The Voyage of the Dolphin (16 page)

They entered Lancaster Sound (Lat. 74° 13
ʹ
0
ʺ
N, 84°), the eastern entrance to the Northwest Passage, on the 27th of June, having found a channel of open water that led them the last hundred miles across the top of the central ice pack. Almost immediately, the weather took a turn for the worse, a northeasterly gale driving sleet and snow against them with such force that McGregor gave the order to reef the top sails. Within an hour the bow was encased in ice and they had no choice but to heave to for the rest of the day. Huddled around the mess hearth drinking cocoa made with condensed milk and rum, all agreed it was the coldest any of them had ever known.

‘When I was up on deck earlier the moisture in my eyes actually started to freeze,' Rafferty said. ‘It was agony.'

‘I know,' Fitzmaurice moaned. ‘I think I might be coming down with ice blink.'

Crozier thought about correcting him but left it. He wondered how far the temperature had fallen. He'd had his first encounter with real cold when he was seven, the severe winter of nineteen hundred and four. His father had taken him sledging in the hills and over the course of the afternoon his boots had filled with snow. He had ignored the discomfort because he was having fun, but by dusk the magnitude of pain was astonishing and by the time they arrived home he fully understood the meaning of the phrase ‘frozen to the bone'. It was a week before he had felt properly warm again.

‘How many layers are you wearing?' Phoebe asked.

‘Five,' Rafferty said. ‘And this coat.'

‘Six,' Crozier said.

‘Seven including my pyjamas.' Fitzmaurice held up his tin mug. ‘Would there be a drop more?'

McGregor entered, his eyelashes white, his moustache a fringe of tinkling icicles. He glared around.

‘Just wondering what the temperature is?' Crozier enquired.

McGregor removed a glove and lifted the jug Fitzmaurice had just emptied. He grimaced and set it down again. He headed for the door.

‘No f—ing idea. Thermometer's f—ing frozen.'

In the early hours the wind began to moderate and by mid-morning the day was bright, with brilliant white clouds huge against the purest cobalt. The ice was drifting against them, in the direction of Baffin Bay, and they progressed with caution through loose pack and scattered fields of small bergs. On the chart, the Sound, which was free of islands and offshore shoals, averaged around forty miles in width but at times land seemed barely a league away and at others a hundred. A range of mountains, some of them a couple of thousand feet high, sparkled along the length of the southern side.

Crozier, taking a turn in the crow's nest that night while Harris slept, marvelled at the fiery gold of the peaks in the rays of a sun that did not set. The icebergs too glittered with many hues as the light changed: lime, indigo, crimson; whilst the vast mosaic of ice and water reflected the shimmer of the sky all the way to the far mirage of the horizon. There was an unearthly stillness at this hour that defied explanation. Why, he asked himself, should there be a difference when there was perpetual daylight? But there
was
: like a withdrawal, an intake of breath. Gazing out across the silent, gleaming tracts of ice, listening to the groans of the paralysed ocean – the scale of it, the majestic indifference – Crozier wondered if he'd ever felt more alive.

The next day they followed a lead that took them close to the northern shore. Here, the floes were thick with seals and the pools on top of the pack full of little auks. From the cliffs, colonies of eider duck fished for urchins and scallops. There were several bowhead sightings, and McGregor speculated that there might be whaling ships in the vicinity.

Around noon, as they were pushing back towards the centre of the Sound, conditions deteriorated, with strong winds churning up a heavy cross-sea and obliging them to hook on to a stable floe. Snow squalls arrived then, intensifying through the night, and by morning they were stuck fast, with the lead behind them closed over and no leeway even to attempt splitting the ice under steam power. There was nothing for it, the skipper said, but to sit it out.

 

In the afternoon, keen to observe the wildlife at closer quarters, Crozier proposed an expedition onto the pack ice, an idea the other three took up enthusiastically after the long spell of confinement. After an extended rummage in the Savage Newell hampers they descended the ship's ladder and stood stamping the crusty ground in their walking boots. Doyle, armed with a rifle, joined them, followed by the cabin boy. A few minutes later a sledge, to transport the Magiflex and any game Doyle might bag, landed with a thump beside them in the snow. At the last minute it was decided that Bunion would benefit from some Husky-style exercise and he was lowered down in a rope cradle, his stumpy legs waving beetle-like in the air. On his release he immediately hopped onto the sledge and refused to get off. With a sigh, the cabin boy took up the reins.

