Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  Amundsen had seen such a form once before, in the Admiralty in London, on his return from the North West Passage expedition. Meares had shown it to him when he brought in the things he’d recovered from King William Island.

  The form that Meares showed him was a famous Arctic relic – the only note ever found from the Franklin Expedition. Dated 1848, it was recovered years later by Leopold McClintock, who had sailed his little search vessel through the Bellot Strait. The note said that Erebus and Terror were abandoned in the ice and that the survivors were trekking south. It had been left in a cairn at Point Victory, on King William Island. Signed: Captain F.R.M. Crozier.

  And now Amundsen saw Crozier’s signature again. No ship’s name, no date, just the Irishman’s name at the top of the page, faded and blurred, written in what looked like charcoal.

  F.R.M. Crozier, Captain, RN, requested the finder to forward this message to the Admiralty, London, with a note of the time and the place at which it was found.

  No date had been written on the form itself. But there was a position, a map reference. He squinted at it, moving his lips. Sixty-eight degrees, seventeen minutes, thirty seconds north; a hundred and thirty-five degrees, twenty-two minutes, ten seconds west . . .

  But that was nowhere near here. That was somewhere in northern Canada, not far south of Hershel Island, where the Gjoa had wintered after sailing the North West Passage. Somewhere in the Richardson Mountains, Amundsen would have guessed.

  What did it mean? What message was to be forwarded?

  He could, he noticed, no longer feel his hands very well. It was difficult to tell, in the yellow light from the lamp, but his fingertips looked an odd shade of blue. He turned up the kerosene lamp to pump out more heat. Then he turned the page over so he could look at the other side, the side that was normally blank. There were symbols written on it: not letters or words, just clumps of numbers, of code, running a third of the way down the page. Amundsen was sure that Crozier had written them too.

  Crozier was here, he thought. Here, thousands of miles from King William Island, on the opposite side of the Arctic Ocean.

  But then again, how did he know that Crozier had himself left this cylinder at the Cape? Someone else might have done it. The answer was surely in the code on the back of the form, perhaps in the map reference. But it made no sense to him.

  I shouldn’t have opened the tube. It wasn’t for me. I ought to reseal it and pass it to Room 38, its rightful recipients. Presumably they can decode it. His head was throbbing. It hurt him to think.

  He rolled up the page and tried to put it back inside the tube. But his fingers weren’t working for him. They no longer felt cold, but when he looked at them he saw they were blue to the knuckles.

  It’s just the light, he told himself.

  Then he heard the noise again, a footstep, crunching in loose snow. Just the one, and then only his own breathing and the hiss of the lamp.

  He wasn’t afraid this time. It was only a pity that he had such a headache that it made it hard to think. He lifted himself off the stool just an inch, so he could shift the crate from under him without scraping the duckboards. Now he was standing. His revolver was snug in his hand.

  The wind gusted outside. Amundsen listened to the sound of dead snowflakes, no longer unique, worn by their long drift into one common dust, and he heard the ghost that was moving among them. It stood by the door, just beyond the thin plywood. Would it wait for him there, or would he see the door shift then slowly swing open?

  ‘Olonkin,’ he said loudly, because he thought it was best to err on the safe side. He waited three seconds, then fired through the door.

  The sound of the shot, trapped in the narrow snow-hut, hammered his eardrums, flashed pain in his eyes. The cordite smoke was sickening. Yet he felt himself swept up on a red surge of triumph. I’ve got you, you bastard. I’ve got you, I bet. He fired another shot through the door, lower this time, then charged it with his shoulder.

  The whole door gave before him, ripping out the wooden pegs that held its frame to the snow-walls. Amundsen sprawled across it. He fired again, blindly, as he staggered to his feet.

  Light blazed from the lamp in the observatory. He wheeled about, waving his revolver. His heart was beating crazily, as if he had sprinted through deep snow. Stars danced in his eyes but he couldn’t see the sky.

