The Discovery Of Slowness (26 page)

Back marched off; Franklin stayed behind. They had to wait in any event for Samandré, Vaillant, and Crédit, whose condition had meanwhile become worse than Hood's. Half an hour later, Samandré dragged himself into camp and told them that the other two had stayed behind in the snow; he had been unable to persuade them to get up. Richardson retraced Samandré's footsteps. He found the two men in an open field, half frozen
and no longer able to talk. Since he was too weak to carry either one of them, he returned to the others.

Franklin had sprained his ankle and was limping. Who had enough energy? They tried to persuade Benoît and Peltier, who were still the strongest, to bring in the two lost men, but in vain. On the contrary, the two
voyageurs
urged John to send them after Back and to leave it up to everyone to see how they could get away. John grabbed Benoît by the shoulders and shook him as hard as he could. ‘You don't know the way. Do you understand? You don't know the way.'

‘We'll follow Mr Back's footsteps.'

‘A little snow or rain and you won't see them any more. Then it'll be all over for you.'

Benoît saw the point with difficulty. But he didn't want to pick up the freezing men: ‘Then it will be all over for me, too.'

For a few moments John fought with himself. Finally he said, ‘Let's go on. We'll leave them behind.'

It was a defeat. He had not been able to save those two men. What kind of a commander was he? Now at least he had to keep the rest from dying of despair or blindness. But his foot got more and more swollen and became cruelly painful. He began to sense how this journey would end for him.

After a few more miles Hood collapsed, unconscious. Since he couldn't be carried, somebody had to stay with him. Richardson wanted to be the one. He knew John would send food from the fort to keep them both from dying. ‘No,' John replied. ‘I am the captain. Also, I'm slower than you. I'll stay with Hood. You go on with the others. Here are the compass and sextant.'

He made this decision because he couldn't go on, and only for that reason. He couldn't keep up with the others, and therefore, as matters stood, he couldn't lead them.

They pitched one of the tents and bedded Hood down inside. Then the doctor assembled the rest of the crew around him. John impressed on them: ‘You must stay together. Anyone who walks ahead is gone, for he'll lose his way and drag the others in his tracks with him into disaster. Stay together.'

Hepburn stepped forward. ‘I'll stay with you and Hood.'

Richardson went off. John and Hepburn went looking for firewood,
tripes de roche
, and deer tracks. They felt no more hunger, only weakness. It was no longer a matter of well-being but, with a great deal of luck, of surviving.

Hepburn shot a partridge, which they fried. They fed it to Hood and he seemed to recover a little. For themselves they found a small quantity of
tripes de roche
.

Two days later, Michel, the Iroquois, suddenly turned up. He had asked Richardson's permission to return to the tent along with Perrault and Jean-Baptiste Bélanger. Unfortunately, he had lost those two in the dark and hadn't been able to find their footprints. That surprised John, because it had neither rained nor snowed, and the wind had died down completely.

Fontano was probably also dead, Michel went on. He had fallen when crossing a lake and had broken his leg. They had had to leave him behind, but he hadn't discovered him on his way back.

Michel had been lucky and had found a dead wolf, probably killed by a blow from a reindeer's horn. He still had some of the wolf meat; they devoured it greedily and praised the Indian highly. He asked for an axe to get more. When he was gone, John worried about this and began to calculate.

Where does Michel get so much ammunition? It's improbable that Richardson left it for him; and why does he have two pistols? When Michel got back and served them more wolf meat, John asked about the pistols. Michel replied that Peltier had given him one as a present.

They went on eating greedily and felt as though strength were already returning to their miserable skeletons. But John's mind worked strenuously: he was trying to remember something. At one point he left the tent and stood outside to allow inner pictures to pass by his eyes unimpeded. When he returned he said, ‘I simply don't pay enough attention to details. I could have sworn this was Bélanger's pistol.'

The others stared at him, horrified.

‘Do you think I killed him?' asked Michel in an imprecating
voice. ‘That isn't true.' Suddenly his hand was on one of the pistols.

