The Solitude of Thomas Cave (11 page)

'This is no place for you. Nor for him most of all. Go back, go away! Why do you bring him here?'

It was she. He could have sworn that it was she. A shawl drawn about the child and over her head so that it hid her face,
but he knew her by the way she stood, with a gentle weight as if she had spread roots into the white ground. She stood quite
still, some few yards off, and a sudden gust of wind blew specks of snow on to the curve of her head and shoulders and into
the folds of the shawl. She did not lift her head to look at him but when he shouted her song stopped, the hum of the lullaby
she had been singing.

'Do you hear me? Go, in God's Name. Whatever kind of apparition you are, and I know that you are not Johanne, go.' Each word
hurt him as he spoke it.

Still she stood, still as a statue. Then at last she brushed away the snow that had gathered on her shawl and rearranged it,
wrapping its end tighter about the child that clung to her side, and when she had finished she took up another song, a livelier
song this one, in a stronger tone that carried well against the wind. A Danish song; he could not make out the words but it
was jaunty like a nursery rhyme or a playground chant. Again she wrapped the shawl and began to turn away, rocking the little
boy on her hip to the rhythm of the song, and the little boy pushed back the shawl so that he saw him for the first time,
and put out his head and beat his round fist against her chest and began to laugh.

How long ago had it been? Ten minutes, an hour? The work before him, the work that he has done this night, suggests that it
was longer, the surface of the table and the floor about him a curling sea of wooden parings. He feels the chisel in his hand,
how his palm is pressed into its shape, has been clenched about it for so long that it is hard to loosen his fingers and release
the wood. Yet he puts the tool down and stretches out his hand, and as he does so his own cruel shouts reverberate the louder
in his brain.

'Go, go, go!' he called into the wind, and the song still came back to him though he could see them no longer.

'Be gone!'

He sank down then on his knees on the polished crust of ice before the door of the tent and began to pray, formlessly at first,
stuttering 'Our Fathers', holding and re-uttering random phrases as if the simple repetition of church words was effective
incantation. Then the tears came slowly and froze on his beard and he began to speak what he knew of the service of burial.
Let him bury them, bury them again, bury even their memory in the snow. Let there be no more dreams, no more ghosts, no more
of superstition. Let there be no more before him than what he knows by his reason, the hard evidence of the material world.
Let survival be his sole intent. Ashes to ashes, ice to ice. His breathing had soothed with the order of the words, and the
luminosity of the sky faded until there was only a blink of green in the stars above the horizon, and the night became densely
black but he could not believe that she was gone.

'Go, God damn you! Go to the Devil. I will not have you here!'

13

T
RULY THE LIGHT is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun.' I have read again on this twenty-seventh
day of February the lines of Ecclesiastes, and never I believe did any man since the Testament was written know the sun so
gloriously resurrected.

I do not know on which day I might first have seen it from my vantage point on the mountain. I have not been able to climb
again all these past days on account of my injury. All this week I have had the sense of the sun's closeness, the weather
each morning clear and full of promise, the colours of the sunrise holding in the sky the full length of a day, the light
falling gold and pink on the ice, and this light becoming so directional at noontime, gilding the mountaintops and throwing
their shadows across the clefts behind them, that I must conclude that its orb would already have been visible from the heights.
Down here where my cabin lies, just a little above the level of the frozen sea, where I hobble about my tasks with a crutch
made up out of whalebone and my ankle, which remains too swollen to fit into a boot, swaddled in bearskin, I saw not even
a slice of it until this day. And then seeing it I left my work, and it drew me, hobbling down the hard path my movements
have beaten into the snow, down to the edge of the land and out some short distance on to the ice of the bay where the widest
view may be obtained of the southern horizon.

Never has a sight been more welcome, never surely more beautiful: the rosy sky, the soft streaks of yellow in it, the glow
that lit from below the few skimming clouds, the sun itself, and all that reflected again on the ice below. My words cannot
begin to convey my elation at that moment, my exhilaration that the predicted and sure event in which yet at the darkest moments
I had almost ceased to believe, had finally come to pass, my tearful relief which must have been akin to that of the women
who saw the stone rolled back and met a living man in the Garden of the Tomb.