  He had to find his enemy, the one who was trying to steal the tube. Whoever, whatever, it was, they hadn’t come from the ship, or at least not directly: he could make out only one trail in that direction, the tracks of his own skis. He staggered around the snow-house, feeling himself sink to the knees with each step. But when he looked down he saw his stockinged feet gliding over frost-hardened snow. When had he taken his boots off? The pistol had lost all the heat from the firing. Cold metal burned his bare hand.

  The land loomed above him, the raised beach at the back of the strand. The Arctic night seemed very dark. But he was sure he could see a faint track on the snow, the prints of feet, without skis or snowshoes, moving along the beach to the north. He turned and followed them as best he could, but his legs were very heavy and he found it hard to breathe. Something tripped him and he fell on his face in the snow.

  The snow moulded itself to his cheek like a pillow. He closed his eyes to rest a minute, to recover his breath and to slow his heart, or at least to find a rhythm for it. He sighed deeply, his lungs craving air and his mouth filled with powdery ice.

  No matter how tired you are, you don’t fall asleep in the snow.

  He spat out the snow and rose on his knees, still gasping for air. His pistol hung from its lanyard around his neck. His bare fingers found the strength to grasp it.

  He saw now what had tripped him. He was kneeling in a ring of stones – round, head-sized beach rocks worn smooth by summer tides, their upper halves protruding from the snow. It was a tent-ring, a circle of heavy stones used by natives to hold down their skin shelters. Such rings were to be found on all the coasts of the American Arctic, on Greenland, even on those islands far to the north where no natives had lived for centuries. Yet surely no Eskimo had ever crossed to central Siberia. And this tent-ring was smaller than the Eskimo rings, less than two metres across, like the circles he’d found once on King William Island, on the ice-bound coast near the magnetic north where his Eskimo guides were too frightened to go.

  His own snow angel, imprinted by his fall, was neatly contained in this circle of stones. How long had the ring been here? How were its stones showing over the snow?

  They must have built it since that last storm.

  A pale, thin figure emerged from the mist which swirled round the tent circle. The pistol was fiendishly heavy and he had to use both hands to raise it. He aimed and tried to fire, but the hammer wouldn’t draw back for him. He couldn’t work out if it was the mechanism that had frozen or his fingers or both.

  Then he saw who it was and let the gun fall from his hands. He should have known her before, when he’d glimpsed her in the shadows at the end of the observatory.

  It was Marie, his landlady from Antwerp. He remembered her pale body, no longer quite young, grinding against him, her youthful lodger, in his cold little bedroom under the stairs. He remembered the final scene of renunciation, then later, the burning smell from the zinc buckets, the blue veins on her thigh.

  She smiled at him sadly, holding her arms out, her skin mottled blue. She must be very cold, he thought. Dressed only in her chemise like that last time I saw her, lying on her kitchen floor.

  He understood, anew, again, as he had so many times before, why the joy he felt at seeing her was always troubled, though at first he could never think why: he would surely wake up and she would be dead again, before he could explain to her, before he found a way to make it right. But this time she didn’t move away or fade out of reach. She stepped into the circle, lifting her bare legs clear of the stone
s, still smiling sadly, and he watched the muscles move in her thigh, and when she reached out to him he pulled her down onto the snow.

  Amundsen lay on the bunk in his cabin moving in and out of morphine dreams. His hands and feet were bandaged. Kiss’s portrait stared down at him from the cabin wall, from the silk furnishings she’d arranged for him herself. It was somehow for her, he recalled, that he had set up this voyage. It had been something to do with proving himself – though when he thought back, surely he had proven himself already, many times over?

  He had wanted Kiss to make her home with him, abandon her family. For there to be warmth there must also be desolation. But looking at her portrait he was no longer sure that he wanted her. He needed to prove himself again.

  ‘Carbon monoxide,’ said Wisting, standing by his bunk. ‘From your pressure lamp. There was a problem with the burner. And of course the observatory has to be airtight so there was no place for the gas to go. You’ve been slowly poisoning yourself all winter, every time you went in there. The medical books say that the effect builds over time. It could be months before you’re completely recovered. Tell me: did you have any strange sensations or experiences before you broke down?’

