The Voyage of the Dolphin (18 page)

Prospect Island, Sir Hamilton Coote had neglected to mention, did not fling its arms wide to visitors. It took them nearly two days to find a landing spot, on the southeastern corner: a tiny shingle beach at the foot of a steep gully between the cliffs, reachable by a long thin floe that stretched out into the bay. They anchored for the night and the next morning two sledges were dropped onto the ice followed by sheaths of heavy canvas, tent poles, climbing equipment, and enough provisions to sustain four people for a week. Fitzmaurice also insisted on taking the Magiflex, and Harris provided a rifle. At the last minute McGregor threw Bunion into the mix. (‘Wee bastard's happier on dry land, and yis might need a watchdog.') This required the addition of canine rations, and while these were being organised, Fitzmaurice remembered he needed tobacco and some O'Hara's lip balm, and Crozier went back on board to fetch a couple of books. At last, they were ready.

‘Don't be buggerin' about,' McGregor warned. ‘Yon sea won't be long freezing up again.'

They departed, hauling their twin burdens up the slope. The going was difficult, and more than once they had to stop to secure spilled equipment, but at last they found themselves on the edge of a treeless plain of scrubby tundra streaked with snow and ice crust. A few miles to the northwest was a cluster of foothills above which towered a range of mountains, their snow-clad peaks dull beneath a sunless sky.

‘I'd say our man's up there,' Fitzmaurice pointed at the nearest and smallest of the mountains. ‘Do you see the little dip at the top, like on the map? If the map's right, of course.'

‘I still don't understand why they had to drag him up there,' Phoebe said. ‘Why didn't they just leave him on the beach?'

‘Well, for one thing there isn't really a beach, as such, and for another… Actually, I have no idea.'

‘Maybe they just wanted him to have a view,' Rafferty said. ‘He'd been used to one all his life after all.'

They contemplated this as they gazed at the flat distance before them. Nothing moved. The air was still and breezeless. A skein of geese straggled overhead. The birds were up high, but the sound of their wingbeats was intimate in the silence.

‘Nice day to go in search of death,' Phoebe murmured.

 

They set off across the plain, following the tracts of crunchy snow, but occasionally having to tug the sledges across patches of bare ground. Bunion sat on the one pulled by Crozier, between bags of tent poles, staring straight ahead, serious in his brown goggles. His tartan waistcoat, ripped during the polar bear encounter, had been repaired by Phoebe, who was unable to resist adding a handsome fur collar that gave him an oddly prosperous look. At lunchtime they stopped and melted ice in a primus stove to make tea, and ate salt-caribou and Jacob's Cream Crackers. They had reached the foothills and the change in gradient was beginning to tell. Rafferty, gauging the forthcoming climb, glanced back at Bunion, who was gnawing on a chunk of dried narwhal.

‘You know, that dog is bloody heavy, I'm damned if I'm going to haul him up there.'

Bunion's ears twitched.

‘Rafferty's right,' Crozier said. ‘He'll have to walk.'

Bunion ceased his chewing.

‘Seems fair enough to me,' Fitzmaurice said.

They all tried to ignore the stare from behind the impenetrable lenses. It was unnerving.

Phoebe finished her tea. ‘Perhaps we shouldn't be too hasty. After all, he
is
a hero. And he
is
here for our protection. He needs to conserve his strength.'

The dog scrutinised them a moment longer, then turned back to its lunch.

Rafferty lit a cigarette. ‘We'll see.'

A few hours later they were nearing the top of the hill and Bunion appeared to be enjoying the vista from the back of the sledge. Rafferty, who had run out of swear words, sparkled with sweat despite the cold. He stopped to mop his face, pushing his goggles up to wipe his eyes. The hill was not particularly steep but large rocks and outcrops, and the fact that they were towing sledges, forced them to follow a meandering route. Wildlife was scarce: the odd snow bunting and ptarmigan, and once, skittering away across the slope, a short-eared hare that Bunion growled at but was too lazy to chase.

