by Emily Butler
“No need to be rude! My only aim is to help,” said the phantasm reproachfully.
Freya waved the lady away and sat up, struggling to remove the ropes, which had half-dried, half-frozen themselves to her feathers.
“Let me help,” offered Zoose from the spot Mrs. Davidson had just vacated. He reached toward her and worked on a knot until it came loose. “Freya, there’s bad news,” he said, pulling the harness over her head.
His voice sounded strange. Freya waited for him to continue. “The humans landed before we did,” he said, fumbling for the right words. “But Death got here first. He was expecting them. He took Knut.”
“Oh, no!” cried Freya. She’d always been partial to Knut, with his playful antics and willing nature. “Not after all that. No!”
“Yes,” Zoose said. “He did the lion’s share of the rowing, but the captain said his heart was weak from getting wet and frozen. Death had his eye on him from the very beginning, I bet. Snatched him right up.”
“I want to see him. Can you take me?” asked Freya.
Zoose nodded, and together they picked their way over the rocks and tide pools until they were close to the place where the men had pulled their boat out of the water. They hid themselves behind a dirty chunk of ice and watched the captain make what indentation he could in the hard ground with an ax. Nils crouched near the body of his comrade, his face as blank as the white Arctic sky. When the improvised grave was a few inches deep, the captain and Nils laid Knut within it and mournfully covered him with large flat rocks.
“Zoose,” said Freya, “I am going to say the words of a poem. Death has done his business here. I’m sure he’s gone. I’ll be careful not to invite him back.”
Zoose gave Freya a wary nod. She took a long breath and began.
“Death has been the end of you,
a real undoing. It came to break
the fragile thread that life spins out,
and what, oh, what, am I to make
of that? Goodbye, you’re gone.
But there’s another point of view
that says that Death’s a guide.
A chaperone is what it is,
an escort to the other side—
the afterlife. And you go on.
And I go on, although I’d rather not.
My world is dark—you were my sun,
the star that dies at end of day
and disappears, but isn’t done.
The dark is real. And so’s the dawn.”
After many moments of respectful silence, Freya and Zoose wended their way back to the crate.
“You made that one up, didn’t you?” said Zoose, guessing correctly. He looked apprehensive but also curious. “What’s it mean, that the sun disappears, but isn’t done?”
“I’m suggesting that the sun still exists, whether or not we can see it. Knut seems to have gone away, but maybe he’s simply in a place where we can’t see him,” explained Freya, stepping over a pile of sea-worn stones.
Zoose pondered this. “Like a place where only Death can take you? Do you really think so?”
“Goodness, I have no idea whatsoever,” Freya said. “But I’d like to believe it. After all, this island is a real place, but you and I never saw it until today. That doesn’t mean it didn’t exist.”
“But it did exist—it was on the map,” Zoose pointed out. “Plus, the humans spotted it through their telescope!”
“Indeed they did. But you and I had to take their word for it, didn’t we?” said Freya.
Now they were back where they’d come ashore. Freya found that she was famished, and she ate the entire tin of gingersnaps that Zoose had managed to fit in with their things. Then they located a well-hidden patch of sand within the crevice of a rock, and they pitched the silk tent. As for the crate itself, they dragged it back down to the water and let it float away, hoping it would wash up someplace where the humans would find it and make use of it.
White Island was nearly as barren as a meteorite, craggy and almost completely covered with ice. Nevertheless, there were life-forms on it that Freya and Zoose were quick to discover. For one thing, curious little shrimp colonized the frigid pools of water left when the tide went out. Freya used a handkerchief as a sort of net to snare them, and when left to dry for a day or two, she found, they could be made into a nutritious paste that had a buttery, briny flavor. Zoose was crazy for it.
There was also a low-lying shrub that, though hard to find and not much to look at, yielded a dark purple berry. Freya scoured the island for the berries, and whenever she accumulated a sufficient quantity, she pressed them into a juice that she stored in every possible container. With time, she hoped it would acquire the warmth-inducing robustness of Mother’s elderberry wine, which she had never quite forgotten.
As before, their chief form of entertainment when they were not gathering food was watching the two remaining humans. Captain Andrée and Nils occupied themselves mainly with collecting driftwood and piling it around their camp, speaking in anxious tones about overwintering on the island. They moved slowly, conserving their strength to better withstand the months to come. Occasionally, Nils sat in the empty boat, addressing the gold locket he still wore around his neck, using many terms of endearment and polishing it with the edge of his scarf. At these times, Captain Andrée kept his distance or went hunting.
One afternoon, the captain shot another walrus, which Nils skinned.
“I don’t mind walrus liver,” remarked Zoose, for the men wouldn’t eat walrus liver any more than bear liver. “Nice and fatty, it is! What I wouldn’t give to spread some on a piece of toast!”
“Look at you,” Freya said good-naturedly. “I do believe you’re rounder in the tummy now than when I met you!”
Zoose patted his belly happily, taking her observation for the compliment it was. “I’m doing all right. You’re the clever one with our food. I never would have thought to use a safety pin as a hook for catching fish.” It so happened that the small white fish in the shoal waters not far from their tent liked liver as much as Zoose did, and Freya used it as bait.
