The Ice Child (49 page)

She noticed the ring that Jo always wore on her wedding finger, a slim platinum band, whose delicate decoration of vines seemed to be picked out in high relief. On Jo’s wrist was a plastic hospital bracelet. Jo had written her own name around it, so that Sam could see that he wasn’t the only one to have this marker. The lettering looked vivid.

Gina strained to hear Sam breathing.

She could hear nothing.

Then, movement in the corner of the room caught her eye.

The TV set was on, but with the sound turned down.

Gina stepped forward, momentarily drawn by the image. She frowned as she looked at it. The familiar BBC logo of the
Evening News
had been replaced by the face of the newscaster, and an overlaid image in the top left-hand corner of the screen. It was of a helicopter hovering above a gray landscape, and a knot of people on the ground below it.

She looked away, and stepped forward.

At the very second she did so, Jo woke up. She stared at her friend.

“What is it?” she asked.

Her eyes widened as she read Gina’s expression. For a second her gaze fixed on the floor, too wary to turn around. Then she looked at Sam, pushing back her chair.

The boy was lying still, arms by his sides.

He was awake and looking at the television.

Following his steady gaze, the two women turned back to the screen.

“My God,” Jo breathed.

It was now a camera shot taken from a moving plane. They could see the Twin Otter shadow on the shoreline below, mirroring the plane as it flew. The first snatched image showed a patch of blue against the gray. It was a small tent, pitched between pools of water, stranded on an isthmus of land.

Jo stood up.

Next image, a green freighter canoe pulled up on shore, abandoned, the Johnson outboard motor on its stern touching the slope of broken limestone.

A map. Gjoa Haven marked as a red spot in the north; Pelly Bay to the east; Cambridge Bay to the west. The long stretch of King William in between, shaped like a heart lying on its side. And the tent again, closer this time, the plane flying lower.

Then, faces.

Catherine, mobbed on an airport strip, her father at her side. Joseph Takkiruq’s brown face and piercing black eyes. Catherine lifting her hair out of her eyes with one hand, grinning, and holding up the other hand, as if fending off questions.

Jo leapt forward for the volume.

“… found alive after five days’ search in this most unforgiving of landscapes, and a worldwide publicity campaign lasting more than two months …”

The crowd was parting. Behind them was a Medevac stretcher.

“Oh God, oh God!” Gina cried.

The commentary swept over them. They heard probably half of it. At that same moment both phones on the head nurse’s desk down the corridor began to ring.

“… this double rescue, on the same day that the polar bear cub was airlifted to Manitoba …”

Now there was Catherine again on-screen.

A barrage of demands.

“Miss Takkiruq! How is John?”

“He’s okay,” she replied, trying to find a way through the crowd. “Exhausted. But okay …”

“Can you show us what was found?”

“I surely can,” she said. They saw Catherine dig into her parka pocket. She brought out a small copper canister, almost greened over with verdigris.

Jo uttered a small, astounded cry. She stepped forward and laid her hand flat on the screen for a second.

“It was underneath him,” Catherine was saying. “Under his arm.”

The noise swelled to a deafening pitch.

“Is it real?”

“Miss Takkiruq …”

Catherine pressed the canister briefly to her forehead, and closed her eyes. Then she smiled broadly as she opened them, and looked at the item in her hand. “Francis Crozier,” she murmured, “captain of Her Majesty’s Ship
Terror
, August eleventh, 1848.”

In the hospital room Jo and Gina flung their arms around each other.

On-screen they saw Catherine put her hands over her ears in renewed protest at the volley of noise around her.

Jo rushed to Sam’s side and kissed him.

Catherine had grabbed the nearest microphone. “Can I say something?” she asked. “Can I just say one thing? I have a message. A message for Jo Harper in London.”

The room around her fell silent. As silent as the moment that Gina had felt not two minutes before. Across the bed Gina gripped Jo’s arm.

They saw Catherine hold up the canister. “Hey, Jo,” she said softly, to the camera, “miracles do happen, after all. Tell Sam his brother is coming home.”

