Tristan Jones

by Ice! [V2. 0]

  To work my mind, when body's work's expired.

  For then my thoughts,from far where I abide,

  Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,

  And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,

  Looking on darkness which the blind do see.

  Save that my soul's imaginary sight

  Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,

  Which like a jewel hung in ghastly night,

  Makes black night beauteous, and her old face new.

  Lo, thus by day my limbs, by night my mind, no quietfind.

  Shakespeare, Sonnet 2.

  18

  Alone on the Ice

  "Jesus Christ Almighty!" I said under my breath to Nelson, who was also on deck to perform his ablutions over the side. But he had gone stock rigid, his ears quivering, his eye glaring at the monster advancing towards us. Then, without thinking, I was down the companionway ladder, grabbing Nelson as I went.

  For a second or two, slithering down the ladder, my mind was in a dither. Instinctively grabbing my harpoon, an eight-foot-long ash shaft with a fine, greased steel tip sharpened to a needlepoint, from its stowage on the deck head of the cabin, I turned to mount the ladder. Then my mind started to work. Fast.

  "Move!" I shouted to Nelson. "Move, you silly sod. Make the bastard think you're a fox! Move!" Nelson jerked out of his stupor and jumped, then ran as fast as his three legs would carry him up the side-deck, to the fore deck, where he stood his ground, snarling.

  By now the bear was hauling himself upright, with his great paws clawing at the guardrails. As his head, with its fierce fangs and glittering, menacing eyes, appeared over the gunwale, I jabbed at him with the harpoon from where I was standing in the companionway. My idea was to fight him off from there, where the lower part of my body was protected and I could duck if he made a swipe at me.

  The bear jerked his head and body back in surprise, his great massive claws tearing away the upper wire of the guardrail, bending the one-inch-thick galvanized iron stanchions as if they were putty. Then I realized that this huge creature could, if he wished, literally tear the boat apart with his strength. At the same time Nelson made a gallant charge towards him aft along the side-deck, yapping, snarling, and barking. All hell broke loose. The bear recovered from his shock and rebounded back, his whole body thumping against the hull, which slid sideways, the keel jarring against the side of the ramp. I reacted fast and jabbed at his right paw, which was tearing at the canvas deck cover, the huge nails ripping into the covering clear through to the wood underneath. The harpoon struck home. It went through the bear's forefoot and stuck in the wood underneath. The bear let out a roar loud enough to shake the boat to pieces. Then he ripped his paw, harpoon and all, out of the deck and dropped down onto the ice. The harpoon went flying, clattering over the floe. I could feel his breath, hot and oily, like a cloud of steam from a locomotive. For a second or two Nelson and I stood stock-still, petrified with shock and alarm. The bear crawled on all fours around the side of the boat, bumping the hull with his shoulder. Then I remembered the Very rocket gun.

  This is a device, shaped like a pistol, with a barrel eight inches long and an inch and a half bore, into which flare rockets are loaded. Fired by mariners in distress, the rocket will rise into the sky up to four hundred feet and slowly descend, its phosphorous flakes burning all the way back down to the sea's surface. When I had sighted the first bear, off Shannon Island, I had loaded the Very pistol in readiness for just such an attack as this. Now I slithered below, fumbled at the fireworks box, and grabbed the pistol, my hands shaking badly.

  The bear had climbed up above the ramp on the other side of the boat and was pawing at the gunwale with one forefoot, while swiping at Nelson, who was trying to lure him forward away from me. I climbed the ladder and turned to face the bear. Holding the Very pistol in one frozen hand, I slammed down as hard as I could on the doghouse roof with the other, fist clenched.

  The bear turned his jaws towards me, showing his great fangs, his hungry, wicked eyes crackling with anger. I fired, sending the rocket straight into his throat, a great stream of red light particles. With a grunt, the bear threw himself backwards onto the ice floe, rolling in agony, for the phosphorus of the flare was burning fiercely in his gorge. Then, jumping up and down with tremendous force, he beat the ice with his paws, all the while weaving his upper body from side to side, while Nelson slithered onto the ice and snapped at his hindquarters. After a few more mighty thuds on the top of the ice floe, which actually shook the boat, the bear took off fast across the ice and dove into the water on the other side of the floe. This did not save him, however, because phosphorus burns underwater. There was a mighty splash in the distance and he disappeared.

