Andrea Barrett - Voyage of the Narwhal

How lucky they’d felt then! For there were Ootuniah and Awahtok and the three other Esquimaux who’d visited the Narwhal; also a few other men, four women, and a handful of children. They were feasting on walrus, and although they seemed startled by the arrival of their guests they shared their food freely and took them into their hut — a large dormitory, built of stone and lined outside with sods, very different from the tents of the Netsilik. Around a blubber fire their wet furs steamed.

For two weeks, these people had sheltered the four pale men. While Ned recovered his eyesight, Joe and Zeke and Dr. Boerhaave hunted with their hosts, capturing birds, seals, and two more walrus, which they afterward ate in the warm hut. Zeke had asked Ootuniah for dogs and men to help him journey north — he needed help, he said. And would pay for it generously. Or so Ned understood from what Joe told him.

Much of what Ned knew he’d gathered only by asking Joe. On their arrival Joe had begun to interpret, as always, but Zeke had ordered him to stop. He didn’t need Joe’s interpreting skills after all, he said; he’d studied hard and now he could understand the Esquimaux language himself.

“I’m not sure about this,” Ned told Erasmus. “How much he understood — but he seemed to be doing well enough, and he really didn’t want Joe to help him. He said he couldn’t establish true friendships with these people if Joe always interposed himself between them and him. You’re to be quiet, Zeke said. So Joe had time to interpret things for me. And time to talk with Ootuniah alone and listen to his stories. He told me some, they were like Esquimaux fairy tales.”

The hunting trips, Ned thought, were where Joe and Ootuniah had grown friendly: he knew no more than that. On their last night in Anoatok, when Ootuniah finally, firmly, denied all Zeke’s requests and said that they could spare no dogs or men, and that Zeke shouldn’t travel north at this time of year, Joe slipped away. Ned and Zeke and Dr. Boerhaave woke the next morning to find that Ootuniah and his companions had loaded Zeke’s sledge with a huge heap of walrus meat, but that Joe was gone.

Zeke had translated Ootuniah’s explanations for Ned and Dr. Boerhaave, his face stricken as he did so. “This land is your friend’s homeland,” Zeke repeated. His face twisted, as though the words were sour on his tongue. “Although his own people live far south of here. He has borrowed a sledge and dogs from us and headed there. We wish him well in his journey, as we wish you well in yours. All this meat, it is for you and your men. Your friend has gone home.”

Ned and Dr. Boerhaave hadn’t been surprised; they’d both seen how tired Joe was of Zeke. Zeke’s demands and requests and posturings, Zeke’s plans and questions and maps; many times Ned had seen Joe and Ootuniah together, talking and laughing and sharing food. “It was Commander Voorhees’s moodiness that drove Joe away,” Ned said. “His carelessness— Joe was our most valuable crew member, and now he’s gone. I could almost feel what Joe was feeling: he was in Greenland, even if so far north, and among Esquimaux, even if not a tribe he knew — and he had a chance to get away from us. Of course he took it. If I had a way to go home, I’d do the same.”

Ned and Zeke and Dr. Boerhaave had been forced to travel back without Joe, loaded with precious walrus meat but with none of the things that Zeke had most desired. That trip was worse than the first, Ned said; the pack was shifting and the floes heaved beneath them. After a brief stretch of smooth, clear ice, they’d run into a maze of pressure ridges, ten-foot blocks heaped in snaking walls that forced them backward and then in circles. Zeke refused to lighten the sledge by discarding any of the meat. It was all they had to show for their trip, he said, and the Narwhal’s crew needed it.

“Although you didn’t,” Ned said bitterly. “How could we not have understood that if the Esquimaux were finding food, you would be too?”

On the fourth day, Dr. Boerhaave’s eyes had given out completely. A vast confusion of rain and snow and glaring sun, wild winds and sudden sharp cold; their furs were soaked through and they had to keep moving to stay warm. Were Dr. Boerhaave to ride on the sledge, Zeke said, he would surely freeze to death. He must keep walking. Perhaps that was true. But it was also true that the sledge was already almost too heavy to pull. Dr. Boerhaave couldn’t possibly lie atop that heap of meat and Zeke wouldn’t discard his sole prize.

Zeke arranged the traces so that Dr. Boerhaave was harnessed next to the sledge, with Ned and Zeke himself a few feet before him, at the points of an equilateral triangle. Another set of ropes ran from Dr. Boerhaave’s waist to Ned’s and Zeke’s, forming the triangle’s sides, so that Dr. Boerhaave could then walk forward guided by the gentle pressure. And it had worked, Ned admitted. It was horrible the way Dr. Boerhaave stumbled over the ridges and mounds, the way his sightless face grimaced and colored— yet perhaps only the constant movement had kept him alive.

Or perhaps if Zeke had emptied the sled, packed Dr. Boerhaave on it wrapped in all their furs, he might be alive even now. Or if they hadn’t untied the ropes connecting them to Dr. Boerhaave before unloading the sledge for their brief rest, or if they’d chosen any other place, any other time to stop…

“The waist ropes weren’t long enough,” Ned said, staring out at the white plain. Erasmus was sweating beneath his jacket, moisture trickling down his sides as if his arms were weeping. That Dr. Boerhaave had had to endure this… “We couldn’t unload the sledge while we were still tied in,” Ned continued. “Just a few minutes we weren’t tied to him — how could the ice have opened just then?”

Erasmus remembered his first impression of his friend: Dr. Boerhaave’s quick and shining mind, flashing like a silver salmon. Did a soul survive? His body moved among the fish but perhaps his soul had floated free. One fine idea in the mind of God, which might express itself in another form.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Erasmus said. And it wasn’t; nor was it, exactly, Zeke’s. Yet if Joe had been there it wouldn’t have happened, Joe would have understood what to do: and who was to blame for Joe’s desertion, if not Zeke? The sweat congealed on his chest. It could have been Zeke, sinking through that ice. It should have been Zeke. Behind that flare of rage was a bleaker thought. If he hadn’t shared that one night with the men — if Zeke hadn’t caught him drinking — he might have been there himself to save Dr. Boerhaave.

BY JUNE 15 Zeke was well enough to rise and resume command of the ship. He gathered all the men on deck, even Captain Tyler and Mr. Tagliabeau, and thanked them for their good work during his absence and subsequent illness. Erasmus stood next to him, his hands jammed in his pockets, trying to listen without shouting. Dr. Boerhaave was dead and here was Zeke. His sister’s love, the leader of all these men, everyone needed him— if I struck him, Erasmus thought, with the calm of real hysteria; if he fell and hit his head… but Zeke’s death wouldn’t help anyone except, very briefly, him. He dug his fingers through the cloth and into his thighs as Sean said, “But what really happened to Joe and Dr. Boerhaave?”

Zeke told a story that resembled what Ned had told Erasmus, but was somehow quite different. In his version, Joe was unhelpful on the crossing to Greenland, and once there poisoned Zeke’s relationship with the Esquimaux. Because of Joe the Esquimaux, initially willing to supply Zeke with dogs, and perhaps even accompany him on some travels north, had turned against him. There was a woman involved, Zeke hinted; he suspected that Joe had formed a relationship with one of the Anoatok women, deserting so he might meet her later.