Heartbroke Bay (32 page)

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Authors: Lynn D'urso

BOOK: Heartbroke Bay
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“We’re walking out of here,” says Hans. Since the passing of the ship, he has stared at the mountains, refusing to believe any longer in rescue from the sea.
Severts looks at the upright walls of the fjord and shakes his head. “Can’t be done, Hans. Where is there to go?”
Nelson scratches a distorted map of the coast in the mud with a stick, draws an
X,
and says, “Here’s Lituya Bay.” Then he drags his wand south in the dirt, turns right to go east, and then back to the north, where he draws another pair of crosses. He plants the tip of the stick in the nearest, saying, “The settlement at Haines,” then taps the farthest. “Only a few miles from Skagway.”
Between Haines and Lituya Bay he scratches a crosshatch of lines. “Glacier Bay and the ice fields lie between us and Haines. We climb up onto the ice fields, circle north across the top of Glacier Bay, and hit the headwaters of the river that drains down to Haines. Can’t be more than fifty or sixty miles.”
His proposal is met with silence. Harky and Dutch stare at the scratchings. Hannah wiggles her toes, feeling the stones beneath her feet through the worn soles of her boots.
Michael disagrees. “I’ve climbed the ridges above the glacier when I was hunting and seen the ice. It’s impossible to travel there. Too rough, and the crevasses are too deep. Even the goats don’t go onto the ice.”
Hans nods, then points with his stick at Lituya Bay. “I agree. The glacier where it comes from the mountains is far too dangerous. But I’ve been thinking about it, and it seems that it must be broken just here, where the glacier comes downhill to the sea. Higher, where it is level, I’m willing to wager it is solid.”
Harky looks up and rumbles, “Mountains are too high. Lots colder up there.”
“We don’t have to go over,” says Hans, tapping the ground emphatically with the kindling. “Look, the ice fills the mountain valleys, right? Just think of it as a frozen lake, and you will see that I am right. Lakes are smooth when they freeze, so we don’t have to worry about crevasses once we are on top. And it will provide us a level trail between the high peaks. It will be like crossing a prairie in winter, that’s all.”
With that poorly informed geography and a route hatched in the mud with a stick, a plan is formed; Michael is assigned the task of killing a sea lion; the meat will be jerked and the animal’s thick hide used to reinforce the soles of their boots. Blankets must be sacrificed, sewn into coats and mittens. Capes of untanned seal and goat hides will protect them from the cold.
Dutch is reluctant and covers his fright with another of his yarns. “I climbed in the Alp Mountains of Europe when I was younger. It’s damned dangerous, I’ll tell you. A bad storm catches us up there, and we’re done for.” Snapping his fingers to demonstrate the suddenness of death. “Done for just like that.”
Hans pushes his jaw out and leans forward. “You’ve never climbed off your own ass, so just keep your poxing lies to yourself. You can walk out with me or stay here and starve. It’s your choice.”
Three days later, as Hannah is helping Michael prepare strips of dark meat sliced from the haunch of a sea lion for drying, he whispers fiercely, “If we get out of here, I’m taking you with me. Tell me you’ll come, Hannah.”
She hammers at a strip of meat with a mallet, beating it tender, then closes her eyes and gives a sharp nod. When she opens her eyes, she strikes the meat once, then again, without looking at Michael.
The first of November, 1898
 
Whosoever finds this message shall know that we were five prospectors cast away on this coast in the winter of 1898: Mr. Hans Nelson of Blue Lake, Minnesota, and his wife, Hannah Butler-Nelson of Bristol, England; Michael Severts of Inishboffin, Ireland; and two Americans who we know only as Harky, from Texas, and Dutch, home unknown.
After being marooned and suffering the privations of hunger and cold, a decision has been made, in hope of preserving our lives, to effect our own rescue by walking out over the ice fields to the settlement of Haines, near Skagway.
I ask the discoverer of this note be so kind as to attend to the attached letters and see to their delivery as addressed. Thank you.
 
May God keep and preserve us,
Hannah Butler-Nelson
Lituya Bay, Alaska Territory
 
 
Dear Mother,
If you receive this letter, it will mean that I have perished in the wilderness of Alaska, where I have been prospecting for gold this past year with my husband, Mr. Hans Nelson, of Blue Lake, Minnesota. I write to tell you that my thoughts are of you, my dear mother, as well as Poppa and my home in England, all of which I miss very much.
We have suffered harsh ordeals here in this wilderness, but I must believe such trials are brought upon us by our own misdeeds. Oh, Mother, I regret so much the unhappiness I caused you and Father when I broke my engagement, and again when I left Lady Hamilton’s entourage to elope with Mr. Nelson. Perhaps it will give you some measure of comfort to know that he has been a loving husband, and should we survive, our fortune and happiness will certainly be secured by his hard work and intelligence.
Forgive me and pray for me, Mother.
 
