Voyage of the Narwhal

by Andrea Barrett

  “You’re the one making me do it,” Zeke said.

  “I can’t leave the men. Not after all that happened this winter.”

  Zeke made a sound of disgust.“They’re not your responsibility—they’re mine. And I know they’ll be fine.”

  “But I’m responsible for you.” Had he admitted this before? “Lavinia made me promise I’d look after you.”

  “As if I’m a child?” He stepped back from Erasmus, into a puddle; his feet disappeared and he seemed to be walking on water. “As if I need the protection of a woman, of you—why would I want to marry her, if she’s like you?”

  “Because you love her,” Erasmus shouted. Then stood with his mouth still open. He leaned back against the largest of Zeke’s Follies.

  “I can’t think about her up here. I can’t think about anything except what I have to do.” Zeke looked down at the blue pool obscuring his feet. “You could still change your mind,” he said softly. “Come with me—I’d put everything that’s happened behind us, we could still discover something wonderful. Be like brothers.”

  “It was Dr. Boerhaave who was like a brother to me,” Erasmus said. “And now he’s dead.”

  Again Zeke made that noise of disgust, clicking his tongue on the roof of his mouth: tchik, tchik, tchik. “Noted,” he said. A string of eider ducks whirred by, their harsh cries shocking in the silence. “You’ve made your feelings perfectly clear all along. If your father could see what you’ve become . . .” He turned and walked off across the film of water.

  Alone, without dogs or human companions, he couldn’t pull a sledge. He left two days later on foot, with a spare pair of boots, a rifle, a good deal of ammunition, and provisions strapped in an unwieldy bedroll to his back.

  SOMETIMES THEY WERE ashamed. Or Erasmus was, and Ned as well; perhaps some of the others: because their lives, through the rest of July and early August, were almost easy. Each day, while their ice structures dripped and consolidated into glassy mounds, they dismantled another heap of the Narwhal’s stores and repacked the items carefully in the hold. Pleasant work, under the warm sun. And with each trip to the hold and back, the men could examine the tiny, heartening gap, like a mouth beginning to open, where the dark hull met the ice.

  Erasmus, checking new lists against the old, found more efficient arrangements for their remaining supplies. Now that the candles were gone, and most of the wood and much of the preserved food, he was able to convert part of the hold aft of the mainmast into storage for the specimens he and Dr. Boerhaave had collected. The crates of bird skins in one neat tower; fossils matched part to counterpart, neatly labeled and layered with hides; bottles crammed with floating invertebrates swathed in dried grasses and then wedged in boxes—only now, given some room and time, was he able to see how much he had. There was enough here to keep him occupied for the rest of his life, and he would have been happy if he weren’t worried about Zeke, and if Dr. Boerhaave had been present. He packed his friend’s books in a case he built next to the fossils, keeping out only a few for the shelf in his bunk.

  On the gravel beach smoke hung in the air; the men had developed a passion for preparing caribou skins, and hides depended like flags from scaffolds of poles raised near little fires. Erasmus asked Ned, who seemed to be directing the efforts, what this was all about. Flushed and pink-cheeked, Ned was bent over a skin, scraping the fascia away with a piece of iron pipe. Next to him Barton was arranging a white skin some distance from a fire, while on deck Isaac and Ivan and Robert were sitting cross-legged amid a pile of skins already smoked and dried.

  Ned said, “You don’t mind, do you? I thought it was a good idea, a way to keep us all busy. The suits we’ve been wearing all winter are worn out and they smell bad—each of us decided to make a complete suit for himself, from the inside out. A sort of souvenir, for when we get home. The things you taught me helped me prepare the skins. Joe showed me the basic pattern of the garments last fall. Ivan worked as a tailor on a sealing ship when he was a boy, and he showed us all how to cut out the pieces.”

  “It’s fine,” Erasmus said. “I suppose. We don’t need the skins for anything else.”

  “Have you seen the underwear?” Ned said. “It’s wonderful.” He showed Erasmus the shirt, drawers, and socks he’d almost completed. “These are from the skin of a calf a few months old,” he said. “Very supple and delicate. You make them with the fur side in. Then these”—he held up a hooded coat, trousers, and mittens—“these we make from a yearling, with the fur side out.”