Postscript

“
… we dream more of bears than of any other animals …
when we find him roaming over drifting fields of ice more
than a hundred miles from land, we are filled with wonder …
when there is no ice, we find him swimming, and we are
scarcely less astonished
.…”

Admiral Sir F. Leopold McClintock

From
The Voyage of the Fox in Arctic Seas

“…
the tracks were not fresh, but had been made some time … the footprints appeared to have been made when the snow was soft … and subsequent gales had swept the impacted snow around the foot prints away leaving them raised … the men had come from the land to the northward and westward [of Christie Lake] … some of the Inuit thought that they would find the white men who had made these tracks
.…”

Reported conversation with Inuit of 1850

Charles Francis Hall

The Tundra Buggy in Churchill Bay, Manitoba, was raised ten feet from the ground, but the bear, stretched to full height, still reached the window.

Those in the vehicle moved back instinctively, seeing the massive head intruding almost into the cab, its teeth fastened on the window edge.

But the child did not move.

Of all those in the buggy perhaps his mother should have been the most afraid, and reached forward to take him away. But Jo Harper stood back with Bill Elliott, with bated breath, to watch this most extraordinary meeting.

It was finally John Marshall who stepped forward. He sat beside his half-brother, taking him on his knee, next to Catherine.

“What shall we call him, Sam?” he asked, wrapping his arms around the four-year-old boy.

“Swimmer,” Sam replied.

“You think he can swim?” Catherine said, smiling.

“Miles and miles,” Sam told her.

“Like his mother,” John agreed.

The bear turned away and dropped onto all fours on the snow-swept plain. It seemed to hesitate for a while, and then it moved away, walking northwest, without once looking back. The first great white bear to be released from captivity back into the wild.

John stood up with Sam. They followed the Swimmer as far as they could see it along the observation deck. Then John turned to Jo, and held out his arms, and hugged her. They stood there for some time, Sam wedged between them.

“Do you think it’ll survive?” Jo murmured.

“Yes,” John replied, with conviction. “The impossible happens here.”

Running back to the window, Sam pulled off his mittened gloves and pressed his palm to the cold pane. As he took his hand away, a perfect impression was left. Taking off his own glove, John superimposed his hand on Sam’s. Over John’s, Jo placed her own.

When they took their hands down, three interwoven prints patterned the window.

And beyond them the track of the polar bear stretched away.

Footprints were still visible near Christie Lake in the spring of 1850.

But they did not belong to Eskimo, Chipewyan, or Cree.

Whoever the white man was who had walked there in the winter, he had done so when the snow was soft and freshly fallen. The snow froze and the winter gales came, and all that was left of his journey now, in the April daylight, were these clear and raised imprints.

His foot was longer than Eskimo, and the track passed onto the ice of the bay from the northwest. There were no heel prints, and the track toed out in a way that native tracks could not. The southern Eskimo who discovered them worked their way through to Lyons Inlet in the hope of finding him.

Some say that the strange traveler passed to Ignearing, northeast of Igloolik. Some say that the white man went east, farther still, to Fort Hope, to the still-standing buildings of John Rae, who had come there three years before, looking for Franklin survivors.

Some said that he passed down that coast and married an Inuit woman, and that he made for Fort Churchill, five hundred miles to the south.

It was possible to travel from this most northerly point of Hudson Bay down to the Fort. There was a chain of Inuit camps in that direction, at Depot Island and Fort Fullerton and at Nuvuk, south of Wager Bay, and they led to the Hudson’s Bay trading post where the annual supply ships called, and they said that perhaps from there he went back the way he had come in 1845, and crossed the ocean to his own people.

And some said that the white man had reached Fort Hope, and stood at the ruins of Rae’s house for several days with the woman Maliaraq, and looked for a long time at the water of the Bay, before he turned back, and went again westward. Because no man in his own country would believe him.