‘Count yourself lucky you've got Phoebe on your side,' Rafferty told the dog. Stepping out of the reins he moved off a short distance and, standing in front of a boulder, began the process of relieving himself – always a delicate procedure at sub-zero temperatures. The others were some way above him and he watched them dragging their burden, inching along, tiny against the white radiance of the hillside. Once again he was struck by an intense consciousness, like an echoing in his head, of their peculiar situation. They were in the middle of nowhere. At the end of the earth. Looking for bones. He stared up at the sky, which was so pale as to be almost transparent, and several moments passed before he came to, jolted by a sound behind him. He turned to see the sledge, dislodged from inertia by a shift of dog haunch, set jerkily off down the slope.

‘Bunion!' he shouted. He made a lunge but slipped, landing on his back and skidding several yards. Below him, the runaway vehicle was picking up speed, Bunion, apparently unfazed, still in position despite the bumpiness of the ride. From higher up Rafferty could hear the panicked yells of the others. He scrambled to his feet and took a few more sidesteps down the hill, then stopped and stared in horror. The sledge, whose pace had been restrained by its diagonal trajectory, had swerved onto a more vertiginous path and was hurtling inexorably towards the largest of the overhangs they had bypassed on the way up. It hit the hummock at peak velocity and rocketed high into the air, its contents scattering in all directions. Bunion, his shape clearly delineated against the afternoon sky, executed a series of somersaults and a final pirouette before falling out of sight, his goggles flashing once in the sun.

Phoebe wasn't hungry. Or at least she said she wasn't. It was a protest. In fact, she was ravenous. Who wouldn't be after a day like that. But she wanted the others to know that what they had done was wrong. They should have gone back for Bunion. He couldn't possibly have survived, they said – the drop beneath the outcrop was a sheer hundred feet onto boulders and shale. But what if he
had
escaped – landed in a snow drift or snagged on a branch? And anyway, even if he
was
dead, didn't they owe him a decent burial? He
had
saved them from the polar bear after all. She watched them from the entrance of her tent and took some satisfaction from their misery. Fitzmaurice was slumped on his shooting stick, staring moodily into the distance while the other two attempted to coax a meal from the emergency rations.

The day had not gone according to plan. Not only had they lost the ship's dog, one of the sledges, and all their edible food, but establishing base camp had proved far more difficult than anticipated, hammering pegs into the iron-hard ground resulting in damaged fingers and frazzled tempers. By the time they fired up the primus it was midnight and, with the setting sun still obscured by cloud, they were working in murky twilight. The only spark of good fortune was the discovery that what they had climbed had turned out to be not a foothill but a shoulder of the mountain itself, making the following day a little easier.

‘What on earth
is
this stuff?' Rafferty was saying.

‘It's called “pemmican”.'

‘I know, but what
is
it?'

Crozier picked up the empty package and squinted at the label.

‘It's “a highly sustaining food made from albumen and fibrin of beef, animal fat, and extractives of meat”, if you must know.'

‘…Jaysus. Is there any chocolate?'

‘No.'

Below them, the plain they had traversed was in dark shadow, the edge of the island out of sight; behind them loomed the mountain, the cold blue glimmers of its muscular flanks daunting in the half-light. The wind was picking up, rattling through the canvas.

‘That is truly heinous.' Fitzmaurice tossed away the remains of his hoosh. ‘Time to turn in, I think.'

‘Goodnight Phoebe,' they called, but she did not reply.

 

The next morning there were drifts of snow against the rear of the tents. The sky hung low, obscuring the mountain peaks and casting a dull mauve tint over the rest of the landscape. After a breakfast of black tea and stale crackers, they stowed the excess equipment and packed their rucksacks with the remaining rations in order to leave the sledge unencumbered, and began their trek towards the second summit. The wind in the night had been northeasterly so the slopes had been spared the worst of the precipitation, and they took it in turns to haul.

