seal responsible for this hole is at that very moment gamboling about the ice-blue depths, gobbling fish, undulating sealishly through the water, out of breath now, darting back to the airhole for a heaving gasp of oxygen. It will be his last gasp, smiles Kresuk.

Some distance off, the man with rifle and notebook is busy naming headlands, cliffs and glaciers after himself and members of his family. The jagged pencil line of the coast grows northward on the paper as each day he hikes farther, ostensibly in search of game. Soon, he thinks, he will have a team of dogs trained and will be able to cover twice the distance in a sledge — but for now he must walk, and haul back meat for the crew and ravenous dog-pack. Up ahead he catches sight of a movement out on the ice — he strains his eyes, but with the glare, and his sun-blindness, the object drifts and melds with the red and blue spots before his eyes. But isn’t it a bear? A fat bear, rich with meat and suet, bent now over a hole in the ice? The man folds the notebook into his parka and begins his stalk. When he gets within two hundred feet he lies flat, braces the rifle on an ice pedestal, takes careful aim, and fires.

Captain’s Log, August 15

Have made contact with the Esquimaux. I found one of these savages unconscious on the ice, suffering apparently from shock as a result of a recent flesh wound in the gluteus maximus. With the aid of a sledge drawn by six of the crew (we’ve not yet been able to train the dogs), I brought the poor fellow back to camp, where I was able to perform a crude operation, dressing his wound and treating the shock with a dose of morphine. He lies asleep now in the main cabin the fellows have constructed from the remains of the Endeavor. In appearance, he is very much like his Christianized counterparts to the south, but in size he greatly surpasses them, measuring six feet from toe to crown, and weighing nearly one hundred ninety pounds. He is dressed in rude garments fashioned from the pelts of his prey — he wears a sort of breeches fabricated from the hindquarters of the polar bear, the claws still attached and trailing upon the ground as he stands. His boots are of sealskin and his parka of arctic fox. He exudes a strong odor of urine.

I am quite anxious to speak with our primitive guest (hopefully through the office of my interpreter, Second Officer Moorhead Bone), as information regarding the indigenous Esquimau tribes and their seasonal wanderings should prove invaluable to us in effecting our spring escape.

Gaunt, and Pale

Kresuk awakes groggy, and with a distant ache in his anak, from a dream in which he had harpooned Osoetuk, the great narwhal, God of the Seas, and been dragged through the ice, down to Osoetuk’s lair in the icy depths. There Osoetuk had given him a wonderful elixir, the spirit of fishes and heart of walrus, and it had made him warm beneath the ice and the dark waters — warm, and drowsy.

Now he lies still, eyes closed, listening to the beat and wash of a strange tongue, remembering the flank attack and the lost seal. He struggles to open his eyes but the elixir prevents him. It takes all his concentration to crack the heavy lids just enough to catch a glimpse of the ceiling, its wooden beams. Wood! The last thing he’d expect to see at Pekiutlik. Hard and carvable, just the ticket for tools and totems — but up here the best he’d ever done was a forked branch washed up from the south. His conclusion is inevitable: I am dead, he thinks, and lifted into another world. The voices drone. His eyes open, close. He looks again: wood all around him, so precious, so rare, a forest above his heavy lids — the lids which now close as if weighted, while the dream seeps back into his consciousness. When again they open he twists his head in the direction of the voices, strains to see, focuses finally … on legends! Men with hair on their faces, gaunt and pale as winter, legends incarnate.

II. NIGHT

Captain’s Log, November 7

So cold your axillary hair shatters like glass, and the spittle freezes in your throat.

Captain’s Log, November 8

We have just enough light at noon to read the thermometer without aid of a lantern. Temperature at noon today was −38 degrees F., with a stiff breeze kicking up. Mr. Mallaby is lost somewhere out on the floes. At ten this morning he went out to feed the dogs and has not been seen since. I have sent out a search party.