Andrea Barrett - Voyage of the Narwhal

“If we could get to the mouth of the cove,” he said to the men that night, “past the icebergs, we’d be ready to move when the bay opens.”

“But we can do that,” Captain Tyler exclaimed. “We have tools.” The sense of being afloat again seemed to cure both him and Mr. Tagliabeau, who claimed to know every trick of the ice saws and powder canisters Erasmus had purchased more than a year ago.

Suddenly the pair were fitting pieces of metal together, calculating charges, giving orders to the men. All their sullen lethargy vanished. On August 1 they began sawing parallel channels through the ice, extending forward from the bit of open water under the bowsprit. The exploding canisters heaved and cracked fifty square yards of ice; the men sawed the slabs into smaller chunks and hauled them from the water, until the Narwhal occupied a tiny, jagged pool, three ship-lengths long but only a few feet broader than her beam. Flat on his stomach and sopping wet, Erasmus watched in wonder as tiny wavelets lapped at the edges of the pool. Each wavelet wore away a few more particles of ice. If they couldn’t carve a canal all the way out to the Sound, still every cut weakened the ice. A little more open water and a swell might arise, the tides might be felt.

They sawed and blasted, sawed and blasted; they crept up on Zeke’s Follies and then were beside them, almost in line with the tip of the point. Captain Tyler anchored the Narwhal to the stable ice, so it wouldn’t snake down the canal until they were fully loaded. Although Smith Sound was still far away, although they hadn’t yet dug themselves out of their cove, never mind into the larger bay, the long black ribbon stretching before the brig was immensely cheering.

August 5 passed without signs of Zeke, but no one discussed this. Zeke knew the margin of safety; that he might be a week, even ten days late, and still reach the brig before it was freed. Surely he was only exploring as long as possible. They worked around the clock, in delirious daylight, expecting Zeke every moment. On August 10, Captain Tyler set up the cables and the capstans.

Taking turns at the capstan bars, sweating and heaving to the tune of Scan’s whaling songs, the crew warped the Narwhal to the far end of the canal. After they anchored, Ned and Barton cooked a special feast, which they ate perched on crates along the thread of water. Their condition hadn’t really changed, Erasmus thought, tearing at a succulent ptarmigan leg. The brig had been one place and now was another, but the white plain still stretched around them, marked only by the line they’d carved across it. Still, the view was subtly changed, and this made an amazing difference. The hills they’d gazed at for almost a year loomed down at a new angle. The ice belt bound to the base of the cliffs was half a mile off their stern, almost beautiful in the distance. The three icebergs were right beside them, shrunken and bordered by rings of water. And the rock cairn beside the storehouse, beneath which they’d interred the remains of Mr. Francis, was no longer visible.

STILL ZEKE DIDN’T return. The temperature dropped and the sun sank toward the horizon; not night, not quite yet, but there were real twilights. On August 16 the temperature dipped below freezing and an inch of young ice formed on the canal. Perfectly smooth, Erasmus saw. Glassy and terrifying. Some slabs they’d sawed out but not yet removed were frozen into the delicate plain. The noon sun melted the ice, but on the seventeenth, when the sun set for the first time, a clear cold descended and the air grew still. The following morning Mr. Tagliabeau, long-faced, stood on the new ice and didn’t fall in. That day they sawed more old ice, with less enthusiasm, and on the nineteenth found that all their efforts had been undone while they slept.

The men came to Erasmus after he’d already lain down to sleep. They stood in a half-circle around the pallet he’d made on deck: Ned, Barton, Isaac, Robert, Ivan, Thomas, and Scan. Captain Tyler and Mr. Tagliabeau, for reasons Erasmus soon understood, stayed belowdecks in their bunks. When Erasmus sat up, rubbing his eyes, Ned stepped forward from the circle.

“Commander Voorhees is lost,” Ned said, after clearing his throat twice. “We all know it — we knew when he left this would happen. He’s two weeks late and we have to admit that he’s dead.”

“He’s not dead” Erasmus said. Although he’d been fearing just this for a week. “He’s late. Anything could have happened to him, he could be near us right now.”

“He’s dead,” Barton said, behind Ned’s shoulder. “He’s been trying to kill us all since the day we left home. And the ice isn’t opening, and the young ice gets thicker every day…”

“And we’re not going to be able to free the Narwhal” Isaac chimed in.

“We’re stuck,” said Ivan.

“Again,” Scan said.

“There’s so little fuel left,” Thomas added. “Our supplies— you know, you have the lists. We can’t make it through another winter.”

A fog seemed to hover over Erasmus’s head. He was tired, he hadn’t been sleeping well. He could almost hear the new ice forming. He could almost hear the beat of wings as the birds gathered for their journeys south, almost hear hooves ringing as the ground hardened and the caribou fled. His eyes felt full of cinders. Hadn’t he wished Zeke dead, if only for a moment?

“What is it you want?” he asked. “I don’t know what’s happened to Commander Voorhees any more than you do. I can’t keep the ice from forming, and I can’t do much about our supplies. We can assign more hunting parties if you’d like, keep half of us working at breaking up the ice and half stockpiling game; that’s a good idea, perhaps we’ll start that tomorrow…”

Ned stepped back, twisted around, and picked up something from the deck. The others mimicked his movements, and when they stood and faced Erasmus again, he saw that each held a stack of neatly folded fur clothing. “We have these,” Ned said. “Each of us. And we want to leave.”

For the rest of the night, and all through the following day, the men ground down Erasmus’s objections. Captain Tyler and Mr. Tagliabeau kept working on the canal, punctuating the men’s comments with explosions and the crack of shattering ice. The officers couldn’t address the subject directly, Ned told Erasmus. It would be inappropriate given their positions; they couldn’t give orders to abandon the brig. But apparently they were willing to join a retreat led by Erasmus.

The men had maps, Erasmus learned. Maps, plans, lists of their own, detailed strategies. How long had they been discussing this without him? Since the moment of Zeke’s departure, perhaps; those fur suits, he now realized, had always been meant for this trip. The men had never believed that Zeke would return. And although they’d hoped that the Narwhal might be freed, they’d found it sensible to make an alternate plan. Among them they had a surprising wealth of knowledge.

Scan and Barton had worked out a possible route. They’d load the whaleboat onto the large sledge and drag it from their cove around the point and to the mouth of the bay; then along the ice belt to Cape Sabine, or perhaps a bit farther south. After that they’d head diagonally southeast across the Sound, dragging the boat over the solid floes and rowing across any cracks. Somewhere south of Cape Alexander, perhaps fifty or sixty miles from the Narwhal, they might hope to find open water or at least navigable pack ice; they’d launch the boat and work past Cape York to the inshore lead of Melville Bay. They might still hope to find whalers there; failing that, they might hope to sail to Upernavik.