  Had there really been a tent circle? Clearly there had not. He could ask Olonkin, who was the first to come in search of him, alerted by the shots. But he couldn’t bring himself to ask him, even though he was sure he knew the answer. There was a more urgent matter between them. After Wisting had gone he called in Olonkin.

  ‘The metal tube. I left it in the observatory. Did you find it there?’

  Olonkin nodded. He put down the breakfast tray by Amundsen’s bunk. There was condensed milk and buttered bread. It was all that his stomach could manage.

  ‘What did you find?’

  ‘The tube. It was opened. There was an old paper beside it.’

  Amundsen levered himself up on his elbow. The effort made him gasp. He glared at the kid by his bed.

  ‘Did you look at the paper?’

  ‘Yes. I couldn’t read it.’

  Amundsen fell back on his pillow. ‘Who has the tube now? Wisting or Hansen or Sverdrup?’

  ‘They don’t know about it.’ Olonkin reached into his

  jacket and fetched out the tube. He handed it to Amundsen. He snatched it away and brought it close to his eyes, then looked at Olonkin.

  ‘It’s sealed.’

  ‘I soldered it shut with the paper inside it.’

  ‘Who the hell told you to do that?’

  ‘You did. When I found you in the snow. After I stopped you from shooting yourself.’

  He wasn’t much use for the rest of that spring. Harald Sverdrup took over the magnetic work and Amundsen would walk the deck, slowly regaining his lungs and his legs, watching parties of hunters and specimen collectors set out across the ice.

  In June, when the sun never set, brown patches appeared in the snow on the mainland. Flocks of brent geese arrived from the south. Later, the rivers and streams broke free of the winter, hurling huge blocks of ice far up their banks with the boom of artillery. The sea ice too was shifting, with tide cracks appearing near Maud’s winter harbour. In a month, maybe two, she might escape from this place and push on to the east. Amundsen allowed his plans to stir again.

  The tube would have to be sent back to Room 38 for decoding. He couldn’t understand its message and he didn’t want to be responsible for it, not here, on this coast where ships vanished. More than that, he didn’t want to look inside it again, even though he couldn’t be sure of its contents: he was sure he had seen Crozier’s name, and some ciphers, and a map reference for some place in Canada, but these told him nothing. The riddles he’d been set on King William Island – on another ice-bound boat in another winter harbour fifteen years before – had been left unanswered, had in fact only multiplied. And he wasn’t yet ready to see this as a blessing.

  The transmitter was broken so he was entitled to send some mail back to Norway. He would dispatch a couple of his men with a sledge to the Russian weather station on Dickson Island, five hundred miles to the west. From there they could make their way back to Norway by boat. Paul Knutsen would lead them: he’d been along that coast before with Otto Sverdrup’s expedition. Peter Tessem would also go: all winter long Tessem had whinged about headaches, as if he were the only one who suffered in the dark. The Maud would be well rid of him; she had other such winters ahead. To bulk out the mailbag, and to give extra justification to his decision to send off two precious crewmen, he would include the scientific records of the expedition up to now. In amongst them would be tucked a separate package for Kiss containing the message tube and instructions for forwarding it. And he would also send back the chronometer that Meares had lent to him, the one he himself had brought back from King ­William Island. He felt it would no longer work for him: his luck had finally changed. He wouldn’t be fit for sledging this year. The expedition had already failed.

  In September the ice broke out to sea. Amundsen climbed into the crow’s nest, with Olonkin pushing him up from beneath, and watched the cracks reach ever closer to the ship. Tessem and Knutsen helped the rest of the crew to dismantle the observatory, re-stow the stores that had wintered on the ice and prepare the ship for sailing.