The vision was over within minutes, the sun slipping away as eerily as it had come, down behind the curvature of the Earth.
And when it had gone the relief burst out in him, and he spread his legs and dug his crutch in firm, took in a great breath
and cried out, a great resounding holler fit to shatter all the ice.

And then.

Thomas Cave puts down his pen and reads back what he has written. There is falseness in the words, but does the falseness
lie in them or between them? Writing, like speech, is part performance and even when it is true it is not the truth. For he
has not written all of it. He will not write the all of it. How the cry died. How the last echo faded off the land behind
him as the colours left the sky. How elation turned, and faith was no longer there. How he wept again then, wept on and on,
a crumpled man.

He wept until the tears were ice.

And then at last he picked up his crutch and hobbled back, and the pain in his ankle as he put his weight on it was the one
vivid point in all the emptiness around and within him.

Fool, he tells himself. Foolish Cave, you should have known. The light of the sun is not spring. Winter is not done with you
yet. Survival does not lie in the heavens but in a man's patience, above all.

Even when the darkness was at its worst he had not known such bleak monotony as comes to him during these last months of the
winter. The days stretch, each one of them almost tangibly longer than the last, but they do not warm. The equinox comes and
is passed, a day of such cold uniform light that almost he wishes to have the dark back. That his soul may sleep, that the
sun had not come to wake it. That he might but lie down on the ice through the empty day and sleep.

April first. I record here that according to my calendar March has run into April, yet still there is no change save for this
lengthening of the light. Can this indeed be April? Such hope in the word as I have always known it, joy and spring and the
rise of sap there just in the word alone, but here in this place it is not any April deserving of the name.

I live. I have food for some weeks more. The days grow, but that is all. Time is barren. I have determined that I shall cease
from writing until life stirs inside it.

14

W
HITE ON WHITE.

The fox is hard to see even three yards off, just a
ripple of white in all the white as it searches through the snow-covered heap of bones and scraps that has grown all winter
outside the tent. Thomas Cave constructs a trap like those he has made in the past for shipboard rats, using split scrimshaw
whalebone that is strong but fine and flexible and springy, baits it with pieces of meat gone rancid in his store.

The fox was hungry. Next morning it is caught. He hangs it to freeze and dry three days in the biting wind and cooks it then
with plums and raisins. He takes up his log once more and records the act, and the flavour of the meat.
The meat of the white fox is sinewy and strong, a rough meat but fresh.

A flutter of white is a bird in the snow. It is so long since he has seen a bird. He knows it as a ptarmigan, recognises now
its odd rattling call. He has heard this sound off and on for days, a sound that is almost mechanical and that has made him
look over his shoulder and unnerved him. Strange soft white bird, so comfortable it looks on the snow. When it is still, only
the line of black that runs from its eye to its beak betrays it. Though he has his musket in his hand he does not take it
up to aim. There is too much promise in the sight.

He begins to see bears frequently now, coming close up to the tent but also in the distance as they cross the ice, the more
easily distinguishable as their fur shows stained and yellowish on bright days against the snow. There are lone bears but
often pairs, mothers with their cubs, and when he hunts and kills a mother he is both astonished and distressed to see the
devotion with which the cub stays by and must be killed itself rather than leave its mother's side. Over the course of the
winter he has developed an admiration for these beasts which the harshest conditions do not deter, and which seem to roam
so far and wide, appearing sometimes from across the ice as if they have skated across oceans to reach the island. He sees
that they move on the ice like skaters, with long slipping steps, and as the ice begins to melt he is amazed to observe how
light they can be in motion, escaping his gun at times by cutting across ice far thinner than he himself would dare to walk
on.

