The Ice Master (24 page)

He hated giving this responsibility to Chafe, who was the youngest of them all, and completely unskilled and untested in shouldering responsibility. Chafe was competitive and always eager to prove himself, as all of his shooting trophies and awards demonstrated. He and Clam had been training themselves to travel on the ice pack and he had already learned a great deal. But he was still green, and more of a follower than a leader, and besides, it was Mamen's job, not Chafe's. Mamen was the one the captain had entrusted with this mission and the one who should get them there, but he had no choice. And there was no way he was sending Munro.

When they got back to Shipwreck Camp, everyone was surprised to see them, and Munro quickly set out again with the provisions and Clam, now in dry clothing. Again, Williamson worked on Mamen's knee, stretching it and massaging it, making every effort to get it back into the socket, but without success. The kneecap was stubborn and loose and hurt like the devil. Finally, the second engineer managed to slip it back into place and bandaged it with surgeon's plaster to hold it there.

Disheartened and miserable, Mamen holed up in his bed and thought about his chances. He was a burden to everyone now, no matter how much they tried to help and cheer him. He could only pray that his knee would be better by the time Bartlett wanted to leave for the island. He knew Bartlett would want to go before too long, taking the entire company, and Mamen wasn't hopeful that he would be healed enough to join them. If not, he told himself, he would just have to wait there by himself and sit things out until his leg was stronger. Then he would go alone to Wrangel Island and afterward make the journey to Siberia.

He told no one of his plan. Better to wait and travel alone than to hold them back. He could survive easily by himself for a year, with enough fuel and provisions and warm clothing, and in that time he would heal. But then he wondered where he would be in a year—how far he would have drifted, a virtual prisoner of the ever-shifting ice. He could be forced hundreds of miles north and hundreds of miles west, and then he would truly be lost.

But it was better than being a burden. As he wrote in his diary, “I do not
⁹
wish to be a hindrance and trouble for the others.”

O
NCE THE DARKNESS
set in and the wind howled angrily outside their makeshift igloo, Kuraluk and Kataktovik asked Chafe to pray. Whenever Eskimos found themselves in trouble or in any type of danger, they always prayed, they told him, and sometimes it helped save them. And so they prayed.

Afterward, Chafe told them that if the ice floe were to break up beneath them in the middle of the night, the most important thing was to save themselves and the dogs. Bartlett had always told his men that they should guard the dogs with their lives. “If you lose
¹⁰
any of those dogs,” he said time and again, “you had better not come back here yourself.”

The night seemed endless, and the men awaited the day with enormous anxiety. They awoke to face a trail that was nothing but pressure ridges and open leads of water. Earlier on the second day out, Chafe and the Eskimos had run across a solid wall of ice ridges, growing to thirty feet in height. As they climbed one of them to look for a way through to the other side, a fresh wind swept in and set the ice moving. From their perch, they could see that a lead of water was opening swiftly between their two sleds.

Scrambling down, Chafe and the Eskimos rescued two of the dogs from the water just in time and moved both teams to one side of the lead. But the ice was once more alive beneath them, and new leads opened, splintering in all directions until the three of them—with the dogs and the sleds—were trapped on a floe just twenty-five yards long and ten to fifteen yards wide. Because there was no way to cross, they built an igloo out of loose snow and sled covers and waited out the night.

It was even worse the next day. Slabs of the ice cake had broken off during the night, and now it was two-thirds its original size. They were afraid to move for fear of ending up in the open water, which was everywhere now. They were helpless. The temperature was minus forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, and they spent another miserable night on the ice floe, huddled together and frightened. It was, as Chafe said, “a night of
¹¹
suffering and waiting
—
waiting for some good turn that might free us from that awful prison.” They prayed the sea would freeze over in the next twelve hours and they would be able to escape.

They had just turned in for the night when there was a deafening crash and the ice split underneath their igloo. Their precious ice floe had collided with another, the impact of which crushed theirs in half. They spent another sleepless night on the now minuscule floe, afraid to move for fear they would lose the only support they had.