The sky had cleared and the expanse before them sparkled under a halo-wreathed sun: ‘God, it's bright.' Crozier shielded his eyes. ‘I hope we don't go snow-blind.'

‘This is definitely not going to help my ice blink,' Fitzmaurice said, wriggling onto his newly-acquired shooting stick.

‘Ah, I nearly forgot.' Rafferty pulled from his pocket a tangle of metal-framed goggles fitted with glass of various colours. ‘I found these in one of the trunks. Apparently they're experimental models. Our sponsors would like a report on them.'

He handed them round, retaining the red lenses for himself. After a brief tussle with Phoebe over the blue ones, Fitzmaurice settled for yellow, while Crozier took green. There was a brown pair left over but neither Doyle nor the cabin boy was interested so Phoebe attached them to the ship's dog, who seemed pleased enough.

To the east and west, immense floes had collided and ridden up over each other forming uninviting ridges, but to the north the pack was smooth and flat for several miles, culminating in a belt of hills or icebergs in front of which appeared to be a dark stretch of open water. It was towards this that the party headed. After a few hundred yards they came to a crack in the ice that extended a long way in either direction. It was no more than a couple of feet in width but it required them to manhandle the sledge over the gap, Bunion sitting high and sniffing the breeze like some bug-eyed sultan on an imperial litter.

As seemed to be the case of late, distance was deceptive, the walk being much further than they had anticipated. After a couple of hours they stopped to eat some biscuit and smoked ham, and to rest the cabin boy. Crozier scanned the horizon for birds. He was itching to see something rare — a grey phalarope (
Phalaropus fulicarius)
say, or a willow ptarmigan
(Lagopus lagopus)
. So far it was just the usual guillemots and terns, though sometimes it was hard to tell with the goggles on, the world, in Crozier's case, appearing as though viewed from inside a wine bottle. For Fitzmaurice the vista was one of sepia eternity, and for Phoebe of moving through a multi-dimensional sky. Rafferty's pink wonderland, meanwhile, was making him feel oddly optimistic.

They pressed on and at last arrived at the edge of the plain. Before them, across a quarter of a mile of open water, a number of large icebergs had fused together to form a continuous range, seabirds nesting in profusion along their ridges and crags. Below, on a network of ice pans connected to the main pack by a narrow causeway, hundreds of seals sprawled and lolled amid a holiday-camp cacophony of splashing and honking. As the party stood there, all of them at a loss for words, a bowhead surfaced, suddenly and massively nearby, its fountain of expelled froth reaching them as fine mist.

‘Well,' Crozier turned and smiled. ‘Aren't you glad you came?'

They were. It was agreed they would spend an hour before returning to the ship, so while Rafferty and Phoebe had a stroll along the water's edge, Fitzmaurice tinkered with the Magiflex, and Doyle and the cabin boy set up their fishing gear over an ice hole, watched sleepily from the sledge by Bunion. Crozier took the field glasses and ventured along the causeway as far as it was safe. The seals, unused to humans and having no reason to fear them, regarded him benignly.

Fulmars,
Brunnich's, little auks, skuas and terns as expected
, he wrote in his notebook,
but also a few Arctic (or
Hoary) redpolls (Carduelis hornemanni), a Sabine's gull
(
Xema sabini
)
and, much to my delight, a group of phalaropes – unusual
in the bird kingdom (remember to tell Phoebe) as it
's the female that sports the colours and the submissive
male that's left to incubate her eggs. Eiders in
huge numbers, the males still in their winter plumage of
black, white and olive. No sign, unfortunately, of the spectacled
eider (Somateria fischeri) with its distinctive white eye patches. Large
groups of snow geese overhead, and several types of seal
around, including harp, bearded, and hooded.

Fitzmaurice loaded a plate into the Magiflex. He had more or less dispensed with the instructions — it was such hard work and besides, after the hot spring incident it was fifty-fifty, he reckoned, as to whether the device would actually yield any more pictures. He slid the film holder into place
(fig
. 7)
, flinched, as usual, at the pistol-crack of the springback mechanism
(fig. 8
) and cocked the shutter
(
fig. 193)
. Crozier was on his way back but the other two were still some distance away so Fitzmaurice swung the camera round and took a quick study of Doyle and the cabin boy peering into their fishing hole (they were wearing Savage Newell hats so it counted).

