The Discovery Of Slowness (25 page)

‘Now we're following a new system,' said Back, as if parenthetically. ‘They have rifles and ammunition; we have only sextant and compass. And that keeps no one from stealing.'

‘The system is working,' John replied. ‘Everyone knows that nobody can get through alive without us navigators. And when we do, he wants to return as an honourable man.'

When Perrault insisted he had taken only a certain amount of powder and lead, Back agreed, all evidence to the contrary. He was impenetrable again – what game was he playing? Did he want to curry favour with the
voyageurs?
When he knew he couldn't win, did he think surrender was preferable to open defeat? Did he want to survive a bloody rebellion by offering himself as a false witness?

John clenched his teeth and wanted to put the thought out of his mind. His system prescribed that nothing like this must be considered possible unless it became a fact. But however ashamed he was, he held on to this suspicion as a form of security.

1 September. Hood was truly ill. The
tripes de roche
had been a disaster for him, and as a result he declined more rapidly than the others, not only because his resistance was lower but also because he suffered more from hunger.

The cold grew worse. The heavy snowflakes had seemed pretty, but now they were only dry white dust creeping into their clothes. At night it was more than an hour before the stiffly frozen blankets became warm enough to allow anything like sleep. They stuffed their boots under their bodies so they would not have to thaw them out in the morning. To do that would require a fire and therefore a search for wood.

Hunger induced a kind of slowness that was not seeing but blind. They were, of course, still moving ahead; they tried to look cheerful and confident, but they made errors about the most obvious things. They crossed rivers in a canoe without taking anything along. They gaped at the approaching edge of a waterfall without springing into action. Their condition was reminiscent of that advanced state of drunkenness when gaiety tips over into misery. Not a single animal for food! Even rock
lichens weren't easy to find any more; they had to be dug out of the snow first. They found the remainder of a wolves' meal – half-rotted reindeer bones, which they prepared by holding them over a fire until they turned black. ‘That's no help,' Junius said. ‘We've got to make soup out of it.' John suggested they try that, but the others wanted to have something between their teeth. Soup? What did an Eskimo know about English and French stomachs? John gave in. He thought the moral lesson was more important than the experiment with the soup. Junius's feelings were hurt. He disappeared for good with fifty rounds of ammunition.

Morality was also on the way out. In effect it had already been abandoned many miles before. It didn't help much that in many ways weakness seemed similar.

Step by step, constantly trudging across a trackless snow cover interrupted only by rivers and lakes.

Now and then it seemed strange to John that his feet were moving, strange, too, that without his doing his right heel always hit his left ankle – never the other way round, constantly, without fail. Weakness taught everybody how crooked one's frame was. Postures became more and more bent. Odd – wasn't man born with a straight back? Their beards were iced over completely; they couldn't be unfrozen without a fire. And they weighed a lot. Such a frozen beard would be enough by itself to make a man bend forward. Their thoughts became dimmer and dimmer, and they feared tackling anything firmly. Now and again one of the
voyageurs
flew into a petty, childish rage about nothing – Perrault screamed that he didn't want to walk behind Samandré any more because the stupid creases in the seat of his trousers moved back and forth so idiotically. Then they trotted on again for hours without a word. Suddenly they thought that they might be moving away from the fort instead of toward it. Perhaps their fate had been long since decided.

Why did George Back have so much strength? Was it just that someone so vain and so fickle could hold out for so long? Beautiful people often have strengths at their disposal that cannot
be easily gauged. Bent on saving their beauty above all else, that gave them their sense of purpose.

For supper,
tripes de roche
, just a handful each after hours of searching. Grey, wrinkled faces.

14 September. Sighted a few reindeer but bagged none. Michel's finger, trembling with excitement, had got on the trigger by accident and a shot had gone off too soon; the whole thing was lost. Michel wept in despair; Crédit joined him.

