The White Voyage (21 page)

Right under the ridge there was a hump of brown in the powdery whiteness of the snow. Katerina, the bear. He was glad now that the girl had insisted on bringing the animal. The strangeness of it, the touch of fantasy, somehow made their position seem less hazardous. He listened for the grinding of the floes. It was quieter and, more distant; because the swell from the east had lessened, perhaps, or because they were in a region of firmer ice. He hoped it was the second. The ice here was steady under foot, with barely a trace of movement.

There would be hazards, no doubt. For the moment, it was enough to be here. Olsen looked at the glory of the sky and nodded: it was enough to be here.

A gust of below-zero wind made him shiver. He went back to the tent and quietly slipped inside.

They made better progress the following day. The ice continued to improve, the wind had dropped again, and they themselves were more accustomed to the work they had to do. They camped for the night on a wide plain of ice, almost featureless for as far as the eye, in the deepening dusk, could see.

They had been over three hours on the trail, on the third day, when they reached open water. The pack-ice ended abruptly, giving way to a channel of water about three hundred yards wide. Beyond the channel there was more ice; farther to the west there were snow-covered hills and the high glacier-decked mountains. Small floes drifted in the dark green water; the sound of the ice now was a tinkling whisper, like little horse bells.

From a slight elevation, twenty or thirty yards from the edge of the ice, they stood and stared at it. The sun, three-quarters of its disc clear of the skyline, streamed sunset on their faces. Mouritzen could see Mary and Nadya standing side by side. Mary’s blondeness looked pale, her face tired, but the blackness of Nadya’s hair caught crimson tints – her skin was a deep russet bronze.

Thorsen said: ‘We’ll never get across that. Even if the raft idea works, we’ll never get everything over.’

Olsen paid him no attention. With his glasses he swept the course of the channel to north and south. He pointed to the north.

‘It narrows, in that direction. About a mile away it is most narrow. We will cross there.’

They changed direction and plodded on across the ice. Mouritzen would have liked to talk to Olsen but at the time they were both in harness on different sledges. When, at Olsen’s command, they halted again, he slipped the harness from his shoulders and went over to him.

Olsen said with satisfaction: ‘A lot nearer. Not much more than a hundred metres.’

‘First we have to strip both sledges,’ Mouritzen said. ‘Then make the raft. It will not take more than two of us at one time, so that is nine trips. And all the food and gear to be taken across bit by bit. We have only three hours before night falls. I do not think it is enough.’

Olsen beat his gloved hands together.

‘Nor do I.’

‘Then we camp here for the night, and cross in the morning?’

Olsen shook his head. ‘We make a start.’

‘And find ourselves half on one side, half on the other, when it becomes too dark to continue?’

‘That is right.’

‘How, then?’

‘It is simple,’ Olsen said. ‘We have two tents. We get the women across today, the rest of us tomorrow.’

Mouritzen thought about this. ‘It will need some organizing.’

Olsen clapped him on the shoulder. ‘We do not lack organizers! Niels, that is shore ice over there. Once we are on it, the worst part of our journey is almost over. You are right in saying we could not take everything across today, but what we can take, we will. If we left all until tomorrow, a storm might blow up when the job was half done. As it is – if we work hard today, I think maybe tomorrow night we will sleep with earth beneath us instead of water.’

‘The storm,’ Mouritzen observed, ‘might blow up tonight.’

‘Then at least half our party is across.’

The sledges were stripped of their contents, and the women put to dividing the material for immediate transport from that which would be left for the next day. There were protests when they realized that Olsen’s plan entailed separation from their menfolk; but the ascendancy he had now achieved was such that the protests were not sustained long.

Mama Simanyi said: ‘If you say it is the only way, Captain … but Papa and I have never been separated.’

Olsen grinned. ‘Nor will you be now. You can call to each other across the water. If you wish, we stretch a rope across and tie one end each to the big toe. Then you will know if he goes wandering in the night!’

‘You must cook your own supper tonight,’ Mama Simanyi said, warningly.

‘You make it ready, eh?’ Olsen said. ‘Put it in the pressure cooker. It will keep there till dark.’