  On the evening of 12 September, with the nearest lead of open water still a mile from the Maud, Amundsen touched off the fifty sticks of dynamite that his crew had drilled into the ice. Fifty charges went off at once, fifty geysers of crystal and smoke. The tide tore the floe along its line of smoking perforations, clearing the way to escape. Maud, making half-revolutions on her semi-diesel engine, became a living ship again. The men on deck cheered and waved their caps. There were more cheers from the shore, across the soupy bay ice. Turning in the crow’s nest, Amundsen saw Tessem and Knutsen wave from the beach then turn and disappear up the mouth of a gully, marching back towards their camp.

  A path had opened to the east, a long lead shining in the moonlight. Amundsen turned to look north towards the loom of Cape Chelyuskin. It was a rare Arctic night, clear, with no hint of haze or fog, and from the crow’s nest he could see a band of white cloud sitting on the horizon, stark in the moonlight. But it was more than cloud, he was sure of it this time. Lifting his binoculars, he steadied his elbows on the rim of the crow’s nest. He was right: there was land beyond the clouds, black mountains streaked with eternal snow. He adjusted the focus and saw that this unknown island, or continent, floated just over the horizon, supported on a silver haze. It was a mirage, he knew that well. But a mirage might once have had substance, might be the echo of some remote event or object – refracted, reflected, enlarged or inverted, a story distorted by ice and by light. The old sailors had a name for this phantom: they called it ‘Cape Flyaway’.

  He looked down to the deck. Helmer Hansen was in the forepeak behind the canvas weather shield, spotting for sunken growlers that his skipper might have missed. Tønnesson and Rønne bustled about, securing bits of running gear, while Wisting stood at the helm. They can’t see my mirage from the deck, thought Amundsen. It’s beyond the curve of their world down there. Every now and then Wisting glanced from Hansen to Amundsen, waiting for instructions to con Maud through the ice. But the open crack grew wider with the tide, a quicksilver line pointing due east. The way north was closed. Amundsen couldn’t change course to steer for Cape Flyaway.

  He knew now that the ice would beat him back from his attempt to cross the polar basin. The boat would be herded east along the coast until it finally reached Alaska, where he would quietly abandon her and her crew. He was running out of time: he needed something faster and blunter than boats and dogs – aeroplanes, perhaps, or even dirigibles. Then he could feel again the weightlessness of starting life from scratch.

  He thought of the evening when the Fram had dropped anchor off Funchal, Madeira. That was nine years before, the last time in his life when he’d been u
nknown and free. He had slipped quietly ashore in his seagoing clothes, bringing with him the texts for a series of telegrams informing the world that the Fram would not be sailing to the Arctic as he had told his sponsors, including the King himself. Instead, he would be stealing a march on the British in the race to the South Pole.

  He remembered how he had stopped in the door of the telegraph office, annihilated by choice. I haven’t sent anything yet: I can still go north to honour or south to glory. I’m both those men at once. I cancel myself out. It was a warm autumn evening in Madeira, the sun gleaming on the harbour and the breeze soft in the trees. He could stay here for ever, dissolved in this air. But some tiny flaw in the fabric of the universe, some original sin in space and time, determined that he was doomed to exist, to be one thing or another. So he sent his telegrams to Scott, to Nansen, to his sponsors, to the King of Norway. Afterwards he walked up the hill to the Bela Vista Hotel and checked in as he was, with only the clothes that he stood in. Then – feeling unaccountably tired and low – he climbed the stairs that would take him to his room. Seated in cane chairs in the lobby, an Englishman and his teenage son silently watched him go past.

  He shivered at the thought of them. Why had they reappeared to him here, nine years later, in another life? He turned his binoculars to the north, searching for any leads in that direction. But the sea ice held firm. It shepherded them eastwards for the rest of September, then closed in for another year. After only twelve days of freedom the Maud was again forced into winter quarters, six hundred miles short of the Bering Strait. Tessem and Knutsen were never seen alive again.

  Inuvik, North West Territories

  Fay had known that Roald Amundsen was Norwegian, and that he’d beaten Captain Scott in the race to the South Pole. That was it. She hadn’t known, until just now, when she’d read it online, that Amundsen had led the first expedition to reach the North Pole too.