Fatal North (26 page)

That morning Punny, too, seemed to be enlightened by the sun. She hummed to herself, then looked searchingly at Tyson as he sat writing in a pocket memorandum with a pencil held in nearly frozen fingers.

“You are nothing but bone,” she said gravely, as if seeing him for the first time.

Indeed, he did not feel like much else. He was glad there were no mirrors.

Tyson went out with the hunters midmorning. The wind cut through his thin clothes like a knife, and he was forced to return early. He had spent twelve winters in Arctic regions, and he considered himself tough, as did others who had sailed with him. But with his inadequate apparel he would have chosen to stay inside during such weather were they not in danger of starvation. Had he, that dark October night, known the long journey before him on the floe, he would have better prepared himself and taken with him a warm suit of clothes and a rifle he could call his own.

Upon arriving back at the hut, he was thankful to find that Hannah had a hot lunch ready: a piece of seal flipper and a pot of seal-blood soup. It was a heavy and ample lunch, and restored Tyson in every way.

In his ceaseless search for game, Joe got adrift on the young ice that afternoon, and was very near to spending a harsh night
outside in the elements, but toward evening he succeeded in regaining the floe.

Feb. 19. The west coast in sight! I think it to be in the vicinity of Cape Seward, and distant thirty-eight or forty miles. If the ice were in condition today, I would try to reach the shore. In this latitude we could find Eskimo, and we could live as they do until June; then we could get to Pond Bay and find English whalemen. But these are castles in the air; the state of the ice forbids the attempt. We must bide our time.

That day Joe, Hans, and Tyson went off at sunrise to hunt. They saw only one seal, and Joe killed it. As they entered camp, several armed men approached Joe and took the seal from him. They did not ask for it or say, “Let us take it and divide it up,” but just laid hands on the catch and took it away as if it were their own.

Joe by then was accustomed to cleaning his catch and dividing the rations under Tyson's supervision. He had always been willing for everyone to have an equal share in whatever he brought in, but he didn't like this menacing way the men had. Neither did Tyson, but short of having a violent confrontation then and there it seemed impossible to stop.

The men were seldom out of their igloo or off their beds before noontime. They took their rations and waited expectantly the rest of the day for the hunters to return. Then these idle men had the audacity to take a catch away from the men who had been up since dawn and exposed for many hours to wind and cold.

“I think they ought to be made to pay a hundred dollars apiece for each seal they have taken from me,” Joe said sternly. “For their bad conduct.”

“Joe, if seal were to be had for the buying,” Tyson responded, “
I
would gladly give a hundred dollars apiece.”

The seal was, at last, divided into eighteen pieces. Tyson
passed out rations of bread to go with it: one-tenth of a pound per person.

On February 21, the thermometer read 3 degrees—the first time it had gone above zero since they had been on the ice floe. The next day's high registered a balmy 20 degrees. Still, the ice in the bay showed no signs of breaking up. Everything was ready for a push to shore and all were anxious to start, but the wait continued. Seals remained scarce, though they could be seen under the ice—food so close, yet it escaped them.

Feb. 22. Prospects look dark and gloomy—eighteen to feed. The little allowance of pemmican and bread will not keep us going much longer, and we have not even a bit of seal skin or entrails to eat … The men are frightened; they seem to see Death staring them in the face and saying, “In a little while you are mine.” Joe is frightened, too. He feels that if he and his family were alone on the shore, without this company of men to feed, he could catch game enough for his own use; but to catch a living for eighteen discourages him, and indeed it seems impossible without some great change occurring … There is a double game working around me. I must be on the watch. It is plain to me that the Eskimos are anxious to get on shore to preserve their own lives from dangers other than scarcity of game. I shall protect them to the utmost extent of my ability.

Tyson went hunting with the Eskimos on March 1. They saw no seals that day, but returned with a total of sixty-six dovekies. Each bird contained but a few bites of flesh, and although it was not heat-giving like seal meat, it was a good deal better than nothing, allowing them to forgo their regular daily allowance, which, to preserve stores, had been cut in half to one meal of a few ounces, the barest minimum to sustain life.

