Alaska (29 page)

'Them, not me,' Kane said, and Atkins proposed that in the coming fight, the three Americans stay together: 'We have guns. We'd better be prepared to use them.'

The Americans and most of the Eskimos slept uneasily that night, but Sopilak did not sleep at all, for he had hunted polar bears before, with his father, and had been present when a great white beast, taller than two men when it reared on its hind legs, had crushed a hunter from Desolation with one smashing blow from its paw.

It had driven the man right down against the ice and then torn at him with all four of its sets of claws. The man and all his clothing had been left in shreds, and that bear had not been taken.

There had been other hunts, some of them led by Sopilak himself, in which the monstrous beasts, more beautiful than a dream of white blizzards, had been tracked for days and brought to heel by wisdom and courage. Toward dawn Sopilak instructed Atkins: 'Tell your men to watch me,' and though the seaman tried to explain to the Eskimo that the Americans had guns, which would give them a sizable advantage if the fight did materialize, no matter how often in the darkness Atkins raised his arms and went 'Bang-bang!' Sopilak did not understand. He saw only that they had no clubs or spears, and he feared for their safety.

When a pale, silvery cold light broke, a scout far to the north signaled that he had the polar bear in sight, and none of the three Americans who experienced the next moments would ever forget them, for when they rounded a huge block of ice thrown high above the surface of the frozen sea on which they moved, they saw ahead of them one of the world's majestic creatures, as grand an animal as the mastodons and mammoths that had once crossed over to Alaska near this point. It was huge, so completely white that it blended with

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the snow, and agile with a lumbering grace that caused the human heart to hesitate, so overpowering was the sense of beauty and awkward energy the bear exhibited as it began to move away. A supreme example of animal majesty, it seemed to be at one with the ice sheet and with the frozen sky. A light snow that began to fall as day brightened enhanced the dreamlike quality of the hunt as Sopilak's men began their chase.

The polar bear, unique among its genus in color, size and speed, could easily outrun any one man, and it also had the capacity to dive headlong into those strange openings in the ice where water flowed free, swim vigorously to the other side, clamber with amazing ease onto the new ice, and scamper off to other frozen areas where the men could not pursue, since they could not cross the open water. But it could not outrun half a dozen pestering men, especially when with spears and clubs and wild shouting they prevented it from attaining open water. So the long day's fight was about equal: the men could harass it and keep it from open water; it could outrun them and swim short distances to new positions. But in the end their persistence and anticipation of its moves enabled them to stay close and to drive it so that it winded itself, and in this manner the fight continued.

But as day began to wane, and it was brief at this autumn latitude, the men realized that they must soon come to grips with the bear or run the risk of losing it in the long night. So two Eskimos, Sopilak and another, became much more daring, and in a pair of coordinated thrusts they ran at the bear, confused it, and with Sopilak's spear damaged its left hind leg, and when they saw that it was wounded, two other men dashed in from behind, evaded the deadly swipe of its forepaws when it turned, and struck again, in the same l
eg.

The bear was now seriously wounded, and knew it, so it retreated until its back was against a large block of ice which protected it in that quarter, and now the men had to attack from positions where it could spot them from the moment they began to approach, and in this posture it was formidable, a towering white giant, red-bloodied in one leg but the possessor of claws that could rip out a man's guts.

In this moment of equal battle, when the Eskimo who first charged knew that he stood a strong likelihood of being disemboweled, none of Sopilak's hunters volunteered to make the possibly sacrificial run, so the master hunter knew that it devolved upon him. He succeeded in striking the bear's undamaged right leg, but in endeavoring to escape, he fell under the bear's full glare, and a mighty swing of the right paw sent him sprawling flat upon the ice and exposed to the bear's revenge.

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In this extremity, two Eskimos darted bravely out to incapacitate the bear, regardless of what happened to Sopilak, but they were so tardy that the bear had time to leap at its fallen enemy and would have crushed him and torn him apart had not Captain Pym and Harpooner Kane discharged their rifles at this moment to stagger the great white monster. With two bullets in it, an experience never known before, the bear stopped and gasped, whereupon Atkins fired his gun, and this bullet lodged in the bear's head, causing it to lose control and to fall powerless across the prone body of the master hunter.