‘No, no,' said Hepburn, ‘nobody thinks that. Why would you think so?' The Indian became calm again. But none of them wanted to eat any more wolf meat.

For days Michel didn't allow the British to talk to each other alone. When they talked in his presence, they had to use a slave language: saying innocuous things that he understood and at the same time communicating something he didn't understand. ‘Did perhaps more wolves get killed in this way?' No one dared to utter the names Perrault and Fontano. Or ‘If a reindeer no longer fears the wolf, it'll certainly kill more of them.'

Still, Michel suspected dimly what they guessed and feared. He refused to go hunting and became more and more tyrannical, ordering who had to sleep where. But the British realised without speaking to each other: if Michel had known the way and had been able to read a compass, he would have long since killed them or, worse still, made them part of his food supply.

‘Why don't you hunt, Michel?'

But he refused. ‘There's no game here. We should start for the Winter Lake at once. We can always come back for Mr Hood later.'

John thought it over. ‘Good. But we must first collect food and firewood for him, because he can't move.' He was only looking for a chance to speak to Hepburn. Michel agreed. They left the tent and went off in different directions. As John was chopping wood – as loudly as possible in order to signal to Hepburn where he was – he heard a shot from the direction of the tent. He got there at the same time as Hepburn to find Hood lying dead beside the fire. The shot had pierced his skull. Michel stood next to him. ‘Mr Hood was cleaning my rifle. That's when it must have happened.'

They buried Hood with difficulty, covering him with a little snow. Now John and Hepburn did not need lengthy communication to understand. Why had Michel left his weapon behind if he was going hunting? How could a half-conscious Hood have
even thought of cleaning it? Above all, the back of Hood's head showed traces of powder burns: the bullet had entered his head from the back and had left it through the front. And for some time now their pistols had been within reach.

Now that Hood was dead, the journey could be resumed. They took down the tent and John fixed the course. By evening they had managed only two miles, because of his sprained foot. Their meal was furnished by Hood's coat of buffalo leather. Michel didn't let them out of his sight for a moment.

Again and again Michel asked, ‘How many miles left? In which direction is the fort?' ‘It's still far,' said John. But after three days Michel thought he could recognise with certainty a rock which was only a day's march from Fort Enterprise. John shook his head. ‘Impossible,' he said. The next morning the Indian crept out of the tent early and took his weapons with him. He wanted to try to gather some
tripes de roche
. He had never offered to do that since they had formed the rear guard.

‘I'm glad,' answered John, and Hepburn added, ‘You're a good man and a friend.'

They waited until the steps outside had moved away. ‘He only wants to load his rifle. He's got nothing in it any more,' said Hepburn. ‘When he comes back, we must be quick.' John loaded his pistol carefully, as though he were doing it for the first time in his life. Hepburn said: ‘We've eaten the meat. We're his accomplices if we don't kill him at once.'

‘For the first time you're talking nonsense, Hepburn,' answered John. ‘He wants to kill us, that's the reason – more reasons we don't need; more are bad for us.' But Hepburn still seemed to fear that John wouldn't pull the trigger. ‘I'll do it for you, sir – it's easier for me.'

John stretched his arm toward the tent flap, holding it at the height of his shoulder while hiding his hand behind some baggage so that Michel could not see it when he entered. With the slightest turn of the body the pistol could be aimed at his head as soon as he appeared. John remained in this posture, rigid and tense.

‘No,' he replied. ‘I'll do it myself. Ten years of war – what
do you think I did all that time? Only one always kills the wrong men.'

‘The wrong men?' Hepburn did not understand. ‘And your arm, sir?'

‘I can hold up my arm for hours,' said John. ‘I could already do that when I was ten. He'll sneak up and listen. We've got to talk loudly about harmless things or he'll shoot us from the outside through the wall of the tent, because he realises we're about to do something.'

‘It'll be a fine day today, sir,' said Hepburn. ‘I think the weather's on our side, too.' He added in a low voice: ‘I hear him.'