When daybreak arrived, they discovered they had been carried within two miles of the island. “Herald Island is
¹²
only a huge rock four and a half miles in length, and less than a mile in width,” observed Chafe, and this was the island they could see at hand. They were sure of it now because just to the west, about forty miles away, was Wrangel, rising up out of the horizon like some grand fortress. Compared to Herald, it looked magnificent.

Chafe turned the field glasses toward land and peered through the lenses, scrutinizing every visible inch of the smaller island. The glasses were strong and allowed him to see even small objects on the earth's surface. He stood there a long time, straining his eyes, running the glasses up and down, back and forth, to this corner and that, but there was no sign of Sandy's party—no sign of life at all.

Chafe took it hard, and he also took it as an omen. “I believe the
¹³
poor fellows met with the same experience as ourselves, and not being as fortunate as we were to escape, they must have perished in the sea.”

Chafe and the Eskimos knew the dangers all too well, having just barely escaped with their own lives from the thrusting, crashing power of the ice. Sandy, Barker, Brady, and Golightly could have been crushed by raftering floes, or lost as the pack suddenly and unpredictably opened, leaving nothing below them but the dark polar sea. They may never have made it to the island. The ice was too forceful, the open water too vast. If one could make it across the fickle ice by some miracle, Herald itself was almost inaccessible, lacking any sort of shoreline, and ringed with imposing cliffs. Perhaps they had gone on to Wrangel Island, as instructed. Or perhaps they were lost. One thing was clear to Chafe now—he and Kuraluk and Kataktovik were not going to make it to either of the islands with these conditions.

Now they tested the young ice that had grown up around their floe, fearing it wasn't strong enough to hold them yet, but deciding to chance it. They couldn't stay stranded forever, so they piled all their provisions on a high ice cake and placed a flag at the center to mark it. Then they grabbed their camping gear and five days' provisions for themselves and for the dogs, loaded the sleds, and headed across the young ice. They separated, traveling twenty yards apart from each other to lighten the weight.

When they reached the main floe, they all breathed sighs of relief. They trudged for five miles before they found their trail again, and by this time it was dark. They made hot tea, fed the dogs, and slept. It was the first full night's sleep they had had in sixty hours.

D
AYS LATER,
on their way back to Shipwreck Camp, Chafe and the Eskimos found the doctor's party on the icy trail, in bad shape. Mackay and the others had been on the trail for ten days now, and their clothes were frozen as stiff as boards, their boots were worn out and threadbare, and they were clearly on the verge of exhaustion. Mackay did not look well, and he and Murray were man-hauling the sled while seaman Morris stumbled behind them. He had accidentally run the doctor's knife through his left hand while trying to open a tin of pemmican and was obviously in great pain. They said he had blood poisoning, which might be a curable malady back in civilization, but here in the Arctic it could be fatal. The chills and raging fever it brought on meant that Morris was now even more susceptible to the cold and frost. Soon his system would begin to shut down and he would go into septic shock, then die. There was nothing to be done for him.

Mackay and his colleagues were discarding gear along the trail to lighten the sled—mittens, shirts, sleeping bags, notebooks. They had lost half their provisions one night by leaving them on young ice, waking up the next morning to find them soaked with water. They had removed their pemmican from the tins and stored it in bags, and these had gotten wet, turning the pemmican to salt.

Chafe asked Mackay and the others to return to Shipwreck Camp. When that didn't work, he pleaded with them. But Mackay and Murray were as foolishly stubborn as ever. They had made their bed, they told him, and now they were going to lie in it. There was no changing their minds, but Chafe persuaded them at least to accept an ice pick and some seal meat. He offered some of his pemmican, but they refused it. He told them about the conditions surrounding Herald Island and about having spotted Wrangel Island to the west, and hearing this, they changed their course and pointed themselves in the direction of Wrangel. Chafe had no choice. He and the Eskimos dropped back and watched the three weary figures make their slow progress across the Arctic desert, discarding items here and there as they went.