A raft was made by lashing the two empty drums to the underside of one of the sledges and, having secured one end with a rope, they eased it down into the water that gently lapped against the edge of the floe. It floated, but one end was deeper in the water than the other. Olsen stared at it, his brow furrowed.

‘I think it would be all right,’ Mouritzen said. ‘We could distribute weight to make it all right.’

For a moment, Olsen continued his contemplation. Then he said sharply:

‘No! We take no chances. Haul her up again. We fix that drum a bit nearer the centre. And maybe we also take the runners off that end. She will balance better if we do that.’

The raft floated more evenly on the next launching. Olsen picked up a shovel and handed it to Mouritzen. He took another for himself.

‘First we will go across together, and find a place from which to run our ferry. Then we start the crossings in earnest.’

It was awkward paddling with the shovels, but the water was extremely calm, unruffled by the faintest breeze. They had to manoeuvre out of the path of a small drifting floe, six or seven feet in diameter, but otherwise the journey was uneventful. They climbed up on the ice at the other side, and waved to the watching figures.

‘This will do,’ Olsen said. ‘The ice is firm here. If they put up the tent fifty yards to the west, there will be no danger.’

‘It is fortunate you brought the drums,’ Mouritzen said.

Olsen shook his head. ‘Not fortunate.’

‘You knew there would be open water?’

‘At this time of year there is always a channel between the shore-ice and the pack-ice. Well, it will not be too difficult. But it is best that we get on with it right away.’

He was a strange man, Mouritzen thought; in him the interplay of confidence and reserve, natural to all human relations, bore an unfathomable, distorted pattern. There was no reason why he should not have told Mouritzen this when, on the
Kreya
, he had queried the value of taking the empty drums. Mouritzen pictured the small boy, an only child, a mother cold and without sympathy, the big sea captain for a father, briefly with them and then away. The roots went deep.

They paddled back, and gear was loaded on the raft for Mouritzen to begin the transportation. On that trip, he found difficulty in getting the stuff unloaded at the other end; as he heaved things up on to the ice, the raft slid away into the channel. There were two requirements: a mooring post and an assistant on the ice at that side. When he got back to the main party, he explained this to Olsen.

‘The post is easy,’ Olsen said. ‘Chisel a hole and fix a runner in it. For the helper …’

Nadya said: ‘I will go. Since the women are to be on the other side tonight, it is better me than one of the men. It saves a crossing. And while Niels is rowing to and fro I can prepare the camping place.’

It was reasonable. Olsen nodded.

‘Yes, we will do that. And we will make a post on this side also.’

Nadya settled herself opposite Mouritzen on the raft. She stretched her hand out.

‘I will take the other shovel.’ They began to paddle out into the stream. She cried suddenly: ‘Katerina!’

The bear was standing on the edge of the ice, watching them. Nadya said:

‘She must come, too.’ She waved her arm and cried a few words in Polish. In English, she added: ‘Come, you stupid bear! Sooner or later you must cross.’

‘If she pulls at the raft,’ Mouritzen warned her, ‘she may turn it over.’

‘She will not do that. She is a good bear. Come now, Katerina!’

The bear hesitated a moment and then, squatting down, slid rump first into the water. She swam steadily after the raft. Nadya called in delight:

‘Good! A little white paint, and you are a polar bear.’

The crossings went smoothly and with reasonable speed after that. Mouritzen was impressed by the competence with which Nadya helped him. She was as useful as any of the men would have been, and her dark face, catching the rays of the disappearing sun, afforded a satisfaction that had nothing to do with utility. Between trips she staked out the tent. By the time the first of the other women crossed, with the sun lost and the afterglow almost gone, she had it erected.

He took Mary and Annabel together; the child gave little extra weight.

Mary said: ‘It seems much wider when you’re crossing it. I wish we could all be on the same side tonight.’

Mouritzen nodded. ‘Erik is right, though. It is better to get as much over today as we can.’

‘I suppose women aren’t as practical as men.’ Mouritzen threw the mooring rope and Nadya caught it, with a loud cry of ‘Right!’ ‘Most women, anyway.’

They finished while the day was still fairly light, and Mouritzen made his last trip back. The camp had been prepared on that side, too. They hauled up the raft, and dragged it over to the tent.