  Shivering with fright and excitement, I went below, still holding the pistol. Once below I found that my fingers were stuck to the rocket gun. Frostbite! I grabbed a flannel cloth in the galley, threw it into the still simmering stew, then fished it out again with a fork and slapped it, steaming, over my hand. I didn't feel a thing for about thirty seconds, until the circulation was restored, and then the hot stew started to scald the hand, and I knew it was safe. I checked my face, which had been exposed just below the eyes, above the icy scarf. There were two fish-belly white spots, one on each cheek. I repeated the burgoo-stew treatment, in my hurry splashing the hot, gooey liquid onto my eyelids, and in a few seconds the cure was made. The pain almost sent me through the roof.

  By this time Nelson was back in the cabin, still shaking with fight-lust.

  I threw him a bone and some hardtack, then, after closing the companionway door and hatch cover to try to warm the boat up again, I collapsed on the berth. "Jesus!" I thought, "I hope there's no more of those around!"

  Wearily I stood at the galley and doled out some stew, but I couldn't eat much. I felt sick with concern and relieved at the same time.

  Sleep, when it came, was fitful and full of fantasy. But before I dropped off, I made two resolutions. One was that I would not, while on the ice, sleep more than two hours at a stretch, and then would always leave Nelson on guard in a box in the cockpit to protect him from the wind. The other was that before sleeping I would always, whenever possible, search the floe, out to a perimeter of a thousand yards, for signs of bear.

  The Danes had told me that bears generally haunt broken floes and areas where there are many seals, and that, usually, where there is a bear, the white fox is never far behind, eating the scraps of seal left by the bear. Not only the tracks of bear in the ice would warn me of their presence, but also the much smaller spoor of the fox.

  Seals are the bears' only food. They are supposed to catch fish, but none of the Danes I met in Iceland and Scoresby Sund had ever seen a bear fishing, neither had any of the Eskimos I met later. There is a conundrum here. If, as the dieticians tell us, fat is only fuel, and protein is the bodybuilder, how is it that the bear, whose only food (evidently) is seal meat, which is practically all fat, manages to build up such a huge, strong body?

  During the short days which followed, I remembered everything that the Danes told me about bears. How they stalk a seal, with their great bulky bodies splayed down on the ice, surprisingly flat and inconspicuous from nose to tail. If it's a bearded seal, a great heavy animal, weighing up to six hundred pounds, the bear will satisfy his appetite, then he will leave the rest of the carcass and amble off to sleep. After two or three days' rest, he will return to the frozen seal remains, a great mass of solid hard blubber and bones, and gnaw it, grinding the rock-hard mass between his teeth till there is nothing left. That is if the foxes have not gotten to it while the bear is sleeping.

  The bears are usually followed by the fox, as the lion is followed by the hyena and the jackal. But the two ignore each other. The bear knows he cannot catch the swift fox, and the fox knows the bear is too slow for him; so as he follows the bear, the fox runs around and around, playfully teasing the great, lumbering king of the Arctic. Ashore, the white fox tends to t
reat man in the same way as he does the bear, running round him with not a care in the world. The fox confuses man with the bear. The bear confuses dogs sleeping or lying down on the ice with the seal. The bear also confuses a still man, sitting or lying down, with the seal. The bear confuses a standing or running dog with the white fox. How he sees an active man is not quite clear. It is either as another bear or as another type of hunting animal. Whichever, out on the ice floes the polar bear will attack, because he cannot stand competition in the fight for survival.

