Rook: Snowman (11 page)

“Mr Rook? Henry Hubbard. Glad you managed to find us.” He gave Jim a strong, dry handshake.

“Jack home yet?” asked Jim.

“He shouldn’t be long. He’s meeting some of his friends from college. I believe they’re forming some sort of support group. They’re getting themselves together to talk out their emotions about what happened to young Ray Krueger today, and Jack seemed to be very keen to be part of it. I guess it’s a good way of helping them to deal with it. You know. Young kids, a trauma like that. They need to express what they feel.”

“Did you see the news?”

“Yes. But, to tell you the truth, I almost wish that I hadn’t. I’ve witnessed enough tragedy in my time, caused by the cold. I don’t need reminding what frostbite can do.”

Henry Hubbard led Jim through to a plain, sparsely furnished living-room. It had a distinctly rented look about it. An olive-green carpet, cheap laminated furniture. A large oil painting of an orange sun that looked like an advertisement for Minute Maid orange juice. In one corner, however, stood a huge new widescreen Sony television and stacks of videotapes, all neatly labeled; and above it was a bookshelf crowded with books on meteorology and geography and Arctic and Antarctic exploration.

“You’ll have to excuse the confusion,” said Henry Hubbard. “I never seem to get the chance to—”

“Hey, don’t worry about it. My place is just the same. That’s the trouble with living alone. That cup of coffee you left on the table in the morning, it’s still there when
you come home at night. I haven’t trained my cat to wash dishes yet.”

“Get you a drink?”

“Anything. Club soda, Coke, whatever you’ve got.”

“Beer? Unless you’re on duty or something.”

“Beer’s fine. I don’t have any problem with beer.”

Henry Hubbard brought two cans of Pabst and they sat on the leatherette couch together.

“West Grove must be in some kind of turmoil today, after what happened.”

“Turmoil?” said Jim. “Turmoil’s an understatement. You can’t blame people for panicking. But I’m determined to find out how that railing got so cold. I’m not letting Ray sacrifice his hands and never know why.”

Henry Hubbard nodded, but he kept his eyes lowered, and didn’t look up at Jim once.

Jim said, “Jack told you about the washroom freezing up?”

“That’s right. You still haven’t found out how that happened?”

“No, but I’m working on the assumption that the washroom incident and the railing incident are directly connected.”

“I wish you luck. But don’t be surprised if you never find out how they happened. The cold can be like that. Full of secrets, you know? The cold … well, let me tell you, the cold is a different country.”

They sat and drank in silence for a while. Then Henry Hubbard said, “Jack’s doing okay? He seems to like his English class.”

“Jack? Jack’s doing fine, from what I’ve seen of him so far. He seems to be intelligent, perceptive, articulate. I don’t think he’s going to have to stay for very long in Special Class II. He just needs to find his place in the educational system,
that’s all. Once he’s up to speed, I don’t see any problems whatsoever.”

“He’s happy? He’s not disturbed?”

“Why should he be disturbed?”

“I don’t know, losing his mother. Moving around so much.”

“He seems okay to me.”

“That’s good,” said Henry Hubbard, nodding. Then, “What happened today … this frostbite thing. I don’t really see how I can help you.”

“I wanted to pick your brains is all.”

“Listen … just because I went to Alaska, just because two of my friends got frozen to death, that doesn’t mean I know anything and everything about cold weather conditions. As a matter of fact, my friends and I were exposed to minus seventy-one degrees … and when you consider that the lowest temperature ever recorded in the US was minus eighty – that was at Prospect Creek, Alaska, in 1971 – well, what we went through, that was pretty close to the limit. It was a miracle I got out of there alive.”

“Jack seems to think that you’ve got something on your mind. Something to do with what happened up there.”

“You said he wasn’t disturbed.”

“There’s a difference between being disturbed and being bewildered.”

“Bewildered? What about?”

“He says he’s tried to talk to you about your last expedition but you always close up. He says you spend hours staring at the video recordings, looking for something, and he doesn’t know what. He says you’ve hung up all of these Inuit fetishes, around the house; and you make him wear a whalebone talisman around his neck. From where I’m standing, I’d say that it bewilders him. He’s looking for answers.”

Henry Hubbard shrugged and said, “It was a tough deal, that last expedition. Very, very tough.”

