T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

The supply of fresh meat I commissioned from Kresuk in early September is nearly gone. It was well worth the price (some three hundred pounds of walrus and bear in exchange for a string of glass beads and six red wooden buttons). Judging from his look of idiot delight as I dangled the beads before his nose, I think I could have got another six hundred pounds of meat in the bargain. My only complaint is that the savage has not returned since, and we are in dire need of further barter. I presume he is wintering at Etah, the Esquimau village sixty miles south of us.

Captain’s Log, November 12

The search party has not returned; no trace either of Mr. Mallaby. I regret to report that of the men remaining (five went out on the search) only four are well enough to be up and about. Frostbite has been our biggest enemy, with scurvy running a close second. All the men suffer from the latter, and to complicate matters, our meager supply of dried fruits has been already exhausted. Even the pickled cabbage is beginning to go quickly — yet all of us show signs of scorbutic weariness and bleeding at the gums.

The incessant hacking and wheezing, and the groaning of the amputees, is trying on my nerves. Besides which I am bored witless — nothing to do but tend the sick and wait for the sun — nearly 140 days distant. Nursing is not exactly my idea of an heroic occupation — I long for the more active fight.

Captain’s Log, November 15

The remains of Mr. Mallaby’s fur suit have been found by Mr. Bone among the dogs: I can only conjecture his fate. The dog-pack, incidentally, is now down to twenty-seven survivors — it appears they have been eating one another, as we have been unable to provide them with fresh meat, and the pemmican (unpalatable though it is), we must conserve for our own use. Yet Mr. Bone reminds me that without dogs we should be hard-pressed in making our spring trek to civilization. Something must be done.

The search party has not yet returned. I have dispatched a second search party, composed of our three ablest men (Tiggis, Tuggle and Mr. Wright), to search for the missing search party.

Barter

Kresuk returns. His round cheeks, white furs, slit eyes. His shaggy frame in the doorway. The stiff seal flipper clutched in his mittens.

The Captain beckons him in, slamming the door against the wind. A dying wood-fire glows in the corner, shadows mount the walls. The men snuff and wheeze. The Captain nods at Kresuk, smiling. Kresuk nods back, smiling. “Bone!” shouts the Captain. “Bone!”

Mr. Bone lifts himself from his pallet, breath steaming around his head like a pot of coffee, and hobbles out to join his superior. “Mr. Bone, speak with this fellow. I feel certain that he’s come to exchange meat for beads, and I don’t think I need emphasize how sorely necessitous we are at this juncture.” Bone coughs, relieves himself of a wad of sputum. “Wuk noah tuk-ha,” he says. Kresuk stares past him for a moment, then turns to sift through the murky low room. He pokes into each cabinet, each bed, beneath each man’s pillow. “What’s he about, Bone?” demands the Captain. “Here now!”

Kresuk is collecting things: fine glittering knives, pewter mugs, pocket watches, axes. A sack of red wooden buttons. He clatters them down in the center of the room, holds out the seal flipper to Mr. Bone.

Captain’s Log, November 21

Kresuk has been back. We exchanged a few of our things for a new, if small, supply of fresh meat. The savage drives a hard bargain. He has us, as they say, over a barrel.

Mr. Bone’s great toe has suppurated to such a degree that I fear gangrenous infection if it is not removed. Once again, I think, as the surgical blade splashes through to negotiate the bone in a quick down-and-across stroke, the damnable frost has cost us another part of our bodies. We’ll all of us be amputees by the time the sun returns to us — a pack of sniveling, scurvied cripples.

No word from either search party. I would organize a third search party to search for the two missing search parties, but there are just five of us here, and I am the only one with two serviceable legs and feet, arms and hands. Really, I feel like chief attendant at a leper colony.

Captain’s Log, November 22

Funeral obsequies for Mr. Mallaby today. My bedridden mates hobbled outside where we gathered round a memorial plaque and sang hymns. What with the coughing and slobbering of the men, and the groans of the wind, it was difficult, but we did manage a fairly respectable job of “Art thou weary, art thou languid?”—one of my personal favorites. Young Harlan Hawkins wept as I read “ashes to ashes, dust to dust, ice to ice” (I thought the insertion quite apposite), and scattered the remaining strands of Mr. Mallaby’s furs to the wind. It was a pitiable sight indeed — the poor boy swabbing at the frozen tears with his right stump as the soul of his valiant shipmate was set free to be gathered to the bosom of his Maker. The boy’s own soul, I’m afraid, will not be long with us either.

Lost on the Floes

The wind howls a gale, the cold shatters steel, splinters wood, transubstantiates flesh to ice. Misshapen ice-hummocks rear up like bad dreams, gray and ghostly in the perennial dark. All living things perish here: only the ice belt lives on — thrives — in the searing winds and falling temperatures.

The search parties, having found one another, are faced with a secondary problem: finding their way back. Their progress for the past six hours has been geometrical — on feet long dead, they have plodded out the shaky hypotenuses of a dozen right triangles, one atop the other. They are drunk with the cold, enraptured with it; cold no longer, they lie down to rest. Pekiutlik Lookout (known variously as Pauce Point) lies but half a mile south of them. Half a mile through the black moonscape of the Arctic Night.

Natural Selection

In his igloo at the Etah settlement Kresuk and his neighbors are lounging about naked, skin on fur, sunning in the prodigious heat put out by their seal-blubber lamps. At this particular moment Kresuk is bending over to display the tiny circular scar on his anak, the badge of his first encounter with the gaunt men. The badge of his later encounters with the gaunt men dangles beneath his chin: a necklace of red wooden buttons, glass beads and gold pocket watches. His neighbors are threading similar necklaces, chipping away at the icy floor with their steel knives, trying their teeth against the smoky pewter mugs. They look up as Kresuk begins retelling the story of the wound, a story they’ve heard as many as ninety-seven times. They are fascinated nonetheless. Beads, knives and mugs drop, mouths hang open. And pairs of quick black eyes follow the necklace twisting and slapping against Kresuk’s breastbone as he pantomimes the action of his sealhunt. When he speaks, the gibbous cheeks part to reveal his smile, and his eyes flash like headlights beneath the fleshy lids.

When the tale is finished and Metek sits up to tell his story of the great winged whale that brought the gaunt men, the others turn back to their beads, knives, mugs. Kresuk stretches out and begins picking at his sealhaunch. He chews thoughtfully, only half-attending his friend’s narrative, his mind on the glory he’s won, glory that will pass down through generations. He sees himself a king, his sons princes. It is then that Sip-su raises himself and waddles over to his father, where he squats to deposit a turd, wet and shapeless, on Kresuk’s foot. The friends laugh. Ooniak stares down at her toe. And Kresuk explodes, slaps the fat-headed child across the igloo — Sip-su totters, spins off the kotluk, scalds himself, wails. The neighbors look down at their beads and laps, faces elongate, and fight to suppress chuffles and snorts while Kresuk pulls on his furs, orders Ooniak to dress the child. Wordless, he snatches up the screeching Sip-su and crawls out the door. The old men nod.