Between Two Worlds (20 page)

“What!” Peary interrupted. “The
Windward
is in Payer Harbor?”

Bag of Bones nodded. “Mitti Peary asked us to look for you and—”

“
Mrs
. Peary is here?” Peary’s expression turned from one of shock to a bright, broad smile.

“Mrs. Peary and Marie,” Duncan put in.

“The missus, Marie, and the baby?” Peary asked.

“No baby,” Angulluk said. “Unless you mean Sammy, Ally’s baby.”

“No, I mean Mrs. Peary’s baby girl. Francine.”

Bag of Bones looked puzzled. “We don’t know of any other baby.”

“We have letters for you from Mitti Peary.” Angulluk retrieved the papers from a sack. Silently, Peary read quickly through the pages, written in Mitti Peary’s beautiful curving loops. He paused here and there, then dropped his head; he coughed, and for a moment it seemed he might choke. “The baby died of an illness,” he said. Then, “My poor Jo.” Then he came to another page, splattered with ink and filled with Marie’s larger handwriting, and his face softened.

Peary folded the sheets and held them to his lips, then put them in his bag.

So Marie had had a little sister, who’d been born and died since Mitti Peary’s last trip to our land. How sad that Peary had never met his second daughter.

After some quiet, Bag of Bones gave details of my accident. Then Mauripaulak told us that we were about midway between the ship and Fort Conger. Peary and Mauripaulak, while tracking musk oxen, had been caught in a storm and separated from two young hunters who worked for Peary and had wintered with him at the fort.

“The fort is large and comfortable,” Peary said to Angulluk,
“and I know a fairly flat route to get there. Tomorrow we could take Billy Bah on the sled. It will be a good place for her to recuperate.”

“Nga!”
I said. I’d grown sleepy with the broth but now was wide awake. I remembered something I hadn’t thought about before. We’d be cooped up in that ghostly place where the spirits of the doomed
qallunaaq
party roamed. “Take me back to the village.”

“How is it along the coast?” Peary asked Angulluk. “Is the snow smooth enough for sled travel?”

“It was hard even to walk. You couldn’t drive a sled there.”

The men speculated whether drifts were too high inland to go to Payer Harbor that way. “Between here and the harbor,” Peary said, “are hills to cross. Snow remains on the higher elevations. We may need to wait before we can go to the ship.”

Before we had started out, I thought we’d give up and turn around well before getting to the interior. Or we’d make it all the way to the fort, locate Peary, and return with him to the
Windward
. I hadn’t considered that we’d find Peary, then be stranded with him. In time, the snow and ice would melt and we’d get back to Payer Harbor. But how long would that take, and would we have enough food? And would my throbbing feet fully heal?

Angulluk and I should have never come on this journey
, I thought.
Mitti Peary was wrong to send us, and we were wrong to agree
.

The next morning, while Mauripaulak changed the wrappings on my feet, Angulluk and Peary harnessed Peary’s sled and headed south to explore the area toward Payer Harbor. After two days, we heard their dogs coming back. It was as feared: snow was too deep to try crossing the hills. We would have to go north to Fort Conger. There was nothing I could do but let myself be covered by a skin, lie on Peary’s sled, and be pulled by his dogs while Angulluk, Duncan, Bag of Bones, and the others, even Peary with his crippled feet, walked. I felt the terrible cold and every rough bump underneath me. The trek lasted two days and nights, the men building snow igloos for sleeping. I hardly reacted to anyone around me. It was too much effort to talk. Angulluk gave me his last piece of seal meat. On the third day, we set out without anything to eat besides what Peary and Mauripaulak handed us: small white pills. Peary said, “These will give us some strength. They’re dried milk.” That night we slept cold and hungry.

Finally, on the fourth day, Peary pointed ahead, saying, “There it is!” As the sled drew near, I sat up. I’d expected a large, gloomy building like ones I’d seen in
America. Instead, the camp was mostly snow-covered stacks of wood and two smaller buildings, square and built of wide planks. As Peary proudly explained, the fort had been bigger but was too hard to heat, so he divided it into two one-room cabins. Twenty-five men had lived at this outpost, so after Peary and his party came, there were plenty of extra beds inside, even after he broke up a number of them.

Peary helped me to stand on my swollen feet and was about to lead me into one of the houses when I said, “Where are the bodies of the dead men? If they’re buried here, I will not enter. Angulluk can build us an igloo.”

“Men did not die here. Nearby, at Cape Sabine,” Peary replied. “A group called the Greely party. They were running out of supplies and left. Some built a boat and tried to sail south, but they drowned. Some died in a shelter at the beach. Greely and a few of his party were rescued when finally a ship found them.”

I hobbled into the surprisingly warm cabin and glanced about for bearded faces of white men lurking in the shadows. I imagined them seated around the plank table, reaching to the shelves for plates and mugs, knives and spoons, sleeping under the blue and red wool blankets that covered the beds.

But soon I forgot about spirits and turned to the stone fireplace and its roaring fire. Two of Peary’s hunters came in and greeted me. They had reached the camp a day before us.

“Stop!” I said as one hunter, Aapilaq, laid a new plank on the fire. I was looking at the flames with horror. They were burning cut-up pieces of wood: wood that was brought by ship, I reminded them, on long voyages. We sat at the table, and I argued about this wastefulness. The wood they burned was enough for a whole village of hunters to fashion into many sled runners and harpoon shafts, useful for generations to come.

Mauripaulak, who fully understood our language, joined us. He said, “It’s all right, Billy Bah. With the logs outside, we have more wood than we need. As you can see. If we can get some of it to your people, we will.”