‘Group portrait,' he announced as they convened. ‘With the icebergs and everything in the background. There behind the sledge. Mr Doyle, if you wouldn't mind?'

He showed the bosun how to release the shutter
(fig. 364)
, ordered the cabin boy out of shot, and took his place in the middle of the line-up. There was some jostling and bickering but finally they were ready. Bunion was woken and prodded into a sitting position.

‘Mr Doyle, if you please…'

The resulting image, should it ever reach the light of day, would show four young people standing in a landscape few of their years had ever seen and that they themselves were unlikely to witness again. Of the quartet only one, the female, was smiling; the males were serious or thoughtful or distracted by bird cries; the one in the centre had his arms folded in a self-important manner. The eyes would have told more of the story but none were visible, the glass in four pairs of goggles reflecting eight dazzling snowscapes in tinted miniature. As for the pale, squat dog on the sledge, its head was in sharp profile as it stared over its left shoulder at something outside the frame.

Crozier was first to notice the sound, thinking initially that it was the creak of the current beneath the pack, but then he saw the raised hackles.

‘What the hell's wrong with Bunion?'

‘Wait, wait,' Fitzmaurice hissed, ‘…seven, eight, nine, and…
ten
. Thank you Mr Doyle. Now, what was that?'

Bunion's growl had increased to the volume of a small engine. They turned in the direction of his gaze and gasped, more or less in unison. Bounding towards them along the causeway, head lowered and ears flattened, was a polar bear, a mature male of impressive dimensions. For a few moments they stood in shock, then Doyle sprinted for the rifle.

‘No need to panic folks,' Fitzmaurice told them. ‘It's that seal he's after, not us.'

A bull harp seal was dozing on the edge of the pack in a direct line between them and the approaching bear.

Phoebe looked dubious. ‘I hope you're right.'

‘Don't worry Phoebe, I'll protect you.' Rafferty put his arm around her but she shrugged it off.

Doyle slid the bolt of the rifle back. Bunion started to twitch. The seal, alerted by vibrations in the ice, started out of its reverie and rolled into the water in one motion. The bear, its eyes like hard black stones in compacted snow, did not falter.

‘Ah,' Fitzmaurice said. ‘Perhaps…'

‘Might I suggest running away?' Crozier said. The creature was now no more than twenty yards from them and its intent was clear.

‘Mr Doyle,' Fitzmaurice took a step back, ‘you may shoot at will.'

The bosun raised the rifle, took aim and squeezed the trigger. The shot went wide. He reloaded and fired again. A splash of blood appeared on the animal's shoulder, but apart from a brief flicker of surprise it was undeterred. Again the bolt was pulled back and released. This time there was no sound. Doyle gave a cry of desperation and began clawing at the firing mechanism. But it was too late.

The bear lumbered to a halt in a shower of ice crystals and, rearing up on its hind legs (the consensus later was that it topped nine feet in height), it gave a roar of such ravenous fury that each one of them felt their heart stop. The sound echoed to the edges of the plain, clearing the ice pans of seals and filling the sky with birds. The bear dropped back on all-fours and began to sway to and fro.

‘If we all run in different directions it might confuse it,' Crozier murmured. He had the distinct impression he had been singled out.

‘Fitz, stab it with your shooting stick, for Godsake.'

‘We're done for,' Phoebe said.

The beast lifted its massive head and let out another bellow. Its teeth were startlingly large and yellow in the black interior. It shifted its weight onto its haunches, gathering itself to launch forward, but just as it was about to spring, another pale-coloured, heavy-set entity hurtled through the air and landed with a thump, four-square on the ice. Bunion! With slavering lip and corrugated snout, the ship's dog let loose a flurry of barrel-chested barking that caused the bear to rear back in surprise. It unleashed a couple of warning swipes. Bunion's guttural outrage became a continuous howl. The bear shuffled backwards, still nonplussed, but then seemed to recover itself, leaning forward with an indignant snarl and sending its opponent tumbling across the pack in a welter of legs and ears. Bunion skidded to a stop, shivered, and was still. In a moment of suspension everyone, including the bear, stared at the immobile body.