There was time after that for them to stand and wave at each other across the barrier of water. In the dusk the water turned from green to black, and seemed to be flowing faster. There were more ice chunks, too, floating down from the north. They called their good nights, their voices flat and echoing. Then they trooped away and squeezed into their tents.

During the night Mouritzen was awakened by noises. There was the wind first; it had risen again, and he could hear it howling, cold and angry, over the ice. More ominously there was the distant roaring of the ice itself – louder, more menacing, punctuated by occasional louder cracks, like thunder. Mouritzen roused himself to sit up.

From the other side of the tent, Olsen’s voice said:

‘You hear it, then?’

‘I hear it,’ Mouritzen said, ‘and I do not like it.’

‘I wonder,’ Olsen said, ‘how it goes with the
Kreya
.’

‘How does it go with us? That is more important.’

‘We are all right, I think,’ Olsen said.

‘And the women?’

‘They, too. The disturbance is well out to sea.’

They lapsed into silence, but Mouritzen did not go to sleep again; and he fancied that Olsen remained awake also. Olsen began to dress soon after six, and Mouritzen followed suit. They went outside, but it was impossible to see anything outside a radius of about fifty yards.

‘Breakfast first,’ Olsen said.

Mouritzen pointed to the sky. ‘Clouded over.’

‘The weather is changing. But it will not change much before breakfast.’

When they went out again, it was light enough to see that there had been a change, during the night, in more than the weather. The channel between the pack-ice and the shore-ice was twice as wide as it had been, and there were still more floes in it. As they looked a berg drifted past, as high above the water as a house.

Mouritzen, astonished, said: ‘The whole field must have moved; but we felt nothing.’

‘The wind is offshore,’ Olsen said, ‘from the north-west.’ His voice had exultance in it. ‘It is as well the crossing is half completed.’

‘One of them is coming out,’ Mouritzen said. He pointed to the tent on the other side. ‘Nadya, I guess.’

‘We will waste no time,’ Olsen said. ‘I think I smell snow in the wind.’

Crossing now was more difficult, not only because of the greater distance, but also because there were more floes to avoid. They pressed on with it as fast as possible; urgency was given to the operation by the fact that the women, during the night, had felt tremors in the ice on which they were camped, and these tremors increased during the morning. The wind was higher, too; the clouds were high but fast moving. When the last trip brought the second sledge, towed behind the raft, Olsen was insistent that no time be wasted in resuming the journey.

‘We shall not need the drums once we are on land,’ he said. ‘The sledges will travel lighter without them.’

Mama Simanyi said: ‘If we are to pack rightly, we need time to make ready – to sort things out.’

‘We can do that tonight,’ Olsen said. ‘When we are on firm land. The important thing now is to get away. As long as they are properly on the sledges, it does not matter how things are packed.’

They moved off soon after midday. There was no sun; the sky was pale grey to the south, dark grey in the remaining quarters. This ice, they found, differed from the pack-ice both in contours and texture; asperities were blockier and more frequent, and it lacked the hardness and toughness of the older ice. It crackled sharply under the sledge runners, and when they were hauling over slopes and ridges it was not unusual for large sections to break away.

Progress was slower again, but it was perceptible. At the same time the ice was becoming less stable. There were cracks in it, which opened and closed with the tide sweeping under from the sea. Occasionally rifts formed, up to a score of feet wide. A dyke which they skirted closed while they were alongside it. A small wave of water spurted up as the jaws of ice jarred together. It was not easy, afterwards, to see where the division had been.

There was a tilting slope of ice in front of them. Going round it would involve a fairly wide detour because of the jagged ice on either side. Olsen and Josef, heaving together, hauled their sledge up while the others pushed from behind. Dragging the sledge on to level ice beyond, Olsen shouted:

‘We are there! That is the shore.’

He pointed to where, no more than a hundred yards away, a long snow field advanced towards the hills. Behind him Mouritzen and Jones were struggling up with the second sledge. Mouritzen heard the crack of breaking ice before Olsen had finished speaking. At the same time the surface under his feet canted up. He fought for his footing as Jones fell heavily, and managed to twist round so that he could dig his heels in. Thus, looking back, he saw before any of the rest the gap that was opening at the bottom of the slope.