  Erasmus saw a wrinkle and several pleats where the hood of Ned’s coat met the back. Something was wrong, too, with the way the sleeve met the armhole, and there were patches where the fur ran backward. It was touching, really. The eager clumsiness, the attempt to keep alive the fragments of Esquimaux lore Joe had passed along. “You’re using sinew?”

  Ned shook his head. “None of us can manage it. But we found some waxed button thread in the chest with the extra wool cloth . . . was it all right to take that?”

  “It’s fine,” Erasmus said. “But maybe you could keep track of how many spools you use, and let me know.”

  “Of course,” Ned agreed. Looking down at the garments, he said, “Ivan and I have been getting along faster than the others. So we’re also making a suit for you, which we hope you’ll like.”

  “That’s very kind,” Erasmus said. “But it isn’t necessary. Everything that Dr. Boerhaave and I gathered, I have enough souvenirs for a lifetime.”

  Ned cleared his throat. “It comforts the men,” he said. “If you know what I mean.”

  Puzzled, Erasmus said, “I don’t.”

  “Because . . . we tell each other we’re making these to bring home and show our relatives, but also some of the men worry about how late in the season it’s getting, and how the ice still hasn’t opened, and they dread getting stuck here again. We don’t want to be caught so ill-prepared as we were last winter.”

  Erasmus felt his face stiffen. “It’s just in case,” Ned said hastily. “It’s not that anyone questions your orders or thinks you’re doing the wrong thing. But just in case, you know. The same way that Barton and I have been packing down some seal meat with blubber on the ice belt, where it’s still cool.”

  “It’s a good idea,” Erasmus said. Was this something Zeke would have thought of, had Zeke been here? During the bright nighttime hours, when he should have been sleeping, he sometimes walked a mile or two north from the brig, trying to imagine what Zeke was doing. What he was seeing, what he might have discovered. How his provisions were lasting and whether he’d been able to feed himself solely by his luck with a rifle. He’d been proud of how well he was managing in Zeke’s absence. He should have anticipated the men’s worries, he knew; but he hadn’t been able even to consider the idea that they might remain trapped here another year.

  “We’ll get out in August,” Erasmus said. “We will. But if it relieves the men’s anxiety to make these preparations, if it makes everyone more comfortable . . .” Abruptly he turned and walked away.

  THE FOLLOWING WEEK, Erasmus walked the length and breadth of their ice-bound cove: puddles, hollows, soggy mounds, but not a single crack. Yet the North Water of Baffin’s Bay must be expanding, he thought; and beyond the protection of the headland that sheltered their cove, the currents must be heaving the ice. What was wrong, what had always been wrong, was the site Zeke had chosen for their home. Erasmus studied the patterns of shadow cast by the hills around them. The brig bobbed in a tiny pool of water, where the refracted heat from her hull had parted the lips of ice for two feet all around.

  “If we could get to the mouth of the cove,” he said to the men that night, “past the icebergs, we’d be ready to move when the bay opens.”

  “But we can do that,” Captain Tyler exclaimed. “We have tools.” The sense of being afloat again seemed to cure both him and Mr. Tagliabeau, who claimed to know every trick of the ice saws and powder canisters Erasmus had purchased more th
an a year ago.

  Suddenly the pair were fitting pieces of metal together, calculating charges, giving orders to the men. All their sullen lethargy vanished. On August 1 they began sawing parallel channels through the ice, extending forward from the bit of open water under the bowsprit. The exploding canisters heaved and cracked fifty square yards of ice; the men sawed the slabs into smaller chunks and hauled them from the water, until the Narwhal occupied a tiny, jagged pool, three ship-lengths long but only a few feet broader than her beam. Flat on his stomach and sopping wet, Erasmus watched in wonder as tiny wavelets lapped at the edges of the pool. Each wavelet wore away a few more particles of ice. If they couldn’t carve a canal all the way out to the Sound, still every cut weakened the ice. A little more open water and a swell might arise, the tides might be felt.

  They sawed and blasted, sawed and blasted; they crept up on Zeke’s Follies and then were beside them, almost in line with the tip of the point. Captain Tyler anchored the Narwhal to the stable ice, so it wouldn’t snake down the canal until they were fully loaded. Although Smith Sound was still far away, although they hadn’t yet dug themselves out of their cove, never mind into the larger bay, the long black ribbon stretching before the brig was immensely cheering.

