Andrea Barrett - Voyage of the Narwhal

Ned’s fever, or frostbite, or something putrid he ate, had caused his own nose to erupt in pustules that leaked yellow fluid and then crusted over and cracked and bled. He would remember dreading his whole nose might disappear. And then thinking it should disappear — along with his face, his entire body: Who was to blame for all this, if not him? He had lied to Erasmus; he’d made those fur suits and shifted supplies like a thief; he’d planned this trip and organized the men. On Boothia, he’d pointed out the copper kettles that had set everything else in motion; on his earlier crossing of the Sound, he’d failed to save Dr. Boerhaave. As they passed fjords and glaciers he heard singing — not Dr. Boerhaave, but someone else — and begged the man against whose knee he was pressed to guard him from the goblins. The innersuit cause much trouble, Ootuniah had said. They plague many a journey. Weeping with guilt and fear, his hands cupped over his nose, Ned remembered his grandmother’s tales back in Ireland. Malicious spirits who made porridge burn, toast fall buttered side down, cows lose their calves. Perhaps it was the innersuit who’d haunted this journey and brought the fickle, difficult weather.

Perhaps, he told Erasmus one night — perhaps it was the innersuit who were to blame for their bad luck. They pushed through half-solid water, around icebergs and currents of drift ice. One night they anchored in a crack as a gale struck from the northwest, watching helplessly as a floe on the far side of the channel broke off, spun on an iceberg like a pivot, and closed upon their resting place. When it hit the corner of their small dock the floe shattered, their haven shattered, everything around them rose and crushed and tumbled. The boat was tossed like a walnut shell into a boiling slurry of crushed ice and water, and Robert would remember this more sharply than the other accidents, because it was here that he dislocated his shoulder. Captain Tyler held him down while Erasmus torqued his arm back into place, and Robert would remember being amazed, even through the blinding pain, that the pair had worked in concert.

On Hakluyt Island they found birds, but failed to shoot any. A seal they shot near an iceberg sank before they could retrieve it. They ran out of food, for a week eating only a few ounces of bread dust and pemmican each day with all of them feverish, all of them weak, and Ned muttered that perhaps the innersuit had stolen Joe from them, and tipped Dr. Boerhaave into the water. Erasmus would remember this comment and how sharply it pained him. Despite his worry for Ned, and for the others who didn’t understand how weak they’d grown but were each day less capable, still the mention of Dr. Boerhaave could make his mind freeze up. He never thought about Zeke, the thought was impossible; he hardly thought about what was happening to his feet, although they were oozing and stinking and numb; he focused on getting them all through each day, pushing forward and cooking and eating and resting and pushing again, putting the miles behind them. But when Ned muttered about goblins and Dr. Boerhaave, Erasmus had to fight to keep his concentration.

Northumberland Island, Whale Sound, Cape Parry. The sea was covered with drifting pack ice, which poured from Whale Sound in a constant stream. At night thin ice formed in the open patches, and Erasmus would remember the panic this caused him. If they were caught here they would never survive; and Ned would be the first to go. Ned was delirious, and when Robert and Ivan shot a heap of dovekies, Ned sat upright, his nose a bloody, eroded mass, and babbled. Something about a great hunt: he and Joe and Dr. Boerhaave joining the Esquimaux on the cliffs where the dovekies were breeding. Sweeping the birds from the air with nets at the end of long narwhal tusks; thousands caught as easily as one might pick peas and the bodies boiling in huge soapstone pots, the children sucking on bird skins and tearing raw birds limb from limb, their faces buried in feathers and blood smeared over their cheeks. But Ned wouldn’t eat these other birds, he couldn’t bear to bring food near his nose. He said names, only some of which Erasmus knew — Awahtok, Metek, Ootuniah; Myouk, Egurk, Nualik, Nessark — and later, when those names and the people behind them would return to haunt Erasmus, he’d remember envying Ned all he’d seen on that trip, and wishing yet again that he’d been present: Dr. Boerhaave might still be alive.

Erasmus both heard and didn’t hear Ned as he forced the boat farther south. Captain Tyler and Mr. Tagliabeau contradicted his every order, more and more confident as they passed Hoppner Point and Granville Bay and it began to seem that, if they could just beat the final freezing-in, they might actually reach the whaling grounds. They were racing, racing, the temperature dropping each day and the new ice forming, the pack consolidating, the narrow channel closing: yet despite the urgency Captain Tyler argued over every tack and turn. These were his waters, Erasmus would remember him saying; they were in his country now and Erasmus must cede command to him. Here he knew what was best for the expedition.

Erasmus had unlaced his boots that morning, unable to resist confirming by eye what he could already feel; eight of his toes were black and dead. In Dr. Boerhaave’s medicine chest were amputating knives, still sharp and gleaming, but it was impossible that he should use them on himself. It was also now impossi ble that he should walk any distance if the ice closed around them, but no one knew that yet. Or maybe Captain Tyler did know; he seemed to sense Erasmus’s growing weakness.

“You refused to lead the men earlier,” Erasmus would remember saying to the captain. “When the men most needed you, you’d do nothing. Now that there’s a chance we might reach safety you want command, you want the credit.” The rifles and powder and shot were scattered throughout the boat, but he had all the percussion caps and felt secure. “I’ll shoot you if you disobey me,” he said.

All the men would remember that: how nearly they’d come to having to choose sides, how only a waving gun had saved them. For the last few days, creeping around Cape Dudley Digges and then through a narrow lead at the base of the ice foot, no one spoke except to give or respond to orders. Every night the temperature dropped below freezing, although it was still warm at noon. Sometimes it snowed. They rowed through a dense sludge that dripped from the oars like porridge, and when at last they doubled Cape York they dreaded the emptiness. October 3, Melville Bay. Upernavik, on the far side of the breaking-up yard, was still so many miles away.

WHAT GREETED ERASMUS in Melville Bay was dense pack ice, broken only by small, irregular leads; he’d expected this. What he didn’t expect were the dark specks on the horizon. A cluster of specks and threads of something that, wavering and wafting upward, made his heart leap. Smoke? By now he’d long been familiar with the way the blank ice shifted perspective and perception — how what looked like a bear, far away, might turn out to be a hare nearby; how a nearby gentle hill might resolve into a distant, mighty range. At first he couldn’t believe that the smoke was smoke. The specks, which seemed far away and large, might be closer, might be Esquimaux hunting. But the upright lines among the smoke threads were really masts, and those were truly ships. Seventeen ships, the men told each other, counting as they smashed the thin ice blocking their way and spun in a frantic, looping course through the seams around the floes. The ships appeared to be frozen in; a mile from the cluster their boat was stopped as well. They’d already burned the sledge for fuel and were too weak to haul the boat onto the solid ice.