At last the thaw becomes a perceptible process although there are days still, sometimes a week together, of blizzard and cold
equal to any that he has previously experienced. It is the sky that first tells him that the ice has begun to break} up out
beyond the bay, dark streaks of what Captain Duke had called water sky, revealing by the intensity of its reflected colour
wherever the darkness of clear sea, rather than the paleness of ice, lies beneath. Out there it is evident also that the sea
has begun to move, for daily he witnesses the effects of the tide as its flow and ebb varies the pressure on the ice in the
bay and causes it to creak and move and in places to crack open. He sees that ice rots before it dissolves, its texture becoming
soft and spongy before it disintegrates into porridge and slush. Where it breaks and pools are revealed, the exposed sea reeks
steam into the sunlight as if it had boiled beneath.

With the melt a drab and dirty world which he had almost forgotten begins to re-emerge. There is seaweed, slimy and almost
black in colour, which the bears claw up on the strand, and patches of anaemic moss. There is the carcase of a fox that must
have frozen as the winter began and become buried in the snow. In the area around the tent the objects of the whale station
once more show themselves, and also his own detritus: not only the bones and scraps but every sausage of faeces he has carried
out that winter and dumped beside the path. He begins to be aware now as he approaches his lodging of its smell, a smell that
has become a constant of his enclosed existence, a fetid and manly smell of smoke and blubber and long-hung meat.

As May reaches its close there are endless days of crystal clarity when the sun at its height feels hot on his face as if
it would burn his skin through. He closes his eyes to its brightness, relishes the heat on his lids, on his temples and cheeks
as if it touched the bone beneath. One of these days, a day that is fine as the warmest spring day in England, he does at
last a thing he has been thinking to do for weeks. He takes off his clothes in the sun, not only the boots and hat and furs
of which he often now divests himself, but jacket and breeches, and linen that is grey and stained and comes off like old
fruit peel. The skin he exposes is extraordinarily naked beneath the sunlight, so white that it is almost blued where the
shadows fall beneath angular bones, in parts coloured darker where clothing has rubbed and it has been chafed and hardened.
He observes his body almost objectively: the pale stomach and ribbed chest, his legs like sticks with a wiry mass of hairs
on them, his thin arms hollowed at the elbows, hands at their ends that look huge and black as he turns them before his eyes,
the dark tidemarks at his wrists, the other tidemark of filth that he cannot see but can only feel where the skin on his neck
beneath his beard is both greasy and engrained with dirt.

He wraps his naked body in a cloak and walks down to a hole in the ice close to the shore. There for the first time he washes,
rubbing himself until every part of his body tingles, and it is an extraordinary hard pleasure. He takes up the cloak again
and returns to the tent. In his cabin there is other linen, clean linen. But first he throws a broad plank down on the dazzling
patch of snow before his door and lies on the smooth wood in the sunshine and basks himself dry.

When he lies on his back he must put a hand across his eyes to shield them from the brightness, to give himself a filtered
view that is criss-crossed by the passage of birds overhead. There are so many birds now, moving in gigantic flocks, thousands
of birds at a time that come in from the south forming a band in the sky that seems to reach to the very horizon; he sees
them approach at first as so many black specks, like particles blown in the smoke from a fire, separating and weaving and
drawn together again, hears then the distant uproar of their cries coming closer, long before he can distinguish the individuals,
the beat of their wings. He remembers how astonished he had been when he saw the first flock of seabirds, a little flock sudden
as an apparition, no more than half a score of birds twittering on a rock on the mountainside. Later that same day a second
group arrived, then others in the days that followed, until after a week the mountain and the glacier behind were entirely
covered with birds, and they remained two days and then as unexpectedly as they had come they were gone, and he did not know
if it was a change in the weather that drove them away or some purpose, some instinct they had that they must move on and
breed on some ground even farther north.

Soon as the weather cleared again other flocks came in their wake, eiders and guillemots and other birds he has known at sea,
and an innumerable flock of some grey bird the size of a pigeon for which he had no name, and he was as strange to them as
they to him, for the birds showed no fear of him or caution and he could almost pluck them out of the sky or off the ground
with his hand. He walked among them where they went to nest on the rocks that were now bare of snow, and there were so many
of them that they darkened the sky above his head and he could hear nothing beyond their clamour. The little pigeon birds
in particular were not much to eat, so little flesh they had on them, but he used their carcases to bait his traps and caught
the foxes that were now to be found in numbers surprising for animals of such solitary nature, attracted to the coast he guessed
by the presence of the birds.