  August 5 passed without signs of Zeke, but no one discussed this. Zeke knew the margin of safety; that he might be a week, even ten days late, and still reach the brig before it was freed. Surely he was only exploring as long as possible. They worked around the clock, in delirious daylight, expecting Zeke every moment. On August 10, Captain Tyler set up the cables and the capstans.

  Taking turns at the capstan bars, sweating and heaving to the tune of Sean’s whaling songs, the crew warped the Narwhal to the far end of the canal. After they anchored, Ned and Barton cooked a special feast, which they ate perched on crates along the thread of water. Their condition hadn’t really changed, Erasmus thought, tearing at a succulent ptarmigan leg. The brig had been one place and now was another, but the white plain still stretched around them, marked only by the line they’d carved across it. Still, the view was subtly changed, and this made an amazing difference. The hills they’d gazed at for almost a year loomed down at a new angle. The ice belt bound to the base of the cliffs was half a mile off their stern, almost beautiful in the distance. The three icebergs were right beside them, shrunken and bordered by rings of water. And the rock cairn beside the storehouse, beneath which they’d interred the remains of Mr. Francis, was no longer visible.

  STILL ZEKE DIDN’T return. The temperature dropped and the sun sank toward the horizon; not night, not quite yet, but there were real twilights. On August 16 the temperature dipped below freezing and an inch of young ice formed on the canal. Perfectly smooth, Erasmus saw. Glassy and terrifying. Some slabs they’d sawed out but not yet removed were frozen into the delicate plain. The noon sun melted the ice, but on the seventeenth, when the sun set for the first time, a clear cold descended and the air grew still. The following morning Mr. Tagliabeau, long-faced, stood on the new ice and didn’t fall in. That day they sawed more old ice, with less enthusiasm, and on the nineteenth found that all their efforts had been undone while they slept.

  The men came to Erasmus after he’d already lain down to sleep. They stood in a half-circle around the pallet he’d made on deck: Ned, Barton, Isaac, Robert, Ivan, Thomas, and Sean. Captain Tyler and Mr. Tagliabeau, for reasons Erasmus soon understood, stayed belowdecks in their bunks. When Erasmus sat up, rubbing his eyes, Ned stepped forward from the circle.

  “Commander Voorhees is lost,” Ned said, after clearing his throat twice. “We all know it—we knew when he left this would happen. He’s two weeks late and we have to admit that he’s dead.”

  “He’s not dead,” Erasmus said. Although he’d been fearing just this for a week. “He’s late. Anything could have happened to him, he could be near us right now.”

  “He’s dead,” Barton said, behind Ned’s shoulder. “He’s been trying to kill us all since the day we left home. And the ice isn’t opening, and the young ice gets thicker every day . . .”

  “And we’re not going to be able to free the Narwhal,” Isaac chimed in.

  “We’re stuck,” said Ivan.

  “Again,” Sean said.

  “There’s so little fuel left,” Thomas added. “Our supplies—you know, you have the lists. We can’t make it through another winter.”

  A fog seemed to hover over Erasmus’s head. He was tired, he hadn’t been sleeping well. He could almost hear the new ice forming. He could almost hear the beat of wings as the birds gathered for their journeys south, almost hear hooves ringing as the ground hardened and the caribou fled. His eyes felt full of cinders. Hadn’t he wished Zeke dead, if only for a moment?

  “What is it you want?” he asked. “I don’t know what’s happened to Commander Voorhees any more than you do. I can’t keep the ice from forming, and I can’t do much about our supplies. We can assign more hunting parties if you’d like, keep half of us working at breaking up the ice and half stockpiling game; that’s a good idea, perhaps we’ll start that tomorrow . . .”

  Ned stepped back, twisted around, and picked up something from the deck. The others mimicked his movements, and when they stood and faced Erasmus again, he saw that each held a stack of neatly folded fur clothing. “We have these,” Ned said. “Each of us. And we want to leave.”

  For the rest of the night, and all through the following day, the men ground down Erasmus’s objections. Captain Tyler and Mr. Tagliabeau kept working on the canal, punctuating the men’s comments with explosions and the crack of shattering ice. The officers couldn’t address the subject directly, Ned told Erasmus. It would be inappropriate given their positions; they couldn’t give orders to abandon the brig. But apparently they were willing to join a retreat led by Erasmus.

