Voyage of Ice (19 page)

Finally, sick of telling him to shut up, Sweet flung aside his pipe and lit into Briggs, giving him a black eye and a fat lip that stuck out so far that for three days Briggs had to pour water into his mouth from above if he wanted a drink. After that, Briggs didn't say anything. Just stared at Elizabeth. Licked his lips. Stared and stared.

It was Christmas. I lay awake, knowing it wasn't time to get up yet. Outside was still and terrible quiet, as if the Arctic held its breath. It had usually been at this time of morning that Ninny had bleated to be milked. I missed Ninny. I missed Aunt Agatha, too. I imagined her bustling down the stairs into the parlor to find Dexter and me under the Christmas tree, poking packages. I imagined her saying, “So I expect ye'll want to open them? Well, Dexter and Nicholas Robbins, not before ye've had your porridge and not before you're dressed and scrubbed.” I felt the familiar press of hot tears that came whenever I thought of home. Would I ever see it again?

After setting more wood on the fire, I lay back down, already frozen to the bone. Beside me, Elizabeth stirred. “You awake?” I whispered, trying not to disturb Dexter and Garret.

“Aye.”

“I have something for you.”

“You do? For me?”

“I made it.” From my pocket I pulled out a gift, wrapped in sailcloth and tied with hemp. “Merry Christmas.”

She untied the bow and unwrapped the cloth, eyes gleaming in the firelight. “Why, it's a wood statue of my father.”

“Aye. Standing and a-smoking his pipe. For you to remember him by.”

“Thank you, Nicholas. I'll treasure it always.”

A warm glow spread through my middles as she looked at me.

“I have something for you too,” she said.

“For me?”

“Who else, silly?” She pulled out a pair of goatskin mittens from inside her fur parka. “Here. Merry Christmas, Nicholas Robbins.”

I smiled. It was a good gift and a sad gift, all at the same time. “Thank you. I really need them.” I tried them on, satisfied that they were a good fit.

So we lay there, each admiring our gifts, Elizabeth caressing the lines of the statue. The legs, the hat, the pipe… She sighed. “It's like I can smell the tobacco smoke right now.”

I sniffed the air. Aye, it strangely reeked of tobacco smoke.

Then I heard a scrape of boot outside the shelter, a rum-maging of something, and Henry Sweet's voice bellowing, “All hands! All hands on deck! We've got ourselves a situation!”

The hard bread was gone. Every last crumb. Gone.

“One of ye has stolen the biscuit!” Sweet marched up and down the line of us men. “If ye return it now, I'll pretend it never happened. But if we find it on ye, or if ye gets fat and blubbery while the rest of us poor folks starves thin as a rail, why, you'll wish ye never heard the name o' Henry Sweet, by fire, and that's the truth of it!”

Of course no one said anything, but we all stared at Briggs. Briggs gave us a dark look and curled his hand into a fist. “First man that accuses me gets it.”

“Shut your trap, Briggs, I've had enough of ye,” growled Sweet. “Search the camp, boys.”

An hour later, after lighting every oil lamp, turning the camp upside down and inside out, and poking round for places the hard bread could have been buried, we gathered back round Sweet.

Nothing. No biscuit, nothing.

Sweet poked tobacco into his pipe and set it alight. The ici-cles hanging from his mustache and eyebrows glowed orange. “I don't know 'bout the rest of ye fellows, but I'm 'bout ready to eat me pipe. We've got to double our efforts for hunting. Get ready to go within the hour. And if I find anyone keeping what he caught to himself, he'll be what's in the stewpot. Now fetch me a whale, boys. Dismissed.”

When I returned to the shelter, Elizabeth declared, “I'm going hunting with you.”

My jaw flapped open.
A woman go hunting? Elizabeth? What does she know about hunting?
I shook my head. “I—I don't think that's a good—”

“You can either come with me or not, Nicholas Robbins, I don't care, but I'm not staying here acting like I don't have legs and arms and a brain like the rest of you. I'm going to fetch me some food, and that's that. Now are you coming or not?” She moved to the entrance, and I realized she was all ready to go, knapsack on her back, whale lance in her hand. Two blond braids dangled out from under her hood. Her jaw was set, and on her face was a look of the purest determination I'd ever seen.

I licked my lips, aware that both Garret and Dexter were lis-tening beside me, saying nothing, just listening and probably waiting to hear what intelligent thing I'd say to her to make her change her mind.

“Uh—well,” I stammered, my face hot as a boiling trypot. “Uh—well, all right, I guess.”

“Then it's settled. Grab your things, Nicholas. I swear my teeth are going to fall out unless I get something to chew.”

Elizabeth and I didn't do any better or worse at hunting than any-one else. Fact was, for the next two weeks, all we had to eat between eleven people was our usual whale oil and a young seal. And we didn't even kill it. It was dead already and partially eaten by a bear, likely. The bear had peeled the skin and blubber from the seal, leaving the red meat. We cooked it and stored it frozen. It made for a couple mouthfuls a day.

One day Elizabeth and I hacked down into a tundra pond, hoping to find fish. Took us two days, even with Dexter and Garret's help, and by the end of it, all we found in the bottom of the pond was more tundra. The pond was frozen solid. “Tundra, anyone?” Dexter had joked.

But no one laughed. Garret just tossed down his harpoon and stomped off.

Another day Elizabeth and I climbed over the jumble of ice ridges and prowled the sea ice, setting pieces of wood atop the ice as markers to guide us back to camp. Elizabeth, whose ears and eyes I learned were very keen, heard a breath behind her and then spotted a nose poking through the ice. “Seal,” she whispered.