Or, worse still, his own country would believe only too well what he had done, and yet not understand it. And they would never let him alone for the rest of his life. And he could not shoulder that burden, the burden of being the only man to come back to them, when all the others were lost, and lay unburied behind him.

And some said that it was all invention, the whisper of legend and fantasy, and that there had never been footprints in the spring of 1850, and that the Eskimo families of the Great Fish River, which the white man called Backs River, had never returned to take the one surviving boy with them.

And that he never grew into a man with them, or lived among them, or walked to Fort Hope before he turned back.

Some stories are true, and some fantasy.

Some journeys are dreamed of, but never made.

And some, like Sam Marshall and Augustus Peterman, travel a long way through the dark, on paths that no other man could ever know.

To reach the light at last, and survive.

Author’s Note and Acknowledgement

“
What I fear is that from our being so late we shall
…
blunder into the ice.… James, I wish you were here, I would then have no doubt as to our pursuing our proper course
.…”

The Ice Child
began with Francis Crozier.

I had already heard of the Franklin expedition of 1845 when I read the above letter in the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. It had been sent from the Whalefish Islands on July 19, 1845, by Crozier to Sir James Clark Ross. The faded script of this single letter, so full of both misgiving and good humor, struck me with its incredible poignancy. Crozier had sailed many times with Ross, and his attachment to the great commander shone through the text.

The more I read about this doomed journey, the more admiration I felt for the endurance and courage of the crews of HMS
Erebus
and
Terror
. I hope I have done them justice. Every man on the two ships died; but their qualities—their astonishing loyalty and love for each other—could not die. It reaches out to touch us now, an example to all those who find themselves making their way through the dark.

It hardly matters whether Franklin found the Northwest Passage, though the Passage was determined by those who searched for him in the years to come. Franklin left a much greater legacy and example, as did all his men.

Those who know the Franklin story will see where the facts end and the fiction begins. I have kept to fact wherever possible, but all the conversations described can only be conjecture. No ship’s logs or journals were ever found. Similarly, only one copper canister was ever found. That Crozier proposed to Franklin’s niece is a fact; that he mourned her loss can only be a guess.

Another guess is the meeting with Eskimos on Cape Felix; however, the final conversations at Starvation Cove are pretty well accepted. The Inuit did give meat to white men in this location at this time.

Traces of the death march are well documented. The classic reference for both the march and the entire expedition is Richard Cyriax’s book,
Sir John Franklin’s Last Arctic Expedition
.

It should be noted that, although many relics of the death march have been found, no one knows the exact sequence of deaths. We know that Fitzjames wrote the fateful message on April 25, 1848, but we do not know whether he was already ill. We do not know if Goodsir and Stanley were left in charge of the hospital tent. And we do not even know if Crozier was one of the last survivors—though some Inuit reports do suggest this.

There was no one called Augustus Peterman on the
Terror
. There were no boys below the age of seventeen. Yet boys of Gus’s age were regularly taken on other vessels, particularly whalers. I wanted to develop the tragedy through a child’s perception, so I hope this slight stretching of the facts will be excused.

To the best of my knowledge the ships were designed, built, and loaded exactly as I have described. Controversy will probably always rage as to whether or how much the crew were poisoned by Goldner’s provisions, and Victorian England was horrified by the suggestion of cannibalism. My own opinion on both issues is represented in
The Ice Child
.

Although the date of Franklin’s death is accurate, the cause of it is unknown. It might well have been natural causes. It might also have been, as is portrayed, botulism. The only thing that is known for sure is that it was sudden.

The autopsies of the bodies on Beechey Island actually happened, and I am indebted to John Geiger and Owen Beattie for their amazing book,
Frozen in Time
. John Torrington’s fate especially touched me, and the picture of his long-fingered, delicate hands, shown in Beattie and Geiger’s work, was an image that never left me.

I am similarly indebted to John Macdonald and John Harrington for allowing me to refer to their research on
The Franklin Trail
Web site, and to their Web master Karis Burkowski. Johns Macdonald and Harrington endured a positive snowstorm of e-mails from me, and always replied with great patience.