“So why don’t you share it with him? He seems to have the feeling that he’s being excluded.”

“Excluded? That expedition … everybody in the whole world was excluded, except us. You can’t share an experience like that. You can’t even talk about an experience like that. I’m only making this TV program because I’m contracted to do it and I need the money. My friends are dead. If I had any choice in the matter, I’d never think about it again.”

“So what are you looking for, when you stare at those videos?”

“White, that’s what I see. White, white, white. I have nightmares about it. What am I supposed to say to Jack? He looks up to me, like I’m some kind of role model. But he wasn’t there. He didn’t see what I saw. He doesn’t understand.”

“He doesn’t understand what?”

“He doesn’t understand what it’s like when you’re right in the middle of that total white-out and you’re sure that you’re going to die.”

“But you didn’t die.”

Henry Hubbard gave Jim a strange, defensive look, as if he had been caught taking money out of somebody’s wallet. “I didn’t, no. I survived. But I was closer to dying than I ever want to be again. If you want to know the truth, Mr Rook, that expedition took everything out of me. My sense of adventure, my courage, everything. It even took my pride.”

Jim sat back and said nothing for a while. Henry Hubbard was clearly agitated. He kept rubbing his hand backwards and forwards across his mouth, as if he were trying to wipe away the taste of a foul-tasting kiss.

“So you feel guilty?” asked Jim.

“Of course I feel guilty. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t come back … just died on the glacier like my friends did. What do they call it? Survivor syndrome. You don’t know how many times I wish I were dead. But it didn’t work out that way.”

Jim said, “Why don’t you tell Jack about it? I mean, not glossed over, not like a TV documentary, but the way it really happened.”

“I can’t. He wouldn’t know what I was talking about.”

“Why don’t you give him a chance?”

Henry Hubbard shook his head. “He doesn’t want to hear how his old man lost his nerve; and his old man doesn’t want to tell him, either.”

“Then why don’t you try telling me?”

Henry Hubbard drank some more beer. Then he stood up, and walked around the couch. “Did you ever hear of Dead Man’s Mansion?”

“Unh-hunh. Can’t say that I did.”

“It’s a story that dates back to 1913 or thereabouts. There’s supposed to be a house in northern Alaska, up in the mountains near the Yukon border, much grander than any of the cabins you usually find in those parts. They say it was built by one of the survivors of the
Titanic
disaster, nobody knows why. Guy called Edward Grace. He was supposed to have lived there all alone for years.

“I still don’t know how much of the story is true. But Edward Grace was supposed to have lived there until he didn’t have the strength to cut himself wood any longer, and he froze to death. They say that he’s still sitting at his living-room table, mummified, along with his cat.”

“His
cat
?”

“I always thought it was one of those tall tales that people tell you in Alaska. But one night in Fairbanks I got talking
to an old man in the hotel bar. He was out in the wilderness once, so he told me, making seismic tests for oil, and he and his companions had gotten lost in the middle of a blizzard. He swore that – just for a moment – he had actually seen Dead Man’s Mansion, although the weather had closed in so bad that he hadn’t been able to get close to it. I thought he was nothing but a rambling old drunk, but when I talked to the barman, he told me that he used to be a world-famous petro-geologist. I looked him up on the Internet, and the barman was right. Senior exploration geologist for Amoco. So that’s when I started to take the story of Dead Man’s Mansion a little more seriously.

“I persuaded NBC to finance most of the trip, and the rest of the sponsorship came from the University of Alaska in Anchorage. I chose two volunteers to go with me – Randy Brett and Charles Tuchman. Randy was the best historian in the north-west, and Charles was a highly-qualified cartographer, and both of them were experienced climbers and Arctic explorers, too.

“We flew up as far as Old Crow, on the Yukon side of the border, and then we trekked our way westward, using two 1920s maps that Charles had found in an antique bookshop in Seattle. We also had a whole notebook full of hearsay stories about Dead Man’s Mansion – where it was located, how it had been constructed, all of the legends and myths that surrounded it. One old cannery worker said that his father had not only found Dead Man’s Mansion, but been inside it, too, and seen Mr Grace sitting at his drawing-room table. Apparently Mr Grace had a deck of cards laid out in front of him, from the HMS
Titanic
. This old cannery worker’s father had even taken one of the cards to prove it – or so he said. He said that he’d lost it, when he moved down south.