The next day at five, Joe shot a monstrous
ugyuk
—a large bearded seal—he caught sunning on the ice. He cleanly put a ball into its brain at fifty feet. It was the biggest seal that Tyson
had ever seen in his Arctic travels, and all hands were needed to drag it to camp, where several men broke out in dance and sang for joy at the great deliverance.

It came at a time when there was no seal meat left in camp. Hannah had but two small pieces of blubber left, enough for the lamp for two days, the men had but little, and Hans had only enough for one day. And now, on the verge of absolute destitution, along came this huge seal—the only one that had been spotted above ice in more than a week—that weighed six or seven hundred pounds. When dressed, it would furnish a week's worth of satisfying meals and some thirty gallons of oil for the lamps.

Truly we are rich indeed,
Tyson wrote.
Praise the Lord for all his mercies!

The warm blood of the seal was quickly scooped up in tin cans and relished by all like new milk. The huts soon looked like slaughterhouses, with meat, blood, entrails all over everything. Their hands and faces were smeared with meat and blood. Anyone coming among them at this moment would have taken them for a pack of carnivorous animals just let loose upon their prey. After such long fasting, they could not restrain their appetites, and some ate until they were sick to their stomachs.

Land to the west of them was still visible thirty miles off.

March 4. We are now approaching Cumberland Gulf—my old whaling ground. Should the weather prove favorable, I shall have no hesitancy about trying to get clear of the floe; for there, finding ships, we should end our misery. But should we drift past the gulf, then we can try Hudson Strait, and getting on Resolution Island, could safety wait there for Hudson Bay vessels or American whalers, who go there every year now … There is no more thought or talk of striking eastward for the coast of Greenland; that is seen to have been all a delusion, inspired by the desire to have it so. What some people wish they soon believe. Meyer, I believe, has given up taking observations, his
countrymen having lost all confidence in him since finding how his prophecies have failed.

The next day, a gale struck with more ferocity than they had yet experienced on the floe. The igloos were completely buried in the snowdrift, and they could not even get into the outer passageway until the storm abated. If not for the supply of
ugyuk
stocked in every hut, they would have been in an even more deplorable condition because the supply hut was buried, too. No one ventured out in the storm but Joe, who cut his way out. Yet he was driven back after a few minutes with his face frozen. Everyone stayed inside, lamps burning in each igloo.

On the night of March 6, the ice began cracking and snapping underneath them, sounding like distant rolling thunder. The noise shook Tyson from his sleep. As he lay listening, several times he thought the ice was breaking in fragments. No two sounds appeared alike, except for the repetition of the grinding and explosive jolts.

The severe shaking augured the breaking up of the floe. The commotion suggested to Tyson that loose chunks of ice had gotten under the floe, and were rolling along until they came to an opening, where they came grinding up and rising to the surface. He began to have some idea of how people in earthquake regions must feel when the ground is trembling and shaking beneath their feet, especially on a dark night when one cannot see a foot before him, and knows not which way lies danger or safety—if there was safety to be had anywhere. But even a violent earthquake is usually over in a matter of seconds. Tyson listened to the overwhelming power of the pushing and grinding masses of ice throughout that night of misery. Their force, and the degree of human helplessness in comparison, brought home to him once again that there were elements in nature which man's ingenuity could never control.

By the light of morning the floe was still intact.

A few days of moderate weather arrived, then ended abruptly
on March 11 with another fierce gale that raged through the day. About 5:00 P.M. the ice began shifting and cracking, with a constant succession of dismal noises, mingled with sharp reports and resounding concussions that seemed to have their center immediately under the small encampment. These sounds commingled with the raging storm and the crushing and grinding from the pressure of the bergs and heavy ice all around them.

With a gale blowing and a thick swirl of snow everywhere, one could scarcely see his hand before him, or know with each moment whether or not the floe's foundation would split and their snow tenements come tumbling down atop their heads.