  The men had maps, Erasmus learned. Maps, plans, lists of their own, detailed strategies. How long had they been discussing this without him? Since the moment of Zeke’s departure, perhaps; those fur suits, he now realized, had always been meant for this trip. The men had never believed that Zeke would return. And although they’d hoped that the Narwhal might be freed, they’d found it sensible to make an alternate plan. Among them they had a surprising wealth of knowledge.

  Sean and Barton had worked out a possible route. They’d load the whaleboat onto the large sledge and drag it from their cove around the point and to the mouth of the bay; then along the ice belt to Cape Sabine, or perhaps a bit farther south. After that they’d head diagonally southeast across the Sound, dragging the boat over the solid floes and rowing across any cracks. Somewhere south of Cape Alexander, perhaps fifty or sixty miles from the Narwhal, they might hope to find open water or at least navigable pack ice; they’d launch the boat and work past Cape York to the inshore lead of Melville Bay. They might still hope to find whalers there; failing that, they might hope to sail to Upernavik.

  “But we’d need weeks to pack everything and prepare the boat,” Erasmus said. “And we’d never get far enough along before the pack closes for the season.”

  Then he learned that chopping out the channel, even as it refroze at night, hadn’t been the only situation that resembled the work of Penelope. While he’d been—what? Sleeping, he supposed, or hunting, or scouting; apparently they’d used each moment—Ned had led the men in a secretive effort down in the hold. Remarkable nerve, Erasmus thought, for someone only recently turned twenty-one; he wasn’t sure whether he felt more admiration or anger. Under Ned’s direction, the men had broken neatly into his boxes, shifting contents until the labels no longer bore any relationship to what was inside. He’d heard them moving around in there; they’d told him they were hunting down the rats.

  They’d calculated what they’d need for their journey: so much pemmican per man per day, so much biscuit and molasses and coffee; so much blubber for the stoves; so much powder and shot and so many percussion caps; so many sleeping sacks. All repacked and grouped together, ready t
o be fitted into the whaleboat. Isaac and Ivan had sewn sailcloth provision bags, made watertight with tar and pitch. And each man had already assembled a tiny sack of personal belongings.

  “Thomas has taken care of the boat,” Ned added.

  He led Erasmus to the whaleboat resting innocently under its tarpaulin. Under that cover, Thomas had fixed a false keel to the flat bottom and built up the bulwarks with planks and canvas. Those wood shavings, Erasmus thought. Earlier, when he’d noticed them, Thomas had claimed to be making standard repairs in anticipation of Zeke’s return. The large sledge, which they’d never used, had been fitted with a cradle to carry the boat. Isaac had made sturdy sets of traces, with which they might haul the loaded sledge. And Ned had made a diagram, showing where they’d fit in the cramped boat and how the provisions might be stowed; he’d thought of everything. All they needed, Ned said, was Erasmus to lead them.

  “Captain Tyler and Mr. Tagliabeau cede command to you,” Ned said. “If you’ll only give the order, we could leave in two days.”

  Erasmus agonized for another thirty-six hours. If Dr. Boerhaave were here, they could have decided together what to do—but Dr. Boerhaave was gone. And it was impossible that he should leave this place that had taken his friend’s bones; impossible that he should abandon the brig and Zeke. On the sodden ice he saw everywhere the Zeke he’d known as a boy: Zeke and Copernicus stringing together a reptile’s skeleton; Zeke tagging along to the creek to listen to Mr. Wells read Pliny; Zeke rolling across the Repository shelves wondering what to borrow next. Wanting so badly to be taken seriously; moving beyond Erasmus’s distracted gaze and then reappearing after a few years’ work at his father’s firm, transformed into a man they all had to take seriously. Erasmus could still hear his father saying, You should give him more credit. He behaves oddly sometimes. But his mind is sharp.

  Was sharp. Is, was—how could he leave Zeke behind, even if he were only leaving Zeke’s body? Yet it was equally impossible that he should condemn the crew to another winter here. They couldn’t survive it, and the Narwhal couldn’t be moved. The only possible compromise was to send Ned and the others off in the boat while he stayed with the brig, hoping for Zeke’s eventual return. He might survive, with luck hunting and perhaps some help from the vanished Esquimaux.