Hood had fallen far behind. He arrived at the tents a few hours later, aided by Richardson. They had just harvested a few
tripes de roche
, the stuff that didn't agree with his stomach. ‘I frolicked about a little.' He smiled. Then his knees gave way and he collapsed. He was not unconscious – Hood was too curious about what went on around him for that – but he couldn't draw well any more. His eyes and brain were occupied with all kinds of things, only not with his own suffering.

Perrault rummaged in his bag and pulled out a few morsels of meat for Hood, saying he had saved it during the last few days. He gave Hood his last handful of meat. All nineteen of them wept, even Back and Hepburn. What did it matter where Perrault had actually got the meat? There it was once more, the honour of mankind – for only a brief moment, it is true, but made manifest.

‘And I think Junius will come back, too,' said Augustus. ‘He'll bring much meat.'

‘Yes, meat!' They embraced each other as if drunk with hope. They'd be home soon. Only a stroll.

Thus ended 14 September, a good day.

23 September. Peltier, who had complained for days about the weight of the canoe, threw it on the ground in a fit of rage, shattering some of the wooden crossbars. He had to pick it up again and keep on carrying it, because with a little luck it could still be repaired.

When a snowstorm set in, Peltier turned the canoe so that the wind could blow it out of his hands. Now they had to leave
it behind for good. Peltier showed frighteningly little shame in pointing to his triumph. Jean-Baptiste Bélanger carried the other canoe – for how long? John appealed to his conscience: ‘We're on the right track, but without a canoe we're lost.'

Soon John discovered that they were not on the right track. In those parts magnetism was unreliable; jeering, the compass needle twirled round the dial as if on a merry-go-round. A bad moment: the half-starved commander had to tell his half-starved crew that they must change course. This required courage, which by now had come to involve an enormous effort.

‘The hour of truth,' Back mumbled, and looked into space. ‘He's botched it!' hissed Vaillant.

‘If you knew as much about navigation as I, you wouldn't be afraid. It's a bit difficult here, but it all works according to logic and science.' They believed him only because they had to. They had all grown too weak to believe in anything. They were now all afraid that they would die.

Hood's courage was important. The midshipman looked like a corpse, but his confidence put anybody who felt the remotest self-pity to shame. Somehow, they all knew that when Hood died the end would not be far off.

When, on a lake shore, John ordered that the ice be cracked for fishing, all the nets were found to be missing. The
voyageurs
had thought them too heavy; they were lying buried in the snow miles away. Two hours later, Jean-Baptiste Bélanger stumbled like a bad actor who had been told to stumble. The place, however, was well chosen. They were just crossing a steep slope. Their last boat was smashed.

In the evening they chewed partly decomposed reindeer skin which they had scraped out of the snow. Here there were not even
tripes de roche
, or firewood. If I found Trim the tomcat, thought John, I would shoot him at once and eat him. He was alarmed at the thought but too sick to prohibit it entirely; it therefore took an even more tormenting path: cat flesh, the most delicious meat in the world. John tried to direct his fantasies on another track: brawn made of pig's head. But the traitor brain didn't go along: it made the
brawn taste like
tripes de roche
and Trim's poor body like fillet of veal.

On 25 September, several
voyageurs
ate the top leather of their spare boots, and the next day they tried their soles. Hood, too, tasted it. He didn't get down much. He looked at John, shrugged with a great effort, and whispered, ‘Pretty tough. When I buy boots in London next time …'

Hood still managed well during the day, but at night he became delirious, raving about Green Stockings and his child. He had two Indian women now, a big one and a little one. Then again he imagined he was at home in Berkshire, cutting thistles and nettles on a sunny morning. ‘Unbearable to listen to' was Hepburn's comment.

On 26 September, they came upon a great river.