John cleared his throat. ‘Then let's get up slowly, Hepburn. I'll fetch firewood …'

At this very moment Michel appeared in the tent entrance, his rifle at his hip, ready to fire. He was aiming at John. Hepburn drew his pistol fast. Michel turned the barrel of his rifle toward him. The picture of this scene remained fixed in John's eyes. The next thing he became aware of was that Hepburn had seized his hand and held it for a long time. They did not say a word for minutes. Hepburn spoke first: ‘You shot him through the forehead, sir. He suffered nothing; he didn't even know it.' John answered: ‘This journey was one week too long.' The next day they saw the fort at the lake shore.

In the blockhouse they found four living skeletons who could barely rise: Dr Richardson, Adam, Peltier, and Samandré. No supplies, not a bite of food. They had scraped off the top of a reindeer blanket that had been discarded half a year ago with their knives and had eaten the shoes they had worn to get there. ‘Where are the others?' asked John. The doctor tried to answer. John admonished him not to speak in a voice that sounded like the grave. Richardson rose, clawing his way up the centre beam with spidery fingers, stared at John with bulging eyes, and said in a rattling voice, ‘You should hear yourself just once, Mr Franklin.'

Richardson had found nothing but a note from Back: ‘No food and no Indians here. Going farther south to find people.
Beauparlant dead, Augustus missing. Back.' Wentzel had apparently been there and had taken the maps, but he had not kept his promise: he had not seen to the supplies.

Hepburn dragged himself outside and tried to shoot something. He was lucky and came back with two partridges. Greedily the six men devoured the raw meat – barely more than a morsel for each. That was 29 October.

Their journey was not yet at an end.

Peltier and Samandré lay dying. Adam could no longer get up or even crawl. His abdomen was swollen. He was in great pain.

The doctor sat by the tiny fire Hepburn had lit and read aloud from the Bible. It seemed oddly weird and crazy: in the midst of the Arctic, a man sat and read in a broken, barely understandable voice crochety sentences from an ancient book of the Orient which likewise could be barely understood. Still, it was a comfort to them all. He might just as well have snapped his fingers and hoped that would bring rescue – since he believed in it himself, it was also a comfort to the others.

In confidence, John told Richardson what had happened. They looked at each other for a long time with their bulging eyeballs, bent forward, coughing slightly, looking like two miserable old drunks in London's Gin Lane.

‘I would have done it, too, Mr Franklin,' the doctor eventually muttered. ‘But now, pray. Do pray.'

They discussed the situation. Gradually they began to lose their minds. Yet each of them considered his own capacity for clear thought greater than that of the other. Therefore, they all talked to each other in a calming, endlessly patient, and simple way, constantly repeating everything because they forgot what had just been said.

It all depended on Back.

During the night of 1 November Samandré died, and when Peltier noticed this he lost all hope and died three hours later. The others were now too weak to carry the bodies out of the hut.

Hepburn and John, who could still move about on their hands and knees, tried to find
tripes de roche
and firewood, but they
fainted constantly and returned with slim pickings. They had long since begun to burn every piece of wood that could be spared; inner doors, shelves, floorboards, the wardrobe.

Now Adam lay close to death. He had not spoken for days, had not even tried to find a more comfortable position.

‘He'll come,' said John.

‘Who?' whispered Richardson.

‘Back. George Back. Midshipman George Back. Don't you understand me, Doctor?'

He broke off, because he realised that Richardson had been speaking, or rather hissing, for some time. Now he repeated it: ‘… is good. All will turn out for the best.'

‘Who?' asked John.

With a movement of his head, Richardson pointed at the ceiling.

‘The Almighty.'

‘Don't know,' whispered John. ‘You know, of course, I …' They were lying wrapped in the remnants of their field blankets. The fire went out. They were waiting for death. The smell was atrocious.

On 7 November, Akaitcho, chief of the Copper Indians, arrived with twenty warriors at Fort Enterprise in the deepest snow. Although near starvation, a walking skeleton, Midshipman Back had made his way to the tents of his tribe with great tenacity and begged the chief for help. Despite the severe frost and nearly impassable snow, Akaitcho had fought his way from the Great Slave Lake to the Winter Lake in only five days. He found Franklin, Dr Richardson, Hepburn, and Adam still alive.