  During the short daylight hours, I obtained fair sun sights, and it was soon evident that the drift of the floe was more or less due south, at the rate of around half a knot. That is about twelve miles a day, but as the days progressed, this seemed to be slowing down, until by the end of September, it was down to six miles a day. The great ice field was moving steadily and surely, and I was by then at around latitude seventy-three, which put me somewhere near the wireless station at Myggbukta and Ella Island. I kept the boat clear of ice and driven snow as best I could to make her show up against the whiteness of the floe, in case a plane passed overhead. One day, during the twilight, I actually saw a flying boat heading northwest, but it was far away on the southern horizon, and with the bear threat I did not dare waste my signal flares trying to attract his attention. I had only eight flares with me and no idea how many bears might show up. But fortunately none did, although on two occasions I saw them through the binoculars, walking over distant ice floes.

  By the first of October my floe, which I had christened Ark Royal, had started to break off here and there, with loud cracks, groans, and wheezes. The lead to the north of Cresswell was once again widening up. Ark Royal was shaped something like an hourglass, with the two sand vessels pointing east and west and Cresswell sitting on top of the narrow stem. If the western edge hit against the solid shore ice, the two "sand vessels" would part company, which would split the floe just about where Cresswell was.

  I made plans to get Cresswell back afloat. It was pointless to slide her back down the ice ramp into the southern lead, for it no longer existed. Where the lead had been was a long line of tossed-up ice cakes and chunks piled up into the air for a distance of about two miles!

  The only reasonable course was to dig another ramp through the ice over into the northern lead, then slide Cresswell down it and try to emerge from the ice field by way of that route, which seemed to be fairly loose, being low, flat, "young" ice, newly formed. If I could get her afloat again, there was a chance I could get out.

  I was out on the ice, huddled up in my Eskimo gear, with a screaming storm coming up from the south, blowing ice particles so strong that I could feel them drumming on my caribou-skin jerkin, even through the inner layer of thick hair. Nelson circled me slowly, keeping watch just within visibility range, about fifty yards. I was probing the ice with the harpoon, plotting the course of the new ramp. Ahead, through a momentary gap in the flying ice, I saw a black lump stretched out on the floe, not more than fifty yards away. A seal! I dropped down flat onto the ice.

  Nelson was behind me, out of eyeshot of the seal. I lifted my head up and looked around, trying to appear like a seal, jerking my hooded head in quick, sniffing motions. Nelson sat down in the driving ice. He had sensed something was afoot, even though the wind was blowing at an oblique angle from our side to the seal's. I waved my hand down and Nelson dropped prone, his nose twitching.

  There, in front of me, was a highly sensitive animal, with built-in natural alarm systems; an animal which never slept for more than three minutes at a time, which continually was on the lookout for foes, and which could move with surprising speed over the ice and into the safe water. Behind me was another animal, highly intelligent at stalking, hunting, and recovering, courageous and bold, but crippled. His missing eye did not seem to affect his sight much. The trouble was the missing forefoot, which deprived him of the hunting dog's speed, though only by a small margin. In between was me, man, intelligent enough to develop weapons capable of killing a seal from a mile away, yet reduced now to becoming a seal himself until he could get near enough to strike.

  Soon I was within forty yards of the seal. He raised his smooth head up, with his shoulders supported by his flippers, and slowly looked around. Then he dropped down on the ice. I watched him for a few seconds, then inched forward again. Every five minutes or so I raised my head, just as the seal was doing, and gazed around. Nelson stayed prone, but he too was slowly slithering forward right behind me, keeping my body between him and the seal. After another hour of inching forward little by little, I was within twenty yards of the seal. After several hard stares, each lasting about a minute, he no longer looked my way. He still rose up on his fins and looked around, but only at the quarters of his vision away from my direction. Then I realized that he had made up his mind that I was another seal.

  I scrabbled quietly forward, keeping as close to the ice as I could. By this time my dark goggles had started to steam, and I longed to take them off and clean them, but of course this would have warned the seal. I moved ahead again, perched up, looked around. Nelson had stopped moving with me. He was too crafty to come near enough for the seal to see him and think he was a fox following a bear. Another hour, another ten yards, then a slow nudging forward over the smooth, twilit ice. The next five yards took about twenty minutes to cover, as I moved a little faster because the seal seemed to be getting restless and I was concerned in case he should suddenly take off.

