The Ice Child (45 page)

But he would never go to the Bay again. He would never get on a whaler, or any ship, again. He felt glad of it. He felt glad at the prospect of ceasing to exist. Never walking again. Never breathing. Never hearing, never listening, never waiting again to see the last dying flicker in a man’s eye.

God would not forgive him.

Then, across the strait, he saw movement.

For a while he thought his eyes were deceiving him. He thought it was just the endless ice, turning over in the current. He thought it was the sea itself, at first. And then he saw that it was men. He sat up on his haunches, staring hard.

Just for that second he wondered if it were the crews. The dots of the bodies on the shoreline flickered and altered like a mirage. Perhaps it was the men they had left behind, he thought. Perhaps it was the dead. Perhaps, in the last few minutes since trying to build the cairn, he had actually died, had his prayers answered, and this was the result—the long, slow shuffling across the sea, the lines of the dead crew coming to meet him.

He knuckled his fists against his eyes.

They were clearer now. Closer. How many weeks was it since he had seen such a number of men? There were more than ten out there. Ten, perhaps twelve. How many weeks ago would that be? Not many. Perhaps two. Fourteen days. Fourteen days of dying. It was the men who had fallen behind them along this strait that were coming now, with their emaciated faces, their coats wrapped around them, their caps pulled down over the cuts and sores on their scalps. Gus struggled to his feet.

He had a sudden, burning desire to be saved from this last terrible spectacle. If they were coming for him, he couldn’t look in their faces, see their eyes. How could he manage that? Those that he had cut himself. Those that he had helped to cut. Those that they had sectioned out like gutted fish, dried in the thin trickle of sun, to feed the sick.

At Crozier’s insistence they had split the thighbones and emptied them. He had taken a piece … it was only a portion, sickly warm in his hand. He had not wanted to swallow it. How could he? How could he not? It was the very warmth of it that made it unbearable. He couldn’t forget that it was a man.

They had wept over those remains.

He didn’t know if Crozier ate or not. He didn’t think so. Yet, as they had sat in the half-circle today—and the third man already sleeping with that familiar rasping of pneumonia—Crozier had touched Gus’s arm.

“Look at me,” he’d whispered.

Gus met his eyes. He saw his own horror reflected there.

“Do you know what this is?” Crozier asked. “What you see here, behind us?”

“I don’t want to see,” Gus had told him.

Crozier had got hold of his arm so tightly that the grasp burned. “This is not for any man to know about,” Crozier said. “When you are free of here, when you have survived …”

Gus had snatched up the canister that Crozier had taken so long to painstakingly fill and seal.

“Wait a moment,” Crozier said. “Listen to me.”

Gus didn’t look in his face. He turned the copper cylinder over and over in his palm, sick with the futility of the final message.

August 11th 1848
.

HM Ships
Erebus
and
Terror.

1 Officer, 3 crew remaining
.

Final cairn constructed Lat 68 degrees 15’ Long 97 degrees 30’

Awaiting Hudson Bay scouts
.

F.R.M. Crozier, Captain and Senior Officer

Crozier’s faltering script ran haphazardly over the Admiralty preprinted page.

The man was gripping his own hand now. In a spasm of frustration he took the canister from Gus and threw it down at their side.

“Gus,” he murmured, “you must listen.”

“I don’t want to see what we did,” Gus repeated.

“I know,” Crozier said. “But God is merciful. Hold on to that truth.”

Gus, at last, looked up at him. His heart broke to recognize the last flame of life burning down in Crozier’s face. “There is no forgiveness for us,” he whispered.

Crozier’s grip on Gus’s fingers was still firm. “There
is
forgiveness,” he told the boy. “There is mercy in heaven. Those that died forgave us. They blessed us and instructed us. Each man told us what we must do. Is God’s heart less than a man’s?”

Gus shook his head. “I can’t do it,” he said.

“You can do it,” Crozier retorted. “When you are left alone, it is the one thing you must do.”

“No,” Gus sobbed.

“Promise me,” Crozier said.

