The Ice Child (30 page)

“It is no shame to live as the Indians live,” he had insisted. “It is an education. We shall see how we thrive.”

They had not believed him; they longed for their bouilli; they hated the messes of lichen and the few stalks of greenery they had dug from the snow. They reasoned that they would only suffer more, and die out on the land here. Surely Crozier was mad, or becoming mad, they said; there was nothing to be gained from this barren place, where the seasons of the year had ceased to exist.

And yet the diet did make a change in them. Those men that had been suffering scurvy began to improve; they had no more pain in their gums and teeth; they had no more lesions on their skin.

“You must eat the fish,” Crozier had told Gus. “Even the entrails and guts and gills, and the heads. You must eat it all, Gus.”

He spat out the bones, though.

He couldn’t stomach that.

Crozier watched the boy carefully, and purposely did not tell him the worst, the part that, privately, he thought they might yet be reduced to. The Coppermine Indian thought the greatest delicacy of all was lice, and set their wives to cleaning their caribou-skin clothes to find the greatest quantities of them, and would scoop them into their hands and devour them with enormous relish. He had thought about that often, and wondered if they should not follow their example. After all, there were more lice on board than rats. Such crawling things were nourishment to the Indian, and the Indian was a man, as they were men. He had never known an Indian to suffer from combing out the vermin. Rather, he flourished.

Crozier thought of such things when the others slept. He considered it his duty to think the unthinkable, knowing that any one of these ideas might be the route through to life, a triumph over the barrenness that faced them.

He thought of the way that the Coppermine dressed the skins of the animals that they had killed, by lathering the animal’s brain with the softest of the bone marrow, and soaking the hides by the heat of a seal-oil lamp, and hanging them up in the smoke of the same fires for days. He had once worn such skins, and felt their soft and luxurious texture, and marveled at how everything worn by these people came from the animals that roamed around them, or the contents of the seas beneath them. Not one factory belched smoke to provide their needs; not a child labored fourteen hours a day. No streets teemed with dung and sewage as result of their habitation. They threw nothing away. Their needs were simple, not complex. They took only what they needed, no more. They were, by comparison with the European, clean and resourceful and long lived.

But such thoughts were unacceptable. And so the captain kept them privately, when he was awake and others slept.

Gus was brought back to camp by one o’clock. They lit a fire and sat him in front of it, and kept turning him so that all sides of his body were close to the warmth for a few moments. They wrapped him in bearskins.

Crozier came to see him.

“Now, Augustus,” he said, “are you mounting an expedition of your own?”

“I fell down,” Gus said. “I’m sorry, sir. I fell asleep.”

Crozier nodded. “When you are exhausted, and fall,” he said, “you should resist the urge to sleep. You are lucky to be alive.”

“I saw a woman,” Gus said. “I dreamed her. She had a tattooed face.”

Crozier paused, frowned. “When?” he asked.

“This morning, sir.”

“What kind of tattoo?”

“In lines like the lines when we smile,” Gus said.

Crozier glanced at the men around them. “And was she real?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Did she speak?”

“No, sir. But I thought she gave me something to eat.”

Crozier bent down and looked into Gus’s face. “You are to keep your face in the furs.” He touched Gus’s cheek and forehead. “Can you feel my hand?” Gus nodded. “Does it feel as normal?”

“Yes, sir.”

Crozier remained looking intently at him. “How tall was she, Gus?”

“Not very tall.”

“An Esquimaux woman.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Like those you have seen before.”

“Yes, sir.”

Crozier nodded. He got to his feet and stayed looking down at the boy for a moment, before walking away.

They raised a cairn that morning.

It was set on a small hill, the highest point, Crozier thought, for many miles. It took some time to haul the stones from the surrounding, ice-cracked land, especially the largest slabs that formed the base. Crozier sat upon this base to write the record that would be put inside it. He had no Admiralty forms with him, and so tore a sheet from his notebook.

HM Ships
Erebus
and
Terror,
25 June 1847
.

Party consisting of 12 Officers and 40 men journey from here 26 June south in continuation of the exploration made by Lieutenant Gore
.