  By this time I could study him at close quarters. He was about nine feet long and must have weighed a good four hundred pounds. He was a bearded seal, what the Eskimos call an ugrug. Every now and then he would rise up, like a huge slug, and search the area away from me. At intervals his tail flapped lazily against the ice. He looked fat and satisfied; there was enough food on him to give me energy to build ten ramps. I edged closer, trying to make the same breathing noise as he, a sort of heavy wheeze, like a person snoring in his throat.

  Fifteen feet away I raised my feet and slapped the ice, just as he was doing with his tail. As he rose to look around away from me, I slowly lifted the harpoon and flung it, hard as I could, straight at his neck. It went right through and he dropped like a stone, with no twitching, no jerking, nothing. His huge carcass just collapsed on the ice.

  "Come on, boy!" I jumped up and fell on the harpoon handle, twisting it out. Nelson was up in a flash, snapping and snarling, standing just clear of the seal's head and throat, his back teeth bared, ready to bite. I plunged the harpoon again into the shoulder, as deep as I could. There was a slight resistance as the steel barb entered the tough skin, then it slid right in like a dart into a slab of lard.

  Satisfied the seal was truly dead, I looked around for bear and then trudged back to the boat for a bucket and a box. In another two hours I had enough blubber laying alongside the boat to feed a small ship's crew for a fortnight and more.

  After a meal and a reconnoiter around our perimeter, I had a sleep, with Nelson on guard, gnawing at a huge chunk of raw seal blubber.

  Once awake, I started to dig the new ramp. A weary, backbreaking job. On the first one I had great difficulty shifting the huge slabs of ice with mittened hands. I made a "longshoreman's hook" out of a great shark-fishing barb by fixing a wooden handle on it, and so I could now grab onto the ice and drag it clear. It took until October 15 to complete the ramp. For two days I was immobile, taking refuge from a raging blizzard. The next task was to start moving the boat.

  The first thing was to dig out the hurricane anchor, then plant it again into another hole astern of the boat. Then the fifty-pound fisherman anchor had to be dug into yet another five-foot-deep hole just over the top of the ramp, about ten yards down. The idea was to use the fisherman to slide the boat forward, until she was sitting, bows forward, on top of the ramp, then brake the slide down into the water with the storm line secured to the hurricane hook.

  Much easier said than done, but on October 16 all was ready and I started p
ulling the boat, using the great blocks, or pulleys, as landsmen call them, to inch the boat along the ice, after unloading two and a half tons of removable gear and food onboard. On the seventeenth, after many hours of hard labor in the freezing cold, interspersed with heavy meals of boiled curried seal blubber, biscuits, and porridge, with great dollops of strawberry jam smeared over the lot, the boat was teetering on the top of the ramp. I married up the brake line to the hurricane hook, gave the stern a mighty heave, grabbed the brake line to control it, and she was away, just like a ship being launched, only Cresswell went bows first. I had left a good amount of weight in the stem, and as she hit the water, the empty bows danced up into the air, the stern swung around sideways, and she was afloat, checked by the heavy line from colliding with the small ice floes in the water.

  Then, using the ladder with a plank lashed along its length, I reloaded the boat, dragging the stores over the ice on a species of sled, which I had knocked together during the comparatively idle day-nights on the floe. With me pulling on one rope and Nelson grasping the other in his teeth, we soon made a quick job of shifting and restowing all the gear. It was not easy, as it was very dark in the boat, with just two small kerosene lamps flickering.

  After a short sleep and another meal, I went out to try the engine. It was frozen solid, despite all the attempts I had made to keep it warm. I had even constructed a chimney from the galley to the engine compartment to conduct warm air, but to no avail. The blowtorch onboard refused to operate despite an hour's fumbling with frozen fingers. There was only one solution. I laboriously dismantled the cabin stove and chimney and, in a matter of hours, had it fitted up in the engine compartment, with the fumes going through the engine exhaust outlet. This did the trick, and early on the eighteenth I had the engine running and was moving slowly out, through thin new ice, to the northwest. As I was on the lee side of the Ark Royal ice floe, the sea was flat calm, and by running the engine flat out, I shoved my way between the thin cakes floating like shining water lilies on the surface of the freezing sea.