As he climbed, Crozier began to feel the effects of a broken night's sleep. At one point he had been awoken by what he thought was the howling of a dog, and then lay, rigid, convinced there was someone walking around outside the tent. Through half-closed eyes he watched shadows moving on the canvas but could not tell whether they were real, or snow flurries, or an overflow of his dreams. And so it went on until he emerged, exhausted, into the dawn.

When he arrived at the top, some hours later and after several much-needed rests, the others were sitting on a hump of rock surveying a sweep of hillocks and ridges made treacherous by layers of crusted ice. The pinnacle of the mountain was still some distance off and obscured by mist. He could see at once that there was nothing in the immediate vicinity even remotely resembling a cairn. He joined them. No one spoke. They drank meltwater and crunched biscuits. A large whitish bird soared overhead, which Crozier thought might have been a gyrfalcon
(Falco rusticolus)
but he was too tired to rummage for the field glasses.

‘We'd better get cracking,' Fitzmaurice said at length. ‘I don't like the look of that sky.'

Above them the clouds glowed with an opaque yellowish light. The four of them straggled off in different directions. Beyond the far edge of the summit the higher mountains ranged out of sight into the north. Crozier trudged about, kicking at likely-looking bumps and knolls, but after an hour fatigue got the better of him and he perched on a boulder, giving in to the conviction that they must have the wrong mountain. Perhaps even the wrong island. He was cold. It struck him that at home it was high summer and he tried to imagine what he might otherwise be doing: strolling on a beach in Donegal or Antrim, sunning himself on Stephen's Green, eating ice cream in Portrush; and he thought of all the other young men, many of them younger than him, fighting for their lives at the Front. He would have to go, he realised, if the war wasn't over…

He looked up. Rafferty was calling and waving from the top of a far ridge. He could see Fitzmaurice jogging back. He turned. Phoebe was a little distance away, already hurrying towards him. He waited, his heart thumping, until she caught up and they approached together. When they arrived, the other two were at the foot of the ridge beside an elongated mound that was thickly encrusted with ice. A pole had been driven into one end of it from which hung the tattered remnants of an unidentifiable flag. They stood for a while, gazing at the object of their quest. Then Phoebe broke the silence.

‘Is that it?'

Fitzmaurice let out a bark of laughter.

‘Of course it is,' he said. ‘What in God's name else would it be?'

‘No, I mean… well, isn't it a bit small?'

The mound, now that she mentioned it, was by no means,
giant
.

‘Maybe he's in the foetal position,' Fitzmaurice said, deep uncertainty taking hold. ‘Quick, give me a hand.'

They hacked at the ice, uncovering the bare boulders, and began to dismantle the cairn, which had been constructed in the interlocking manner of a dry-stone wall, the stones diminishing in size towards the top. For half an hour the only sound was the clack and thud of rocks hitting the ground. As they worked, the swollen sky began to give up its burden, gently at first and then more steadily, until each of them was furred in white. Eventually the cairn began to crumble and a hole appeared at one end.

‘Bones! I see bones,' Fitzmaurice cried.

They kept at it, their efforts hampered by the snow which made the rocks slippery and difficult to grip. They were also obliged to stop every few minutes to wipe slush from their goggles and shake drifts from their arms and shoulders. As the afternoon wore on, visibility beyond the circle in which they worked diminished, but they were too busy to notice.

At last the grave lay open and they gazed upon the skeleton within: snowflakes were falling between the rungs of its ribcage, melting on its skull, twinkling in its eye sockets.

‘I don't believe it,' Fitzmaurice exclaimed.

‘Crikey.'

‘Frank,' said Crozier, ‘perhaps you'd give us a scientific view?'

‘You're the naturalist,' Rafferty replied. ‘Over to you.'

‘Very well. It's big, no doubt about that. A male if I'm not mistaken, of mature years. Some signs of wear and tear but, overall, a fine example of
canis lupus familiaris
, and if I had to guess the breed…' he leaned closer, ‘I'd say Husky.'