There the marvelous bear died, this creature of the frozen seas, this magnificent giant whose fur was often whiter than the snow upon which it moved, and when the seven Eskimos saw that it was truly dead they did something that amazed the three Americans: they began to dance, solemnly and with tears streaming down their faces, and the man holding wounded Sopilak erect so that he too could participate began to chant a song that reached back five thousand years, and there as darkness fell the men of Desolation wept and danced in honor of the great white creature they had killed. Seaman Atkins, watching this performance, appreciated its meaning instantly, and in response to some ancient force that his ancestors in Europe had revered, he dropped the gun which had been instrumental in killing the bear and joined the dancers, and Sopilak took his hand and welcomed him to the circle, and picking up the rhythm, Atkins joined the chant, for he too honored the splendid white bear, that creature of the north that had been so majestic in life, so brave in death.

SOPILAK HAD A FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD SISTER NAMED KHnak, and in the days following the kill of the polar bear she worked with her mother and the other women of Desolation in butchering and tending to the valuable bones, sinews and magnificent white skin.

As she did so, she became aware that the young seaman from the Evening Star

was placing himself near her, watching her. With the Eskimo words which he was acquiring so rapidly, he had been able to explain to Sopilak and his mother that he, Atkins, as one of the cooks aboard the American vessel, wanted to learn how the Eskimos handled the meat of the bear, the walrus and the seal that they caught in winter, and this explanation was accepted.

But the Eskimo men who had participated in the famous hunt of this bear also knew that it was only the bravery of Atkins and his leader, Noah Pym, that had saved the life of Sopilak, and since they had told the story of those culminating moments, the heroism of the young man was known 185

throughout the village, and his attendance upon the butchering and Kiinak was accepted and even encouraged. Several times Sopilak told the villagers: 'The young one saved my life,' and whenever he said this, Kiinak smiled.

She was a vivacious girl, just under five feet tall, broad shouldered, broad-faced, with a smile that charmed all upon whom it fell. But her outstanding characteristic was a heavy head of very black hair, which she kept cut so low that it obscured her eyebrows and shook from side to side when she laughed, which she did many times each day, for she loved the great nonsense of the world: the pomposity of her brother when he killed a walrus or captured a seal, the posturing of some young woman trying to attract the attention of her brother, or even the whimpering behavior of a child who was trying to enforce his will upon his mother. When she talked, she had the habit of using her left hand in a wide, careless sweep to brush the hair out of her eyes, and at such times she seemed quite gamin, and the older women of the village knew very well that this girl Kiinak was going to give the young men of the village much to think about as the time came for her to select a husband.

There was one other charming aspect, which John Atkins noticed the first time he saw her in the hut she shared with Sopilak and his young wife: Kiinak was not, like many Eskimo women, heavily tattooed about the face, but she did have two parallel slim blue lines coming down from her lower lip to the edge of her chin, and they gave her rather large, square face a touch of delicacy, for when she smiled the lines seemed to participate, thus making her warm smile even more generous.

When the butchering of the bear was completed on the spot where it had been slain, and the hundreds of pounds of rich meat lugged ashore for treatment in various ways, Atkins had no utilitarian reason for lingering about Sopilak's hut, but he did, and it was not long before the gossipy women of Desolation began predicting that something of interest was going to happen one of these days. And now came an amusing contradiction, the kind that confused many societies: the older women were romantics who reveled in watching how young girls attracted and bewildered young men, and they spent many hours speculating on who was going to go to bed with whom and what kind of scandal this might produce; but they were also rigorous moralists and protectors of village continuity.