“Oh, I wish you could try some of the sorrel that used to grow behind my parents’ home,” reminisced Freya. “It tasted like tart green apples. We made a soup with it that would bring you to your knees.”
“I do love a good, hot soup,” agreed Zoose eagerly. “Did you ever float oyster crackers in beef broth, and then get them stuck to the roof of your mouth…?” Reconstructing the sumptuous meals of days gone by was another favorite diversion, and so transported did they become that they were no longer on the island, but in some enchanted wonderland where the streams flowed with raspberry syrup, and butterscotch candy dotted the grass like dandelions. And thus for the second time they failed to notice the approach of a polar bear.
It was probably the aroma of fresh walrus blood that drew the bear to the humans’ campsite. The walrus was a much more attractive prize than Nils, who looked and smelled nothing like what the bear thought of as food. But from the bear’s point of view, Nils was standing between him and his next meal, and that is never a good place for a person to be. The captain heard Nils’s cries for help and loaded his rifle as fast as he could, but he was too late. Polar bears are unbelievably strong, and it was over very quickly. Nils lay motionless in the snow, and the bear ambled away, having decided that the walrus was too much trouble after all.
Freya and Zoose were stricken with horror, but the worst part was watching the captain’s mind come unhinged. “I shall go mad!” he wailed as he buried Nils in a shallow, rock-covered grave. “Stark raving mad!” he howled into the wind, which muffled his words and blew them away.
“I think he has gone mad,” said Zoose a few days later as they watched the captain stare into the fog that surrounded the island like a blanket, hour after hour. He rolled up his maps and never touched
them again. He stopped eating. His clothes hung from his body in great folds, as though there were nothing inside. “He’s almost not even here anymore. He’s turning into a ghost.”
“Yes, but he’s our ghost,” said Freya. “He brought us this far, even if he never knew it. Now we can stay with him until the end.”
“Until the end?” asked Zoose. “You mean…”
Freya nodded. “I think Death will come for him very soon.”
She was right, of course. But while the captain waited for Death, the animals made sure he was never alone. During the long nights (which in the Arctic become longer and longer until the sun hardly makes an appearance at all), Zoose fed his fire with pieces of driftwood, never letting it go out. And Freya sat with him while he slept, singing every lullaby she knew and making up a few more. There was no indication that he heard her, but she felt that lullabies were the best defense against nightmares, and she was determined that at least his dreams would be peaceful.
One morning, Captain Andrée went down to the water’s edge and shaved his chin. He trimmed his mustache, which was still as blond and admirable as the day Freya first saw him. He tucked his journal, in which he had noted his observations, scientific and personal, into his front pocket and buttoned his coat. Then he sat with his back against an outcropping of rocks, laid his rifle across his lap, and closed his eyes for the last time. Freya and Zoose kept vigil until his final breath.
“You know,” said the mouse, “it wasn’t a bad way to go. Death met him in the middle, so to speak.” It was springtime. He and Freya had endured their first winter on the island with true grit and were now enjoying the later evenings. They sipped wine by their own fire, which was a direct descendant of the captain’s and which they tended as carefully as a garden.
“What are you trying to say?” asked Freya, casting some dry seaweed into the flames.
“I mean, Death didn’t overtake him, and the captain didn’t try to run away. Seems like they had an appointment with each other, and they kept it,” Zoose said.
“Good heavens, for someone who almost fainted the first time I said the word death, now you can hardly stop talking about it.” Freya laughed.
“I’ve come a long way,” said Zoose with a wink. “And I wonder how much further I’ll go. What do you think, Freya? Is this the end of the line for us?”
Freya cocked her head, tossing her yellow feathers a bit. “I suppose we could put up a flag and hope that a whaler might see us.”
“Or a whale!” responded Zoose, and they both laughed at that. From time to time they relived their encounter with the whale and the fox, always quoting Marguerite’s dubious prophecy that they would miss her, and always surprised that they did.
“Maybe we should build ourselves a hot-air balloon!” said Freya. This was far from the first time she and Zoose had mulled over ways to leave the island, and they took inordinate satisfaction in planning their future exploits. “Did you know, Zoose, that there are mountains in Nepal just waiting to be scaled?”
“You’d have to be off your nut to try something like that,” said Zoose. Now it was his turn to poke the fire with a stick and throw on a piece of driftwood, which he did with a practiced flick of his wrist. He wore a spare sock he’d found among the crew’s things, wrapping it around himself like a shawl.
“Missing your old sock, are you?” Freya was in a teasing mood.
“A little, maybe,” admitted Zoose. “How about you? Do you miss anything? Do you miss home?”
“I am home,” said Freya, and poured some more wine into Zoose’s cup.
After months and even years of living together convivially, Freya and Zoose knew each other’s brains inside and out. With an icicle, Zoose could trace the streets of Freya’s Swedish village into the snow with an easy familiarity, including the back alleys. And Freya could rattle off the names of Zoose’s nearly two hundred siblings more fluently than Zoose himself!
“But seriously, Vincenzo-Againzo?” she queried.