By the time we crept over, the seal was gone, the tiny hole only a circle of rippling slush. I stood poised over the hole, iron drawn back, waiting for it to breathe again. Five minutes … Ten … How long could a seal hold its breath? My muscles burned. My arm wobbled. Just as the iron began to drop, Elizabeth took the same position with her lance, her eye hungry as a hunter's, her jaw set. For many hours we took turns like that, waiting for the seal to breathe again. For the sound of exhaling. For a quiver in the iced-over slush. “It has to breathe again,” I whispered.

“Of course it does, Nicholas.” Elizabeth's voice sounded
drawn and thin. “But don't you think it has more than one breathing hole? Likely it's miles away by now.”

It was a cold, long, seal-less, hungry, hungry day.

It came like a thief in the night. A fox. Fur white as winter, eyes aglow in the light of the fire, it stealthily snapped up an old hen bone lying outside the shelter entrance and slipped away before either Elizabeth or I could react.

“Hey!” I shouted. “He stole our bone!”

“Never mind about that! Grab your iron and let's go!”

Elizabeth was already on her feet. “Hurry, before he disappears!”

Like tomcats after a mouse, we seized our weapons and dashed out of camp. At once, air stabbed my lungs like ice shards. A rainbow halo surrounded the Arctic moon. Stars gleamed, scattered like silver dust. The tundra was still, motionless, except for the fox that trotted fifty yards away, glancing back every few steps. Chest heaving, black spots dancing before my eyes, I deter-mined to catch him. We ran and ran, seeming to grow no closer, my legs beginning to give way, when, suddenly, he vanished.

“Must be his den!” said Elizabeth, still running, gasping for breath.

We hurried to where we'd last seen the fox. Sure enough, a shadowy hole gaped in the snow like an open mouth.

“He's down there.” Elizabeth peered into the burrow, breathing hard. “Hiding.”

“Now what?”

She stood, holding her lance like a spear. “We dig.”

Several hours later, we returned to camp. A group of men, including Dexter and Garret, sat round a fire, drinking whale oil and spinning yarns. At our approach, Dexter stopped midyarn and stared. They all did.

Without a word, Elizabeth and I strode into the circle, where she cast the fox onto the ground, its throat stained crimson. She then hunched down by the fire, yanked off her mittens, and rubbed her hands over the flame. I squatted beside her, doing the same, feeling the eyes of everyone on us. Finally, she looked up, seeming surprised, as if realizing for the first time that everyone was there and that they were all staring at her. “Well, fellows, what are you waiting for? Skin the fox and fix us a meal. I'm starved.”

A week later, long after the fox was consumed, the marrow licked and sucked out of every bony crevice, a storm blasted in from the north. All hunting parties were halted. We huddled in our shelters, freezing, bunched together for warmth. The wind shrieked through the shelter, finding every opening. Hoarfrost covered everything that wasn't flapping in the wind. The four of us lay in a row like sausages in a skillet—a frosty skillet, that is— squeezed so tight we had to roll over together or not at all. Even so, cold seeped through my clothing, through every thread, chilling my bones. My ears ached. I shook with hunger. Beside me, Elizabeth clutched the carving of her father in her mittened hand, hugging it to her chest, a distant look in her eyes.

What if the storm continues for weeks?
I wondered.
What, then? Will we all die in our shelters, starved and frozen stiff? Already Sweet and Garret have scurvy, their gums swollen and stinky. Sweet's leg is drawn up so bad only his toe touches the ground as he limps about.
Again, terror hunched in my chest like a ball of ice. Only now, I swear, sometimes I heard it laughing at me.

Aye.

Sometimes in the dead of night, when everyone was sleeping, I heard it howling with laughter. Like some ghost in the wind. Horrible and insane.

inished, Elizabeth?” I clutched the blubber knife and ducked my head down into my shoulders. I blinked against the snow. Ice pelted my cheeks.

“Not yet.” Elizabeth's voice came from behind me. Ever since the night of the polar bear attack, I always went with her when-ever she had to, well … do her womanly business. I turned my back and waited until she finished. Tonight she was taking a long time.

“You still there?” I asked, speaking loudly to be heard over the wind's constant howl.

“Don't peek.”

I heard her teeth chattering. “Don't let the bear eat you.”

“Very funny.”

“Holler if he drags you away.”

“Ha ha.”

I stomped my feet, which were already starting to turn numb.
By fire, it's freezing out here! What's taking her so long?
“Anything I can do to help?”

“Nicholas!”

“Sorry.”

I ran in place, thanking God for the millionth time that I wasn't built like a woman.

“Nick—listen. Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“Listen.”

I stopped running and bent my ear to the wind. There, faint on the wind, like a mermaid singing below the sea, was laughter. Why, it was the same laughter I'd heard many a night! Horrible and insane. “You—you can hear that too?”

“I've heard it every night for a long time.”

“I thought it was just me. What is it, do you suppose?”

I heard a rustle of clothing. “I—I don't know.” Then Elizabeth was tugging my arm. “C'mon, Nick, let's go back. I don't like it out here.”

I waited until Elizabeth was asleep.

Then, quiet as a whisper, I got up, took the lantern, and went outside as if it were my turn to do business.

But I had other plans.

The wind had picked up. It sliced through my clothes as though they were made of paper. I held up my lantern, smelling the whale oil, and peered out into the darkness. Beyond my bright circle of swirling snow, I could see nothing. It was hard snow, whipped up from the ground, never melting, dry and stinging like sand. I coughed. My breath gusted white.

After I stopped coughing, I stood and listened.

The flap of canvas.

The forever howl of wind.