Andrea Barrett - Voyage of the Narwhal

L ater, different scenes from the boat journey would float back to each of them. So much work, so much pain; so little rest or food or hope. What happened when? What happened in fact, and what was only imagined, or misremembered? Erasmus made no diary entries, nor did Ned or the other men. Of the days when they were out on the ice, heaving against the harnesses and rowing through lanes of ice-choked water, or sleeping packed like a litter of piglets inside the canvas-covered boat, nothing remained but a blur ofimpressions.

From their cove down the ice belt to Cape Sabine, then across the broken, heaving Sound to a point slightly north of Cape Hatherton: pack ice, water, old ice, hummocks, thin ice, pressure ridges. Always pulling, except for the wearying, exasperating times when their way was blocked by an open channel and they must unload everything, remove the boat from the sledge, ferry across, reload, and begin the whole process again. Their shoulders and hands were rubbed raw by the ropes, and Ivan would remember the acid burn of vomit on his lips; they all threw up, they were pulling too much weight. Near the leads the ice was covered with slush and often they sank above their knees. Scan would remember how his ankles ballooned, forcing him to slit his boots and finally cut them off entirely, so that he made the rest of the journey with his feet wrapped in caribou hides. Robert would remember his persistent, burning diarrhea, and the humiliation of soiling his pants when he strained against the weight of the sledge.

Erasmus would pause one day after skidding helplessly on the ice, and then he’d think of the bit of boot sole sealed in his box and wonder why they hadn’t all thought to stud their boots similarly. In what seemed to him now like another life, his boots had shot him off the face of a cliff — and still he hadn’t learned. But it was too late now, they had no screws; they fell and stumbled and were relieved only once, when the ice field was smooth and the wind blew from the northwest. That day they set the sails and glided for eight miles: a great blessing, never repeated, which Barton would dream about for years.

From a high point of land on the Greenland side of Smith Sound, Captain Tyler and Mr. Tagliabeau saw more ice south of them, but also, in the distance, an open channel between the land-fast ice and the pack ice slicing southward. Isaac, blinded by the snow, would not remember this sight, but the others would; and Thomas would remember his frantic rush, at night when he was already exhausted, to caulk the boat’s seams and repair the holes. And how anxious he’d felt when Erasmus told him they all depended on his ability to keep the boat together with no proper supplies.

At the Littleton Islands the ice field thinned, abraded from beneath by the currents from a nearby river. Barton would remember inching forward the last few miles, sounding the ice with a boat hook at every step and eying the eddies gurgling just below his feet. And then breaking through, despite his precautions: one side of the sledge crashing under, the sickening lurch and the scramble to firmer ice. Ivan remembered that moment— always, always — because he’d been tied in closest to the sledge and, as his companions heaved, had lost his footing and been pulled into the water, to bob briefly under the edge of the ice. By the time Erasmus pulled him out by the hair, he’d broken two fingers and seen blood pour from a gash in Erasmus’s forehead. In the ice-choked water Erasmus floundered, scrambling for the provision bags slithering out of the boat as the sea slithered over the sides. The copper pot containing the Franklin relics slipped out too, but the air beneath the walrus skin kept it floating low in the water and at first Erasmus thought he might retrieve it. Under the broken floe it sailed, the floe that had nearly claimed Ivan; and although Erasmus pressed his shoulder against the edge and swept with his arms and then a paddle, finally lowering his head beneath the ice, the pot disappeared. That night a hard wind blew from the northeast, nearly freezing the wet men to death.

Erasmus would remember this because it was here that he lost the evidence of their search for Franklin’s remains, and also because, although he could never be sure, he suspected that here began the process of freezing and constriction and infection that would later cause him to lose his toes. He should have been resting, with his boots removed and his feet wrapped in dry furs. But instead, that night he and Captain Tyler, with whom he’d been arguing since they left the brig, stood screaming at each other in front of the men and nearly came to blows. Each blamed the other for the accident and the loss of the relics — as each had blamed the other for every wrong turn taken, bad camping site chosen, failure hunting — and Captain Tyler had slashed the air with a boathook and said, “I despise you.” A moment that Mr. Tagliabeau, never more than a few feet from his captain but less and less certain that his loyalty was justified, would also always remember. He’d longed to turn his back and say, “I despise you both,” but had said nothing; on this journey he learned that he was both a coward and a complainer.

Not long after that accident, though, they stood on a high mound and saw a lane of open water spreading before them. With much effort they made their way to a rocky beach, and then unloaded the boat for the last time and sank it for a day to swell the seams. Not long enough, Thomas would remember thinking. The surf was beating against the cliffs; was it his fault the boat still leaked when it was finally, properly launched? They were ten men in a whaleboat made for six, with too much baggage. Trembling inches above the water they rowed, and felt like they were swimming. Under reefed sails, in a fresh breeze, they rounded Cape Alexander.

Ned would remember the mock sun that appeared in the sky that evening; a perfect parhelion — Dr. Boerhaave had taught him that word — with a point of light on either side. But neither Ned nor anyone else would be haunted by the sight of Dr. Boerhaave’s head, which in the months since his drowning had been severed from his body by a passing grampus and then swept south in the currents, coming to rest face up on the rubble below a cliff. Among the rounded rocks his head was invisible to his friends, and the singing noise made by the wind passing over his jaw bones was lost in the roar of the waves.

Sutherland Island, where they’d hoped to land, was barricaded by ice. They bobbed all night in irregular winds and a violent freezing rain, and Ned would remember this place for the weather and the onset of his fever, which caused this journey to be jumbled forever after in his mind with his two earlier crossings of Smith Sound. Eastward with Joe and Dr. Boerhaave and Zeke he’d gone; westward with only Zeke. He remembered that. Pushing like an animal against the harness, pulling the sledge sunk into the soft surface — those journeys, or this journey?

Once the worst of the fever hit and he lay helpless among his companions, he repeated to himself the stories Joe had told him as they pulled another sledge, in another month. The stories that, once they reached Anoatok, Joe had translated for him around the fire. They’d lain on a platform inside the hut, mashed in a crowd of Esquimaux and sharing walrus steaks. Meat was piled along the ice belt and walrus skulls glared eyeless from the snowbanks. A mighty spirit called Tonarsuk, Joe had said, spearing a morsel from the soup pot. In whom these Esquimaux believe. And many minor supernatural beings, chief among them the goblins known as innersuit, who live among the fjords and have no noses. The innersuit hide behind the rocks, waiting to capture a passing man so they may cut off his nose and force him to join their tribe. Should the victim escape their clutches, his nose may be returned to him by the intercession of a skillful wizard, or angekok. The nose may come back, Joe had said; he’d been translating Ootuniah’s words for Ned and Dr. Boerhaave, as they steamed companionably in the hut. The nose may come flying through the sky, and settle down in its former place; but the man once captured by the innersuit will always be known by the scar across his face.