The boy began to cry in earnest. It was not an oath he could make. It was not an order he could obey. He had obeyed all the others. He had followed Crozier to this hellish place. He would follow him into the mouth of true hell itself. But he could not do this final thing that Crozier demanded. If he were left alone, what body would be left, but Crozier himself? The man who had been more of a father to him than any man.

“Gus,” Crozier said, “listen to me. The bone marrow—”

“No, sir. No—”

“The bone marrow has the most nourishment, Gus. Remember that. If nothing else you must take the bone marrow.”

Gus covered his face with his hands, weeping with utter despair. He hardly felt the touch of Crozier’s hand on his shoulder.

“I forgive you, Gus,” Crozier murmured. “Do you hear me? I forgive you.”

Gus had shaken his head. He wanted to do what Crozier asked him. He would have done anything else at all. The solution had struck him in that moment, and he opened his eyes and raised his head.

“Let me go first,” he said to Crozier. “Let me be first, for you.”

Then, Crozier, too, bowed his head. A groan came out of him, dredged up from the depths, screwed out of his soul.

And this was the worst, the worst of all, the sound of this final groan.

As the Esquimaux approached the camp, they had both a scent and a premonition. They wheeled in a half circle, wondering, listening to the fragments. A voice. Two voices, mixed with the great insistence of the sea alongside them, the rattle and grunt of ice.

The men in front glanced at each other. They were tempted to pass by.

The four had come some distance to hunt seal on the rapidly breaking floes. They knew, as all natives knew, that white men came into this country, but none of those who stood on the shoreline now had seen white men before.

Tooshooarthariu stepped a little way forward. There was something alongside the tent that intrigued him. He could see a man on the ground, and an older one standing above him.

He lifted his hand.

The standing man slowly returned the gesture. Then he walked toward him.

At his side Teekeeta and Owwer shrank back, and Mangaq, who had not moved until that moment, turned swiftly on his heel, ready to run. He signaled his wife; they hauled the sledge around.

Tooshooarthariu could see that the hunger that had plagued his own family all winter had struck hard in the man before him. But before him was an illustration of something more horrible than mere hunger. Tooshooarthariu had heard that white man’s skin was lighter, but the man coming toward him was a strange color, not lined by the weather, but patched and jumbled, like badly sewn skins. His forehead was crosshatched with different shades: a curious, ugly blue, a gray, dead white. His cheekbones, too, looked white. But the mouth was black, and too horrible to look at for long. The lips, the gums, were the same dark color; the teeth long, yellow, flecked with blood.

The man began to speak.

Tooshooarthariu watched his hands. He didn’t understand the language—so many harsh, short sounds—but he understood that he had come from the north—he waved his arm behind him. And that there were boats. Large boats. The man picked up the melting rim of ice at the edge of the water and held it toward him. Made a crushing motion with both hands. Then, with the same fingers, he counted off himself, holding up one finger and then pointing back at his chest. He repeated the gesture. One man. Two, three. The hands flew. Many men.

The Esquimaux looked disbelievingly at the tent. There were not many men, that was obvious. How could there ever have been many men walking from the ice? Native families even did not move in great numbers together. To do so was dangerous. They existed in small communities of two or three families. Even at great summer meetings there were never more than forty or fifty. Tooshooarthariu shook his head. You couldn’t bring many men—what was he saying, hundreds?—you couldn’t bring hundreds of men through the ice.

The white man was thin. You could see that, even if you didn’t look at the awful face. He didn’t stand straight. The younger one behind him was standing now, and was a little taller, but even he bent over from the waist.

“They’re hungry,” Owwer whispered at his back.

The Esquimaux walked away, back to the women.

The first thing that his wife, Ahlangyah, said was that there was not much seal. It was as if she had read her husband’s mind.