They got everything ready to grab and run—but to where?

At nine there was a heavy explosion, then a terrible grinding sound.

Joe and Tyson decided to take a look.

Through the snowstorm, they cautiously felt their way down in the darkness some twenty yards from the entrance to the hut, and there found that the floe had broken off. The severed pieces swayed back and forth, then rushed upon each other, grinding their sides together with all the combined force which the sea and the gale could give them.

The next morning, the wind abated and the snow ceased, enabling them to look around and see what had happened.

The large floe they had lived on all winter had shattered into hundreds of pieces. They were left on a piece of ice about seventy-five by a hundred yards.

 

When Tyson selected the place for erecting their igloos, he had picked out what seemed to be the thickest and most solid spot, not far from the center of the floe.

As he surveyed their new, precarious situation, he wondered if their island of ice was thick enough that it might yet endure for a time the shock of riding among the loosened bergs without being broken into still smaller fragments. But with a heavy sea
running now, too, it seemed unlikely that the floe could hold together much longer after the tremendous shocks it had received.

He also saw a great change in the condition of the ice around them. The surrounding floes had formed a pack, and great blocks of ice—of all sizes and shapes—were piled and jammed together in every imaginable position. On his last extended walk before the storm, the floes had appeared to extend for many miles. They were now all broken up, the fractured pieces heaped over each other in utter disarray.

Fortunately, their boat—their one lifeline to shore—remained undamaged.

In a ship after such a storm, the first work, with returning light, would have been to clear the decks and set about repairing the damage. But how could they repair their shattered ice craft? They could look around and take account of loss and damage, but could do nothing toward making it more seaworthy.

Their reduced platform of ice was drifting along quiedy, and they felt relatively safe for now, surrounded by icebergs that had drifted with them all winter and, oddly, seemed like old if unpredictable friends.

With the return of moderate weather, they were able to commence daily hunting again. As they moved farther south, they entered seal grounds and began to find their prey more plentiful. Also, they had open water all around them and could shoot any they saw, then use the kayak for retrieving the game.

That first day Joe shot two, Hans one, and Tyson one.

Notwithstanding the cataclysmic events of the previous twenty-four hours, all was relatively well, which Tyson considered astonishing. Their success in collecting food further raised the spirits of the party. Even Hans' little boy, Tobias, had rebounded from his illness with the addition of ample seal meat to his diet.

On March 14, Tyson shot an
ugyuk,
although not as large as the previous one, and Joe bagged two seals, keeping them in fresh meat and a good supply of blubber and oil.

With Meyer no longer interested in taking observations, he allowed Tyson use of his navigational instruments. Tyson determined on March 17 that they were 63 degrees, 47 minutes north, showing a drift of ten miles a day.

The next morning, Tyson was the first one up, and around five o'clock, he came across a polar bear close to camp. An exciting chase ensued, which Joe and Hans quickly joined. The bear appeared to be a young male in the five-hundred-pound range. They fired several shots but failed to bring him down, and the bear swam across a crack to make good his escape. They had seen tracks all around them and bears had been within twenty paces of the huts through the night, but this was the closest they had come in daylight. Polar bears were nearly as much water creatures as seals, and Arctic sailors would spot them swimming among the loose ice a hundred miles from land.

A few nights later, shortly after dark, Tyson had just settled into the igloo and taken off his boots, preparing to rest, when he heard a loud noise outside.

Joe, too, was about to retire, but on hearing the noise he thought the ice could be breaking up. He went out to see. He was not gone more than ten seconds before he came back, pale, exclaiming excitedly: “There is a bear close to the kayak!”

The kayak, Tyson knew, was within ten feet of the entrance to the igloo. As he quickly put on his boots, he remembered that his rifle, and also Joe's, were outside; his was lying close to the kayak, and Joe's inside it. They kept the guns outside because they soon would have been ruined inside the hut from the condensation. The exhalations from their lungs formed moisture that settled on everything, and would have rusted the firearms unless carefully cased, and they had no casings.