Your loving daughter,
Hannah Nelson
Hannah considers the lie she has told—that Nelson is a model husband, and by implication, that she has been happy with him—and worries what punishment such a falsehood may bring. After all, breaking the disciplines of her life has certainly led to the troubles they have now. Might this falsehood bring more? She weighs the matter carefully, her pen loitering in her hand, then convinces herself that the good intention to ease a mother’s loss might offset any judgment, and folds and seals the letter.
Hannah places the note in an empty marmalade jar, then rests the jar atop the letters. There is the letter to her mother, another addressed to Mr. Uliah Witt in Sitka, and a message from Michael to his own mother in Ireland. Hans scoffed at the notion of an epistle to his family in Minnesota. “I’ll write ’em from Skagway, just to tell them I am rich!” Dutch sniffs and rubs at his nose. “I don’t reckon anyone’ll miss me.” Harky just shakes his head and says, “I don’t write.”
On the next windless morning, with the sky clearing at sunrise to a mottled blue and gray, the weight of the gold is again distributed among them. Harky carries half the gold, a load of firewood, and the iron kettle as well. The straps of their packs pull at their shoulders with the heft of ore, meat, ropes, blankets, a scrap of canvas that will serve as a rude shelter, and what extra clothing they own. Hans carries the ax, intending to use it as a mountain staff, and Michael the shotgun as he leads the small party along the hunting trail to the alpine. Underfoot, the moss crackles with frost. Crusts of snow lie in the shadows of the trees.
An
unkindness
of ravens plays in the sky, singing
klook-klook
to each other as they soar, dipping and rolling through the clouds on broad wings like dark angels, watching from the heavens as the marooned miners rise steadily higher.
Once clear of the timber, the castaways pause for breath, and on the mirrored waters of the bay far below, they see clusters of white seabirds. Slow wisps of clouds move across the sky, by turns revealing, then obscuring, the peaks. They climb higher. Everything not in direct sunlight becomes frozen.
By noon they have come to the highest point of the alpine, and the glacier lies tumbled and broken below. Everything above is snow and stone. They move slowly, carefully, their hearts in their mouths, across slanting, frost-slicked ground. In the light, the ice is bone white; when a cloud sails across the sun, it turns gray. They climb higher, looking out at an unending treatise of blue mountains, and as the uppermost limb of the sun falls below the horizon, Michael rigs a windbreak, and everyone spreads blankets on the bare granite shoulder of the massif.
“Don’t be so niggardly with that fire,” orders Hans. Harky is sparing with precious splinters and shavings as he kindles a flame to melt a kettle of snow.
Ignoring Hans for a moment, he shakes his shaggy head. “Gotta make it last. No wood up here.” His feet ache from the weight of his burden, but the load of firewood he carries must last as long as their journey, or they will be reduced to eating snow and warming their hands on their empty bellies.
“It’s only going to take three days, maybe four, to get across,” argues Hans. “We’ve got enough to warm ourselves properly.”
The others look out from their precarious perch and see a universe of bare stone that goes on for eternity. The air grows still and cold, and when Michael hurls a stone into the chasm, everyone listens to the endless, rebounding echo of its falling. Harky picks up a stick of firewood the size of a hammer handle, considers it a moment, then lays it aside. Dutch moans and mutters God’s name. The fire and their lives seem suddenly no more than brief, weightless sparks.
Heaped beneath inadequate blankets, the miners shiver and tremble in a mind-numbing search for warmth. Overhead, in a night sky that is luminous and hissing with silence, the aurora borealis dances: greens the color of sea moss, reds the exact shade of war. Stars shine like fireflies through the curtains of shifting light.
Rising before daybreak, Hans blows on the ashes of the fire and feeds shavings to the coals until a small flame begins to snap and push against the darkness. Harky must be helped to his feet and groans as he straightens his legs. Michael and Hannah scrape frost into the kettle, while Dutch digs into his pack for a coil of small-diameter rope, cuts it into lengths, then demonstrates how to take several turns around a boot and whip it to a finish at the ankle to improve the friction of slick leather soles against ice. “It’s a trick of the Prussians. They ain’t the climbers the Swiss are, but come up with a dodge or two anyway.”

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