Sir John Franklin died on 11th June 1847 and Lieutenant G. Gore on 14th June 1847, the total loss to date two Officers and seven men
.

Ships beset in unseasonably heavy ice at latitude 70/O5N, longitude 98/23 W
.

They built up the cairn with stone five feet high, and on the top they placed two bottles, into which Crozier sealed the note. The bottles were covered, then, with further stones. When they had finished, they stood back and looked at their monument.

“Will it stand?” asked one of the ratings.

“For years,” Crozier said. He had shrugged himself deeper into the coat he wore. “I have seen places where the depressions in the earth made by Parry’s sledges are still visible. Bones you see scattered on the shore, of seal, or bear, may have been there for centuries.” He ventured a smile. “Nothing moves here,” he said. “There is nothing to move it.”

They turned away and went down the hill, and it was only as they drew closer to the tents that they saw their first Esquimaux.

Crozier heard the raised voices before he breached the slight rise between the cairn and the camp.

He saw Augustus, still sitting by the fire, humped over with the skins, his small face peering out at the group who were walking toward him. One of the seamen rushed out of a tent, carrying a rifle.

“Stop!” Crozier called.

They ran down the hill. Or, rather, they attempted an approximation of running.

The silence of the camp was profound: Crozier was suddenly acutely aware of the miles, the hundreds and thousands of miles, that stretched in every direction, with this little band of Englishmen at its center, stranded and blistered and cold and ill, with their little cache of skinned fox and plucked birds. The band that faced them now were, by contrast, well fed and well clothed, and entirely at ease. And curious. Very curious.

Three men came up to Crozier. They stopped a few yards from him. At their back their team of dogs watched, alongside the women and children. Crozier looked into the men’s faces. They had cropped dark hair, with a single lock hanging down at each side of the face.

Crozier repeated the few words he knew. “
Kammiktoomee
. We are friends.”

The Esquimaux grinned. They advanced on him, all talking at once.

Several men at Crozier’s back raised, and cocked, their guns.

“Don’t fire,” Crozier said.

The first man reached out and, with a dark brown finger, tapped Crozier on the chest. He was grinning from ear to ear. He turned around and called out to those behind him. Men, women, and children all ran forward.

“Mr. Irving,” Crozier said, “go and get the chest in the tent. The small wooden chest with an iron latch.”

The children circled Gus. They pinched at the furs, giggling.

“Don’t be afraid, Gus,” Crozier said. “Don’t shout, or move.”

A woman to Crozier’s right walked straight past him and into the nearest tent. Two of the crew went after her. Not fifteen seconds later she emerged, carrying tobacco pouches and some of the timber stored for fuel.

“Watch them,” Crozier said. “Stand by the tent doors. Don’t let them in. Stand fast. Don’t touch them. Don’t touch the women.”

He opened the box that was brought to him. The Inuit peered down into it, still grinning, still talking.

“Needles and knives,” Crozier said. He showed the needles in the flat of his palm.

The men ignored the needles. They touched the knife blade.

Irving’s hand hovered over the rifle trigger.

“Don’t shoot,” Crozier said.

“Sir,” Irving replied, “I shall shoot a man who raises a knife to you.”

“No one will raise the knife,” Crozier said. “Wait. Be patient.”

Gus sat stock still. His legs were tingling now. It was agony as they came back to life. He needed to move, to stretch the affected limbs, but dared not. He looked from the strange, weather-beaten faces of the Inuit to Crozier’s, which was so light and had a tinge of redness, showing his Celtic ancestry. The captain’s eyes were raw and inflamed. Looking from one face to the other, Gus suddenly saw, for the first time, how sick the Europeans looked next to these seemingly indestructible natives, whose skin was faintly oiled looking. The whites of their eyes were brilliantly clear and white, uncannily so. He noticed now that everyone from the ship, even the captain, had the same bloodshot look to their eyes. He felt suddenly feeble.

A package brought from the Esquimaux sleds was displayed. The men directly behind Crozier stepped back, away from it, but Crozier did not move.

“Blubber and seal meat,” he said at last. “Frozen salmon.”

The men pushed Crozier on the shoulder. A great hubbub of talking broke out among the natives. They were laughing. They pointed back at the dogs.