‘Poo and onions!' Fitzmaurice shouted, spinning round and booting a rock into the white yonder. ‘Bloody …
arse parsley!
'

He stomped off. The others stood in contemplation of the evidence at their feet. The skull snarled up at them, unassailable in death.

‘What the bloody hell do we do now?'

‘I can't believe we came all this way for a...'

Fitzmaurice returned from his tribal rage-dance.

‘This can't be it,' he cried. ‘We've got to keep going.'

‘Fitz, it's over. It's a wild goose chase.'

‘No! There must be another cairn. There has to be!'

‘Hugh, we have to get back to camp. Look at the weather.'

Fitzmaurice peered around, as if noticing the snow for the first time.

‘Buggering bollocks!'

*

Crozier stopped in his tracks and scraped at his goggles but it made little difference: there was nothing to see but emerald-tinted blizzard. Where were the others? The shouts he had been moving towards had ceased hours ago. Were they safely back at the tents drinking tea? Or buried under the snow?

He continued in what he hoped was a straight line but after a while the terrain became rough and boulder-strewn and, after falling over several times, he was forced into so many twists and turns that his sense of direction left him completely. Panic was beginning to build inside him and it was an effort suppressing it. He realised he was also fighting the desire to sleep and that this was a dangerous sign. When he licked some snow off his sleeve to wet his mouth it only reawakened the intense emptiness in his stomach. What he wouldn't give for a mess-tin of pemmican hoosh and mug of cocoa.

He halted again, straining to hear, but his breathing was too loud. He started forward again, struggling to free his boots in the deepening drifts. His next step was into snow so deep his foot kept going and the rest of him followed, tumbling for endless seconds into an explosion of ice crystals. Then blackness.

When he came to, his head hurt, and there was blood on his cheek. He pushed himself half onto his side. He was at the bottom of a narrow crevasse, walls of frozen rock rising sheer on either side. He gazed up at the crack of light above. It had stopped snowing, apart from the odd fluttering flake, and he could see a gash of papery sky. He tried to move his legs, but they were numb and unresponsive, so he lay back again, letting the full hopelessness of the situation unfold around him. This was it. The others, if they were still alive, would never find him here; he was injured and the cold was tightening its grip, drawing him towards its core. Crozier knew the signs. He closed his eyes: the blood-plush behind the lids was pale, the corpuscles sparking; flashing and melting, like snowflakes.

Death was coming for him.

*

A man that is born falls into
a dream like a man who falls into the sea
. Wreckage; a piece of planking with letters painted on it, dips and bobs on the surface of the ocean. It crests upwards with one small wave, then downwards on the next, and the next. He reaches out for it but it keeps darting away, tugged by the current, always just beyond his fingertips. He is exhausted. His body is heavy. He is sinking into the slow spiral. He half wakes, suffocating, struggling to clear his lungs of water.

But he finds he is not in the sea: he is breathing air — air that is thick with the cloying stink of wet soil — and he is at the bottom of a deep trench. As his eyes adjust to the gloom he sees in front of him, embedded in the dark brown clay, the gleaming white rungs of a ladder, and he begins to climb. The rungs are slippery, and it takes all his strength to heave himself up, but at last his hands encounter flat ground, and his head emerges above the surface.

And there they are, clattering towards him out of the fog, the lines rocking from side to side: a regiment of skeletons stretching for miles behind, their ivory hands held out in silent supplication; the wind whistling through their gapped, insistent grins.

*

When Crozier next opened his eyes, the fissure above was no longer clear to the sky. The light was blocked by the looming outline of a head and shoulders, and his heart convulsed. Salvation! He blinked, trying to focus, and may even have croaked a name. The shape withdrew and for a few moments huge shadows passed back and forth. Then a face filled the gap, peering down at him. He struggled with the features, which were blurred and strangely out of proportion, but was unable to make them conform, and this dissolved the hope he had felt. There was no one there. A figment, merely, of his dying brain. His thoughts began to gutter. The face disintegrated, rearranged itself, zoomed out and in again, drew close. It examined him with great interest. With a curious detachment he realised it was smiling.