Now that the winter is over,
he has written in his log,
there is such an abundance of creatures and species here that it altogether boggles the mind, such numbers coming off the
sea that you had not thought so many creatures could have survived and reproduced themselves since Noah's Flood.

There were reindeer corning in, corning up to the tent and looking at him without any appearance of fear, and they were lean
as sticks after the winter and hardly worth the killing. He did not know from where they had come, and marvelled that they
came at all for there was so little for them to feed on at first, the vegetation so recently stripped of snow that it had
not even greenness to it yet every patch of pale moss on the mountainside behind the shore was marked with the glossy piles
of their droppings.

With such plenty about him he saw that he could choose what he might hunt, knowing that whatever he required for his survival
was so infinitesimal that its loss could hardly be reckoned. He phrased a prayer of thanksgiving in his mind and remembered
how Adam had lived alongside the beasts in Eden, and made it his rule to kill no more than he needed. Gulls dived so close
to his head that their wingtips brushed his hair but he made no attempt to knock them down; their eggs alone were enough to
feed five thousand. And then there were the seals that came soon as the ice had broken apart and given them passage, these
too in huge herds that played together in the water and then drew themselves on to the beach, steaming and snorting and jostling
one another like cattle crowded into a market. The company of the seals touched him as that of none of the other creatures
had, some kinship about them that made him at once warm and alone. It was their great uncanny eyes, so redolent of human expression
as they popped their heads out from the ice and watched him. They made him conscious of himself as he had not been since he
had last seen men, as he had thought he could not be save before another human being.

He walked out on the ice as far as he dared and crouched down on his hunkers before the ice holes and gazed back at them,
eye to eye, and at last he began to speak to them, beneath his breath, just for the relief of it, and then one day one of
them popped up its head before him and fixed him with such a very human look that he spoke to it aloud. He greeted it and
asked it from where it had come, and it turned its head around and looked at him again as if there were indeed words forming
there behind its eyes. He laughed at himself then for his fantasy and took himself back to his cabin. Later he went down to
the very same hole and this time he had brought his violin with him that he had at last taken down from its pegs on the wall,
and he had prepared the bow and tuned its untouched strings as best he could. Seals loved music, the sailors said; there were
seals in tales that had human souls and deep under water where men could not see them they danced.

He stood at the edge of the hole in the ice and played, softly, waveringly at first, the notes creaking out of disuse. It
was so very long since he had played. So long since he had heard music of any kind. And yet it still existed, he could bring
it out of himself. He played to the empty hole and as he did so the tears rose in him and flooded out from his eyes. He held
the instrument tighter to his chest then and played the harder, played now from deep within him, played to rouse and exorcise.
Suddenly there was a splash and a pop in the hole before him as a seal came up and blew out a spray of water. He played on
until his fingers were sore, and took a bow in a second of silence, and not until that was done did the seal dip and disappear.

With the presence of the seals it is as if I live once again in a populated world. Their barks fill the air, and the yelps
of the pups that begin to be born now and grow and play at their mothers' sides between the rocks on the strand. The cry of
a seal pup is more akin to the cry of a human child than any voice I have otherwise known. Massed together the sound is something
like the yells of a mob of children playing, but singly and in distress a man could not I think tell it from the call of fear
a human child makes to its parent. I know of no cry so plaintive to my ear as the cry of a seal pup left by its mother alone
among the mass. It lies with just the narrow cleft, the idea of a space between itself and all the rest that are strange to
it, and reaches up its head and calls that very human and personal cry that seems directed precise as a name, to its mother
and to no other. I think that the sense of hearing owned by these beasts must be very acute, for they seem to react to music
and even to hear it and be drawn to it from under water, and come then to the surface and crane their necks to listen.