Peary and Duncan stamped snow from their boots. Angulluk and Bag of Bones removed theirs. Angulluk hung my
kapatak
and
kamiit
on hooks by the fireplace, where they began to thaw and drip, giving off a musky odor. At last, days after I fell in the water, my furs could dry.

All the men were caring for me now, and Angulluk and Duncan vied for my attention. With a mug of tea warm in my hands, and my mouth full of Peary’s too-salty canned meat, I could almost forget the constant throbbing in my feet. I took off my socks to inspect them and found that my right foot had turned red and blotchy, hard to the touch, and my left foot bluish gray. Blisters had risen. Though my toes were dark purple, they hadn’t turned black, and I could move them.

The cabin soon filled with a bitter aroma I remembered from America. Peary was turning the handle on a small box and grinding brown beans for coffee. He tapped the ground beans in a pot and poured in boiling water. “Not bad for coffee that has been here twenty years,” Peary said, taking a sip from a mug. “One of these days, if I see Adolphus Greely, I’m going to thank him for it.”

“It’s lost its flavor,” Mauripaulak said. “We need to use more beans.”

“We have a huge supply,” Peary said, wiping his reddish mustache. His handkerchief was embroidered by Mitti Peary with a letter I knew to be P, the only letter I could read.

Angulluk took a sip of coffee and made a face.

“Do you want a taste, Billy Bah?” Duncan asked.

“No, thank you.” The idea of drinking things left over from white explorers who had died still made me shiver.

Peary went to a trunk and, raising a small cloud of dust, took out bundles of papers. “Here are letters,” he said, “and charts, and a calendar from 1881 to 1882.” He took out candles and set them on the shelves, then began putting objects on the table: a gold pocket watch, a smoking pipe, a photograph in a frame of a lady with long ringlets, and a box with carved figures for the game called chess. Peary told us he planned to take as many of the Greely party’s possessions back to America as he could, to return them to the survivors or their widows.

“You should bury all these things,” I warned him.

Peary laughed. “They won’t bite us. And I’m so grateful to these men for their beds and blankets, pots and pans. I haven’t lived in such comfort for a long time. I’ve greatly enjoyed the peacefulness and solitude of the place. Sometimes when the men go out hunting, I stay and read a book by the fire. I’m almost sorry the winter is coming to an end.”

How selfish! “Mitti Peary didn’t need to be worried about you,” I said. “And Angulluk and I, Qaorlutoq and Duncan would have been better off if we hadn’t set out to find you. Surely you would have come and found us yourself.”

“Yes. But it’s good all the same that you came looking for me. We
might
have needed rescuing,” Peary said. “I’m delighted that Mrs. Peary sent you. Otherwise, I wouldn’t know she was here.” He paused. “I could never do my work in your land if it wasn’t for her belief in me.”

He was
thanking
her for nearly sending me to my death! Then he added that it was Lieutenant Greely’s wife, Henrietta, who’d arranged for one search party after another to sail here looking for her husband. One ship was tragically lost, others found no one and sailed back, but she persevered until a rescue ship succeeded in finding the survivors. “As it was, six men lived, and all would have starved or frozen to death if help hadn’t come soon. This woman, like my own wife, would have done anything for her husband.”

I thought of all I did for Angulluk, and all that he did for Mitti Peary, who in turn served her husband; in a way, he was driving us forward like dogs harnessed together. Was he worth our risks? Peary hadn’t even asked how Ally and Sammy fared.

“Let me show you something, Billy Bah,” Peary said. He helped me to my feet and guided me to his bed on the far side of the room. He’d carved letters in the planks of the wall. “I did it with my pocketknife, just after Matt Henson amputated my toes,” he said. “To inspire me and buck me up. It’s an old language called Latin that I learned as a boy.” He read out loud: “
Inveniam viam aut faciam
. It means ‘Find a way or make one.’ One day I will make it to the North Pole. You’ll all see!”

“Yes, I’m sure you will.” Did he hear the edge to my voice?

He looked at me intently with his clear blue eyes. “There’s a reason I’m showing you this quotation, Billy Bah. You must not let your injury stop you. I speak to you as if you were my own daughter. What decisions can you make to take you into the future?”

Peary like a father to me! “I had a good father. Please leave me be.” I pulled away.

Later, as the men slept, I thought about Peary’s words. What power did I have to do anything, to make any kind of choice, especially with my injuries? It was hard to think about the days and seasons ahead. I wanted to walk easily again, to go back to the village, and when I could, to return
to my own people in Itta—to see my sister, to talk to the spirits of my parents at their burial house. Perhaps there, upon my return, I’d start my life over. But I knew that life in Itta, as anywhere, could be difficult; people gossiped, and they might not welcome me. Navarana had said it didn’t matter where I lived if I discovered a contentment within, a different kind of “home.”

How could I find it? Did it even exist?

Every day at Fort Conger, I inspected my feet, helping my husband or Mauripaulak wash them and smooth on seal oil. The red swellings turned blotchier; the purple spots lightened to browns and yellows. As blisters dried, new ones rose. The largest, on my left sole, was big as a seal’s eyeball. I didn’t walk at all for five tedious days. Without skins to prepare or sew, I grew restless and bored. Duncan slept in Peary’s cabin, and Angulluk kept him from visiting me.

A half moon had passed since the accident. Then one afternoon, when Angulluk and Bag of Bones and the two men from Itta were out hunting, I wanted no more of the smoky room; I needed air. There was no one to stop me. So I got up, reached for my
kapatak
, painfully slid on my
kamiit
, and took burning, shaking steps out the door.