Through long centuries they had learned that Eskimo society functioned best when girls postponed having babies until they had fastened themselves to some reassuring man who

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would provide for their children. Widespread flirtation and even bedding down with this attractive young fellow or that was permitted and even encouraged for example, if two aunts had an ungainly niece who looked as if she might never catch a man; but if that niece had a child without first having found a husband, these same aunts would excoriate her and even banish her from their hut. As one wise old woman said while watching the courtship of Seaman Atkins and Sopilak's sister: 'It's always better when things go orderly.'

The romantic half of their concern was quickly resolved, for although Atkins had returned to his long hut half a mile away when the butchering ended, he remained there only two days, after which he came plodding back to Desolation on snowshoes, longing to see his Eskimo lass. He arrived at noon, bringing with him four ship's biscuits as a present to Sopilak, his young wife, Sopilak's old mother and Kiinak.

Tasting the strange food outside their hut so as to enjoy the final few hours of faint haze before winter clamped a perpetual frozen darkness over all, they asked Atkins: 'Is this what you told us about? Is this what white people eat?' and when he nodded, they said, not contemptuously: 'Seal blubber is much better. Fat to keep you warm in winter,' and Atkins laughed: 'We'll soon find out. Our biscuits are almost gone.'

And within the next week the Eskimos were starting to provide the marooned sailors with seal meat, which they learned to enjoy, and with seal blubber, the part of the animal that enabled the Eskimos to live in the arctic, which the white men could not force themselves to eat. And one afternoon, as John Atkins helped bring the meat to the ship, accompanied by Sopilak, who had caught the seal, he returned to the Point and lived thereafter in Sopilak's hut, sharing a sealskin bed with laughing Kiinak.

WHEN THE LAST DAYS OF NOVEMBER BROUGHT TOTAL darkness to the icebound ship, the twenty-one Americans living in the long hut Atkins no longer being with them settled into a routine which enabled them to withstand the terrible isolation. Most important, each day at what they judged to be high noon, Captain Pym attended by First Mate Corey marched to the rude ship's clock and ceremoniously wound it so that they could ensure having what they called Greenwich Time, which made it possible to calculate where they were in relation to London. The principle was simple, as Captain Pym always explained to each new sailor coming aboard his ship: 'If the clock shows it's five in the afternoon at the Prime Meridian in London, and our shot of the sun 187

shows it's high noon here, obviously we're five hours west of London. Since -each hour represents fifteen degrees of longitude, we know for certain that we're at seventy-five degrees west, which puts us in the Atlantic some miles east of Norfolk, Virginia.'

Within a few years, wandering sea captains like Pym would have one of the new chronometers being perfected by English clock making geniuses, and with it they would be able to ascertain their longitude precisely; for the present, using the rough clocks available, they could only approximate. Latitude, of course, had been determinable with amazing accuracy for the last three thousand years: in daylight, shoot the noonday sun; at night, shoot the North Star. '159 degrees West Longitude,' Pym would chart each day as he completed winding, '70 degrees, thirty-three minutes North Latitude.' No other explorer had been so far north in these waters.

From the inadequate tables which mariners like Captain Pym carried with them, he calculated that at this latitude north the sun would quit the heavens sometime near the fifteenth of November and not reappear as even a sliver until sometime in late January. Harpooner Kane, hearing him speak of this, asked in a kind of stupor: 'You mean, no light at all for seventy days?' and Pym nodded.

But on the midday of November the sun was still faintly visible for a few minutes, low in the sky, and Pym heard Kane tell the others: 'Tomorrow it'll be gone,' but on the sixteenth it still lingered. However, two days later the merest edge of the sun appeared for two minutes, then disappeared, and the sailors battened down their minds and their emotions, going into the kind of hibernation which many of the other arctic animals followed.

They were surprised, however, by the discovery that even at this great distance north, a kind of magical glow did appear each midday, illuminating their frozen world for a few precious minutes, not with actual daylight but with something more precious: a wonderful, silvery aura which reminded them that the loss of their sun was not going to be perpetual. Of course, when this ambient glow vanished, the ensuing twenty-two hours of pitch-black seemed more oppressive and the penetrating cold more devastating.