John shoved his swollen tongue in place and mumbled, ‘This is the Coppermine river. We must get across, then we're almost there.' They believed him only after more than an hour, but they no longer had a boat. ‘Build a raft,' mumbled John. After three days, something resembling a raft was finished. But how could they keep it from drifting with the current as they crossed? Richardson, who called himself a good swimmer, tried to get across with a rope in order to set up what he called a ‘ferry station'. He prayed a while, then undressed to his underwear and started to swim. But he froze stiff almost at once. They pulled him lifeless out of the water with the rope and undressed him completely to rub his body with snow. Horrified, they stared at his naked body, eighteen fearful pairs of eyes in emaciated faces. Solomon Bélanger was the first to speak: ‘
Mon
Dieu! Que nous sommes maigres
,' he moaned. Benoît, the man from St-Yrieix-La-Perche, suffering a new attack of homesickness, sobbed loudly, and soon all of them were in tears. When weeping broke out now, it became infectious at once. Perhaps we've all become children again, not more than three years old, thought John, wiping away his tears. Desperately they rubbed Richardson's body. He came to, but they kept on rubbing, as if with their last strength they wanted to restore
his original figure, to put more on his ribs than snow and tears.

A snowstorm. The first raft broke loose and disappeared in the rapids. Only with the second raft did they get across the river on 4 October. No time to lose. ‘Only forty miles to Fort Enterprise!' But how much time does forty miles take if one can't go on? How much can be asked of a man's will? Actually, the will was supposed to command, ‘Go on! Go on! Don't die!' But again and again he ran off course, made common cause with the stupid body, and self-importantly considered reasons for immediate surrender – sinking down, sleeping, and dying. The will was a sturdy but vain fellow, swayed with unpredictable ease. Suddenly he would announce, full of energy and noble defiance, ‘All this is too much to ask of a man. Now is the time for courage to take a break.' As soon as the tired, sick body heard this, it surrendered to gravity and lay down. Good thing that didn't happen to all of them at the same time.

John had not yet collapsed, but he knew he had strength only because he was the commander. My system does not protect me from the vagaries of fate, he thought. Sometimes I'm the right man for a situation, sometimes the wrong one, and one can die of that. We should have cooked that soup. We would have had … If I don't watch out …

Suddenly he saw the town of Louth before him, surrounded by its peaceful cow pastures, hills and forests in the distance. He even saw barges laden with freight passing through the canal. Then he was in the town, watching people walking on both sides of the street, cheerfully waving, respecting and understanding each other. On the other side of town, a gigantic mountain – but that was he himself. Only he and the other mountains were truly travelling. He alone was the commander. He held the rope for others …

When he came to again, Augustus sat beside him whistling a tune.

‘Why are you whistling?'

‘Whistling drives death away,' the interpreter replied.

John got up. ‘That's how it is, then? I thought that I was a mountain and that my feet could walk on without me. Where are the others? Has Dr Orme shown up yet?'

Augustus looked at him in alarm. John turned around vigorously and marched on. He now realised that what he feared most was happening: he found himself in a sea of madness, was capsizing, and would sink then and there, like a badly navigated ship. Fear made him walk faster and faster. It seemed to him as though the first heralds of madness were already reaching out their hands to seize him so that he might believe in the devil, be pursued by the dead – who, being even slower than he, would have to catch up with him. There were not only badly navigated ships; there were also unfortunate ones.

Back's the one who drives me crazy, he thought. Whether my suspicions are justified or not, he drives me mad. I must send him away.

A sextant, a compass, a sketch with the locations of Fort Enterprise, Fort Providence and most of the important lakes and rivers – that was what Back received from John. The ammunition was divided: Back received a good fifth. After all, he had only four men with him, and they were the strongest: Saint-Germain, Solomon Bélanger, Beauparlant, and Augustus. Moreover, he'd be in Fort Enterprise, where the supplies were waiting, long before the others. Let him fend for himself. Even if there were fewer provisions than expected, even if Back and his men used up too much, it was still far better than a mutiny of the quick against the slow.

So the system was preserved: John Franklin remained the commander, and they could all keep on being men of honour.