Andrea Barrett - Voyage of the Narwhal

“I almost missed you ” Erasmus said. The gentle rasp of Copernicus’s ladder against the floor was the sound that sent both them and Tom to sleep.

Torn dreamed a darker version of the scene Copernicus painted. The same ice, humped and shattered, but twilight rather than streaming sun; cold October rather than brilliant July. He dreamed a scene that preceded Zeke, at first as if he were dreaming simple history. His mother’s brother left the camp with his sledge and six dogs, hoping to hunt seal on the thickening sea ice although the weather was bad. He left and didn’t return. In Tom’s dream, as in real life, a fog arose, and a terrible wind, which trapped them in their huts. When they were able to search for the lost hunter, they followed the tracks of the sledge until they vanished. In the moonlight a round area of new ice, surrounded by broken blocks, marked where the hunter had fallen through. The men chopped through it, widened the hole, and prepared the lines and harpoons and the sturdy bone hooks.

In his dream, Tom was no longer a small boy watching, but one of the men. In his arms he felt the pull of the line, and the gentle shudder of the hook as it bumped against something and then caught. In his back he felt the weight as he joined with the others, pulling up first the sledge and then, one by one, the dogs still tangled in their traces. On the traces he saw the marks of their teeth, where they’d tried to free themselves. Laid head to head on the ice, the dogs froze solid instantly. His hands grew numb as he coiled the line and sent the hook back into the water.

In his dream he could see everything, all he’d only been able to imagine when it happened; beneath the ice he saw the hook touch a booted leg. As if it were alive, the hook bounced three times along the leg and then caught the ankle. Gently, gently. He was the hook; he was the line; he was the strong body above, pulling delicately. He was the woman wailing as the boot broke the surface of the water, and he was the man watching as the body was born, feet first, from the sea. Feet, legs, hands, chest, head. The mouth was open in a terrible grimace, the fingernails broken where they’d clawed the edges of the hole. The body, laid out on the ice, glazed and stiffened and turned pure white. Tom bent over the face and saw not his uncle, but Zeke.

The sight jolted him awake; around him were only walls. At the foot of his bed lay the cache of bones and the muskrat pelt that would someday be his tupilaq. He turned so his head was near them. The place he had fled, and would never return to again, was called Philadelphia; and in that place, unaware of his fate, Zeke was sleeping. The sunny, golden length of him sprawled across the sheets, one arm almost touching the floor, one foot sticking off the mattress, bobbing as he dreamed of Annie.

Not Annie as she’d been in this house; not Annie as she’d been in Washington; not, not of her skeleton gleaming through a glass display case. But Annie as she’d been in Anoatok, utterly strange and utterly herself. She was smiling at him beneath a bird-filled sky. The life he’d lived with her and her family was the life Erasmus’s father had taught him to seek; his dream shifted and he was part of that family, the true son, the son Mr. Wells had always wanted. The four sons of his body were only boys, listening wide-eyed to tales of bees brought back to life when covered by a fresh-killed ox’s stomach. None of them had understood, as Zeke had, that those tales were natural history and not science. Surely that was what Mr. Wells had meant to teach him?

A FEW MORE times, in the drafty house, the four companions slept and woke. Then they were gone. Into the woods went Copernicus, easel and paintbox strapped to his back and Ned at his side: just for the summer, he said, just for the brief months of buttery, tree-filtered light. Erasmus and Tom and Alexandra set off for the coast. Later that summer, they’d learn that McClintock’s Fox had been caught in the ice of Melville Bay during their own winter in the mountains. Swept twelve hundred miles south in the moving pack, the Fox had started north again as soon as the ice released it — headed, Erasmus knew, for exactly the place he and Zeke had explored. He guessed McClintock’s crew would meet the same or similar Esquimaux and find their way to King William Land as he and Zeke had not. Driving a sledge bearing a red silk banner embroidered by Lady Franklin herself, they’d find relics and bodies and evidence, returning to the glory that might have been his.

But by the time all this happened, he wouldn’t care. He’d be in Greenland, after an easy trip during which no disasters happened and no one died. A Scottish whaling ship ferried the three of them from Godhavn to Upernavik; after that came a Danish fishing boat, and then a skin-covered umiak. They had little luggage, and weren’t much trouble. Past cliffs and glaciers and low gravel beaches strangers guided them: where the geese nest; where the goblins hide; where the ice cave grows beneath the ledge.

Erasmus took no notes: he would do that later. Beside him, though, Alexandra drew in a larger version of the black-bound notebooks she’d been filling since she was a girl. The sights she saw resembled those she’d first glimpsed in Erasmus’s green journal and then reconstructed with his guidance: and were also completely different. She lay on gray rocks, eyes level with a tuft of tiny, bladder-shaped blossoms. In Philadelphia she’d drawn these twenty times but only now saw what Erasmus hadn’t captured: each flower was really a calyx, inflated and striped and deceptive; the true petals were hidden inside. The stems, the texture of the rock, the ice, the sky, the streaming clouds — they looked one way to Erasmus, another way to her. Also— also, she thought, it was everything— they were themselves.

Erasmus watched her draw. Nothing she rendered was new to him, yet each stroke of her pencil — he had bought her special pencils, Dr. Boerhaave’s pencils — was like a chisel held to a cleavage plane: tap, tap, and the rock split into two sharp pieces, the world cracked and spoke to him. Annie spoke to him each time it rained, Dr. Boerhaave when the wind blew; Tom was silent much of the time but Erasmus could hear the language of his body as he strengthened and straightened and breathed the air and ate the food he’d missed.

They found Tom’s people late in August. Against the hills beyond Anoatok were two-legged dots, four-legged dots, which Tom was the first to spot. He ran up the rocky shore, Alexandra and Erasmus following more slowly but still steadily: Erasmus had grown used to his feet and regained his balance, casting aside his walking sticks for a single ball-headed cane. As he approached the dots turned into figures, and faces appeared. Among that small crowd moving toward him were Tom’s father — which one was he? — and men who’d hunted and talked with Dr. Boerhaave. A tall man in a worn fur jacket stumbled forward, stretched out a hand, pressed Tom to his chest and then lifted him into the air.

Sometime later, the people moved toward Erasmus and Alexandra, and Tom made introductions: Ootuniah, Awahtok, and the three other young men whom Erasmus remembered visiting the Narwhal; Nessark, Tom’s father, who had known both Dr. Boerhaave and Zeke; the angekok, who wore around his neck a thong strung with long teeth. A few more men and then, behind them, shy women and children. Alexandra took four steps and stood among them, bending so the children could touch her hair. One of the women touched the back of her hand and she turned it, offering her palm; the woman rested three fingers there. Erasmus felt that touch in his own hand but he kept his gaze on the men before him, repeating each name, burning each face into his mind. When it was time, speaking slowly, waiting after each phrase for Tom to repeat the words in a language he was just beginning to grasp, Erasmus explained to them what he knew of Annie’s death.