Andrea Barrett - Voyage of the Narwhal

A DISTANT SOUND woke Erasmus during the night of May 21. He threw on his clothes and ran outside, into the pearly, improbable midnight light: two figures, dark against the ice, were creeping toward him. No matter how quickly he moved, how he halved the distance between himself and the figures and halved it again, still there were only two. Two. Ned, bent forward but still upright, resting a long moment before each step; and leaning against him, almost being carried by him, Zeke.

“Wait,” Erasmus said to the blackened, bloody faces. “Only a minute more.” Before he touched them, before even determining how far behind them Joe and Dr. Boerhaave might be, he flew back to the brig, rounded up Barton and Scan and Isaac, and tossed down the smallest sledge. Ned and Zeke, weighed down by the lumpy packages tied to their backs, had crumpled to the ice by the time the crew reached them. Zeke was unconscious and Ned hardly better, but Erasmus bent close to Ned’s ear.

“How far back are they?” he asked urgently. “Can you tell us where to start looking? Are they with the sledge?”

Ned twisted his head into Erasmus’s face.

“Can you talk?” Erasmus asked, pulling back. “You’re almost home, we’ll have you inside in five minutes — are they far?”

“Joe left us,” Ned groaned. “He stayed in Greenland. Dr. Boerhaave…” He banged his cheekbone into Erasmus’s mouth, hard enough to split Erasmus’s lower lip. Joe in Greenland? How could that be? Once more Erasmus pulled his head away.

“Under,” Ned whispered. “Under. We were, he was blind from the snow, we stopped. Zeke and I, we unharnessed ourselves, we left him in the traces while we were unloading the sledge to camp, we were, we were — it was safer to leave him tied in for a minute we thought, so he wouldn’t wander, he couldn’t see — we were unloading.”

“Unloading,” Erasmus repeated. He put a hand to his streaming lip. How could he be bleeding when time had stopped?

“It cracked,” Ned whispered. “The floe, right under the sledge. There was ice and then there wasn’t. The sledge went in and it pulled him. So fast. I couldn’t even touch his hand before he was gone.”

ZEKE REMAINED UNCONSCIOUS for eleven day sand was weak for a fortnight after that; brain fever, Erasmus thought. Ned was in better shape physically, but too exhausted and brokenhearted to talk. In their sleeping sacks Erasmus found some clues from which he tried to piece together the story.

Before the sledge had vanished, Ned had unloaded those sacks, most of their supplies, and Dr. Boerhaave’s small medicine chest and oilskin-wrapped journal; he’d carried home both despite his weakness. Erasmus went through the chest’s contents, not mourning his dead friend — not yet, he couldn’t admit that Dr. Boerhaave was truly gone — but searching for remedies for the survivors. Ointments, plasters, a few canisters of pills, oiled silk, lint, bandages, scalpels. Many small bottles and vials: tartar emetic, mercurous chloride, syrup of squill, tincture of opium. Not much use to Erasmus, but he heard Dr. Boerhaave’s voice as he read those names aloud. When he retreated to his bunk after tending to the invalids, he browsed through Dr. Boerhaave’s journal. Before leaving the Narwhal Dr. Boerhaave had written:

The last pages of my acquaintance’s Walden continue to comfort me. “Is it the source of the Nile, or the Niger, or the Mississippi, or a Northwest Passage around this continent, that we would find?” Thoreau writes. “Are these the problems which most concern mankind? Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him? Does Mr. Grinnell know where he himself is? Be rather the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clarkf and Frobisher, of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes — with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary, and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign…. What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact, that there are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone.”

Those words made Erasmus weep. A message for him, he thought: that Exploring Expedition was the one he’d been on as a youth, that search for Franklin had sent him here. If he and Dr. Boerhaave had truly heeded those words they might be safe in Philadelphia, comparing notes on crustaceans. Instead Dr. Boerhaave had crossed the Sound.

He’d written nothing during the crossing itself. His next entry read:

How difficult that was! Ridges of hummocks, barricades blocking our way again and again; I’ve never suffered such bodily pains. Yet we’re safe, finally. Ned’s snow blindness seems to have responded to treatment. For the last two days of our crossing I washed out his eyes with solution of boric acid, then put in morphine drops and bandaged his eyes shut; we pulled him on the sledge. A terrible trip.

The birds have been remarkable: snow buntings, a passerine that is probably the Lappland longspun hoary redpolls, the American pipit (surely this is the extreme north of its range?), wheatears. Red-throated loons, ivory gulls, a white gyrfalcon. The pipits fly high then flutter down, repeating their song faster and faster as they approach the ground. How these songbirds change the barren landscape! Suddenly everything seems alive. The dovekies are the most numerous; our hosts slaughter great flocks of them. We join their feasts gratefully.

Campions, cochlearia, and lichens are beginning their growth beneath the snow. In a sheltered pocket, whereon ice crust had formed, a purple saxifrage was flowering and a cinquefoil was greening. On some dry stones, from which the snow had already melted, I found two spiders.

And that was all. Not a word about the disappearance of Joe, the nature of the Greenland Esquimaux, the response to Zeke’s requests for dogs and help. Not a word, of course, about his own trials on the journey back.

He was blind, Erasmus thought, staring out into the harsh morning light. Not just blind but in pain. On what day had that happened? And why had he been walking blind, harnessed like a dog to the sledge? Why wasn’t he being pulled on the sledge, as Ned had been pulled on the journey over?

DURING THE MONTH that Zeke was laid up, Erasmus tried to prepare the brig for their departure. Ned still couldn’t or wouldn’t talk. To the men, who clamored for explanations about the disappearances of Joe and Dr. Boerhaave, Erasmus could say only what Ned had whispered before his collapse: that Joe had left them, and that Dr. Boerhaave had died in an accident on the ice. Erasmus grieved for Dr. Boerhaave constantly, and was consumed with questions about his end — but there was work to do, so much work to do, and Captain Tyler and Mr. Tagliabeau continued to shirk their duties. Leaning into Captain Tyler’s bunk and shouting at him that he must get up, they were so short-handed, Erasmus saw that Dr. Boerhaave’s name had been added to the paper gravestone. After that he left the captain alone.

He gave orders, made lists, split the duties of nursing the sick among the well, and assigned hunting teams. He waited impatiently for Zeke’s recovery, but it was Ned who recovered first and Ned, leaning on his arm while they paced the promenade, who first told Erasmus what had happened.

The ice in Smith Sound had been murderous, Ned said, like nothing they’d ever seen before: great tumbled blocks, amid which the sledge crashed like a toy. Sleeping had been almost impossible and they’d walked for twenty hours some days, half-blinded by the glare. Ned’s eyes were the worst. For ten or eleven days they’d wandered, finally reaching the coast with still no idea of where they were. But Dr. Boerhaave found tracks, Ned said, the faint tracks of a sledge, and Joe steered by them to a small settlement.