In spring they spent countless hours chasing the sea ice for the right places to hunt. On sunny days, when the seals lay on the floes, they looked easy enough targets, but for a hunter to get within range took time, patience, practice. Seal had acute hearing, and the approach to the ice or the breathing hole was slow, wormlike. Sometimes the hunters rested on the ice for hours, waiting for the sound of a seal coming up to its breathing place, approaching it by fits and starts. This was the moment of greatest skill, to listen to the sound of the seal blowing under the ice and to estimate the exact time that it would flex its muscles for the leap upward. The hunter would plunge his spear, hopefully into the skull, and enlarge the breathing hole, and land his kill, all the while with the seal straining on the line.

They never landed huge quantities. They didn’t store them by great numbers. They killed only when they needed them, and they bagged the bones, and took them back to the sea, and dumped them in the water, because to do anything else, to behave in any other way toward the seal, would be bad luck for other hunting.

“They have killed birds,” Owwer said. “Let them wait for more birds.”

Tooshooarthariu looked back at the older man.

“We haven’t enough to feed them,” Ahlangyah told him.

He didn’t know how many there were. He stared at the tent. Maybe there were other men in there. How many would it hold? Maybe ten. If they gave them enough meat for ten men they would have nothing left for themselves. If the white man saw that they had food at all on their sled, he might want it all.

Tooshooarthariu had been told that when men called Parry and Lyon had come to Igloolik in their ships twenty winters before, their grandfathers had been on the white men’s ships. They had talked to them, stayed with them, hunted with them. A man called Artungun, a child at the time, had even been told that he could travel with Parry back to the white man’s country. Artungun could count in their language, and sing songs that they had taught him, and said that he had been brought back to life by Parry’s shaman, by letting blood from his arm. And Artungun could show the scar on his arm to prove that what he said was true.

But the stories of their grandfathers had something else in them that was more worrying. The white man carried sticks that could kill animals. They carried them across their shoulders, and they used a black powder with them that was very fine, and could ignite.

Tooshooarthariu, looking back still at the older man, wondered if any of this powder, and any of these curved sticks with iron in them, were inside the tents. If they offered the white men food, and it was not enough, even if they gave them all they had, would they use their powder and their weapons to ask for more, to kill them if there was not more?

He looked at Ahlangyah. She leveled his glance with her stony gaze.

“What is the sickness?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he told her.

She inclined her head to their children. “We don’t want their sickness,” she said. They had lost a child five months before, and she was thinking of that, he knew. Yet even while he looked around the other men, Ahlangyah’s gaze trailed back to the white boy, who could not have been more than sixteen. She gave a half smile before lowering her face and covering it with her hand. Despite his mottled skin, she could see that he was fair. He reminded her of the thin ribbons of lights in the sky.

Owwer crossed his arms. “They’re dying,” he murmured. “Giving them our meat won’t stop that. It only makes the dying longer.”

Tooshooarthariu hesitated. Owwer was right. But he couldn’t walk on with the meat in the bags. He couldn’t walk past with meat, and leave them. He looked again at the sorrowful little tent, and he wondered what ships the men had come on, and where they were. He wondered if they were lying. Hundreds of men. Tall sailed ships.

If they were telling the truth, where were the rest of them?

Perhaps the answer was that they were waiting for others. Perhaps the hundreds of men were coming to them. Perhaps tomorrow they would see them. Perhaps they had left their sick here and were returning for them. And perhaps they wouldn’t die if they were given a week’s food, because it would be all that was needed.

He wished he knew. He wished he understood them.

The older white man sat down suddenly on the shore, as if the breath had been knocked out of him. Tooshooarthariu met his muddied gaze, saw the blunt hopelessness in his eyes.

Whatever had happened, whatever was to happen, he thought, it came down to the same fact.

He couldn’t walk past them with seal in their own packs.

“Give them meat,” he said.

Two mornings later there was a brighter light. The sea looked very blue. The air was amazingly sweet. Just for a second Gus thought of gardens.

At his side was the pack of seal meat that the Esquimaux had left.

The night before, he and Crozier had barely eaten a half dozen mouthfuls. It had been too rich, and very hard to chew. They had tried their best, each facing the other. The long evening had faded, but not quite into darkness.

They had said nothing.

There was nothing left to say.

Francis Crozier died early in the morning.