Voyage of Ice (14 page)

“Take off your clothes and wrap yourself in the fur. It's dry. I hid it in the aft cuddy, away from the spray.”

I glanced at Elizabeth, seeing color spread across her face before she looked away. Heat sprang to the roots of my hair. While she knelt next to her father, I fumbled with the buttons on my oilskin. “Dexter?”

“Aye?”

“Thanks—thanks for t-trying to find me,” I stammered, my tongue thick with cold. “Thanks for staying behind after every-one else had left. Y-you're a true brother, D-dex.”

Dexter shrugged and began to unbutton my oilskin coat. His hands shivered too, and he could hardly grasp the buttons.

By the time I'd wrapped myself in the reindeer fur, Dexter had wrung out my wet clothes and hung them over the casks nearest the fire. It was the last thing I saw before I fell into a shiv-ering sleep.

I opened my eyes. Something was wrong.

I lay for a moment, my mind still groggy, until gradually I realized what it was. It was silent. The wind. The crashing of the waves. Everything silent.

I sat up. Dexter was gone. The early-morning air was crisp as crystals, smoky. My breath steamed. The fire burned. Flames snapped and curled. Dexter must have added wood. On the other side of the shelter, I saw the vague shapes of Elizabeth and Thorndike, huddled together.

Quiet as I could, I got dressed. My clothes weren't much drier than before—more like frosty and damp rather than freezing and soggy. I coughed out a lungful of smoke and broke out in a shiver, my nose, ears, and hands stinging with cold.

I pulled on my socks and brogans, thinking Dexter was likely loading the whaleboat with provisions, preparing to launch. We had to sail all day, I knew, and every day after until we met up with the whaling fleet before it headed south for the winter. Without a wind, and with about eleven hours of daylight, it would be a long day at the oar. That would warm my hands, all right. I crawled round the fire and out the shelter. I stood, stretched, and yawned, blinded in the brightness, wishing I were already home in New Bedford. Safe and snug.

The land stretched away from the shelter in an endless, bar-ren, snow-covered plain. As far as I could see, there was nothing. Just ground to walk on and a few scrubby grasses poking up. It was a boring place to be, and seeing it made me anxious to be on our way. After relieving myself, I found Dexter standing at the shore atop one of the dunes.

“Morning, Dex.”

Dexter said nothing, just pointed out to sea.

I blinked in disbelief, my smile slipping to my brogans.

A half mile offshore stood the pack ice. Old ice it was, snow-covered, jumbled in piles of pressure ridges like buildings tossed about in an earthquake. Between the pack ice and the shore, slush covered the water. “We're stuck,” said Dexter grimly. “It's over.”

he weather turned bitter cold and the slush thickened into ice.

The first day, Dexter and I set about establishing camp. Thorndike lay inside the shelter, covered with the fur, wheezing, coughing up blood as Elizabeth tended him, her handkerchief soaked crimson. I wished I could do something for him.

For the time being, Dexter and I dragged the dead sailor behind a dune. Then we brought supplies up from the beach and stacked them round our shelter. Timber. Casks filled with tools, wood shooks for building more casks, sailcloth, tobacco, water, coal, tar, whalecraft, whale oil, and navigational equipment, including a sextant. Dexter joked that at least now we'd know where we were stuck. We removed the
canvas from atop our shelter and reinforced the roof with timbers laid over the rectangle of barrels. We then secured the canvas back over the rafters and down the sides of the barrels with rope. Rigging a set of block and tackle, we hauled the whaleboat off the beach and placed her upside down next to our shelter. Underneath we stowed what food supplies we'd found—a keg each of tea and grog, plus three kegs filled with hard bread. (The bread inside a fourth keg was ruined, soaked in seawater.) For all our searching we never did find a cask of salt beef or pork. Three kegs of hard bread and Ninny's milk had to last us through the winter. We figured how much hard bread each of us could eat per day—round half a pound—and began to ration.

A few days later, after I thought we'd combed the beach for everything of value, I found a good-sized tin of pickled meat. I foolishly picked it up with a wet, frozen hand, too late feeling the sizzle of cold. The skin on my thumb pad tore off, stuck blood-less to the tin.

Despite my skinless thumb and the blood blisters that formed on my fingers, we made a great ceremony of supper, spreading pickled meat atop our hard bread. We opened our one keg of grog and warmed ourselves from the inside out. Even Thorndike seemed to revive, sitting up a bit. For the first time since the shipwreck, Elizabeth looked happy. Dexter told lots of jokes that evening, and we busted our sides laughing. More than once, I turned to see Thorndike watching me as I laughed with Elizabeth. Once he saw her grasp my hand and smile at me warmly. I tensed, expecting him to order her away from me, but he looked away and said nothing.

Elizabeth made a blubber lamp out of the empty tin of meat, using strips of sailcloth as the wick. It was ingenious, I thought, and told her so. Now we had two lanterns and our little shelter shone with white light, though it was still dim and sometimes
smoky if the wicks weren't trimmed proper or if the lantern glass turned sooty. The bloodless skin on the meat tin withered, cooked, and finally fell off.

We had plenty of wood to last us through the winter, what with the wreckage, and wood smoke swirled through our shelter and our lungs, making us squint and our eyes water. Dexter cut a hole in the top of the canvas, and that helped, but the smell and taste of smoke never went away. We started to look like dark-skinned Gypsies.

Outside the shelter, snow glittered like millions of diamonds, every surface coated with hoarfrost. Hoarfrost also lined the inside of our shelter, more than an inch thick. If we accidentally touched the canvas, a shower of prickly ice rained down, onto our necks, into our hair. If we built up the fire too much, the hoarfrost lining melted, making a soggy, dripping mess, our breath a foggy dew that seeped through everything and chilled us to the bone.

