Andrea Barrett - Voyage of the Narwhal

“Interesting,” Erasmus said, although he was taken aback by this hodgepodge. Where was the urgency of their quest? “I can see this is where you kept track of what you learned while we were planning the trip. But what about now? Don’t you — describe things? Write about what you’ve seen each day, and the progress we’re making?”

“That’s not important,” Zeke said. On the cabin table a candle burned, casting improbable shadows. “Or not as important as planning ahead for what’s to come. I like to use this for thinking, writing down what’s really significant. Captain Tyler may run this brig on a daily basis. But I’m the one with the vision. I’m the one who has to keep us on track in the largest sense.”

“I could do the mundane part,” Erasmus offered. “Keep a record of our daily life, I mean. Then you’d be free to keep a more personal account.”

“Why don’t you take this?” Zeke said, indicating Lavinia’s gift. “It’s a good size, you’ll have plenty of room.” He lifted a stack of pages and let them slip along his thumb: a whirring noise, like wing beats. “When we get home, we can tell Lavinia we worked on it together.”

THE WIND GREW fierce again. Not far from Cape York, Zeke gave in to Captain Tyler’s wishes and ordered a dock cut in the land-fast ice, where they might shelter until the gale passed. Above them a glacier poured between two cliffs crowded with nesting murres: black rock streaked with streams of droppings, the clean white river of ice; more soiled rock secreting waves of ammonia and an astonishing squawking noise. As birds left their eggs to seek fish in the cracks between the floes, a hunting party fired at them. Dr. Boerhaave, perched on a boulder, stayed behind to examine the parasites in the slaughtered birds’ feathers. Zeke and Erasmus and Joe headed up the glacier’s tongue.

They climbed joined by a long rope, which Joe looped around their waists as protection against the crevasses. Wissy, attached to Zeke by a separate rope, led; then Zeke and behind him Erasmus, who kept listing to the glacier’s edge where it met the cliff, and where plants grew in the rocky, sheltered hollows. Chickweeds and sorrel and saxifrages, willows hardly bigger than his hand— but Zeke pulled on him like a farmer tugging a reluctant cow. In the rear Joe called out instructions when he detected a weakness in the ice. The lichens alone, Erasmus thought, would have repaid a week’s visit; he didn’t have a minute with them. The heaps of envelopes he’d brought for seeds were useless. The white bells of arctic heather like dwarfed lilies of the valley, the inch-high tangle of rhizomes, everything spreading vegetatively in a season too short for most plants to set seeds — he should be taking notes, copious notes, but they were moving too fast.

What was Zeke pulling him toward? A rough, craggy object half-embedded in the ice; he was missing his chance with the cliffside plants for the sake of a rock. By the time he caught up to Zeke, about to complain, Zeke was digging out one side of the boulder, assisted by Wissy’s frantic paws. “What’s so interesting?” Erasmus asked.

“I don’t know,” Zeke said. “It caught my eye, it looked so out of place — what is this doing here?”

Erasmus bent and saw that the side of the boulder opposite his hands was chipped and fractured in a way that suggested human interference. Elsewhere was a crust he recognized. “It’s a meteorite,” he told Zeke, annoyed that he hadn’t discovered it himself.

Joe caught up to them, out of breath, and inspected the chipped side. “One of the iron stones!” he exclaimed.

“Why do you call it that?” Erasmus asked. He could feel where flakes the size of fingernails were missing.

“There are Esquimaux around here,” Joe said. “The ones Ross called Arctic Highlanders. Even as far south as Godhavn we’ve heard stories of how they use the odd rocks stuck in the glaciers. They chip harpoon heads from them.”

Erasmus inspected the rock more closely and probed it with his knife: a siderite, he decided, metallic iron alloyed with nickel.

A similar specimen had fallen in Gloucestershire in 1835—but how remarkable to find one here! And for Joe to know the story that made sense of it. “Ever since Ross explored this area, people have been wondering about the source of the northern tribe’s iron,” he said to Zeke. “They must have been getting it from this stone, or from others like it.”

Joe nodded. “Somewhere near here are supposed to be three large ones, which the Esquimaux have named. And perhaps smaller ones like this as well.”

Zeke tapped the lumpy, dull-colored rock. “We can’t leave such an important discovery here.”

“You can’t take it,” Joe exclaimed. “The natives need these. They call them saviksue, they believe they have a soul.”

Erasmus looked at Joe, at Zeke, at the rock. He couldn’t help himself, he coveted it.

“Them,” Zeke said. “You acknowledge yourself that there are others. I’m only taking this small one.”

Over Joe’s protests Zeke and Erasmus chipped the ice away with their knives, until the rock was free. It was as heavy as a man. “Just help us roll it to the ship,” Zeke begged; and Joe finally agreed.

In the eerie pink light they sweated and struggled and pushed, all the time hearing the distant gunshots and the indignant roar of the birds. Erasmus, as the angle of the glacier grew steeper, slipped near a patch of meltwater and fell. Joe and Zeke, roped on either side of him, tumbled seconds later. The meteorite, free of their hands, rolled clumsily as they untied the knots that tangled them. It gathered speed and lurched down slantwise, leaping over a last ridge of ice to plunge into the gap where the glacier had pulled away from the side of the cliff.

Erasmus heard it shatter and leapt to his feet. Running after it, too late to save it, stumbling and slipping and hoping, still, that he might retrieve a piece, he stayed upright most of the way down the glacier but skidded off the last, lowest ledge. He was flying; his eyes were open. He was arcing over the stony shore, heading for the ice, praying that he’d die quickly. He saw a patch of darkness the size of a dining-room table, an open pool in the ice; then he was underwater. Then under ice.

The water burned him like fire and scoured his mouth and eyes, but even as he thrashed and struggled and felt his limbs numb he saw the fish schooling around his legs, and the murres serenely swimming like fish, and the cool, green, glowing underside of the ice. He had a few minutes, he thought, remembering Ivan’s near drowning. No more. Something shimmered white: belugas? He fainted, or froze, or drowned. When he came to himself again he was looking up at Dr. Boerhaave’s anxious face.

“Am I alive?” he asked.

“Just barely,” Dr. Boerhaave said. “Ned pulled you out.”

“Did you see the meteorite?”

Dr. Boerhaave shook his head.

THEY COULDN’T RECOVER even a single piece of the stone before Captain Tyler hurried the Narwhal into a suddenly open lead. In his berth, recovering from his chilly bath, Erasmus rested for a day. When he felt better he thanked Ned.

“It was nothing,” Ned said. “I was gutting a fish, looking right at the hole in the ice where you landed. All I did was run over with the boat hook.”

With Dr. Boerhaave’s help, Erasmus wrote up a description of the meteorite to send to Edinburgh. The weather grew fine— warm during the day; just below freezing during the gleaming north light that was as close as they came to night — and as Erasmus wrote to Dr. Boerhaave’s friend he noted the odd combination of summer and winter features: cool air, hot sun; black cliffs, white ice. On the cloudless day when they reached the North Water, he felt as though he were home during harvest-time.