“Let’s be fair,” said Zoose. “Vincenzo’s the only name Ma used twice. Of course, they both went by Vinny, so we never knew who was who.”
What was even more interesting was the way in which Freya transferred her knowledge of Mrs. Davidson’s Hints to Lady Travellers to Zoose. There came a day when Zoose knew every word of it, forward and backward and sideways. He regularly amused himself by inserting nuggets of Mrs. Davidson’s wisdom into casual conversation.
“We must bear in mind the proverbial philosophy which tells us that accidents will happen,” he intoned as Freya tripped over a rocky crevasse.
“Still, one wonders why they happen so regularly to me,” replied Freya gamely.
“Damp sheets surely need no preaching against—everyone knows their deadly effects!” cautioned Zoose as they aired out Freya’s sleeping bag.
“Frozen sheets are a thousand times worse,” Freya quipped.
“Two thousand times worse, even!” agreed Zoose. “And speaking of books—”
“We weren’t speaking of books,” interrupted Freya.
“Speaking of books,” continued Zoose, “wouldn’t you agree that ‘as a rule, deep or profound reading is not suited to the requirements of travel’?”
“Deep reading!” said Freya. The books they had at their disposal amounted to exactly none. “I’d read the label off a jar of pickles at this point, with relish! Did you hear that, Zoose? I’ve indulged in a pun!”
“So you did! Well done! And while we’re on the subject of food, I insist that ‘sandwiches may be eaten, provided they are not of ham,’ ” quoted Zoose.
Freya groaned. “I’d clobber a ham sandwich right now,” she declared. “Why, I’d eat a sandwich made of cardboard and glue if I could get my flippers on one.”
“Can we at least agree,” Zoose giggled, with a ludicrous affectation, “that ‘as fellow passengers, young babies are about as trying as any’?”
Now it was Freya’s turn to laugh. “Really, Zoose? Have you ever traveled with a mouse?”
Another extraordinary development was Zoose’s eventual embrace of poetry. Freya was happy to recite every last poem she knew. And she composed original ones weekly to keep up with his growing fondness for verse. The tables were delightfully turned the day Zoose announced that he had invented a poem of his very own.
“It’s what you’d call a limerick,” said Zoose.
“Oh, is it?” asked Freya.
“Yeah, on account of the syllables,” he clarified. “I’m calling it ‘The Mouse and the Greeble.’ ”
Freya was bemused. “Greeble? What’s a greeble?”
“Now, look, do you want to hear it or not?” Zoose was nervous, as one often is when sharing a new poem.
“Sorry,” Freya said. “Carry on.”
“Right. It goes like this,” said Zoose.
There once was a mouse and a greeble,
One was good, and the other pure eeble.
Then a hot-air balloon
Bunged them both to the moon,
Where they jigged for the rest of their meeble.
Freya rolled the words around in her head. She repeated the lines silently, approaching possible interpretations from all the angles. She didn’t wish to quash Zoose’s zeal. It was, after all, his first attempt. Nevertheless, something about the poem made her feel defensive.
“Everyone enjoys a nice limerick, now and again,” she allowed. “And your poem scans very well, despite a few words that I’m fairly certain don’t exist, you understand, in an actual language….”
“Artistic liberty,” explained Zoose.
“Yes, of course,” Freya conceded. “But…but…was it about us? Because it seems that in some nonliteral sense you’ve called me both a ‘greeble’ and ‘pure eeble.’ Which is, I have to say, rather hard to know how to take.”
Zoose sig
hed heavily. “Oh, Freya. I had the worst time trying to rhyme ‘penguin’ with ‘wonderfully beautiful.’ Went at it every which way, but no dice. Had to invent a few words to get the job done. You can do that in a poem, can’t you? Make words up?”
Freya looked at the ground, clearing a small area with her boot as if she had lost something and was trying very hard to find it in the ice and gravel. She adjusted her scarf and smoothed a few of her yellow feathers.
“Make words up?” she repeated at last. “Yes, you can do that in a poem. You can make up all the words you like, Zoose. I’d say you have a gift for it.”
To my readers who are enthralled by Arctic exploration, you will probably recognize the names of the brave men who tried to fly a hydrogen balloon to the North Pole in 1897. Salomon Andrée, Nils Strindberg, and Knut Fraenkel are still regarded as heroes in Sweden, and the country mourned when they failed to return from their great adventure. The country mourned again when, thirty-three years later, their remains were discovered on White Island by a Norwegian sealing expedition, and they were brought home at last.
Salomon Andrée was an engineer who was fascinated by aerial navigation—that is to say, travel by hot-air balloon. His interest was so keen that he determined never to marry, in case his wife ever asked him to stop flying. It’s fair to say that he was not a terribly experienced navigator. His balloon trips amounted to a grand total of nine before he attempted a trip to the North Pole. But he was smart and inventive and very determined.
Thanks to Nils Strindberg, the second member of the expedition, we have ninety-three photographs of the doomed voyage. Nils, a physics professor, was very much in love with his fiancée, Anna Charlier, whose picture he carried in a locket. For Anna’s part, her last wish (granted, by the way!) was that after her death in England many years later, her heart be removed from her body and buried in Stockholm next to his grave.