Henry Hubbard switched on his television. “We took two
snowmobiles and we made pretty rapid progress. We were convinced that we knew approximately where Dead Man’s Mansion had been built, and that if we made a systematic search it wouldn’t take us more than a week to find it. But then the snow started, and the winds got up, and by day three we were struggling to make more than six or seven miles a day.”

Jim turned around on the couch and looked at the TV screen. At first it looked as if there was thick white interference, but then he realized that what he was looking at was snow.

Henry Hubbard said, “It was April, and sure, you can still get plenty of snow in April, up in those latitudes, and up at those elevations. But this was worse than anything I’ve ever seen. The snowmobiles seized up, so we had to walk, and even though we had satellite direction-finding equipment and transponders and you name it, we were lost and we were blind and we seriously began to think that we were in a life-threatening situation.”

He pointed to a dark shadowy shape on the right of the screen. “That’s me … that’s Randy, walking next to me – you can hardly see him, can you? And Charles was taking the pictures.”

All that Jim could see was whirling white flakes and occasional dark flickers which might have been anything.

“Jack says you stare at the screen, real close. What are you actually looking for?”

Even now, Henry Hubbard had his eyes fixed, unblinking, on the television. “I’m looking for the fourth man,” he said.

“The fourth man? What fourth man?”

“Huh! It sounds as if I’m losing my marbles, doesn’t it? But after two days of crossing the mountains, we all began to think that we were four in our party, not three. We were
conscious that somebody was walking with us, and after a while the feeling grew so strong that we talked about him as if he were really there.”

He paused and said, “He always walked on our left.”

“Did you see him?”

Henry Hubbard didn’t answer, but continued to stare at the mesmerizing snowflakes. “It was a joke at first. We called him George. If anything went wrong, we could always blame George. But by the end of the fourth day it was more than a joke. We even saved rations for him.

“I didn’t know about this until I got back to Anchorage, but other explorers have experienced the ‘extra man’ phenomenon. It goes right back to Marco Polo when he rode across the Lop Nor desert on his way to China. At night he heard spirits talking who appeared to be his companions.”

He picked up a loose-leaf folder from the top of the television. “And look at this: when Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship
Endurance
was crushed in Antarctic ice in 1916, he and two others left the crew on Elephant Island and traveled eight hundred miles in a small boat to South Georgia. They landed on the deserted side of the island and climbed ranges that had never been climbed before to get help from a whaling station.

“Here, this is what Shackleton wrote: ‘I know that during that long march of thirty-six hours it often seemed to me that we were four, not three. And Worseley and Crean had the same idea.’ Seven years after the event, Worseley wrote that ‘even now I find myself counting our party – Shackleton, Crean and I and – who was the other? Of course there were only three, but it is strange that in mentally reviewing the crossing we should always think of a fourth, and then correct ourselves.’

“And listen to this: ‘Steve Martin and David Mitchell and another Antarctic veteran, Keith Burgess, came across
the fourth man when they were crossing Greenland. They called him Fletch. When they came to record their journey, they put it down as a four-man crossing, and F. Letch was the fourth member.’

“The extra man has appeared again and again – whenever it’s cold, whenever people are lost. Frank Smythe climbed up Everest in 1933 and always felt that he had a companion, somebody to catch his rope and save him if he slipped. He kept food for his companion, too. And here – in February 1957, a fellwalker called Dennis Goy was caught in a blizzard in Britain’s Lake District. He came across some recent footprints in the snow and followed them. But the footprints stopped, right in the middle of a vast expanse of untouched snow.”

“Don’t you think that you can put it down to physical and mental stress, in very remote locations?”

“Probably.”

“You’re not sure, though, are you? You’re not sure at all?”

“Well, he seemed so damned real at the time. George, or Fletch, or whatever you care to call him. When I came back, I talked to my father-in-law about it. He’s a full-blooded Inuit, and he lives in Inuvik now – he’s an archivist for Inuit culture. He said that he’s plenty of stories about the ‘extra man’. He has friends who were saved from the wilderness, just like me; and all of them talk about somebody who came to guide them out of the snow. The Inuit won’t talk about him much. But my father-in-law said that they call him an Inuit name meaning ‘snowman’.”