At night, color drenched the sky in strange swirling clouds— green, red, blue, purple. It was beautiful, like dancing flame. Dexter and I stood watching, our faces shimmering till our blood turned to slush and we dived back into the shelter.

Dexter and I buried the washed-up body some distance away, but not before I took the man's gloves, hat, clothes, and coat. I'd lost my gloves and hat on the night of the shipwreck. His was a nice thick woolen cap, knitted by his mother likely. The coat we used at night as an extra layer, having given the fur to Elizabeth and her father. I lay under the coat next to Dexter, wondering what had happened to all our shipmates. To Garret, Sweet, Cole, Walker, Briggs, Cook, Duff, and the others. Were they drowned like the fellow who'd owned this coat? Had they sailed ahead of us down the open lead, and were they now heading south through the Bering Strait toward the Sandwich Islands? Were they shipwrecked like us?

After a week of drinking tea and goat's milk, and eating only hard bread and one tin of meat, we were stricken with hunger.

“I need meat.” Dexter knelt next to Elizabeth, rubbing his hands over the fire as she added more wood. “I swear I'll starve without it.”

“Drink the oil,” said Thorndike, wheezing.

We stared at the captain. “Drink the oil,” he repeated. “'Tis edible and 'twill give us fat.”

Following the captain's orders, we each drank a cup of whale oil. I expected to have to choke it down like pig slop, but it was surprisingly good. After this, we soaked our hard bread in oil. Along with Ninny's milk, it still wasn't enough, but I stopped feeling so weak and shaky.

During the day, Dexter and I went hunting. Armed with har-poons and blubber knives, we scouted round within sight of our camp, as stealthy as we knew how to be. But nothing moved. Nothing breathed. Nothing lived in this desert of ice. We came to realize that it really didn't snow much here. Truly, it was an Arctic desert. What snow there was, though, didn't melt, instead rising and swirling in a blinding whiteness with every gust of wind.

Ten days after we'd come ashore (I cut notches daily in one of the casks), while I sawed wood into fire-sized pieces, Elizabeth approached. Her nose was pink and peeling, her skin chapped, dusted with soot. Shadows were stamped beneath her eyes like half-moons. Two yellow braids snaked out from her hood.

“I've never thanked you for saving my life.”

I flushed, still sawing. “It's what any man would have done.”

“But they didn't. You were the only one who stayed behind to help me.”

“Dexter would have, if he'd known.”

“Nick—” She paused.

“Aye.”

“I want to go home.” I looked up from my sawing.

“I don't want to be here anymore,” she continued, blinking back tears. “I wasn't meant to be here.”

“None of us were.”

“It's all a mistake.” She brushed her mitten across her face, then looked straight at me with those cornflower-blue eyes, her chin quivering. “Are we going to get out of here? Alive, I mean?”

I wanted to tell her everything would be fine, that a lead would open in the ice tomorrow, and then we'd be on our way to safety. That a seal would pop up and we'd have meat to eat. And blubber. But somehow that's not what came out. “No mat-ter what happens, I'll never leave you.”

She sniffed, fiddling with one of her braids, seeming to think about what I'd just said. What it meant. “I'm worried about my father.”

“I know. Me too.”

“What if he dies?”

“Don't think about it, Elizabeth. Just don't think about it. Brings bad luck, it does.”

“First my brother, then my mother, then Prince Albert, and now my father. I hate the sea. It takes everything I love.
Everything.
” She turned away.

I set down my saw, turned her to face me, wrapping my arms round her. I put my cheek against hers, patting her back, as if that would somehow whisk us home to New Bedford.

“I'm scared, Nicholas.”

“Me too.”

We stood there a long time, arms wrapped round each other. Pressed cheek to cheek. I thought,
If everything can stay like it is right now, we'll be all right.

But of course, nothing stays like it is.

I know that now.

I had a terrible singing voice, but sing I did. Dexter lay on his back staring into nothing. Elizabeth fingered her ivory figure of Prince Albert and looked a million miles away. Thorndike, his face tanned and weather-worn, simply watched Elizabeth as if he'd never seen her before and was trying to figure out who she was. We'd just eaten our meager meal of hard bread, whale oil, and goat's milk.

This place could use some cheering
, I figured, and so, without another thought, I started singing, loud and off-key. They all blinked in surprise.
“'Tis advertised in Boston, New York and Buffalo, five hundred brave Americans, a-whaling for to go, singing …”
I stopped, frowning. “What are you waiting for? C'mon, join in.”

Dexter rolled his eyes but started singing:
“Blow, ye winds in the morning, and blow, ye winds, high-igh! Clear away your running gear, and blow, ye winds, high-o! They send you to New Bedford, that famous whaling port, And give you to some land sharks to board and fit you out….”

Meanwhile, Elizabeth came and sat next to me, smiling as she began to sing.
“The skipper's on the quarterdeck a-squinting at the sails, When up aloft the lookout sights a school of whales. ‘Now clear away the boats, my boys, and after him we'll travel, But if you get too near his fluke, he'll kick you to the devil!' …
C'mon, Father, sing like you used to! Remember? When I used to play the piano?”

I caught the expression on Thorndike's face. It was that same look of defeat I'd seen in his eyes when he lay under the main-mast. Raw pain. One by one, beginning with mine, our voices trailed off into silence. Thorndike turned away.

The rest of us exchanged looks. Dexter shrugged, ran a hand through his hair, pulled his cap on tight, and rolled over as if to
go to sleep. Elizabeth gazed at her father, placed her carving of Prince Albert in her pocket, and lay down too. I sighed, my attempt at cheering folks smashed all to heck. I stoked the fire, blew out the oil lamp, and lay down beside Dexter.