“We have no dogs,” Crozier said.

The children were running round the camp, pulling up stores and turning them over. One of the marines caught one and lifted him up. It was a boy of not more than four or five. He squealed as he was turned head-over-heels and dangled above the snow.

“They have no fear,” Irving said.

“They have nothing to be afraid of,” Crozier said. “Your rifle there is no more than a stick. They have no idea why you should stand there clutching it so, or pointing it at them. They have never seen a gun before.”

Irving glanced at him. He found it hard to tear his eyes from the sledges, where the men were now working, pulling more from their packs. “That’s not so, sir,” Irving said. “In Greenland they use guns always.”

“We are not in Greenland,” Crozier said. “We are in the region of other tribes, other family groups. These people work this strait, not Lancaster Sound or anywhere near it. They may not have seen a white man before.”

As if to demonstrate that he was right, the women had gathered around Gus. They poked their fingers into the fur and stroked his face, prodding the area of frostbite on his cheek.

“It’s her,” Gus called.

Crozier stepped forward.

“Let her look at you,” he said. “It’s all that she wants to do.”

But he needn’t have given this instruction. Gus was already enthralled.

He had never seen such eyes, almost ink-black. A face framed with sumptuously thick, oily dark hair. The girl was his own age, and she wore a caribou-skin jerkin and trousers, like a man, with a white fur edging that had been combed into fringed strands at the hem of the jerkin. The hood almost covered her face at first, but she pushed it back to show the tattoos that Gus remembered: extraordinary henna-brown lines in arcs on her cheeks, and radiating along her chin.

Another woman squatted down by her side. This one was older: he wondered if she were the girl’s mother. The older woman had the tattoo, but in addition her face was positively crisscrossed with deep folds of skin, a mimicking of extreme age, that had been hatched by the extremes of weather. It was impossible to say exactly how old she was, but when she smiled Gus saw that the teeth in her mouth were ground very low.

The packages from the sledges had been hauled to Crozier’s feet. There was plenty of meat, all raw. The man who had tapped Crozier’s chest deftly took the knife and pushed it into his sleeve. The women were called: they took the needle and wood, and the iron tips of the pikestaffs; and the old woman would have taken the copper cooking pot had not one of the crew wrested it from her grasp.

“Offer them food,” Crozier said.

They showed the Esquimaux their stock of rock ptarmigan, but the birds were refused. None of the men were surprised, for the flesh of ptarmigan was hard and bitter and dark, but it was all they could shoot with any ease.

They opened a box of raisins, and of figs, and sugar.

The Esquimaux dipped their fingertips in the sugar, rubbing between thumb and forefinger before tasting it. The sugar had solidified to something like molasses, and the Esquimaux spat it out. Similarly, they chewed for only a few seconds on the figs and raisins before hawking them into the snow.

The girl had not left Gus’s side. After suffering her stroking and prodding his face, he finally got to his feet, relieving the agonizing prickling. He stumbled a little. She gripped his arm and spoke to him, pointing at the sleds, laughing.

“Aye,” Gus said, “but they’re not like ours.”

He was right.

The Esquimaux sleds were neat and slim. They were over twenty feet in length, Gus estimated; and less than two feet wide. Sealskin line was threaded through holes in the runners and passed over the ends of wooden crossbows, each one not more than three or four inches apart. They looked long and lithe and flexible, and there was not a nail to be seen. By contrast the sledges that they had hauled from the ships were two refurbished lifeboats, with runners attached to them, wooden and broad and heavy. Gus saw at once how the Esquimaux sledges would glide, if pulled by dogs at any speed, over even large humped ridges, whereas the
Terror
sledges balked at every ridge, and got stuck, and took minutes of maneuvering and effort to free them. Just looking so briefly at them, he wondered why men like Franklin, who knew the Esquimaux, didn’t order sledges like theirs, whippet-thin and graceful.

The girl ran away from him. She went down to the sleds, looking over her shoulder. There was a lot of gesturing and talking: something was lifted from the first sled, cradled in the girl’s arms, and brought back to Gus’s side. Two other girls on either side of the first were screaming with delight, pointing at what she had brought him.