As Chafe and the Eskimos continued back toward camp, they came across Beuchat, a mile or so down the trail. He stood there, utterly lost, a pitiful sight, waiting with the other half of his party's stores. Mackay and the others were coming back for him just as soon as they could, but for now, he waited, unable to walk or move.

Simply to look at Beuchat brought Chafe to tears. His arms hung lifeless at his sides, his hands swollen and bare. He wasn't wearing his gloves anymore because they didn't fit his hands, which were frozen into fists, purplish and swollen, covered in blisters and a thick layer of black skin. Beuchat could not wear his stockings or boots, as his feet were in a similar condition. Instead, his skin boots were only half on his feet, and he was standing on the legs of them, while the soles of the boots were sticking out in front of him on the snow.

He was delirious and in the throes of hypothermia, his breathing slow and irregular, his muscles stiff, his face puffy.

“It's useless for
¹⁴
you to try to go any further in the condition you're in,” Chafe told him, “so the best thing you can do is to come back with us to Shipwreck Camp.”

Beuchat wasn't listening.

“You will be welcomed there,” Chafe persisted, “and we will fix you up all right.”

He would never live to get there, Beuchat said.

Chafe persevered. He begged and pleaded, but Beuchat was obstinate in his delirium. He had given up all hope of living and expected to die at any time. Mackay, too, had said that he thought Beuchat would be dead by the end of the night.

“Go on,”
¹⁵
this once elegant Frenchman said at last, “and leave me alone.”

Chafe reluctantly decided that there was nothing he could do, and although it was the hardest thing he had ever faced, he must respect Beuchat and let him be.

Before Chafe and the Eskimos left him, Beuchat asked Chafe to give Bartlett a message for him. Please tell the captain that he had absolutely nothing against him. And tell him that it was through no ill feeling whatsoever toward him or anyone else that Beuchat chose to leave the main party.

Chafe promised to deliver the message, and then he, Kuraluk, and Kataktovik shook hands with Beuchat and left him there.

He would die that night, they were sure of it. And Morris, thanks to the blood poisoning, wouldn't last much longer.

T
HERE WAS ONLY
one razor in camp, and McKinlay borrowed it to have a much-needed shave. He washed and then put on a clean suit of underwear, and it was the height of luxury after a month of accumulating dirt and soot and coal oil. He felt quite dapper afterward in pants that shone from the seal blubber and coal oil that coated them. Every seam on the trousers had ripped open and been restitched and patched at least once, but McKinlay was saving his only other pair for the trail.

He was enjoying keeping company with Auntie and the two little girls, who were lonely without Kuraluk. He frequently made malted milk for Mugpi and amused her and her sister by making jumping rabbits and caps out of his handkerchiefs. They would laugh with delight, and it felt good to make them happy.

Now that Mackay was gone, Auntie had begun to look on McKinlay as the official camp doctor. There was little medicine in camp, since the only medical supplies saved from the ship were in a small traveling medical chest that Munro had rescued. For several days
¹⁶
now, McKinlay had been treating a deep scratch on Mugpi's chin, just below her lip. Auntie had warned her daughter repeatedly about teasing the cat, but Mugpi couldn't resist. The cat was her playmate and friend, and she loved to chase it about and pull its tail. This time, the cat had gotten its revenge.

On the night before Kuraluk left, Auntie had complained about a pain in her thigh. McKinlay told her to rub it, and she was cured. To further validate his reputation as a miracle doctor, he had given Auntie two cascara tablets for heart pain, and now she was once again feeling fine and thinking him a great “medicine man.”

“Thus easily are
¹⁷
reputations made!” McKinlay wrote in his diary later that night.

A
GREAT DEAL OF OPEN
water stopped Clam and Munro from overtaking Chafe and the Eskimos, so they cached their load and returned to camp. Bartlett was trying to give everyone some experience on the trail before they all set out for Wrangel Island. McKinlay, who was in charge of the stores, was the only exception, as he was much more useful to Bartlett in camp and was looked upon by the captain as a confidant and trusted companion.